TOUSSAINT AND THE BLACK LIBERATION STRUGGLE IN HAITI

TOUSSAINT AND THE BLACK LIBERATION STRUGGLE IN HAITI

BOOK REVIEW

BLACK JACOBIN-TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE AND THE SAN DOMINGO REVOLUTION, C.R.L.JAMES,VINTAGE BOOKS, 1989 NEW YORK

FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH

The French Revolution, as all great revolutions do, had effects on world politics and the struggle of other peoples whom it awoken to political life in its aftermath. The fight for freedom in French San Domingo (now Haiti, the name that I will use to avoid confusion hereafter) led by Toussaint to a point just short of independence is a prime example of that effect. Without the revolution in the metropolis it is very unlikely that at that time the struggle in Haiti could have been successful, or progressed as far as it did. The history of the times was replete with isolated unsuccessful slave rebellions. Why it was successful in Haiti and how that success was accomplished, mainly under the leadership of Toussaint in its decisive phases, is the subject of the eccentric Marxist, later Pan-Africanist historian C.L.R. James. Although originally written in 1938 Black Jacobin is still the best biography of Toussaint in English.

The freedom struggle in Haiti, a tropical island well suited to intensive agricultural development for the new international market in those goods necessary for the embryonic industrial system, was above all the struggle for the abolition of slavery. The fight against that servile condition was a struggle that many revolutionaries, white and black, and former revolutionaries of the time broke their teeth on. Today that freedom struggle, successful in its way in the Haiti of the early 19th century, remains a shining example of the most successful fight against slavery by the slaves. So it pays to pay particular attention to the fight.

The forces which pushed the French Revolution forward in the metropolis had their its own set of priorities, among them the fight to move the population from a condition of subjugation to a monarch to citizens of a democracy. I have noted elsewhere how important that changed social status was to the historical and psychological development of modern humankind. That same psychology applied to the struggle in Haiti although even more so under conditions of chattel slavery. Thus, the events in French had their reflection in the colonies particularly in Haiti. One can observe in France the changes in attitude and policy from the early revolutionary days when representatives all classes opposed to the monarchy were 'good fellows and true' through the rise of the leftist Robespierre regime based on the plebian masses, its eventually overthrow and establishment of the Directory and then the various manifestations of Napoleon's rule. That Napoleonic regime and its treacherous colonial policy attempting to reimpose slavery was a very far drop down hill from the early, heady days when even moderate revolutionaries were in both places prepared to go quite far to eliminate slavery.

There is something of a truism in the statement that great revolutions throw up personalities fit for the times. Certainly revolutions shake up the traditional order of things and let some individuals who might have stayed dormant rise to the occasion. That is the case with Toussaint. For most of his life he was a middle level functionary on his master’s estate respected by most but not slated for greatness. Early on, as the struggle against slavery heated up among the black slaves, he exhibited the military, social, political diplomatic and other skills that would eventual thrust him into the leadership of the liberation struggle.

This is really saying something special about the man because in the context of that Haitian revolution with the initial disputes between British, Spanish and French interests and then the conflicting interests on the island itself between white, black and mulatto would have driven a lesser man around the bend. That it did not do so and that in his errors of judgement that were, at times, grievous especially around his seemingly obsessive commitment to maintain the French connection, does not take away from the grandeur of the experience. A cursory look at the latter developments on the island and the seemingly never ending series of tin pot despots who in their turn devastated the island only brings out Toussaint’s fascinating role, warts and all, in the earlier liberation struggle in broader relief.

*ROBESPIERRE AND THE GREAT FRENCH REVOLUTION

Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" article on French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre.

IN THE TIME OF THE GREAT FRENCH REVOLUTION

DVD REVIEW

REMEMEBER THE BASTILLE, BUT HONOR ROBESPIERRE AND SAINT JUST.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, HISTORY CHANNEL PRODUCTION, 2004

This year marks the 218th anniversary of the beginning of the Great French Revolution with storming of the Bastille on July 14th 1789. An old Chinese Communist leader, the late Zhou Enlai, was once asked by a reporter to sum up the important lessons of the French Revolution. In reply he answered that it was too early to tell what those lessons might be. Whether that particular story is true or not it does contain one important truth. Militants today at the beginning of the 21st century can still profit from an understanding of the history of the French Revolution.

