Du Bois described the development of a “petty bourgeoisie” within the working class in the United States as a “post-Marxian phenomenon.” As such, Marxism could not fully explain U.S. political economy. He started to think beyond Marx and Russian communists at the time, as antiracist and anticapitalist Black scholars have ever since. “Instead of a horizontal division of classes, there was a vertical fissure, a complete separation of classes by race, cutting square across the economic layers,” Du Bois wrote. The vertical cutting knife? Racism, sharpened through the centuries. “This flat and
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