World Crisis
The people of the world stand at the precipice of a new epoch of humanity. The unipolar world order, marked by the hegemonic dominance of American ideology, capital and military force, is coming to an end.
The U.S., which is celebrating 250 years of its establishment this year, was the inheritor of the contradictory history of the European renaissance and enlightenment on the one hand, and the trans-atlantic slave trade and colonialism on the other hand. The ruling class of the U.S. saw itself as the defender of Western civilization, and tried to establish Western style democracy around the world. Today, we have witnessed a complete collapse of this project and the terms on which the Western dominated world order was established after the second world war is fundamentally in question. This is nowhere more visible than in American society itself, which is more polarised than at any time since the American civil war and struggling with multiple crises. Indian immigrants in the U.S. have come into intense focus as they are no longer welcome in a country where they found unprecedented success.
The meteoric rise of the Chinese people and the Chinese state has also shaped our world in ways that are not yet fully understood. The modernization of China and their elimination of extreme poverty is part of the ongoing struggle for modernization in Asia and a great contribution to humanity’s struggle for democracy. Developments in China carry lessons for Asian and African societies that are being studied. Further, the economic rise of Asia is challenging the dependence on the petro-dollar and the financial and economic monopoly of the U.S. The tragic war in Palestine and the attack on Venezuela, which are desperate acts of Western reassertion, only further these processes.
Afro-Asia is seeing a new emerging democracy, with a new consciousness in those who were submerged under poverty and illiteracy just a generation ago. In the coming years our world will forever be reshaped and re-constituted along more democratic terms.
These unprecedented processes call for new theorizing and fresh thinking that can explain these world developments. The importance of theory is also not just to explain the past, but to interpret the present and illuminate the possibilities for the future. In European thought, writers ranging from G. W. Hegel and Karl Marx to Francis Fukuyama have seen modernity as a European achievement. It was widely accepted that the social, political and economic contours of modernity had been determined by the industrialised societies of the West and Afro-Asian societies would follow the paths that Europe had pioneered. Yet the profound changes witnessed in recent times have exposed the limitations of European and Eurocentric ideas, and heightened the need for new theoretical and scientific advances in social theory.
India and America
India is bound to play a central role in these world processes. The Indian state in its present form was established after a century long freedom struggle, which served as an inspiration for struggles around the world. As the largest nation in the world with a young population, an old civilization and a rising economy, India must be at the vanguard of the establishment of this new democratic world order. We must contribute to the world and establish the Indian people’s place in it.
As India moves towards its own modernity, several questions face us. How do we characterize the Indian freedom struggle and what was its revolutionary significance in creating our present world order? If Western modernity is no longer the only substantial example for the future of the world, what will take its place? Will each nation follow its own path or is a distinct colored modernity possible, which will be based on the interlinked future of the darker nations? How will Indian modernity retain and continue its ancient civilizational inheritance? How can we study and know the logics of the movement of our people? These are questions that face not only us in India but people in all developing societies.
Yet, our intellectual class is facing a crisis. Its subservience to the West and American Universities has stifled its creativity and made it incapable of facing these challenges. It has promoted reactionary theories of gender, sexuality and other forms of identity politics and post-modernism which are artificially applied to the Indian context. It has become imperative that we in India understand the roots of the current crisis in the US and the reorientation of world systems on our own terms.
The answer to this challenge is not to retreat from the West. No people, nation or civilization can isolate itself in our deeply interlinked world. Instead, we must engage in genuine democratic intercivilizational dialogue. In our view, the foremost example of such a dialogue in the 20th century was the African American engagement with the Indian Freedom Struggle. In their search for a method to fight oppression, several eminent African Americans visited India during the period of the freedom movement, including Benjamin Mays, Mordecai Johnson, William Stuart Nelson. Howard and Sue Bailey Thurman visited India 90 years ago in 1936, meeting with both Tagore and Gandhi. Sue Bailey Thurman sang Negro spirituals upon Gandhi’s request and Gandhi had prophetically said that it would be through the Negros of America that the true message of non-violence would be delivered to the world.
Both Thurman and Mordecai Johnson would go on to influence Martin Luther King Jr. to look into the Gandhian method as a young pastor. King would adapt and build upon the ideas of Satyagraha and Ahimsa in the Montgomery bus boycott and other movements that followed. The Black freedom movement was thus constituted to remake American society and make true the promises of the American revolution. Several Indian revolutionaries, like Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Krishnalal Sridharni also visited the US, choosing to identify as coloured in the American racial system, and seeking out Black Americans to meet both in the South and North of the US.
The African American struggle against racism made space in American society for many Indians to immigrate to the US in search of better opportunities. As a result, a large Indian American and NRI population now exists, tying India and America in a close cultural and economic relationship. Indians in the US have a large influence in Indian society, culture and politics. The recent crisis in the US has caused several in the US to seek to return with a consciousness shaped indelibly by American society.