There are many books that outline the history of that revolution. I have reviewed some of them in this space. Probably the most succinct overview, although it was written over one half century ago, is Professor Georges Lefebvre’s study. For those who want a quick visual overview of the main events and political disputes the History Channel production under review has a lot to recommend it. The production covers all the main pre-revolutionary problems confronting France at the time, including its terrible debt problems caused in the main by its support of the American Revolution to the political, social and, yes, sexual inadequacies of Louis XVI. As has been noted by many commentators on revolution, including myself, one of the prerequisites for revolution is that the old regime can no longer govern in the same way. The personage of Louis XVI seemingly fits that proposition to a tee.

The production goes on to highlight the key events. Obviously, and most visibly, the storming of the Bastille that opened up the cracks in the old monarchial regime. It details the struggle to create a constitutional monarchy through the various legislative assemblies that sought to carry out the reforms necessary to bring France into the modern age short of declaring a republic. And also the attempts, including by Louis himself, by forces of the old regime to return the old monarchy or stop the revolution in its tracks. When those efforts failed and the revolution began in earnest the production details the internal struggle by the revolutionaries, most notably the great fight between the Girondins and Jacobins for power, and the formation of the republic. After the defeat of the Girondins this led to the further fights to ‘purify’ the revolution among the Jacobin forces and the reign of the Robespierre-led Committee of Public Safety that consolidated the gains of the revolution through the ‘Reign of Terror’. Finally, the downfall and execution of Robespierre in 1794 represented the reaction that most revolutions exhibit when the political possibilities for further leftward revolutionary moves are no longer tenable.

There are many great scenes portrayed here as well. The murder of Marat by Corday. The Festival of the Supreme Being. The oratory of Danton and many more scenes that give one a pretty good general feel for the dynamics of the revolution. Included are ‘talking head’ comments by noted historians of the revolution giving their take on the meaning of various events. This is a plus. The major negative is in the axis of presentation. Almost fatalistically the emergence of Robespierre is intertwined throughout all of the earlier events giving the impression that he was inevitably bound to take power. And, also inevitably, due to the excesses of the ‘Reign of Terror’, to lose it. This may be good documentary presentation form but it is bad history. Revolutions, particularly great revolutions, are few and far between. They are messy affairs at the time and reamin the same seen through the historical lens. Nevertheless if the social tensions in society could always, or should always, be resolved in a nice non- violent parliamentary way there would be no revolutions. Damn, where would that leave us as the inheritors of the sans-culottes tradition?

From The "Renegade Eye" Blog-Revolutionary Precursors: Radical Bourgeois Architects in the Age of Reason and Revolution

In honor of the Platypus Affiliated Society’s Radical Bourgeois Philosophy summer reading group, I thought I would devote a blog entry to the celebration of radical bourgeois architecture. I’ve been writing a lot of posts related to the subject of the revolutionary avant-garde architecture that followed October 1917 in Russia and in Europe, so I think that it might be fitting to take a step back and review some of the architectural fantasies that surrounded that other great revolutionary date, 1789, the year of the glorious French Revolution. The three utopian architects whose work I will be focusing on here also happen to be French — perhaps not coincidentally.

Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728—1799), Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736—1806), and François Marie Charles Fourier (1772—1837) were each architects and thinkers whose ideas reflected some of the most radical strains of liberal bourgeois philosophy, with its cult of reason and devotion to the triplicate ideals of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. The structures they imagined and city plans they proposed were undeniably some of the most ambitious and revolutionary of their time. At their most fantastic, the buildings they envisioned were absolutely unbuildable — either according to the technical standards of their day or arguably even of our own.

The first two utopian architects mentioned above, Boullée and Ledoux, were also renowned theorists and teachers of the neoclassical style that developed in eighteenth-century France. Indeed, between them they trained some of the most brilliant neoclassicists of their age. The French architects Jean Chalgrin, Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart, and Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand were trained by Boullée, while Ledoux helped teach the influential Lithuanian architect Laurynas Gucevičius. Most of their own work that was actually built worked within the more traditional parameters of neoclassicism, and attests to their total mastery over the style.

But beyond their admiration for the Greek, Roman, and Renaissance styles from which they drew their primary inspiration, both Boullée and Ledoux were drawn into utopian speculation. In flagrant defiance of all the Vitruvian and Albertian dicta on feasibility and practicality, each drew up plans for impossible structures. Immersed as they were in an age of scientific, intellectual, and political revolution, Boullée and Ledoux each bore the imprint of their times. The radical ideas they encountered and revolutionary events that they witnessed gave them both the impression that a new world was forming before their eyes, in which the space of limitless possibility could open up.

