Capitalist Management of Haiti:
A Disaster for Working People

Jul 22, 2024

This article is taken from the July 5, 2024 issue of La Voix des Travailleurs, issue # 316, published in Haiti by the Organization of Revolutionary Workers (OTR-UCI).

Supported by American imperialism with 360 million dollars, the first contingent of Kenyan soldiers landed on the tarmac of Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince on Tuesday, June 25. The various factions of the Haitian ruling class once again resort to international military intervention to extricate themselves from a bloody crisis with out-of-control gangs.

They themselves established these gangs in their competition to seize the surplus value from the exploitation of the working class and the popular masses. The primary victims of these clashes, in “times of peace” as well as during open conflicts, the exploited masses must unite to make their voices heard to stop their endless suffering.

Having not yet found the means to free themselves from the barbarity of the gangs, the popular masses have not shown hostility toward the arrival of foreign soldiers. Many have expressed the wish to see these soldiers work toward a return to a “normal life.”

Riding on this weariness of the population, Prime Minister Gary Conille took the opportunity to praise the messianic virtues of the Multinational Support Mission for Security (MMSS). "We will reclaim our territory house by house, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city," he declared on Wednesday, June 26, during a press conference. This intervention is a maneuver by the government, Western embassies, and the U.N. to hide their responsibilities, those of the bourgeoisie and the political class, in the poverty and centuries-old violence suffered by the population.

The life of a worker, a poor peasant, a day laborer, or a young person from the poor classes is a long ordeal until death comes, often at a very young age. Wages have always hovered around $4 a day. Unemployment has exploded. There are no basic services. The exploited masses have also always suffered violence from the state’s legal repressive forces, militias, and gangs of the ruling class whenever the masses dared to rise up to demand better living conditions. In the impoverished neighborhoods where they live, they are permanently at the mercy of all kinds of criminals.

While the rich get richer, the poor masses become even poorer. Since independence and even before, the bourgeoisie and the big landowners have left them no chance. Caught between the demagoguery of politicians and the exploitation by the bourgeoisie, their struggles are repressed with the utmost severity by the army or the police, or both at once.

As long as the rich continue to have control over the country’s economy, nothing will change in the objective situation of the population. As long as employers continue to pay poverty wages to workers, as long as agricultural lands, private properties of absentee landowners, remain unused, as long as access to education, health, culture, and housing remains impossible for the poorest, the tandem of poverty and violence will only persist.

The laboring population will only put an end to their exploitation and violence by taking away these means of production, that are today the property of this minority, through a revolution.

The current intervention of American imperialist military forces is primarily a support to the ruling class, employers, bankers, big merchants, and the political class. It is up to the working class, the popular masses, to organize and take the lead in the fight to defend their demands.