I see. I think it’s a great that a lot of people aren’t that simplistic in their judgments of other people.
For one thing, people change.
For another thing, to condemn a man who spent many decades fighting for the downtrodden because of a mistake he made in his late eighties (while still fighting for the downtrodden) is to throw out a ton of good features while in effect obsessing to the point of fetishization about one bad feature.
And for one more thing, people’s reasons for supporting movements of which one facet is sometimes totalitarianism are often more complex than you give them credit for. As Mullens also says about Du Bois,
Du Bois’s political evaluations of Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China were consistent with those of many of the people whom we consider to be the most important radicals of the 20th century, including the majority of anticolonial leaders from Asia and Africa. His strong desire for decolonization led him to trust the Soviet Union and China and their promises of aid to that project well past the time their revolutions had become corrupted. To be for world revolution and decolonization in the 20th century, in other words, was to sign up for Communist internationalism with all of its faults. Du Bois signed up early and never fully recanted.
On the other hand, he misapprehended the meaning of Marxism and socialism in ways that we should not forgive or forget. He confused state capitalism – Stalin’s system of socialism in one country and bureaucratic rule from above – with the real meaning of socialism as working-class self-emancipation. His thin understanding of Japanese and Chinese history caused him to perceive Japanese imperialism and expansionism in China as a viable alternative to capitalism for nonwhite workers of the world. Du Bois was both brilliant and fallible.
But he was always, as I try to make clear, vying to find a way that ordinary people could fashion their own liberation and self-emancipation. He found this match of political will and human self-activity in his most brilliant book, Black Reconstruction in America (1935). If he had written nothing else in his life, Black Reconstruction would have cemented his place as one of the most original scholars and political theorists of human freedom. So his life and his work demand a judicious and balanced approach that is well grounded in the theories of revolution and human liberation he was trying to advance. I try to provide that approach, and as you say, walk that line, in my book.
