Haiti:
The Owning Classes Have Failed. Power to the Exploited Classes!

Feb 20, 2023

This article is translated from the February 10 issue, #2845 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the newspaper of the revolutionary workers group of that name active in France.

The following is the editorial of the monthly Workers’ Voice (La Voix des Travailleurs) published by the Organization of Revolutionary Workers in Haiti.

Haiti’s economy is collapsing. Prices of goods and services explode. Annual inflation nears 50%, a peak never reached before. In under a year we had two huge increases in gas prices. The gourd (Haiti’s currency) lost more than half its value over the year! Purchasing power is dwindling. The owning classes and their lackeys in the government wage a dirty war on the exploited classes to make them pay for the crisis.

The bourgeois press talks about food insecurity for five million starving people. But these numbers are far below the reality. The overwhelming majority of the population is brutally pushed into abject poverty. Gang terror makes the already precarious conditions of working people all the harder.

People escape from this hell by any means. Overloaded sailboats take to the sea, defying the inherent risks. The press regularly reports on shipwrecks with deaths and disappearances. For all its contempt for the poorer classes like domestic workers, now the petty bourgeoisie has also become poor. The overwhelming majority of those with visas flew overseas and work there on the black market in precarious jobs reserved for illegal immigrants—for the poor.

The number of unemployed also exploded as many small and medium size businesses not tough enough to face the crisis simply closed. In the Caracol industrial park, principal employer S & H Global just announced it will lay off 3,500 workers. The job sites still open impose increasingly harsh piecework and working conditions, not to mention ill-timed furloughs.

The agony of the working population, the sorry state of the country, the humanitarian catastrophe that is fast approaching: that’s what the ruling classes in power have brought us. Since independence, the head of government has been a succession of dictators and democrats, soldiers, priests, agronomists, lawyers, engineers and even a musician, often loaded with diplomas. Capitalist families like Mevs, Brandt, Biggio, and Paid, pass management of their companies, and the spoils derived from exploiting workers, from father to son.

Economic and political leaders have definitively failed. It is up to the poor classes, who have been exploited non-stop, to energize themselves to drive out their oppressors and give the country another perspective.