Disavowing many of the ornamental and columnar principles on which neoclassical architecture was based, both Boullée and Ledoux reverted to extremely simplified geometric shapes — spheres, tetrahedra, unadorned arches, etc. Boullée even included a rectangular oculus (if an object so shaped can still be called an “oculus”) in his sketch for a Metropolitan cathedral. These were stripped of any decorative features and displayed in their raw profundity. Stunning examples of both architects’ visions of spheroid structures can be seen in Boullée’s “Cenotaph to Newton” (1784) and Ledoux’s “Ideal House” (1770), pictured above.

Many of the buildings designed by Boullée in particular were dedicated to the great personalities or concepts that characterized the Enlightenment. Besides his proposed building in honor of Newton, Boullée also envisioned a ”Monument intended for tributes due to the Supreme Being” in 1794, just after Robespierre announced the foundation of Le culte de l’Être suprême. Boullée was extremely excited to give the concept concrete shape. “An edifice for the worship of the Supreme being!” he exclaimed. ”That is indeed a subject that calls for sublime ideas and to which architecture must give character.” Ledoux, who had amassed great wealth constructing buildings for the aristocracy under the Ancien Régime, was imprisoned for several years during the Revolution. He thus had an understandably bleaker view of such Jacobin innovations as Robespierre’s cult.

Some of the buildings and objects that Ledoux depicted were even more abstract in their meaning and unbuildable in their design than Boullée’s celebration of Newton or the Supreme Being. For example, in one his last sketches published in 1804 in a compilation of his engravings, Ledoux portrayed a cosmology of the clouds, as it were, floating above the cemetery of the city of Chaux, a city which he had originally helped to plan. A miniature representation of the Earth, seemingly propped up on a cloud, is surrounded by a number of smaller planetoids that circle it in orbit. Suspended in air without support, they would almost seem to resemble a collection of aerostatic spheres, not unlike the famous hot-air balloon unveiled by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783. With its geocentric model, Ledoux appears to grant the buried cemetery inhabitants a Ptolemaic afterlife.

Ledoux was not the only one thinking of the afterlife, however. In 1794, following the execution of Robespierre and Saint-Just in the Thermidorean Reaction, Boullée felt the Revolution had been betrayed. As his mood grew ever more morbid, he began to ruminate increasingly on the idea of death and entombment. He recorded in his diary a terrifying vision: “A mass of objects detached in black against a light of extreme pallor. Nature seemed to offer itself, in mourning, to my sight. Walls stripped of every ornament…[a] light-absorbing material should create a dark architecture of shadows, outlined by even darker shadows.” It was in this spirit that Boullée composed drafts for yet another one of his unrealizable masterpieces — “The Temple of Death” (1795). The sketch of the pyramidal tower of its exterior and his representation of the spherical tomb encased therein were shown earlier. Boullée’s most haunting depiction, shown above, is probably the blackest, however. Whereas the interior to his earlier “Cenotaph to Newton” was shown as flooded with an artificial internal light, the interior of his “Temple of Death” shows the darkness of a tomb dwarfed at the bottom of an immense chamber, wrapped in perpetual night.

~ by Ross Wolfe on June 25, 2011.

*"How Haiti Saved America" Back In The Day - A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to a "Boston Sunday Globe" article, dated March 21, 2010, which details the relationship between Haiti and American during the revolutionary period.

Markin comments:

The political conclusions drawn by Ted Widmer in this article, as is to be expected, are off but the quick, detailed overview of the importance of Haiti a couple of centuries ago to the American revolution is a worthy point to make.

*From The Blogosphere-From The HistoMat Blog-Selma James on the Black Jacobins

It took an earthquake whose destructive power was enhanced by dire poverty to rekindle interest in Haiti. Many who want to know who Haitians are seem to have turned to CLR James’ classic text, The Black Jacobins, a history of the revolution the slaves made.

Seizing on the revolution in France, they took their freedom and got revolutionary Paris to ratify it. But as the revolution’s power in France waned, to prevent slavery’s return they had to defeat the armies of Spain and Britain as well as France’s Napoleon and, amazingly, they did. In 1804 the independent republic of Haiti was born.

