This month marks the 100th anniversary of the U.S. bosses’ first occupation of Haiti. The Haitian rulers and their international masters are celebrating a century of imperialist plunder with a CARIFESTA, a Caribbean Festival of Arts. But Haitian workers and students are fed up! U.S. imperialism has created the recurrent crises that have plagued the Haitian working class since 1915, including the current wave of racist expulsions of workers of Haitian descent from the Dominican Republic (see front page).
Which leads to some questions: How do the imperialists maintain their domination? And, most important: Is a communist-led working class ready to abolish this brutal exploitation?
Betrayal and Slave Labor
The twenty-year U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915-1934), backed by the local Haitian ruling class, was part of a regional imperialist strategy. In 1898, the U.S. annexed Cuba and Puerto Rico as spoils of the Spanish-American War. In 1910, after failing in previous attempts to take over Haiti and the Dominican Republic, U.S. rulers used the Rockefeller-owned National City Bank to lend large sums and gain a controlling interest in the Banque Nationale d’Haïti. The U.S. plan was for Haiti to use these funds to pay off its crushing debt to France, compensation for France’s loss of slaves and other property in Haiti’s revolt for independence (1791-1804). In return, France would recognize Haiti as a sovereign republic—and reduce European influence in what the U.S. considered its own backyard since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. Then, in 1914, the U.S. opened the Panama Canal to control critical shipping routes.
On July 28, 1915, under the cover of protecting U.S. lives, businesses and property from the instability of Haitian politics, a battalion of 330 U.S. Marines debarked in Port-au-Prince and marched to take over the Banque Nationale d’Haïti and the Customs Office. With the U.S. ruling class effectively in control of the Haitian state and economy, the Haitian constitution was rewritten to permit foreign nationals to legally own property. The imperialists also established the corvée, literally kidnapping rural residents for slave labor to build roads, railroads and other infrastructure. The Marines administered provincial governments and dressed as officers (with second salaries) of the newly formed Haitian national police force, or Gendarmerie. Many of the Marines were Southerners and avowed racists. They vigorously carried out the racist policies of U.S. imperialism, including rape and theft.
Rebels vs. Racketeers
They were not unopposed, however. Rural fighters known as Cacos, who had rebelled for decades against the abuses of the grandons, or local landowners, picked up arms once again and for years fought a valiant guerrilla war against the Marines. But they were outnumbered and outgunned, and restricted to small-scale acts of resistance.
The formal U.S. occupation lasted until 1934. In 1935, Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler exposed the role of U.S. imperialism in Haiti and elsewhere in a speech and booklet titled “War Is a Racket.” Butler admitted that he was a “high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. I was a racketeer for capitalism.”
The real occupation of Haiti continues to this day. With the collaboration of the local Haitian bosses, the U.S. Embassy continues to call all the shots. It directs rigged elections through the Organization of American States. It determines how the capitalists exploit workers through CARICOM, the Caribbean Community and Common Market. The all-powerful arm of imperialism generates the political and economic crises that have made Haiti the poorest country in the Americas.
Two Languages, Same People
The working class of Haiti has a long and proud history of fighting back. Haitian slaves defied the slaveholders and colonialists and freed themselves from chattel slavery in 1794, 69 years before revolts and civil war compelled U.S. rulers to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1804, Haiti’s workers won a hard-fought battle for independence, only to become wage slaves of the capitalist class and their local lackeys.
The capitalist bosses, whether based in the U.S. or France or Canada, have created the current crisis that is forcing Haitian-Dominicans from the Dominican Republic. The capitalists feed off anti-Haitian racism to justify their continued domination of Haiti and the super-exploitation of workers identified as Haitian. They use the Dominican Republic to further their accumulation of wealth.
Even more devastating to the working class, the rulers use racism to sow disunity between Haitian and Dominican workers, who are the same people with different languages. This racist divide-and-conquer strategy hurts workers in both sides of the island. The capitalist strategy is clear: to prevent workers from uniting to fight their common enemy.
Smash All Bosses, Big and Small
On July 28, Haitian workers and students must commemorate one hundred years of U.S. occupation by organizing a sustained fightback against racism and exploitive free trade zones. Fight the imperialists, local capitalists and their lackeys.
We must fight against hunger and for clean water, affordable housing, and free and decent education and health care. Most important, workers in Haiti and elsewhere must build their revolutionary communist party—the Progressive Labor Party—to once and for all smash the profit system and transform society into a communist world, where workers rule the earth.
Forget CARIFESTA! We stand on the shoulders of giants! Fight for communism today and every day! Build PLP!

Multi-racial unity slams scabs in 1967 strike shutting the world’s largest shipbuilder in Newport News, Virginia. Ignited by a wildcat walkout led by over 200 Black workers in the key transportation department, it was joined by 14,000 Black and white workers who defied the bosses’ “national interest” by refusing to service U.S. Navy aircraft carriers during the Vietnam War. Said one police official, “They attacked us like they were brothers.” The working class needs the same multiracial solidarity today.

