This past August marked the 235th anniversary of the start of the Haitian Revolution. The following is an excerpt from a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) magazine article titled "The History of Haiti," published in 2014. The history of Haiti offers lessons for the international working class.
Haiti was born of slave rebellion, and its history makes clear that slavery and racism were essential to the very foundation of capitalism. The Haitian working class has also endured some of the most vicious exploitation by imperialism, both direct and indirect. Yet ever since Haitian workers rose up to abolish slavery in the 1790s, they have fought back with militancy, pushing for reform after reform in an effort to free themselves from exploitation. Time and again, however, these reforms have failed.
Today, conditions facing Haitian workers continue to deteriorate. Gangs, weapons imported from the U.S., and assassinations have devastated the well-being of the Haitian working class, while the racist attack on Haitian workers' Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in the U.S. has brought further uncertainty and pain.
This history carries the most important lesson for all workers: only communism can end exploitation and put the international working class in control of society. It is a reminder that while Black workers around the world remain the most brutally exploited section of our class, the fight against racism can never be separated from the fight against capitalism and imperialism. Only communist revolution can end this system of exploitation for good. From Haiti to the United States, Black workers' leadership remains a crucial revolutionary force.
We conclude this series in the nineteenth century with the aftermath of the revolution, and summarize how its leaders sought to build a new republic on the foundations — and the stumbling blocks — of the bourgeois French Revolution. That inheritance carried both radical promises of a communist movement and hard lessons of concessions with capitalism, laying the groundwork for ideological questions our class still confronts as we fight the consequences of liberal democracy, imperialism, nationalism, and capitalism, and struggle against the failures of the Soviet Union and the old communist movement.
Defining a new nineteenth-century nation
The rebellion of the enslaved workers began at the point of production with the destruction of the mills and cane fields. Control over production and reproduction continued to be at the center of the struggle to define freedom. As Haiti declared its independence, this struggle expanded to new arenas, including efforts to define race and nationality and to develop formal institutions of government.
During the insurgency, rebels had continued to farm family plots to raise food, often claiming these small pieces of land as their personal property. Sometimes these plots were farmed by small groups. When slavery was formally ended, the effort to define work and labor rights in a free French San Domingue was taken up by the new political elite, initially by Toussaint Louverture. But in the 1790’s, what did freedom look like?
To Toussaint’s effort increased the production of coffee and sugar, and throughout the 19th century Haitian elites—both black and gens de couleurs—repeatedly adopted similar laws (called rural codes) to reinvigorate the economy by forcing people to work as plantation laborers. These elites tried to reorganize their world in class terms, with a rural proletariat of contracted wage workers exploited for capitalist profits.
To Toussaint, freedom for Saint-Domingue required the rebuilding of a plantation economy so the country could once again become a major exporter of sugar and coffee. Toussaint wanted a “modern” economy and invited white planters who were still in exile to return to help rebuild. Confiscated plantation lands were turned over to leaders of the insurgency, creating a new group of black plantation owners. Strict labor laws required former slaves to return to the plantation under year-long labor contracts where they would be paid wages defined as a share of the profits of production. To keep people at work in the industrial style plantations, sales of small plots of land were forbidden.
But the Haitian workers had a different definition of freedom. To the ex-slaves freedom meant working for one’s family without any bosses. They rejected all forms of slavery, including the wage slavery that was becoming dominant in Europe and the northern United States as industrial capitalism developed. In Road to Revolution IV, PLP noted that true freedom can only exist under communism. But that understanding had not yet emerged. Instead of communism, a form of peasant economy emerged. Former plantation laborers, most of them armed and experienced in the wars against slavery, forced the break-up of many plantations. The industrial production of sugar was replaced by small-holders and squatters operating subsistence farms and growing small quantities of coffee and other goods for sale internally and for export. The new ruling class of Haiti wanted to focus on commodity production (production for export to markets), which is essential to capitalism. Haitian workers, wanting to create a new society, instead focused on natural production (production that meets the needs of the workers). This shows that workers, unlike bosses and wannabe bosses, are often revolutionary and can be won to communism.
Concept of race and modern day racism develop
Race would likewise be redefined in the course of the struggle. Racism (in fact the very concept of race) was the product of slavery. And racist divisions—in colonial Haiti a three-part division between whites, gens de couleur, and blacks—were part of the structure of the slave economy In the 1790s, when the French Republic abolished slavery, the political leadership of Saint-Domingue had been multi-racial, and Black leaders such as Toussaint Louverture had welcomed the aid of whites. But race also had a class dimension, since most slaves were Black, often African-born, and those who owned slaves were white or mixed race gens de couleur.
