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!

CHICAGO, August 15 - Seven members from the international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined hundreds of other angry workers and youth at a school on the city’s South Side to protest the liberal bosses’ plans for greater environmental racism and worker displacement. The event was a “Community over Quantum” Town Hall in the majority-Black South Shore neighborhood. For several months before the forum PLers came from across Indiana and Chicago to canvas the neighborhood with the community organization Southside Together, who organized the event and invited the mayor, Brandon Johnson.

The audience and the speakers were unanimous in demanding the mayor revoke the permits for the Quantum Shore Project, which is a massive high-tech research campus that will include military and surveillance purposes. Johnson insisted that the community needs to accept the Quantum Shore development to allow the capitalists to get something from their community. According to the bosses’ exploitative logic, only once the community gives the capitalists what they want, then there can be some progress on environmental racism, poverty, and violence. There always must be a transaction to get something in return.

Our Party must lead the working class to smash ruling class ideology so we can win class conscious fighters to fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat, a new state form where workers will decide collectively how to run things based on criticism, self-criticism and dialectical materialism (a philosophy that is the foundation for all communist revolutions). We won’t need to beg for crumbs! 

Angry workers shout liberal misleader down

Under a hail of boos and hisses Mayor Johnson dipped out the back before the event was even over. He attempted to convince the audience they should trust him to represent “working people” in ongoing negotiations with developers when directly asked to kill the project by a presenter. Johnson can’t even say the words “working class.” 

A PLP member on stage made the point that the bosses’ quantum center advocates claim their tool can solve problems like healthcare and climate change with new inventions. This comrade explained from personal experience as an EMT that his hospital on the west side of the city is full of working-class people suffering from preventable ailments unable to afford medicine that is already invented. 

Only the working class can change history to stop climate change and cure disease. Machines (including computers) are not capable of this type of historical action on their own. When bosses control machines, they use them to dominate workers, building fascism and inter-imperialist war. Workers must take over the machines to liberate their productive forces to support life instead of death. This is the class basis of science.

Capitalism poisons the earth and workers while building for war

South Shore was the site of US Steel’s South Works, which once employed 20,000 workers. The works have been shut down since 1992, leaving a legacy of unemployment and environmental racism (steel production leaves behind heavy metals like lead, manganese, chromium as well as petroleum waste) (Hyde Park Herald, 7/3). 

The town hall presenters were all lifelong working-class residents of the neighborhood, and many were from families of multiple generations of South Shore workers. For decades there has been poverty, filthy streets, decaying housing, unmet needs for medical care, including mental health care and care for respiratory problems related to pollution. Residents described new harms from the recent construction of the project, including hospitalizations for respiratory illnesses and appalling rent increases of $400 or more per month even as the neighborhood becomes less livable after losing its last grocery store.

Two of the speakers made the point that powerful public figures and institutions of the ruling class are aligned in support of this project. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, President Donald Trump, local construction firms, the Air Force Research Lab, the Department of Defense DARPA program, and academics from major universities organized under the umbrella Chicago Quantum Exchange all expressed public support and organized funds for the Quantum facility. DARPA-funded Project Maven, which uses AI to plan warfare, and has been used in Gaza to try to murder entire families at once for the genocide. Despite feigning horror at Trump’s research grant cuts, Pritzker, liberal scientists and the military brass can unite with Trump’s department of war to lavish funding on military technology preparing for war with China, the leading rival of U.S. imperialism.

Don’t negotiate with the bosses – make revolution!

