One of the historical events which DuBois addresses was the rise of Booker T. Washington as a sort of spokesperson for African-Americans after the era of Reconstruction. Washington urged young Black Americans to seek material advancement and redemption through a mastery of the skills needed to succeed within the economy of the day and age. It was through this strategy that Washington hoped for Black Americans to be seen as desirable, productive, and necessary members of a fully functioning society.
However, in The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois disputes this point; he finds it counterproductive that an attitude of submission to the current political order would do anything to redeem Black people and ensure their prosperity as citizens. Instead, DuBois centers his priorities on achievements that he believes can be sustainable in the long term: the right to vote, proper education, and civic representation. In essence, he focuses more on the cultural and political elements of inequality as factors that work to sustain Black people in their current marginalization.
This strikes a provoking conversation with Marx. In "On the Jewish Question," Marx grapples philosophically with a similar problem, which is the religious and political emancipation of Jews in Europe. He insists, however, against the idea that political emancipation is full emancipation. To do so, he makes a clear distinction between the state and the private sphere / civil society, two spheres that operate independently of one another yet both seem to collude together under liberal thought. He simply states that while it might be beneficial in the short term for Jews to be granted equal status at the level of the state, inequalities will simply shift to the realm of the private, where it can remain active in its own fashion. For Marx, political emancipation isn't pure mystification, but it certainly is not the final step in a journey of complete liberation.
The notion that you discuss concerning the delicate relation between the political and “private” spectrums of life is certainly of great relevance in Marx, DuBois and just about any discussion regarding the implications of politics in life. I think it is also interesting to consider the miscommunication between these two realms, namely it seems that change in one of the two aforementioned aspects of life tends to force change in the other, however adaptation of this change often times seems to lag. Certainly social change leads to political change, however the formalism of politics leads to sluggish policy change. Conversely, due to the force that legislation is inherently imbued with, policy impacts the private life instantaneously (via law), however, it is the mentality of the citizens that lags behind. If one consider the gradual adaptation of the human mind as congruent to the lag that we see in political structures, one can hope to better understand the duality between private life and politics.
ReplyDelete