From Haiti cadre school: ‘a tremendous experience’

The following letters are from participants at a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) cadre school in Haiti. (See other letters in this issue)
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The PLP cadre school was designed to strengthen our ideas about communism and the struggle against the capitalist system. Through this weekend school and the topics we debated, I came to understand that world history has always been a “lutte de classe” (class struggle), that no matter what type of person you are, you belong to a class. And that we have to struggle in the interests of our class.

Consequently, I am a future communist whose goal is to unite people from the disadvantaged classes, to help them recognize their class and the roots of the situation they live in, and to join in the struggle to eradicate the corrupt system based on “exploitation of man by man.” We must plan a revolution to change society and replace it with a proletarian dictatorship. In this sense, workers and students will live the life that they have always hoped for and deserve, based on their contributions to the growth and development of a just society.
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I was happy to participate in the workshop with PLP. I liked the way it worked, with sessions that we all prepared for, with some of us leading the discussions, and all of us learning from them. It helped us understand our own reality, especially the debates we had. It helped us understand better the source of the misery that we and our parents live day to day. I thank PLP for this work that will help us move forward, in our understanding and in our struggle.
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The three-day cadre school was a tremendous experience. It allowed us to better understand many things that we sometimes minimize but that play a big role in the decadent situation we are in.

We live under an unequal (and inadequate for most people) system that exploits all the resources, human and otherwise. In the school, we debated many different ideas, leading to an understanding that anything that we want to achieve must be thought out first, and must have a basis in the real world. We understand that the brain is the engine of all thought, but these thoughts are not created automatically; the conditions we live under are responsible for how we think.

We talked about the development of classes, how the first human society was not based on class but on coexistence, learning how to tame nature. There were individual and collective interests, but the individual was not prioritized. That was the primitive form of communism. We discussed what it means to have class struggle, where we fight for the ideas necessary to make our class rule in our own interests. When we don’t fight for our class, if anything is “won” at all, it is merely reforms. And if all we fight for is to reform a corrupt, exploitative system, we still end up with a bourgeoisie exploiting the proletarians. But there are some people who understand this, and say no. I hope to become a committed fighter for the working class and to share what I have learned.
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The PLP cadre school was really important for me, it helped me acquire new knowledge, it helped me understand the functioning of society, and it allowed me to think in a different way. It taught me how to fight to change this system today. The school taught me how to live collectively and how to support others in struggle. I think the school made me a new person with a new outlook on life.
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During the PLP cadre school workshops, we had an opportunity to read and discuss with our colleagues all or parts of Historical Materialism, Road to Revolution III and IV, and Reform and Revolution. The readings allowed us to do a lot of reflection so that we could know how the world functions and why, how it was not always like this, and how it became like this.

It is essential that we know what we need to do and know how to arm ourselves, ideologically and materially. We learned that we need to prepare relentlessly, together, to fight the capitalist system that every day increases the misery of the working masses of people, here in Haiti and around the world, through poverty, racism, sexism, and war.

We spent a memorable weekend together, not only studying, but also sharing food, sports, and discussing many ideas of interest to us. I would like to thank the PLP comrades in Haiti and abroad who contributed their efforts to make this cadre school successful.
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The cadre school session is a space where we learn to debate and to understand/respect everyone’s opinion. It was extremely important for us to participate in this workshop, it taught us to have confidence in ourselves when we read texts that contain new ideas. It taught us how to organize ourselves. I suggest that in the next cadre school, perhaps we can watch a film together and discuss its ideas. Overall it was a good experience.