The General Strike arose from social contradictions, not a vanguard.

Evidence

The General Strike had not been planned or consciously organized. Instead, what Du Bois termed a “General Strike” was the total impact on the secessionist South of a series of actions circumstantially related to each other: some 200,000 Black workers, most of them slaves, had become part of the Union’s military forces. These, and an even larger number of Blacks, had withdrawn their productive labor and paramilitary services from the Confederacy, transferring a substantial portion of them to the Union. In addition, tens of thousands of slaves and poor whites had emigrated from the South. The former were escaping slavery, the latter their poverty and the demands and ravages of a war in which they had no vested interest. The result was to critically weaken the secessionists. The ordering of these diverse actions was then a consequence of the social order to which they were reactions. The contradictions within southern society rather than a revolutionary vanguard knit these phenomena into a historical force. After the war, a different ordering would be required to integrate these phenomena into a political movement. This could be accomplished if only the ruling ideologies of the society were transcended. This was not done. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1083

The General Strike had not been planned or consciously organized. Instead, what Du Bois termed a “General Strike” was the total impact on the secessionist South of a series of actions circumstantially related to each other: some 200,000 Black workers, most of them slaves, had become part of the Union’s military forces. These, and an even larger number of Blacks, had withdrawn their productive labor and paramilitary services from the Confederacy, transferring a substantial portion of them to the Union. In addition, tens of thousands of slaves and poor whites had emigrated from the South. The former were escaping slavery, the latter their poverty and the demands and ravages of a war in which they had no vested interest. The result was to critically weaken the secessionists. The ordering of these diverse actions was then a consequence of the social order to which they were reactions. The contradictions within southern society rather than a revolutionary vanguard knit these phenomena into a historical force. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1083

Categorization

• XREF: Directly challenges Lenin’s vanguard theory, the de-prioritized analytical thread that Robinson uses throughout to distinguish Black radicalism from European Marxism.
• SEED: Material for an essay on how spontaneous mass action (the General Strike) differed from planned revolutionary organization — the ‘revolution without a vanguard’ angle.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1083