Haiti's earthquake reveals living roots of revolution

The devastation wrought by the magnitude seven earthquake that struck Haiti is still sinking in: estimates put casualty figures at up to 230,000 killed; 300,000 injured; and an estimated 1,000,000 plus left homeless. In addition, 250,000 homes and 30,000 businesses have been destroyed. The dead are people from all walks of life, including feminists Myriam Merlet, Magalie Marcelin and Anne Marie Coriolan, and opposition political activist Michel Gaillard.

The response to this apocalyptic destruction was swift and profound, at a grassroots level. Many Haitians commented on the way people in the Dominican Republic rushed to provide aid and comfort, as the woman in New York who said, "I was shocked to hear Dominicans speak of their Haitian 'brothers,'  this is new and very exciting...There has never been a problem between the peoples; only the leaders." This grassroots solidarity held true in the U.S. and elsewhere.

In Haiti there has been remarkable solidarity and self-organization among people forced to take on the tasks which the government abandoned. Sharing food and homes has been common. As Kim Ives of Haiti Liberté said, "We see throughout Haiti the population organizing themselves into popular committees to clean up, to pull out the bodies from the rubble, to build refugee camps, to set up their security for the refugee camps. This is a population that is self-sufficient, and it has been self-sufficient for many years."

The heavy-handed, oppressive U.S. military response reflected the historic relationship with Haiti. All emphasis was put on military considerations and "securing order." Deliveries of medicine, food and clean water were delayed. This resulted in many needless deaths. Doctors Without Borders criticized the diversion of aid flights: "We have had five patients in Martissant health center die for lack of the medical supplies that this plane was carrying. We were forced to buy a saw in the market to continue amputations."

Now 16,000 heavily armed combat troops are on the ground as an occupying force, in addition to 9,000 UN troops and police.

HAITI'S REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY

The current situation in Haiti has roots which go back centuries. One can't overestimate the importance of Haiti's Revolution, which began in 1791 as the most radical aspect of the French Revolutionary era. It was the first successful slave rebellion in history, and it established the first and, at the time, only independent Black republic in a hemisphere dominated by slave-owning societies in North and South America and the Caribbean. Its impact was so deep and lasting it wrote itself into the history of revolutionary thought. (See "Black/Red View.")

A common saying is that Haiti was never forgiven for its revolution. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that the implications of that revolution never ceased to inspire the most intense fear and hatred in the ruling class of racist societies like the U.S. and France. It explains why the U.S. allowed France to bleed "reparations" from Haiti from 1825 to 1947. This despite the Monroe Doctrine. Free Haiti was a dagger aimed at the heart of the racist slave system.

This fear of Black revolution has been constant, and explains the repeated U.S. interventions in Haiti, including U.S. support for the brutal father and son Duvalier dictatorship. When "Baby Doc" Duvalier was overthrown in 1986, then-President Reagan responded by supporting "interim" ruler Gen. Henri Namphy to "keep order." What became clear at that time was that the Haitian people had no desire to return to the sort of caricatured, U.S.-dictated bourgeois democracy that existed before the Duvaliers. Rather, they overwhelmingly elected liberation theologian Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the Lavalas (flood) movement he spoke for with a mandate for revolutionary changes in social relations--the dechoukaj (uprooting) of Duvalierist oppression. This grew out of a movement that had seen an unprecedented involvement of workers, peasants and students who had been organizing in clandestine study circles without centralized hierarchical structures.

THE U.S.'S SAVAGE HISTORY IN HAITI

The U.S. responded by supporting a military coup in 1991 that overthrew Aristide's government. Then the CIA helped form the terrorist FRAPH paramilitary which assassinated, raped and tortured thousands of Haitian revolutionaries and Lavalas supporters. This created difficulties for the U.S., however, including a flood of Haitian refugees. Thousands of them were held illegally at Guantanamo. When President Clinton was elected, he broke his campaign promise to cease repatriating Haitian refugees, then finally, under pressure, used military force to reinstate Aristide.

