Class War, Race War, and the General Strike

Abstract Scholars have shown how race war is foundational to the discipline of International Relations and the hierarchies of international order. This paper asks how the legacies of slavery in global politics and the politics of race war shaped other conceptions of war as global politics in international relations—mainly class war through a genealogy of the general strike. This paper demonstrates how the general strike was transformed from this radical overturning of the slave master's world order (race war) into a politics of labor reform (class war). I trace the “general strike” through Robert Wedderburn's interpretation of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), the Demerara Revolt 1823, and its subsequent canonization in socialist thought by the radical William Benbow. Wedderburn's holiday sought to overturn the ontological status of the enslaved as property through a radicalized race and class war. British abolitionists reformed the politics of the strike to maintain a class peace, by divorcing class war from the radical politics of the Haitian Revolution and incorporating the enslaved into forms of waged labor. Finally, British socialists sought to revive antagonistic narratives of class war but did so by warding off the radical legacy of the Haitian Revolution and excluding the enslaved.