Black Jacobins was published in 1938 as a contribution to the movement for colonial emancipation — for Africa first of all, when few considered this possible. By 1963 it had been out of print for years but the exploding anti-imperialist and anti-racist movements had created a new market for it. Later books updating information on Haiti’s revolution have not challenged its classic status. It’s worth asking why.

First, James takes sides uncompromisingly with the slaves. While he has all the time in the world for anti-racist whites who loved Toussaint and the revolution, his point of reference is the struggle of those who were wresting themselves back from being the possession of others. The book recounts their courage, imagination and determination. But James doesn’t glamorise: ‘The slaves destroyed tirelessly. . . . And if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much. They knew that as long as these plantations stood their lot would be to labour on them until they dropped. The only thing was to destroy them.’

Nor does he shield us from the terrorism and sadism of the masters. But the catalogue of tortures does more than torture the reader; it deepens our appreciation of the former slaves’ power to endure and overcome. Despite death and destruction, the slaves are never helpless victims. This may explain why strugglers from the Caribbean and even South Africa told the author that at low points in their movements Black Jacobins had helped sustain them. This quality is what makes the book thrilling and inspiring — we are learning from the Haitians’ determination to be free what being human is about.

Second, Toussaint L’Ouverture possessed all the skills of leadership that the revolution needed. An uneducated, middle-aged West Indian when it began, he was soon able to handle sophisticated European diplomats and politicians who foolishly thought they could manipulate him because he was black and had been a slave.

James liked to say that while the official claim is that Lincoln freed the slaves, it was in fact the slaves who had freed Lincoln — from his limitations and the conservative restraints of office. Here James says that ‘. . . Toussaint did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint.’ Then he adds: ‘And even that is not the whole truth.’

In other words, while the movement chooses, creates and develops its leadership, historians are unlikely to pin that process down, whatever they surmise from events. What we can be sure of, however, is that the great leader is never a ‘self-made man,’ but a product of his individual talents and skills (and weaknesses) shaped by the movement he leads in the course of great upheavals. The Haitian Jacobins created Toussaint and he led them to where they had the will and determination to go.

This is still groundbreaking today, considering that there are parties and organisations, large and small, which claim that their leadership is crucial for a revolution’s success. There are also those who believe leadership is unnecessary and it would hold the movement back. In Haiti the slaves made the revolution, and Toussaint, one of them, played a vital role in their winning.

Third, James tells us who many of these revolutionary slaves were. They were not proletarians,

‘But working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar-factories which covered the North Plain, they were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time, and the rising was, therefore, a thoroughly prepared and organised mass movement.’

This is relevant to the problem of development which the book poses: what are non-industrial people to do after the revolution? The movement has struggled with this question for generations. Toussaint relied on the plantation system of the former masters who claimed to personify ‘civilisation’ and ‘culture’; they ultimately captured and killed him. The ex-slaves would not have it. They wanted their own plots of land, and the end of the plantation – an early form of forced collectivisation.

Lenin finally (1923) proposed that the State encourage co-operatives which, independent of the party, would dominate the economy. Gandhi insisted that Indians must hold on to the cotton industry and its village way of life against all odds. Nyerere proposed ujamaa or African socialism for Tanzanians, and with the momentum of the independence movement, people made extraordinary strides (an untold story). China has more to tell us; and some Indigenous Latin Americans are gaining the power to say what they propose.

We know that Haiti went further than the movements elsewhere: it was decades before others abolished slavery. Haiti, so far ahead, was vulnerable to the imperial powers which it had infuriated by its revolutionary impertinence.

Now, despite often racist reporting of events there, we are learning how the present Black Jacobins have been organising and how their struggle has continued. President Aristide, whom they elected by 92% of the vote, was twice taken from them by an alliance of the US and the local elite. They demand his return. The least we can do is support that demand.

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-A Call For U.S. /U.N. Troops Out Of Haiti

Click on the headline to link to an "American Left History" blog entry, "A Polemic On Haiti And What Revolutionaries Can Do About It- The Internationalist Group vs. The Spartacist League-Part 2", which gives some context to the material below.

Markin comment:

The question of the call for the withdrawal of American and United Nations troops from Haiti in the aftermath of the recent horrific earthquake there has been the subject of an on-going polemic between the International Communist League/ Spartacist League/U.S. and one of its off-shoots, the International Group (with another off-shoot, the International Bolshevik Tendency, chiming in for good measure). I have provided a link above to the various polemics between the organizations that I had posted previously in this space on this subject. I just want to make a couple of quick comments here now that the ICL/Spartacist League/U.S. has, as their article below states, shifted their position on the question in light of changed circumstances on the ground in Haiti.