But the U.S., France, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund placed severe restrictions on what Aristide could do once in office. Clinton's intervention was simply a way to enforce a racist refugee and immigration policy by other means. As a group of Aristide supporters wrote at the time: "Don't be fooled. This intervention will be made against the Haitian people, because it follows from the same logic as the coup d'etat, simply put, to legitimize its principal gain under an international cover: the total erasure of the Haitian people from the political scene of their country." Haitians made their voices heard through street demonstrations and attacks on police stations as hated symbols of the coup leaders.

One of Aristide's most radical acts was disbanding the army. But the period between the reinstatement of Aristide and the second coup against him in 2004--when he was forcibly removed by the U.S. military--was a period of political stalemate. Imperialism did everything to ensure that revolutionary change wasn't on the agenda: starving the Aristide government of money; interfering in elections; clandestinely funding terrorists. Meanwhile, neoliberal economic policies begun under the Duvaliers were devastating Haitian life. The flood of cheap U.S. "Miami rice" and other subsidized products wiped out Haiti's traditional peasant agriculture, flooding Port-au-Prince with unemployed, cheap laborers. These policies contributed to making vast areas of Port-au-Prince the poorly built death traps they became for the Haitian workers and poor. (See "Haiti's unnatural disaster," Jan.-Feb. 2010 N&L.) 

TOWARD PERMANENT REVOLUTION

What U.S. imperialism wanted was simple: no revolution. As Raya Dunayevskaya wrote in 1986, "The hope that [U.S.] sudden, timely support for the removal of Marcos and Duvalier...may have staved off full social revolution has been made into a political category by the Reagan administration. In seeking to control 'what happens after' the overthrow of the old, even before the overthrow is completed, Reagan's new 'democratic revolution' is revealed to be the other side of the coin of 'contra aid.'" This has held true in various ways under Republican and Democratic Party administrations.

To this end the U.S. was willing, along with the UN, to become the guarantor of "order" and "stability" in Haiti. Haiti, since at least 1994, has really been the model for imperialism's "humanitarian intervention." It is also the place where the question of revolution is most starkly contrasted to that doctrine, because revolution is the great issue of Haitian history.

Clearly, nothing imperialism has tried has been able to silence the aspirations of the Haitian people. Before the earthquake there were many ongoing struggles: against occupation and against continuing privatization of government resources; there were student protests, women's rights activism, and the struggle of factory workers for a $5 minimum wage adjustment. In 2008 there were massive food protests. Now there are again calls for the return of Aristide.

These mass struggles truly represent what is rational and human. The U.S., and the Haitian elite it supported, did nothing to prepare for this devastating earthquake which was long predicted. The neoliberal vision for Haiti has worked to enrich a small, elite sector which based its profits on sweatshops and imports of rice, beans and corn, rather than domestic production. It helped create a huge gap between Haiti's wealthiest people and the rest of the population.

Haiti's future will be either continued imperialist interventions to "restore order" or it will be popular revolution, the dechoukaj, the lavalas.

DEEP CHORDS OF FREEDOM

The response to the earthquake hints at an entirely different logic of development. The kind of self-organization and cooperation happening in Haiti today has deep roots in the historic struggles of the people for freedom. It is resolutely opposed to the dehumanizing logic of the sweatshop, that iron fist of globalized capital. It strikes a deep chord in the world. As one member of Rising in Solidarity with Ayiti said recently, "We've targeted our fundraising for groups doing local organizing, working with women, peasants, to reframe discussion that doesn't focus on Haitians only as victims, but to give capacity to those at the grassroots who were at the cutting edge of the struggle for the last few decades."

It is this deep opposition to what is that helped Marxist-Humanism see the need for the entirety of Marx's work, including the Ethnological Notebooks of his last decade, as opening up a new path to the revolutions of the 1980s in Haiti and other Third World countries. It was a need felt by a new kind of revolutionary striving to unite theory and practice, aiming at the total uprooting of old structures of oppression and their replacement by new types of human relations.  

Much will depend on the ability of revolutionaries now to articulate that opposition with the depth and seriousness owed to Haiti's long freedom struggle, which has given so very much to the world.

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