The black worker’s labor, not unionism, was the underlying cause of civil war.

Evidence

It was thus the black worker, as founding stone of a new economic system in the nineteenth century and for the modern world, who brought civil war in America. He was its underlying cause, in spite of every effort to base the strife upon union and national power, (p. 15) Now let us pay close attention to what Du Bois was saying: slavery was the specific historical institution through which the Black worker had been introduced into the modern world system. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 929

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: This directly reverses standard Civil War historiography (that the war was about union/national power vs. states’ rights) and connects to Du Bois’s dismissal of “union and national power” as the base of the conflict.

Related

• Du Bois held the Black worker’s enslaved labor causally caused the Civil War. (similarity 0.94)
• The black worker was the underlying cause of America’s civil war (similarity 0.83)
• Slavery’s coexistence with proclaimed equality was America’s founding contradiction. (similarity 0.81)
• The post-Reconstruction abandonment of Black labor led toward world war (similarity 0.81)
• Du Bois insisted Black people’s historical significance lay in their labor, not enslaved status. (similarity 0.81)
• Du Bois read the American Civil War as a peasant-based revolution. (similarity 0.80)
• Slavery gains historical meaning only when read as labor, not as bondage. (similarity 0.80)
• Black slave labor undergirded worldwide capitalist expansion. (similarity 0.80)
• Racism, not production relations, blocked the rise of a US labor movement. (similarity 0.79)
• Black historical being exceeds what historical materialism can capture (similarity 0.79)
• Du Bois in 1917 charged American socialists with ignoring Black American revolt (similarity 0.79)
• Racial labor violence explains Black skepticism toward organized labor (similarity 0.78)
• Du Bois positioned slaves rather than industrial workers as revolutionary. (similarity 0.78)
• Civil War general strike of Black and white workers prefigured the Russian Revolution pattern (similarity 0.78)