the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Dec 2, 2024
This article is translated from the November 29 issue of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.
On Thursday, November 21, during the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro, Macron was challenged by a Haitian who accused France of being responsible for the chaos in which his country is plunged. Macron’s retort was insulting to an entire people.
"There frankly, it’s the Haitians who killed Haiti, by letting the drug trade flourish (...) They’re completely stupid. They should never have taken out the Prime Minister. He was great," Macron exclaimed. The insult could be returned, when we know the outcome of his stroke of genius: the dissolution of the National Assembly in June. Above all, Macron oozes social contempt and colonial arrogance at a time when Haiti’s working classes are starving, being shot at by gangs, condemned to live as refugees in their own country, while the clans in what serves as government are tearing each other apart with the sole aim of enriching themselves.
Macron felt sorry for Gary Conille, who was sacked on November 10 after serving as Prime Minister since May 29. Of course, his appointment brought no relief to the population. He was by no means a new man, having been a minister on several occasions since 2011, sharing responsibility with all Haiti’s political cliques for the hell experienced by the population.
The imperialist powers are primarily responsible for this hellish state of affairs—the United States, of course. But France is also the main culprit, because Haiti, when it was called Saint-Domingue, was a French colony, the most profitable because of the exploitation of slaves. The slaves fought for their emancipation in 1791, and managed to hold on to it in the face of Napoleon’s troops, who landed in 1802 in an attempt to re-establish slavery. The colonial powers never forgave Haiti for having become the symbol of the slaves’ victory over their masters. As soon as they could, the former colonial powers imposed a financial burden on Haiti as compensation or ransom for the former masters. This contributed, from 1825 until 1952, to strangling a country made bloodless by the impoverishment of the soil, due to the production of sugar cane for Europe.
France’s role in Haiti is obvious when you consider that former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, ousted from power in 1986 by the people of Port-au-Prince, lived in France in exile until 2011, having taken with him a fortune greater than Haiti’s foreign debt. Returning to Haiti in 2011—when the “formidable” Gary Conille was Minister of Justice and then Prime Minister—Duvalier lived happily ever after until his death in 2014.
Today, Haiti is one of the poorest countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, and has seen gangs and the insatiable appetite of Gary Conille-style politicians flourish. The sole reason for this is that rotting capitalism is sinking ever deeper into a country it has never forgiven for setting an example of victorious revolt. Macron is complicit in maintaining this rot that only a social revolution, in the Caribbean and beyond, can sweep away.