Civil War general strike of Black and white workers prefigured the Russian Revolution pattern

Evidence

Du Bois added that the poor whites were also bound to the master class: “Indeed, the natural leaders of the poor whites, the small farmer, the merchant, the professional man, the white mechanic and slave overseer, were bound to the planters and repelled from the slaves… . [T]he only heaven that attracted them was the life of the great Southern planter” (p. 27). Yet in the midst of the Civil War, it was these two peoples, the Black and the white workers, who had mounted the rebellions, the “General Strike,” which had turned loose the revolutionary dynamics that Du Bois would describe as “the most extraordinary experiments of Marxism that the world, before the Russian revolution, had seen” (p. 358). One hundred thousand poor whites had deserted the Confederate armies and perhaps a half million Black workers had abandoned the plantations. It was the same pattern, indeed, that would come to fruition in Russia. Like the American slaves and the poor whites, in the midst of war the Russian peasantry would desert their armies in the field. Their rebellion, too, marked the beginnings of revolution. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1109

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction general strike thesis and links American slave rebellion to the Russian peasant desertion pattern Robinson uses to argue a shared Black revolutionary causality.