Mark Anniversary of Haiti Quake; International Solidarity from Port-au-Prince to Brooklyn

BROOKLYN, NY, January 12 — In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, students marked the anniversary of the 2010 earthquake with a march between two campuses of UEH, the State University of Haiti, while simultaneously PLP rallied in a Brooklyn neighborhood where many workers from Haiti live.

Our banner here read, in English, Kreyòl, French and Spanish: “International Solidarity with Haitian Workers: The Struggle Will Go On!” We distributed more than 500 Party flyers, along with CHALLENGE, and gathered over 100 signatures on a solidarity petition to be sent to five union and student groups in Haiti, supporting their efforts to defend themselves against the failed system of Haitian local bosses under imperialist control.

Students spoke in Kreyòl and English about the need to abolish capitalism itself, both in the U.S. and in Haiti, and to build a worker-run society, egalitarian communism. Our bullhorn echoed through the busy intersection as thousands of workers hurrying home heard the communist message.

Just as Bill Clinton’s vaunted “reconstruction” has failed in Haiti (his Interim Haiti Recovery Commission folded last October), capitalism itself is failing everywhere. Consider these racist unemployment figures: 80% in Haiti, 70% in Pakistan, 70% among youth in South Africa, 20% in Spain, 17% in France, 21% in the U.S., (50% among black youth).

Capitalism is a system of production for profit but because of overproduction and a credit crisis, its drive to maintain profits has thrown 250 million workers worldwide onto the streets. Meanwhile, U.S. banks sit on $2 trillion of capital they will not release for investment in real production. So workers’ needs simply go unmet.

As Karl Marx showed, these crises inevitably have recurred throughout capitalism’s entire history. The bosses’ solution to mantain profits during crises is to redivide the pie and destroy workers’ lives through gigantic inter-imperialist wars. Haiti too, as an “ally,” will be caught up in the major war brewing between the U.S. imperialists and their rivals.

The bosses’ proclaimed programs of aid to Haiti have gone mostly right back to the bosses themselves, not to workers there. The vast majority of the $4.59 billion in international aid to Haiti went to the donor governments themselves, to major “vulture capitalists” who swoop in to profit from natural disasters, and to the big NGOs (Non-Government Organizations) with their expensive overhead costs.

For example, $600 million of the $1.6 billion the U.S. Congress eventually released went to the U.S. Department of Defense to reimburse it for deploying 20,000 troops to Haiti to guard against post-quake rebellions. (For details see “Haiti: Seven Places Where Earthquake Money Did and Did Not Go,” at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/03-2.) We can never count on any capitalist, only on ourselves as one international working class.

These January 12 actions are small steps in PLP’s strategic effort to revive the proletarian internationalism so necessary for all workers to defend ourselves, defying the bosses’ borders. We see this urgent need as the big imperialists prepare for world war, most menacingly right now in the flash point of the Hormuz Strait near Iran (see CHALLENGE editorial, 1/18).

The mistakes of the old communist movement, as it collapsed because of the abandonment of its principles, dragged the red flag of internationalism into the mud. In 1943, the Soviet leadership, with the agreement of the Chinese and other communist parties, dissolved the Communist International (the Comintern) and lapsed into a loose collection of national parties. This retreat came directly from the parties’ united front with the capitalist “Allies” in the war against fascism. The Soviets and the others saw abolishing the Comintern as necessary to reassure the Allies that they were safe from communist revolution at home — in essence abandoning workers to their own bosses in the Allied countries. 

We need a new version of the Comintern! PLP is organizing as a single international party, a step beyond the Comintern coalition form. This is a gigantic task, but the principle is clear, as we chanted today: “Same Enemy, Same Fight: Workers of the World Unite!”

Workers have no country and want no country: as workers our “country” is the whole world. Workers in Haiti need both solidarity from the entire international working class as well as to contribute to it. From small actions like these simultaneous rallies a great movement will grow.