This August 21 is the 235th anniversary of the start of 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 provides lessons for all working people. Haiti was born of slave rebellion, and its history makes clear that slavery and racism were essential elements in the very foundation of capitalism. The working class in Haiti has also endured some of the most vicious exploitation by imperialism, both direct and indirect. Yet since Haitian workers rose up to abolish slavery in the 1790s, they have fought back with militancy — pushing for reform after reform in the effort to free themselves from exploitation. Time and again, however, these reforms have failed.
The political and economic conditions facing Haitian workers have continued to deteriorate. Gangs, weapons imported from the U.S., and assassinations have devastated the well-being of the Haitian working class. The racist attack on Haitian workers’ Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in the U.S. has brought further uncertainty and pain.
This history illustrates the most important lesson for all workers: that only communism can end exploitation and put the international working class in control of all of society. It serves as 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 a communist revolution can end this system of exploitation for good. From Haiti to the U.S., Black workers’ leadership is a crucial revolutionary force for our liberation.
This is Part I of a communist History of the Haitian Revolution. Please find Part two in the next issue of CHALLENGE.
Hispaniola and the birth of capitalism
Haiti is located on the island of Hispaniola, the island that Christopher Columbus first landed upon and claimed for Spain in 1492. Some three million Taino people lived there at that time, but within a decade disease and brutal slavery, all part of a deliberate genocide on the part of mainly Spanish Europeans, had wiped out the entire population. By 1625 the Spanish were more focused on their conquests of Mexico and Peru. French pirates took control of the western part of the island. In the eighteenth-century, this area, which the French called Saint-Domingue, became the world’s richest sugar colony, the crown jewel of the French Empire, all built on the labor of slaves imported from Africa.
By the 1790s, some 30,000 French and 20,000 mixed-race free people supervised 500,000 enslaved workers in Saint-Domingue. The death rate was so high that new Africans were constantly being imported. In fact, the majority of slaves in Saint-Domingue had been born in Africa, many in the Kongo region. There were also 5,000 or more “maroons,” former slaves living in liberated zones in the mountains and waging frequent warfare against the slave masters to maintain their independence.
Saint Domingue and other Caribbean colonies were a locus of what Marx called “primitive accumulation”—a process that included the theft of land from the population of the Americas, the enclosures that forced English workers off the commons, as well as the violent expropriation of the bodies and labor of people from Africa.
The profits extracted from the super-exploitation of enslaved sugar workers and the trade networks that sugar production spawned (including the slave trade itself) produced vast wealth for both French merchant capitalists and British industrial capitalists. This “fearful and painful expropriation of the mass of people”—including the enslaved workers of Saint-Domingue—funded the development of manufacturing and the markets necessary for sustained industrial production and capitalist development.
The sugar plantations also provided a model of new forms of work. In fact, the enslaved workers of Saint-Domingue were among the most industrialized workers in the eighteenth-century world. They built sophisticated irrigation works, operated massive mills, and manufactured barrels and metal goods, as well as cultivating food crops for themselves and sugar for their owners. This production regime required both an elaborate division of labor and extensive organization and coordination among the work force.
The fight to destroy slavery
While school books point to the rhetoric of the American and French revolutions as inspiring struggles for freedom, the most profound fight of the 18th century came from the enslaved workers of Saint-Domingue. As the newly independent United States expanded slavery, the working class of Saint-Domingue rose up to take its freedom. In 1804, Haiti became the second independent republic in the western hemisphere, and the only country to be established as a result of a slave rebellion.
The movement that abolished slavery and led to the independence of Haiti began during the French Revolution. The French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution against the limits imposed by historic feudal privileges. The merchant capitalists of Bordeaux and Nantes, who organized the French slave trade and whose wealth was tied to Saint-Domingue, were among those most active in the initial phases of the Revolution. The bourgeoisie raised the banner of equality, which to them meant more power in the government and more power to shape trade in their favor.
The banner of equality was then taken up by Saint-Domingue’s gens de couleur, the mixed-race free people. Many of the gens de couleur were French-educated property owners, often slave-owners, who operated coffee plantations in the southern and western parts of the colony. They demanded the same rights of French citizenship that were given to other property owners, including the right to vote. These demands were initially rejected by the large white sugar planters and their allies, who saw racial divisions as key to maintaining slavery. Leaders of the gens de couleur argued that class unity (of all slave-owners) was more important than race in maintaining slavery and pointed to their role in the militias that enforced slavery.
Haitian workers choose action over debate to achieve freedom
As this debate raged, enslaved workers organized to claim their own freedom. The slave insurrection began in mid-August 1791, when 200 slave-delegates from plantations throughout the northern sugar region of Saint-Domingue met at what their owners thought was a “dinner.” Many of these delegates were slaves who worked as slave drivers, overseers, and skilled artisans on the plantations, and as such had been granted the privilege of travel to such events. This group planned for an uprising to begin later that week when owners would be in the regional capital of Cap Français (now Cap Haitian) for a political meeting.
In the third week of August, slaves rose up, killing their white owners and mill supervisors, burning sugar mills and cane fields, smashing manufacturing equipment—that is destroying all the tools of exploitation. Only their own homes and garden plots were spared. The insurrection involved men and women, African-born and creole, overseers and field workers, slaves from sugar plantations and from upland coffee plantations.
Within eight days, 184 plantations had been destroyed. By late September, 200 sugar plantations and 1200 coffee plantations had been sacked, and at least 20,000 (by some estimates 80,000) were in the insurgent camps. By 1793, insurgents had networks of communication throughout Saint-Domingue and the rest of the Caribbean.
In 1791, the demand to end of slavery was expressed in a variety of political forms. Some thought that the king of France had extended protections against the most brutal practices of the planters, and thus expressed loyalty to the king. Some used religious ceremonies to protect their rebellion, an aspect of the insurgency that became a major part of Haitian national mythology. Many—and sometimes the same people—adopted the rhetoric of the French Revolution with its call for universal rights. But the main source of success was the early organizing and the careful planning of groups of slaves from different regions, and the discipline these industrialized agricultural workers displayed as a military force during the ensuing twelve years of armed struggle.
