DuBois's "General Strike"

Oakes examines chapter four of W. E. B. Dubois' book Black Reconstruction, which is entitled "The General Strike." The chapter one opens with a short epigraph neatly summarizing the point DuBois intended to make which focuses on the Civil War and how African American workers won the war by a general strike which transferred labor from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader. This is the central thesis of the chapter, and it's worth quoting in full because its title can seem jarringly anachronistic even to the most sympathetic readers. It conjured up industrial capitalism far more than plantation slavery. In one sense the title is not surprising. DuBois had identified himself as a socialist as early as 1907, although he remained unfamiliar with Marxism for more than two decades after that.