As the Movement for Black Lives gathers for its founding convention in Cleveland, its rank-and-file stands at a fork in the road. If they follow the Movement’s leadership and splinter into a Black group with non-Black “allies,” they will move onto the dead-end path of nationalism and reformism—and, inevitably, into the capitalist bosses’ camp. From Haiti and Indonesia to South Africa and the Congo, from Vietnam’s National Liberation Front to the Black Panther Party in the U.S. (see CHALLENGE, p. 6), nationalism has derailed workers’ revolts and led them to death and exploitation by a new set of bosses.
By dividing us, nationalism conquers us.
But there is another choice for all workers: Black, Latin, Asian and white. It is the path of multiracial unity of the international working class, the only force that can end racism and ultimately smash capitalism with communist revolution. Progressive Labor Party is taking that path. Over the last fifty years, we have built a multiracial movement and fought racism and sexism in the streets, in factories and hospitals, in schools and colleges (see CHALLENGE, p. 8). Struggle has taught us there are no good bosses, regardless of color or nationalist identification. The latest wave of rebellion keeps teaching us that multiracial unity is indispensable and non-negotiable.
Black Lives Matter, Plus and Minus
As a leading element in the Movement for Black Lives, Black Lives Matter is faced with a contradiction—with a progressive appearance masking a pro-capitalist essence. Founded by three women after George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin in 2013, the group has recognized both the special oppression of women and the role Black women have played as a driving force in workers’ struggles. It has helped to galvanize thousands of honest, anti-racist workers and youth—of all “races”—to the resistance against murders-by-cop. Black workers’ militant struggle has reverberated from Ferguson to Brazil to London to Israel; a global movement now looks to the U.S. Black working class for leadership. These are all very positive things.
But Black Lives Matter is fatally compromised by its capitalist ideas. Its emphasis on identity politics caters to capitalist individualism over working-class consciousness. The group has taken millions of dollars from its most notorious “ally,” liberal billionaire George Soros, who is best known for exporting capitalist “democracy” and diverting workers’ fightback into support for U.S. imperialism. As the Washington Times noted, “Soros-sponsored organizations helped mobilize protests in Ferguson, building grass-roots coalitions on the ground backed by a nationwide online and social media campaign” (1/24/15).
Black Nationalism: Just Another Jail
Class collaboration with the bosses works hand in hand with nationalist ideology. On its website, Black Lives Matter declares that it “goes beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within Black communities.” Then it proceeds to call itself “a tactic to (re)build the Black liberation movement.”
But Black workers don’t need a new Black liberation movement; the old one gave rise to pro-boss sellouts like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. What’s needed is an alternative to a capitalist system that uses racism to super-exploit Black workers for super-profits—and to divide Black and white workers who need each other to bring the system down.
Like all workers, Black workers need communism, a system organized around workers’ needs. A society where the basis of racism and sexism—exploitation and inequality—will join the bosses in the dustbin of history.
Despite his reformist flaws, Martin Luther King understood how nationalism and separation play into the bosses’ hands, and how they undermine our class’s common goal of a society organized around workers’ needs. In his 1965 address at the end of the Selma to Montgomery march, he said:
“Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then….[T]he segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land. You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low.”
After the Civil War, King noted, as the poor white masses and former Black slaves moved to unite politically, the Southern ruling class “began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society….Through their control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy….They then directed the placement on the books of the South of laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level.”
In a reference to the legalized segregation in the South known as Jim Crow, King added: “If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow.”
Let’s not do the bosses’ job for them. Let’s stay united, Black and white, Asian and Latin, as we fight together against racism and for a communist world!

THE HAGUE, THE NETHERLANDS, July 2 — Three days of rebellion broke out after the kkkops murdered a Black tourist. The uprising in Ferguson, Missouri has spread beyond the borders of the U.S., setting the tone for a militant fight against global racist terror aimed at Black workers.
A multiracial group of young workers, out to enjoy a concert, witnessed the brutal murder. They saw the cops charge a concert-goer named Mitch  Henriquez. Subsequently, five of the kkkops pinned Mitch down and choked him to death on the street. The workers responded immediately, organizing a march that turned into a battle with the police. When the Rebels cornered one group of police, the cops had to fire live warning shots at the crowd to escape justice. For three days the country’s largest city, Amsterdam, was shut down as rebels kept battling the kkkops.
    These anti-racist, multiracial rebellions are inspiring our working-class sisters and brothers to realize our potential to defeat our oppressors and their racist system. Battles like these teach us how to fight and build unity for war. The next step in our battle is for workers to join the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party and the movement to create a new world run by and for workers, not the ruling-class parasites.