We must defend this great legacy of the twentieth century and re-establish our relationship with the American people as a whole and the African American people in particular. The African American people are that part of American society who have determined much of its dynamics and provided a new vision for it. The foremost American intellectual to theorize this was the historical, sociologist, philosopher and freedom fighter, W.E.B Du Bois.
The Legacy of W.E.B Du Bois
W.E.B Du Bois (1868-1963) was born in Great Barrington Massachusetts. He studied history and philosophy and became one of the founders of modern sociology with his study on The Philadelphia Negro. He scientifically studied race and capitalism to formulate universal ideas for our modern epoch.
We believe that Du Bois’ work constitutes a new movement of world thought, which contains the possibility of illuminating for the world new modes of thinking suited to our modern moment. Du Bois’ thought deals with not just the particularities of the African American condition and people but in scientifically theorizing race and capitalism, he formulated universal ideas for our modern epoch.
W.E.B Du Bois predicted our present crisis and shift away from European modernity in his works the World and Africa and Russia and America. He spoke of the ‘collapse of Europe’ during the second world war, when he saw the complete betrayal of all Europe had claimed to stand for. He identified in his The Souls of Black Folk the central contradiction of modernity: the color line. In Black Reconstruction, he made the pioneering observation that the driving force of capitalism in England was not the sheer ingenuity and daring of white individuals, but rather the surplus value extracted from black slave labor in the Caribbean islands and the Americas. This observation is now being proven by latest historical research 90 years after it was initially made.
Indeed, Du Bois was well known among those fighting for India’s independence. He had contact with wide sections of Indian society. Lala Lajpat Rai was his close friend and interlocutor. The leadership of our freedom struggle, including figures like Gandhi, Nehru and Tagore knew him well. He corresponded with many sections of Indian society. He was also admired by the cultural and peace movements in the country who invited him on several occasions. In turn, Du Bois supported the Indian Independence movement and organized several anti-colonial conferences. In 1928, Du Bois wrote the novel Dark Princess, an allegory for the anticolonial movement, which was a romance between an African American man and an Indian princess. The thinkers of the anticolonial struggle saw the struggle for labor as linked to the struggle against imperialism, and knew that capitalism was part and parcel of the overarching framework of colonialism.
These interactions gave rise to a new understanding of modern industry, economics, and labor in the darker world. It allowed our freedom fighters to situate India in the broader humanity wide struggle for freedom. They saw that the real modern labor problem was inseparable from the world color line. As Du Bois had said in Black Reconstruction “The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black.” This conceptualization placed the Black proletariat at the center of world history, as it did Indian working people and peasantry. Western modernity, then, was inseparable from racism and the myth of white superiority.
Du Bois pioneered a new science, sociology, to push a correct understanding of labor and the color line. He worked to undo the racialization of science and epistemology by speaking from the vantage point of the Black proletariat in America. He would say that he was ‘flesh of their flesh and bone of their bone’, and his scientific project was conducted as part of the colonial subjects of the world. He would argue that the next step in the project of human knowledge was to know man, and darker humanity in particular, who had been silenced by slavery and colonialism. Sociology, as Du Bois conceived of it, would be crucial to a reworking of our understanding of modern world history and to the struggle for a more just world.
Yet, we in India do not know Du Bois today. The smear campaign against Du Bois during the McCarthyist period in the cold war erased him from the memory of the world’s people. His work, central to American sociology and history, was not taught even in American universities for fifty years. He who was once called “elder brother of the entire colored family” by Cedric Dover was entirely lost to us. The time has come for us to know W.E.B Du Bois once again, a man who loved India and saw the immense possibility for human creation in India. When India won her independence on 15 August 1947, Du Bois would celebrate it as the greatest historical moment of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Proposed Visit
For this purpose we invite Du Boisian scholar and life-long activist Dr. Anthony Monteiro to undertake a tour of India. Dr Monteiro has studied Du Bois’s writings deeply, drawing out their implications for American society and the world. Dr. Monteiro is a teacher of teachers — one who has dedicated his life to the struggle for truth and to the task of educating the people for freedom.
We invite Dr. Monteiro as a representative of the African American people and of the American people more broadly. Rejecting the elitism of university-trained academics, Dr Monteiro has chosen to be close to ordinary American people. He has studied the present crisis in the US in its depths, and is rooted in the African American Revolutionary tradition of W.E.B Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. He organized The Year of Du Bois in Philadelphia in 2018. He has also studied the Indian Freedom Struggle and led the organization of The Year of Gandhi in Philadelphia in 2019.
Dr. Monteiro will speak on the ideas of W.E.B. Du Bois and how they relate to the ideas of our own freedom struggle, including Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and others. He will speak on how the scientific study of ancient civilization is important for determining the path of modernity in the future.
Through this visit, we hope to not only reintroduce Du Bois to Indian intellectuals, scientists, artists, trade-unionists and students, but also rekindle the deep historical relationship between the Indian and American people and engage in an intercivilizational dialogue for a democratic future.