Cooperation as Democracy's Revitalization: Du Bois's Critique of Capitalism

• In Event: Du Bois and Democratic Theory: Race, Capitalism, and the State

Abstract

Scholars have long mined the work of W.E.B. Du Bois to understand the challenges of modern democracy and to examine the operation of racial capitalism. This article brings these two conversations together by re-centering an overlooked aspect of Du Bois's democratic vision: his involvement in and theorization of cooperative movements. For Du Bois, cooperation provided a training ground for reactivating African American associational life by enabling the construction of novel, egalitarian institutions. In theorizing cooperation, Du Bois proposed that the construction of an anti-imperial popular sovereignty depended on the internal work of the citizenry to reimagine the economic realm. Such a view reveals the relationship between economic domination, democratic backsliding, and imperial exploitation in our own time.

Author

• Larry Svabek, University of Missouri