"It's People in the Swamp": Du Bois against the Democracy of Things.

This article examines W. E. B. Du Bois's first novel, *The Quest of the Silver Fleece* (1911), as a critical response to Frank Norris's *The Octopus* (1901), focusing on their contrasting portrayals of nonhuman agency and capitalist exploitation. While Norris's novel attributes autonomous, almost salvific power to wheat and railroads, naturalizing capitalist forces as nonhuman actors, Du Bois centers human labor and political struggle, particularly highlighting the entanglement of cotton with racial capitalism in the post-Civil War South. The article critiques contemporary New Materialist and Object-Oriented Ontology theories that advocate for a "democracy of things," arguing that Du Bois's work reveals the limitations of attributing democratizing agency to nonhuman entities without accounting for human social and political dynamics. Ultimately, Du Bois's novel envisions Black political power as rooted in collective human agency and institutions rather than in the autonomous vitality of natural or material forces.