To boil down the argument to its core the dispute has centered on the question of the timeliness of a slogan, in this case the withdrawal of imperial troops in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, and under what circumstances to raise the slogan.
There is no question that revolutionaries would not, and do not, call for bourgeois governments, large or small, to sent their troops anywhere, under virtually any foreseeable circumstances. That is the ABCs of Marxism, pure and simple.

Our international workers movement has broken its teeth too many times on that issue, fundamentally the issue of the state and who controls it, to require much further comment on that point. However, I have raised, on several previous occasions in this space, the timeliness of slogans in politics in general and of our revolutionary politics in particular. And that is where I believe that the ICL/SL had the better of the argument here. As cited in the article below that organization, taking a leaf from the thinking of the American Socialist Workers Party in its revolutionary days back in the 1940s (“Shall We Campaign For U.S. Government Aid To The USSR?”, “Militant”, 19 July 1941, although I was not able to get a Google for the article to place it here), argued that while revolutionaries, of course, do not call for sending troops into a situation may, under certain circumstances, not raise an objection. That fits the situation in Haiti in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake to a tee. I would add, as well, particularly when there was precious little, as in Haiti, which revolutionaries today could do about it in that immediate aftermath.

We, unfortunately, can no longer do something like call on the ex-Soviet Union to provide massive relief in the alternative, although I did not see any group calling on the Chinese workers state to do so. Cuba, despite its heroic efforts, is, frankly, just too limited in resources to have effectively provided such an alternative. To pose the question that way gives a little more realistic approach to what was possible, and why raising no immediate objections made sense in conditions of a human/natural catastrophe on the ground. Where I would fault the ICL position, while we are on the subject of timeliness of slogans, is the fact of their timeliness in calling for troop withdrawals. I believe that the withdrawal call could have and should have been made within a month after the earthquake as it became clear that this “aid” situation with the American/ United Nations troops had gone beyond the usual, to use their word, “piggish” nature of such beasts. In any case, we are all on the same page now, and for anyone who isn’t- U.S. /.U.N Troops Out Of Haiti, And Stay Out!

***********

Workers Vanguard No. 955
26 March 2010


All U.S./UN Troops Out of Haiti Now!

It is now more than two months since Haiti was struck by the earthquake that left over 200,000 of its nine million people dead. The quake has multiplied the desperate conditions of what was already the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Even before the devastation wreaked by it, nearly one out of every two Haitians had no regular access to drinking water and more than half the population survived on less than one dollar a day. Two centuries of looting by the U.S. and France and repeated American invasions to install and prop up brutal tinpot dictatorships had left the populace utterly exposed to the ravages of this natural disaster and totally reliant on outside aid. The quisling state administration of President René Préval—a fig leaf for a United Nations occupation regime—installed in 2006 at U.S. imperialism’s behest, collapsed as rapidly as did the tin shacks housing much of the population.

As part of a “relief effort,” the Obama administration dispatched some 20,000 troops and a flotilla of naval vessels to Haiti, not least in order to prevent Haitians from fleeing to the U.S. and to shore up the UN occupation force, which itself was damaged by the quake. Some 2,000 additional UN troops have been sent to the country, as well as an additional 1,500 UN police.

In response to the quake, a range of pseudo-socialist groups in the U.S. rushed to beg the American imperialists to do right by the Haitian people and send “aid not troops.” In this, groups like the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and Workers World Party (WWP) served only to aid Democrat Obama, whose election they had hailed, in providing a “humanitarian” facelift for blood-drenched U.S. imperialism. The notion that the imperialist powers that have laid waste to this small black country will serve the interests of the Haitian masses is a sick joke.

As we made clear in our article, “Haiti Earthquake Horror: Imperialism, Racism and Starvation” (WV No. 951, 29 January), while we were not for the U.S. military going into Haiti, neither were we going to demand, in the immediate aftermath of that horrific natural disaster, the immediate withdrawal of any forces that were supplying such aid as was reaching the Haitian masses. But the continued presence of any U.S. or UN military forces can only be a dagger aimed at the social and national aspirations of the Haitian toiling people. All U.S./UN troops and police out now!