The struggle against Napoleon brought race to the forefront. The formal declaration of independence was issued by Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Like Toussaint, Dessalines was an ex-slave insurgent leader who had fought for the Spanish and had served under Leclerc. In declaring independence and choosing the name Haiti (from the Taino name Ayti for the island), Dessalines rejected any further association with French colonizers.
Independence brings about the many contradictions of nationalism
As he pursued those who had participated in the French-organized massacres of Blacks, Dessalines ordered and supervised the killing of many white inhabitants. Other whites—including Poles who had joined the fight for independence, a group of Germans who had settled in Haiti before its revolution and many white women who were willing to renounce France—were given Haitian citizenship. The constitution merged nationalism with race. It declared Haiti to be a “Black” nation, and declared that all Haitians (including the gens de couleurs and the naturalized whites) would be known as “Black.” The constitution also stated that “no white, no matter what his nation,” could henceforth come to Haiti as “master or property owner.”
With independence, Haiti also struggled to set up structures of government. This effort was defined by conflicts within the revolutionary elite, often between the old elite of the gens de couleurs who had owned small plantations before the insurgency and Black ex-slave generals who had gained control of plantations as rewards for their military and political prowess. In its earliest years, Haiti was divided, with a monarchy claiming to be based on African patterns in the north, and a republic in the south. By 1821, the country was unified under one government which had established control of the entire island of Hispaniola.
While independent, Haiti had not escaped the reach of colonialism or slavery. In these decades, Haiti’s economy developed in new ways. The ex-slave peasants preferred to grow subsistence crops not cash crops. And while local markets flourished (often organized by women), the export trade languished. Sugar production, which required capital investment and an industrial organization of work, collapsed. However, coffee production was high enough to make Haiti a major exporter, especially to France. Unable to force black workers to work on their plantations, many gens de couleur migrated to the cities, becoming government officials and merchants, and creating a new geography of race and power between rural and urban areas.
France’s bosses, needing money for wars, demand repayments for lost colony
France pushed to reestablish control over its former colony. In 1825, France announced that it would recognize the independence of Haiti if Haiti paid compensation to former masters for their property losses when slavery was abolished and plantations confiscated. As the French anchored warships in the harbor, the Haitian government decided to negotiate. It allowed the French to assess the value of their losses (including appraising the “value” of some of the government officials who had once been slaves). In the end, France demanded that Haiti pay some 150 million gold francs for the slaves whose lives and labor French planters had stolen in the first place! The French also demanded and won lower tariffs for French-made goods.
The Haitian government had to borrow money from French banks to make these payments, and in 1871 French bankers set up the National Bank of Haiti to serve as a tool of economic power in its former colony. It took Haiti over 100 years, and 70% of the state’s income to repay this claim.
In the 19th century, over a quarter of the government’s income went to debt repayment, and another half of government income paid for a large military, originally needed to protect against France. Over time the military focused on suppressing domestic rebellions against high taxes and increasing exploitation by merchants. In the 1840s slave-produced Brazilian coffee began to flood international markets and drive prices down. In the face of increasing economic hardship, Haitian peasants rose up in 1843, 1865, 1867, and 1911.
Exploitation continued for Haitian workers
The Haitian working class had defeated slavery at home, but the existence of slavery elsewhere, with its super-exploitation of sugar, coffee and cotton workers, was still felt. While Haitian peasants were not wage slaves, exploitation and colonialism continued to dominate their lives.
The Haitian Revolution is an inspirational example of rebellion and antiracist struggle, but as we see today, the Revolution did not lead to a worker-led antiracist state. The struggle began in the 1790s, before Marx and Engels had analyzed this revolutionary history to produce a dialectical analysis of class society and class struggle. Lacking a communist analysis, Haitian leaders resorted to the French Revolution's goals of nationalism and the development of bourgeois supremacy over feudalism. Still, in some ways the success of Haitian workers was impressive. For example, they sent troops to South America to assist in the campaigns against Spanish rule, demanding that freed regions be liberated from slavery. To end the misery in Haiti, and worldwide, workers need communism, not national liberation to end up with capitalist dictatorship. Fight for communism! Join PLP!
