Du Bois came to believe that the preservation of the capitalist world system, its very expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had involved the absorption of new sources of labor power, not by their conversion into wage labor but by coercion. Characteristically, capitalist imperialism had magnified the capacity for capital accumulation by force variously disguised as state nationalism, benevolent colonialism, race destiny, or the civilizing mission. Except in scattered instances, the peasantries of the third World had become neither urban nor rural proletariats but near-slaves. For most, their social development had been effectively arrested. The result, relative to their own recent pasts and the situation of European workers, was retardation. Indeed, whole populations had been eliminated either during “pacification” or through forced labor. The belief that capitalism would advance African and Asian and other peasantries had for the most part proved to be misplaced. Beyond western Europe, the capitalist world system had produced social and economic chaos. No theory of history that conceptualized capitalism as a progressive historical force, qualitatively increasing the mastery of human beings over the material bases of their existence, was adequate to the task of making the experiences of the modern world comprehensible. For Du Bois, America in the fist half of the nineteenth century, a society in which manufacturing and industrial capitalism had been married to slave production, had been a microcosm of the world system. The advanced sectors of the world economy could expand just so long as they could dominate and rationalize by brute force the exploitation of essentially nonindustrial and agrarian labor. The expansion of American slavery in the nineteenth century was not an anachronism but a forewarning. But so too, he believed, was its defeat. I had a circle of friends (most of them white) with whom I exchanged ideas, books, records and manuscripts. We published local magazines and gave lectures or wrote articles on Wordsworth, the English Drama, and Poetry as a Criticism of Life. We lived according to the tenets of Matthew Arnold, spreading sweetness and light and the best that has been thought and said in the world. . . . Never losing sight of my plan to go abroad and write, I studied and practiced assiduously the art of fiction. What was it like to be a black man in the Britain of the 1930s? Certainly we were not rich; far from it. But we were generally happy in our lot—just to know that we were challenging one of the greatest empires in the world. Imagine what it meant to us to go to Hyde Park to speak to a race of people who were considered our masters, and tell them right out what we felt about their empire and about them . . . “If you are interested in communism, then buy the book. . . . Don’t join the club!” [I]nside the classrooms the code had little success. Sneaking was taboo, but we lied and cheated without any sense of shame. I know I did. . . . But as soon as we stepped on to the cricket or football field, more particularly the cricket field, all was changed. . . . [W]e learned to obey the umpire’s decision without question, however irrational it was. We learned to play with the team, which meant subordinating your personal inclinations, and even interests, to the good of the whole. We kept a stiff upper lip in that we did not complain about ill-fortune. We did not denounce failure, but “Well tried” or “Hard luck” came easily to our lips. We were generous to opponents and congratulated them on victories, even when we knew they did not deserve it. . . . On the playing field we did what ought to be done. For James, the starting point for understanding the English ruling classes and their hegemony over the laboring classes at home and abroad was in the historical parallel he discovered between ancient Greece and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Imperial Britain. It was a natural place for him to begin, he was British and “Greco-Roman we are.” In both societies, he recognized a relationship that fused power and organized games; an almost fanatical obsession with athletics, cemented (as he wrote of the Greeks) to the assertion of “the national unity of Greek civilization and the consciousness of themselves as separate from the barbarians who surrounded them.” The first recorded date in European history is 776 B.C., the date of the first Olympic Games. The Greek states made unceasing war against one another. But when the four-yearly games approached they declared a national truce, the various competitors assembled at Olympia, the games were held and when these were over the wars began again. . . . To every Greek city and every colony (as far away as Italy, Sicily, Africa, Egypt and Marseilles) the envoys went from Olympia with the invitations, and the communities sent their representatives and their official deputations. Forty thousand pilgrims would assemble, including the most distinguished members of Greek society. But, James insisted, the whole spectacle and its apparent but deceptive parallel in British society required closer analysis. Such an inspection would reveal the subtle dialectic between culture and the exercise of domination: The games were not introduced into Greece by the popular democracy. In fact, when the democracy came into power it lifted another type of celebration [the tragic drama] to a position of eminence to which the games soon took second place. The Olympic Games had been a festival of the feudal aristocracy and the bourgeoisie of Greece. Only the bourgeoisie had the money to stand the expense of the competitors. . . . Only the aristocratic families were in a position to take part in the chariot races. In England, organized sport had been a mass phenomenon, a spontaneous and public creation. And then, just as with land and labor, the rising bourgeoisie had expropriated it for their own purposes. Undisciplined, vulgar, and lacking self-confidence, they had sensed that their reliance on naked force in their personae as expropriators, exploiters, and imperialists would ultimately destroy them if they could not establish to their own satisfaction their right to rule: “They wanted a culture, a way of life of their own.” Africans and people of African descent, especially those who have been poisoned by British Imperialist education, needed a lesson. They have got it. Every succeeding day shows exactly the real motives which move imperialism in its contact with Africa, shows the incredible savagery and duplicity of European Imperialism in its quest for markets and raw materials. Let the lesson sink deep. The lesson sank deeper than he imagined. His tutorship under European radical thought had come to an end. From this point on his work would leap beyond the doctrinaire constructions of the anti-Stalinist Left and Engels and Marx themselves. The force of the Black radical tradition merged with the exigencies of Black masses in movement to form a new theory and ideology in James’s writing.