It was a great step for the workers to publicly reject the Quantum project and to reject the mayor’s misleadership and false promises of a better life through negotiations with capitalists. Many speakers and community members suggested better alternatives for development: from mental health facilities to grocery stores with subsidized prices. However, we still need to do a better job in raising the PLP’s line. Capitalism is a total system of private ownership of socialized production that spans the earth, especially in its highest stage, imperialism. 
Only by co-operating with the whole world’s international working class can we remake this system for the working class’s benefit. We need a revolution led by the PLP to defeat the capitalists who have stood in the way of this type of working-class cooperation since the Paris Commune. This struggle in the South Shore will only grow more intense as the ruling class and their lackeys attack the Black workers more aggressively. We must unite to fight alongside these workers to win them as a key part of the international fight for communist revolution.  J

PRINCE GEORGE COUNTY, Maryland, September 8 — Over 50 residents gathered outside the Prince George’s County government building to demand “ICE out of Hyattsville.”. The racist and fascist moves of the Donald Trump administration have come into our neighborhood and we are fighting back. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members have been involved in this struggle for over six months, marching, organizing, and strategizing the best way to fight back with both our longstanding base and our new friends. Building a larger, more multiracial movement among our neighbors is more important than talking with politicians. We  know that organized workers have tremendous potential power to stymie the bosses and that bringing in workers from the Metro transit union Local 689 can build power. If Local 689 took a political stand and struck against ICE, imagine the advances that could be made! We also encourage residents to call out capitalism and take the road to communist revolution to smash this wellspring of fascism, racism, and ICE stormtroopers.

Putting the bosses’ stooges on the spot

Today’s protest came on the heels of the Greenbelt Labor Day Parade at which Greenbelt Resistance Network (GRN) organized an Anti-ICE float and leafleting.  GRN members and other angry activists brought militant energy as we entered the council chambers. We presented our petition with 1000 signatures to the County Council and 17 speakers, including three PLP members, testified that the council must fight to revoke the permit that allows ICE to expand its offices at 6505 Belcrest Road in Hyattsville (see CHALLENGE 8/26/26). One speaker attacked the idea that the building will only be used for ICE administrators and lawyers. ICE lawyers are just as much a part of the fascist ICE machine as the goons/thugs on the street. Several others declared that “ICE does what they want” so “who is to say this will not be used for detentions”. A student told the council “If you don’t get sued for revoking this permit then you haven’t done your job.”Others said there should be no borders and attacked Trump’s racism. 

The permit was issued in late July despite six months of weekly protests at the building and multiple appeals to the council people and county executives. The building serves community college students, provides SNAP benefits and medical offices and sits next to a day care center. The immigration court is two blocks away – convenient for ICE to pick up immigrants, grab the ICE lawyers, and endanger our community. 

Cowardly politicians side with the ruling class

The politicians on the County Council voiced sympathy with the cause and thanked us for organizing around this issue but quickly pointed out that they could do nothing themselves. The County Executive, Aisha Braveboy, occupies the same building so we headed to her office to hand over a copy of the petition and demand that she revoke the permit. At this point, the cops and security guards blocked us and refused to let us go up to the fourth floor. Some of the speakers who had walked outside were blocked from coming back into the building. But 12 of us continued to demand that Braveboy come down to receive the petitions and listen to us. In the next hour we were herded around the building to be out of sight but we returned to the lobby and began singing. The security guards went upstairs and finally several staffers came down to meet with us and accept the petitions and set up a meeting in the future. A staffer from Puerto Rico tried to explain that the lease had been signed by Braveboy’s predecessor, Angela Alsobrooks (now a U.S. Senator), so unfortunately she could not change it. The lying and cowardice of these politicians was visible to all of us and will hopefully help us win our friends to keep building the movement rather than wasting time talking to these liberal defenders of a brutal racist system.

PLP members and close friends have guaranteed ongoing activity in this fight and have written about this in CHALLENGE, which has been appreciated by several of the GRN and Hyattsville Resistance members. We struggle to expose the politicians and urge outreach into neighborhoods and the labor movement to build the anti-ICE movement and move in a deeper multiracial direction. Talking to politicians is useless without building a larger and more diverse movement that has some punch. While there are supporters of voting among the protesters and a desire to shift to “mutual aid” activities rather than movement building, this action exposed the system as a whole and demonstrated the need to intensify the confrontation with authorities, not retreat. This rally was a step up in numbers but more is needed. More regular strategic one-on-one discussions with the activists are necessary to recruit to the Party and develop revolutionary class consciousness, and we are doing more of this as the struggle continues. We will continue to write about this fight in CHALLENGE to show the communist role of the Party and our leadership in advancing the class struggle against ICE.

