"Employment" (published in 1930 in The Crisis)
There still persists, the conviction that unemployment primarily and at bottom is the fault of the man who is without work. It may not be his fault under present circumstances but he surely must have been idle and careless in his youth, wasteful and thoughtless as a young man, to be found in his full manhood or in middle-age without work. This is cruelly untrue and leads to injustice and social disaster. It is especially untrue of colored workers and yet it is applied to them by whites and blacks. Whites suspect that the unemployed Negro thinks himself too good for menial work and the successful black man has a terrible faith in thrift and diligence.
The League for Independent Political Action has issued a little twelve-paged pamphlet on "Unemployment" written by Henry R. Mussey, which every Negro ought to read. We have had the tenets of an outworn and passing economic situation drilled into us: thrift and wage, property and income, work and wealth -- all this is looked upon as the natural path of progress for a poor black laborer. As it becomes, under modern economic organization, increasingly impossible to realize this, even for white laborers, we are continually leaping to the conclusion that Negroes are the ones who are wrong and not the system; that our paupers and criminals and unsuccessful men are the victims of their own faithlessness and lack of foresight. True it is that the grandchildren of slaves will have an undue share of the lazy and unskilled. But our poverty and unemployment today is but partially due to that and this we must realize.
In truth there are, as Mr. Mussey points out, tens of millions of people in the United States who are perpetually in danger of losing their jobs, and the proportion of colored people among these is naturally very much larger than our proportion in the population. This is the natural result of slavery, caste, and prejudice.
Despite the effort of the President and his cabinet and now of the census to minimize the facts, there must be today five million people in the United States who want work and cannot get it. Unemployment, then, is not a matter to be cured simply by individual effort, or even by common effort.
Unemployment comes first through new inventions and improvements in the industrial process: a new machine, a new process, may forthwith put thousands of men out of employment; and it does not cure their desperate plight, even if later larger numbers of other men or of other generations receive new work with better wages, by learning a new technique.
There are, secondly, seasonal fluctuations in the number of workers wanted and this especially hits the colored agricultural laborer in the South and the colored day laborer in the North. There is also the cycle of business variation with panics and booms like those through which we are continually passing.
All these things cause inevitable unemployment no matter how thrifty the worker is and how carefully he may save.
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And of course DuBois's solution to all of this was Soviet Communism; his glowing assessment of Stalin was noxious and revolting (and this was long after just about everyone else stopped defending the Soviet Union much less Stalin). Further, the fact that he defended the Soviet invasion of Hungary shows exactly where anti-capitalism and anti-individualism leads one to.
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