Du Bois and Racial Capitalism: Symposium on Andrew J. Douglas, W. E. B. Du Bois and the Critique of the Competitive Society, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2019

• Published date: 01 June 2021
• Date: 01 June 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591720973166
• Author: Ella Myers,Aldon Morris,James Ford
• Subject Matter: Symposium

Political Theory

2021, Vol. 49(3) 483 –507

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Symposium

Du Bois and Racial

Capitalism: Symposium

on Andrew J. Douglas,

W. E. B. Du Bois and the

Critique of the Competitive

Society, Athens, GA:

University of Georgia

Press, 2019

Ella Myers, James Ford III, and Aldon Morris

DOI: 10.1177/0090591720973166

Brutal Competition

Ella Myers

Political Science and Gender Studies, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT

In this slim, powerful book, Andrew J. Douglas presents an energetic “cri-

tique of the competitive society,” derived from the later work of W. E. B. Du

Bois. Although Douglas’s engagement with Du Bois’s work is central to the

project, the book’s most significant achievement, to my mind, is how effec-

tively it “prompt[s] serious thinking about our competitive culture and the

racial politics of a society set up to produce winners and losers” (4). Turning

to a neglected strand of Du Bois’s thought—his growing opposition to the

“competitive form”—and drawing on overlapping analyses of other thinkers,

including Karl Marx, Abram Harris, and Martin Luther King, Jr., Douglas

presents a provocative appraisal of our contemporary moment. He argues

forcefully that today’s neoliberal regime is one in which the norm of competi-

tiveness, a long-standing and integral feature of American capitalist society,

has intensified to the point that we are expected to “do battle with one

another” in nearly every part of our lives (100). Douglas urges readers to

consider how this way of life, animated by the “spirit of privatization and

973166PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720973166Political TheoryReview Symposium

book-review2020

484 Political Theory 49(3)

ethic of competitive individualism,” sanctions widespread suffering and

reproduces “racially marked cycles of loss and defeat” (17, 58). The competi-

tive society, Douglas persuasively argues, is “ethically irredeemable” (97).

I approach the book from two angles here—first, reflecting on Douglas’s

thoughtful but somewhat broad interpretation of Du Bois as a “diagnostic

critic of the competitive society,” and then asking about the role that Du Bois

plays in the project as a whole.

Douglas contends that Du Bois’s work, beginning in the 1930s, enunci-

ates a “sustained critical theory of the competitive society,” about which his

readers have been mostly “quiet” (17, 47). To elaborate this claim, he

emphasizes Du Bois’s “liberal disillusionment”: that Du Bois’s turn toward

Black radicalism grew out of the realization that the governing philosophy

of the white world—“liberalism” or “competitive liberalism”—enabled and

validated unjustifiable inequalities, often along racialized lines. “Liberalism,”

however, seems unduly ambiguous for understanding the “critique of com-

petitive society” at the core of the book. Liberalism, of course, regularly

refers to both political and economic ideologies, which are often intertwined

but also distinguishable. When Douglas uses the term, it is usually with an

economic meaning—for example, “laissez faire liberalism” (26). Moreover,

in the course of Douglas’s argument—including his tracking Du Bois’s rela-

tionship to “liberalism”—it becomes clear that Du Bois’s “critique of the

competitive society” is a critique of capitalism. For example, when Douglas

attempts to identify the underlying sources of the American “competitive

way of life,” he cites “the logic of accumulation” (11, 19, 34); “practices of

capital accumulation” (20, 34); “capitalism’s value form” (11, 53); and

“capital as a sovereign force” (14, 22). When arguing that “basic features of

the competitive society” link Du Bois’s context to ours, Douglas focuses on

categories of “labor” and “property” to demonstrate continuity across

Fordist, post-Fordist, and neoliberal eras. Douglas maintains that Du Bois,

like Marx, believed a competitive ethos is “built into” societies “oriented

toward private capital accumulation” (54).

Douglas’s account of Du Bois’s “critique of the competitive society”

would be sharpened if the specifically anticapitalist character of Du Bois’s

critique were foregrounded. It seems undeniable that for Du Bois (and for

Douglas) the competitive society is capitalist society. This point deserves to

be amplified in order to render Du Bois’s intervention in more precise terms.

Stressing Du Bois’s critique of capitalist society might also open up reflec-

tion on how his work prefigures recent efforts to theorize capitalism as a

comprehensive mode of existence rather than merely an economic system.

Douglas presents “the competitive society,” via Du Bois, as a vast cultural

formation endowed with a distinctive ethos and characteristic institutions that