Haiti is one of the Caribbean countries with the lowest wages in addition to facing massive insecurity for the past several years. This insecurity—gangs—has taken over the economy of the working class. Our class is bearing the burden of the abysmal—and racist—organization of the state, as it funds corruption. The state is, in turn, a victim of and in collusion with the gangs, which in their turn are allowed to flourish through the action and inaction of the imperialist countries, especially the U.S. and their junior partners France and Canada.  

Since May 2026, the minimum wage in Haiti has been 1000 gourdes. This amounts to US$7.40 per day for work in the subcontracting sector (the minimum wage is determined by the sector of employment). This astonishingly low wage level has led to the ever-increasing pauperization of the working class: wages are low and stagnant, yet inflation has skyrocketed to 35 percent recently. The worst part of all this is that while workers suffer, they are also the central pillar which sustains an entire economy. 

Workers at the Group M2 garment factory, part of the CODEVI free trade zone, in Ouanaminthe, in the northeast of Haiti, went on strike in April against this starvation wage. Group M2, a British company, sells upscale clothing mainly to the U.S., produced by these Haitian workers in sweatshops for slave-like wages. The workers are demanding 3000 gourdes (US$23) per day, plus paid overtime, an increase over the current US$2.40 wage that has been in effect for about 10 years.

Insecurity as a form of accumulation in Haiti 

Since the presidency of Jovenel Moise, assassinated in 2021, and his fight against the demands of the working class (provide security against gang violence, lower the cost of living or create jobs, though he did manage to increase taxes on the workers!) gutter gangs have taken control of a continually growing portion of the capital, Port-au-Prince,  as well as attacking provincial towns, especially in the Artibonite department (in the center of Haiti), and in the Kenscoff suburbs southeast of Port-au-Prince in August where dozens were murdered and/or kidnapped. 

Now, it is mainly workers who are victims of acts of violence: rape, murder, and kidnapping, as well as the high cost of living generated by insecurity. In the last nine9 months, the gangs have killed nearly 1,500 workers and wounded nearly 800. It is not a new phenomenon, but self-defense groups have had some success in fighting back against the gangs, killing hundreds. Those efforts have been thwarted by the government when it accepted foreign mercenary police from Kenya. Those forces did little to stop the gangs, but their presence was used to dismantle neighborhood defense groups. 

If we consider the prices of consumer products and transportation, Haiti is one of the most expensive places to live, though with the most feeble means to do so. The cheapest plate of food costs 500 gourdes, which represents half of the minimum wage, not to mention that the prices of beverages increase constantly (the cheapest soft drink is 125 gourdes), and the cost of transportation eats up another big slice of wages. 
Haiti has 10 departments (states), but the entire economy flows from what is locally called “the Republic of Port-au-Prince” to the other departments. Goods are carried to other regions of the country by boat or by a complex system of poorly maintained roads over often mountainous terrain. Truck and bus drivers and boat pilots as well as casual travelers must pay fees to the gangs in order to pass through controlled areasalong the entire route. Moreover, the Haitian police show no willingness to put an end to this practice, and some cops take a cut of the money stolen from the workers. United Nations units numbering around 2,000 have failed at protecting Haitian workers in Port-au-Prince and Gonaïves, as have mercenaries, such as Eric Price’s Vectus Global (formerly Blackwater), who are paid to collect taxes at the Haitian–Dominican border.

Time to turn the fear and the guns around

The working class cannot live on their knees like this. Throughout history, the masses of workers have always fought back against their oppressors (see page 8). The insecurity aimed at destroying the lives of the working class should never keep the masses from fighting to live as a free people, worthy of their greatness.  

Capitalism can never bring peace or freedom to our class. But communism, the very foundation of liberation and well-being, can—and will. We want to uproot the system, not just those who lead it. We want liberty, equality and well-being for our class. Only communism will bring that. Let’s fight for a communist world with the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) today.