PORT-AU-PRINCE, MARCH 16 — As we gathered to mourn a fallen comrade in Haiti, Janil Louis-Juste, the famous cry of IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) “Wobbly” rebel Joe Hill, before the bosses executed him in 1915, came to mind. “Don’t mourn; organize!” Janil was a leader of students and faculty at the State University of Haiti in their militant 2009 campaign against cuts and in support of the Haitian workers’ struggle for a livable minimum wage.
Janil’s death was a political assassination, probably on the orders of the UN “peacekeeping” mission, MINUSTAH. He was shot by two professional killers not far from his campus on January 12, just two hours before the earthquake struck. His OCHAN, or memorial service, March 12 in the courtyard of his ruined university was strong and beautiful.
We were summoned to attention by the solemn bass drone of the LAMBI, the conch-shell trumpet used by Haitian revolutionaries in 1791 to call the slaves to revolt. A ceremonial wood fire blazed under repeated libations of rum, candles flickered in a block of lava, and poetry, music, theatre and an amazing river of words flowed powerfully for over four hours.
In this blaze of speech, mourners became organizers. Some PLP comrades and friends had been invited to speak in a gesture of international solidarity. One of us, a professor who knew Janil, paid him a personal tribute as a fighting philosopher and internationalist. Another, a Stella D’oro striker (see CHALLENGE, 9/09-7/10) from the Caribbean, recalled a revolutionary friend from his student days also shot down by the police, and called for international class unity of all workers and students to fight back against repression.
A veteran Party leader ended by saying that when the conch-shell sounded for international communist revolution, we in PLP would be there to fight alongside our sisters and brothers in Haiti. A teacher in the audience told us afterwards that these words made him want to get out of his seat and march in the streets. (Students did hit the streets immediately after the assassination, some escaping death in collapsing buildings as a result.)
Of the speeches by students, peasants, organized and unorganized workers, intellectuals and artists, more than one echoed our communist sentiments. A student MC quoted Janil: “The struggle... knows no borders.” His widow read a political essay, saying that as he had taught her the art of political writing this was her best tribute.
Janil’s death was joined to the “many thousands gone” of the old U.S. slave song, our casualties and our heroes. The heroes of the working class, “who as workers have no country,” as Marx wrote, come from all times and places and “races” and nations. The defiance with which revolutionaries greet the capitalist state that kills us broke through in call-and-response chants like: ”Camarade Janil: Présent!” and “Liberty or Death!” (the slogan of Dessalines, the Haitian slave general who defeated a Napoleonic army in 1803).
A kind of revolutionary mass education took shape at the ceremony, following Janil’s critique of bourgeois education: “Education is a trap where capital makes its pile.” One of our speakers got the most applause for saying the state university served the state, not the working class, and only a communist revolution could create real workers’ schools. Some discussed opening up “freedom schools” run by workers in place of schools closed by the earthquake.
As many said, the truest tribute is to carry on the struggle. And in the succeeding days we did so, in intense meetings with our sisters and brothers regrouping to organize in terrible circumstances. They asked us to help by putting pressure on the Haitian and U.S. governments and bosses to stop killing and jailing and firing students, faculty and workers who fight back. We agreed to raise resolutions in our unions and other organizations against this repression and to get the imperialist troops (both U.S. and UN) out of Haiti.
All PLP members and friends should bring such resolutions to their groups. They also need, rather than money or medicines and food, material political aid to help organize, such as video projectors and cameras, printers and laptops they can share, students and workers together. When you collect for this, think that you are defying Janil’s killers, proving right one speaker’s cry: “You can kill a revolutionary but you can’t kill the revolution!”