Haiti, January 1—It is a tradition to eat pumpkin soup (“bwe soup joumou” in Creole) every January 1. This soup, sometimes called “Independence Soup,” is a symbol of liberty for the Haitian masses because prior to January 1, 1804, enslaved people were forbidden to have soup. It has also become an occasion to show solidarity: you get up at four o’clock in the morning to prepare the pumpkin soup in the largest pot you can find. It is shared with all your family, neighbors and friends, who come by to have soup and share the news of the day.
But for a long time now, because of the impoverishment of the working class and the strengthening of the capitalist ideology of individualism, some families, especially the most vulnerable, can’t afford the ingredients for the soup. Little by little, the feeling of liberty and solidarity that the practice represents is being lost.
It is in this context, that for the last three years, every January 1,Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has organized a “solidarity soup” in a small provincial town. Party members and friends raise money and families guarantee the cooking. When the soup is done and piping hot, we distribute the soup in our working class neighborhoods and on the public square, using the occasion to talk about what is really going on in Haiti and in the world, from a communist point of view. Hundreds of people share the soup—turning the social inequality created by the capitalist system on its head, if only for a little while, allowing our friends and neighbors to savor their traditional soup in dignity and respect.
More and more, the workers of this town understand the importance of class solidarity, which is essential for the struggle of workers against the class of exploiters, both domestic and international, which threaten their daily existence. In essence, there is no victory without unity and the communist concepts of sharing and collectivity among the oppressed workers of the world. We are all living the same reality, in differing degrees: if we want to win the class struggle we must unite, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels remind us in The Communist Manifesto. There is no better way for our class to win than to build solidarity in all aspects of life.
In Haiti, 2018 was a year of intense mass struggle against a viciously corrupt system. While many politicians and bankers and bosses are complicit in the theft of funds in the PetroCaribe affair, they are all guilty because they all defend the interests of their class against the working class. Workers have no friends in this den of thieves. But the struggle was mostly spontaneous, with workers, students and youth pouring out into the streets by the thousands over and over to demand an end to capitalist corruption. Many were killed and injured by cops and their death squad agents. But it will take more than spontaneity to defeat the capitalist system, and that is what PLP in Haiti and around the world is organizing to do. Let 2019 be the beginning of the end of the dark night of global capitalism. Let us, the international working class, commit to becoming united into a single fist, to arming both ideologically and militarily, to carrying the red flag of communist revolution, to fighting for an egalitarian world, under the leadership of the PLP. Then we will truly be able to savor our pumpkin soup, knowing that we have changed the world.