Haiti: Workers fed up, bring system to a halt

Haiti, March 3—It’s been close to a month since the first uprising of 2019 with masses of working class people rising up against the capitalist system. Recalling a history of the first Black people to successfully fight back against capitalist slavery and colonialism (1804 Haitian Revolution), today, in the streets and through social media, workers and students call for an end to a system of inequality. For several days, starting on February 7, the anniversary of the fall of the hated Duvalier dictatorship in 1986, to February 18, a series of mobilizations shut everything down: roads were barricaded, no transport moved, businesses closed. An estimated two million people in every corner from big cities to small “sections rurales” (hamlets) were in the streets.
The demands, at heart, were anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, calling out in particular France and the U.S. who are responsible for the impoverishment of the masses through their economic and political stranglehold of the country. The demonstrators called for the departure of politicians in power, for jobs and better living conditions, and jail for those who stole from the masses in the PetroCaribe gasoline scandal. It is more and more clear that the whole damn capitalist system has to go. The working class needs communism.
Let us not imply that we are on the cusp of revolution here. There are many in the mass movement who just don’t really get it. In one demonstration, video cameras caught numbers of young people shouting, “Putin yes, U.S.A. no!” The enemy of our enemy is not our friend! Capitalists are always in competition with one another to gain more power for themselves; their rivalry is always at the expense of the workers. In some social media posts, there was a calling out and mocking of those who think they are part of the middle class, noting they supported the class in power even though they themselves didn’t have a working toilet or drove a tenth-hand car. There is a lot of opportunism inside the movement, “what’s in it for me?” This way of thinking is promoted by the bourgeoisie because it divides our movement. It will be stamped out as revolutionary class consciousness grows among the masses and the Progressive Labor Party(PLP) grows in influence. Our goal is to lead class struggle and lead the working class to seize state power and establish a communist egalitarian system.
In general, working people here are fed up with misery. During an agitational rally organized by the Party in a provincial city we got a very positive response. In a public market, both vendors and shoppers shouted, “We can’t continue like this, life is too expensive, we can’t feed our children, this has to change!”
Thanks to these mobilizations, PLP has yet another opportunity to struggle around the necessity for communist revolution as the only way to end exploitation and misery. People are becoming more class conscious, more interested in knowing who the ruling class is and how they work. In fact, many people are using social media to circulate the names, the companies, the fields of activities, the political implications and the history of the small group of bourgeois who “keep us in the misery, who starve us as they get fat,” as the demonstrators say.
In the working class areas, people are regaining confidence in their ability to defeat the system. Witness the cancellation of most carnival celebrations. The people are saying, “no, we will not dance as garbage fills the streets, because we are hungry, we will not dance on the blood of those murdered in the struggle, we will not dance when there are no hospitals to receive our sick and wounded, let alone with a corrupt president in power.”
Our Party invites you to take part in advancing class struggle everywhere to end capitalism and to establish communism. March with us on May Day 2019 and put another nail in the bosses’ coffin!