Let’s Organize the Workers’ Camp!

Feb 26, 2024

This article is translated from the January 30 issue #313 of Voix des Travailleurs [Workers’ Voice], published in Haiti by the Organization of Revolutionary Workers (OTR-UCI).

Ariel Henry and his government have been weakened by the suspension of the deployment of soldiers and military personnel from the multinational force in Haiti since February. All the political groups and chancelleries working on Haiti’s behalf are preparing for this new political situation as February 7, 2024 approaches. What about the working class, the exploited masses who are the main victims of this situation?

In the neighborhoods where they suffer daily violence at the hands of bandits, in the displaced persons’ camps where they struggle to make a living, in the factories where they toil to get through the day’s work, in the public markets, in the streets, on the sidewalks, the instantaneous, individual struggles to get a morsel of bread to live on and support their families prevail. Their anger, revolt and despair have, for the time being, retreated to the depths of their subconscious.

Yet they are the ones who make the revolution. Only the conscious, organized struggles of the working class, the poor peasants and the exploited masses can wrest economic and political control of the country from the clutches of the capitalists, socialize the means of production and then develop them under the dictatorship of the proletariat to meet the needs of the population. This requires the existence of a revolutionary party of workers and poor peasants within the working class, whose task it will be to organize their struggles and lead them to victory.

Today more than ever, no political group has sought to awaken this class consciousness, or even to organize it within the working class. The few individuals who have tried have done so in the name of nationalism, i.e., by subordinating the interests of the workers to those of the bourgeoisie, by subordinating the struggles of the exploited to those of bourgeois politicians in order to gain power.

Since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship, the struggles of the exploited masses have favored the rise to power of nationalist, petty bourgeois demagogues flirting with extreme right-wing ideas and defrocked politicians. But their situation has never ceased to deteriorate. By now, we might as well try something else!

Everyone knows that organization is the infallible way to get the simplest thing done. The working and grass-roots classes can only defend their interests if they have the organizations to do so. Drawn from the most conscious elements within them, the Workers’ Party is the body that will take charge of planning everything on behalf of the millions of poor workers and peasants across the country and beyond.

By taking the lead in political and economic struggles, by uniting under the banner of their own organizations, workers will give themselves a chance of defeating the bourgeoisie and its villains. For those who believe in such a policy, let’s get down to mobilizing workers and building a revolutionary workers’ party.