In a 1941 article titled “Shall We Campaign for U.S. Government Aid to the USSR?” (Militant, 19 July 1941), the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) underlined: “There is a difference between not raising any objection, when a capitalist government sends aid, and agitating for such aid. The key to the whole question consists in the understanding that we cannot rely on bourgeois governments to aid our cause.” The SWP was addressing the demand of the Stalinist Communist Party that the U.S. provide aid to the Soviet Union following the June 1941 Nazi invasion amid the Second World War. The Trotskyists opposed all the belligerent imperialist powers in that interimperialist slaughter, while standing for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state.

But while the circumstances were different than those in Haiti today, the Marxist method outlined by our Trotskyist forebears remains fully valid. To call on the imperialists to provide aid means taking “responsibility for bourgeois governmental policy.” Drawing out the logic of the Stalinists’ position, the SWP article added: “Were we to agitate for aid to the Soviet Union by the Roosevelt government, would we then not be compelled to favor convoys to guarantee the arrival of the material shipped to the Soviet Union? Should we then not demand that the waters to Vladivostok be kept open by the U.S. government against Japan?” Indeed, the Stalinists’ call for imperialist aid was part and parcel of their support to the “democratic” imperialists in World War II.

In Haiti today, the U.S. imperialists have basically achieved their purpose, including a blunt reassertion to the rest of the world, most notably French imperialism, that the Caribbean remains an “American lake.” They are patting themselves on the back for a job well done as they wind down their military deployment in Haiti to 8,000 soldiers in order to direct troops back to where the Pentagon needs them—as part of the armies of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, some 9,000 UN troops and 3,600 UN cops are to occupy Haiti. The U.S. and other imperialist military forces in the Caribbean are a particular threat to the Cuban bureaucratically deformed workers state. Defend Cuba! U.S. out of Guantánamo! All U.S. troops and bases out of Puerto Rico!

Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s vaunted offer of temporary legal status for undocumented Haitian immigrants in the U.S. has been shown to be the sham that it is, as only a small percentage of these immigrants has been able to afford the $500 application fees for the legal permits. Anybody who has made it to the U.S. should have the right to stay and work here. Down with the racist ban on Haitian refugees! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!

The notion purveyed by reformists like the ISO and WWP that U.S. imperialism can be cajoled or pressured into serving the needs of the oppressed, rather than its own class interests, shows boundless illusions in the good offices of the rapacious American ruling class. Such illusion-mongering goes hand in hand with fawning over Third World populist nationalists like Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Préval’s mentor, who was restored to the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince in 1994 by a U.S. invasion force after being ousted by a (U.S.-backed) military coup. Aristide was then subsequently whisked away by the U.S. in 2004.

Taking up the left flank of the reformists is the centrist Internationalist Group (IG). In a 20 January article, the IG grotesquely and cynically claimed that the earthquake provided an opening for socialist revolution in Haiti, “particularly at present where the machinery of the capitalist state is largely reduced to rubble and a few marauding bands of police.” As we wrote in response in WV No. 951, “not only is the state ‘largely reduced to rubble,’ but so is the society as a whole,” underlining that “there is a military power in Haiti that is far from ‘reduced to rubble,’ and it’s U.S. imperialism.” Indeed, the only force that seemed to share the IG’s delusions of an uprising in Haiti after the quake was the Pentagon.

Yet the IG denounced us as “supporting imperialism” because we didn’t call for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops. As we stated, in a situation where there were no good alternatives, we were “not going to call for an end to such aid as the desperate Haitian masses can get their hands on.” That the IG conjured up fantasies of a workers uprising was little more than an effort to give a phony “revolutionary” veneer to Haitian populists and others who used the earthquake to reinforce the illusions of the Haitian masses in Aristide (see “Haiti: IG Conjures Up Revolution Amid the Rubble,” WV No. 952, 12 February).

The desperate conditions of Haiti cannot be resolved within Haiti. To end the grinding poverty and degradation of the Haitian people, the imperialist system must be swept away through international socialist revolution. What there is of a working class in Haiti has neither the social weight nor industrial concentration to effect a revolutionary transformation of that society. But in the Dominican Republic, Canada and the U.S. there are hundreds of thousands of Haitian workers who can play a vital role in the struggle for socialist revolution. As we stressed in WV No. 951: “The key to the liberation of Haiti lies in proletarian revolution throughout the hemisphere, in which the mobilization of the sizable Haitian proletariat in the diaspora can play a key role.... It is only this revolutionary internationalist program that holds out any genuine perspective for the liberation of the Haitian masses.”