On Haiti and Polemics

(Letters)

Massachusetts
15 May 2010

Workers Vanguard has often stated that Haiti has virtually no working class. I think it is important to be clear exactly what this means. Preliminarily, I did some research on www.economywatch.com/economic-statistics/country/Haiti and www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/1982.htm#econ.

Haiti does have a working class but it is very small and objectively weak. The assembly sector employed over 100,000 workers in the mid-1980s, but due to an embargo in the 1990s, it decreased to under 20,000. The number is likely far less after the recent earthquake which leveled many of the factories. What proletariat exists, is largely in the apparel industry, which accounts for nearly 1/10th of the GDP. The apparel industry is largely unskilled and low profit. What’s largely missing in Haiti is a proletariat employed in basic infrastructure, core industries (coal, steel, electricity, transport, etc.) or high profit industries like auto or electronics. It has legalized unions, largely under the influence of Aristide populism, with not much of a left and nothing that comes close to a Trotskyist party. In a country of 9 million, with rampant unemployment and poverty, the social numbers and weight of the proletariat is marginal, limiting its ability to effect change through strikes, protests or revolution.

The key to Haiti, as you point out, lies in the Haitian diaspora (which employs many skilled workers and whose remittances account for nearly 25% of Haiti’s GDP), the much stronger proletariat in neighboring countries, and the powerful proletariat in the imperialist centers.

This should not imply discounting the inhabitants of Haiti from playing a more direct role in shaping their own destiny and sparking struggles elsewhere. This should also not discount the possibility that the economy and social composition of Haiti may change in the future from imperialist investment, although this is uncertain given the global recession and at best would result in transforming Haiti into an even bigger sweatshop.

Haiti has a militant history, including the 1791 slave revolution. It has a history of political instability and there is currently a lot of anger at the government, which could spill over into protests against imperialist troops. It would be wrong to expect mass protests in the midst of the ruins and social collapse, but it would also be wrong to refuse to call for such protest, in Haiti and internationally. The exact nature of the protest would depend on the circumstances and the emphasis of the demands may differ, but the guiding light for Haiti and the rest of the neocolonial world remains permanent revolution.

Joel

* * *

12 May 2010

To the Editor, Workers Vanguard

The SL’s support for the U.S. takeover in Haiti was shockingly inconsistent with all your previous practice, but your self-criticism failed to consider the internal cause for so sudden and outrageous a lapse. In my opinion as a decades-long subscriber to WV, this cause is not reformist contamination but the solipsism by which you have sought to shield yourselves from it.

The symptoms of this excessive inward focus are not at all diagnostic of incipient reformism—i.e. too-great openness to the engulfing mainstream. These symptoms are: a dismissive or hostile attitude to critics, press coverage of your “own” and of feuds with rivals beyond all reasonable proportion to their world-historic significance and the drive to distinguish the organization from rivals at any cost. Thus, where your bête-noir epigones the IG put a minus, you had to put a plus. Loss of perspective turned essential political polemic into a crusade against an enemy, justifying any and all arguments.

These deformations constitute a sad abdication of the valuable revolutionary leadership you could and should provide. You’ve been walking on one edge of the tightwire between being true to principle and open to others. Please take this opportunity to seek a proper balance.

Yours for the revolutionary party,
R. Freed

WV replies:

We thank both our readers for their contributions. As we noted in repudiating our former social-imperialist position supporting the U.S. imperialist troop presence in Haiti, our correction lays the basis for political rectification (see “Repudiating Our Position on Haiti Earthquake—A Capitulation to U.S. Imperialism,” WV No. 958, 7 May). However, we do not agree that what R. Freed calls “the drive to distinguish the organization from rivals,” i.e., our practice of polemicizing against other leftist groups, is at the root of this betrayal of principle.

In repudiating our line on Haiti, we did not relinquish the struggle against fake socialists whose oppositional activity is firmly within the bounds of pressuring the capitalist state, preferably as administered by the Democratic Party. Nor are we about to accommodate outfits such as the Internationalist Group (IG), which sometimes likes to dress up its tailing of Latin American nationalists and militant-talking union bureaucrats with “Marxist” phraseology. As the ICL statement noted, the problem was that “instead of simply exposing the IG’s Third Worldist fantasies, we concentrated in our polemics on zealous apologies for the U.S. imperialist military intervention, a position to the right of the IG.” To renounce polemical struggle would be to renounce the fight for a Leninist vanguard party—the necessary instrument for leading the proletariat in socialist revolution—and to descend into wretched “family of the left” politics and its inevitable corollary, class collaborationism.

As James P. Cannon, the historic leader of American Trotskyism, stated in 1966, “If we disagree with other people, we have to say so! We have to make it clear why we disagree so that inquiring young people, looking for an organization to represent their aspirations and ideals, will know the difference between one party and another. Nothing is worse than muddying up differences when they concern fundamental questions” (“Don’t Strangle the Party,” reprinted in Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 38-39, Summer 1986).