PORT-AU-PRINCE — The hot-button subject in the Dominican Republican is the racist “hunt for Haitians.” The current attack, reminiscent of the 1937 “Parsley Massacre” of up to 50,000 Haitian sugar cane workers, has led to the deportation of 40,000 people to Haiti in the first quarter of 2015 alone (Guardian, 6/16/15). As workers are expelled or flee in terror, they move from capitalist oppression in the DR to what is often an even worse plight in Haiti. They are the living proof that national borders serve only the capitalist ruling class.
PLP, our international communist party, has joined anti-racist struggles in support of our Haitian sisters and brothers, both here and the U.S. In Brooklyn, PLP connected the racist deportations in DR to the racist deportations and killings of Black and Latin youth in the U.S. In Port-au-Prince, comrades held demonstrations and conferences attacking the racist bosses on both sides of the island of Hispaniola.
KKKourts Ordain Racism
In 2013, the DR bosses’ highest court broke their own constitution to withdraw citizenship from tens of thousands of people born in the Dominican since 1929 to migrant parents. The new law was blatantly aimed at workers of Haitian descent, who represent 80 percent of the so-called foreign population.
While the court ruling was later modified by the national legislature, the Dominican ruling class continues to use the state apparatus to blame workers of Haitian heritage for mounting unemployment—the perpetual crisis of capitalism. Anti-Haitian racism also serves as a smokescreen for corruption charges against present and past DR governments. Most damaging of all, it divides the working class along nationalist lines.
Two Flags, Same Exploitation
In both the DR and Haiti, workers have lined up behind their respective bosses’ flags, a sure disaster. Appeals to nationalism and racism are the bosses’ main weapon to sow disunity within our class. Haitian workers are super-exploited by Dominican bosses on both sides of the island, from agricultural and construction workers in the DR to factory workers in free-trade-zone shops owned by Dominican-Haitian capitalist partnerships. And these same Dominican bosses exploit Dominican workers on “their side” of the island.
Meanwhile, thousands of more recent Haitian immigrants have fled the DR “voluntarily,” not daring to wait for more brutality. In some cases, their documents proving legal residence were torn up in front of them by soldiers and immigration agents. Others, in the DR for decades and with children and grandchildren born there, are anxiously waiting; they have few remaining ties to Haiti and speak only Spanish.
The Haitian government has done nothing about this crisis. Recently, their ministers met at the Royal Oasis, one of five luxury hotels built since the 2010 earthquake in the capital’s suburbs—with money that should have gone to housing for the earthquake’s victims. The ministers’ big plan was to set up a handful of tents in the border areas to receive refugees from the DR crisis. Much like the earthquake victims, these refugees have no jobs, no services, no hope.
Teaching Nationalist Poison
The Dominican and Haitian ruling classes are in competition to profit off the backs of workers. In the DR, the bosses’ education system is riddled with racism. It poisons working-class children with the nationalist myth that people of Haitian descent are to blame for all the ills of their society. For their part, the Haitian bosses and their politicians do their best to keep the working class in the dark with barely functioning schools. Dominican workers are taught to persecute Haitian workers, while Haitian workers are taught that they are hated by Dominicans and should respond in kind. The workers’ natural class hatred toward the bosses is subverted by racism and division.
Whether in the DR or Haiti, the local ruling classes—backed by imperialist powers like the U.S.—could not care less about workers’ deaths and dislocation. Their only concern is to make more profit. For Haitian workers, the attack is doubled. In addition to laboring under subhuman conditions for miserable wages (earning 50 to 60 percent less than Dominicans for the same work), and experiencing racist humiliation on a daily basis, they may be hanged, burned alive, lynched or shot. Historically, these atrocities have broken out whenever tensions rise between the two countries’ rulers. Haitian bosses invest their capital in the DR, while Dominican bosses make their bread and butter in both Haiti and the DR.
Communism Will Smash All Borders
As long as nationalism, individualism, selfishness and capitalist inequality exist, racism will flourish. The capitalists will use it as a weapon to divide and dominate the working class. Racism obstructs the unity of the working class. This is why communists in Progressive Labor Party fight against racism and sexism in thought and deed. We organize to build communist consciousness in anti-racist struggles. We struggle for a world of equality. Smash racism and nationalism! Fight for communism!
PAKISTAN, July 15 — Pakistan is moving along a bloody path established by the capitalist bosses for their long- and short-term interests. The bosses need fear, chaos and unrest in the country to keep the working class silent on their exploitation and poverty. The bosses pit workers against each other by using nationalism, fundamentalism, sexism, racism and the false concept of ethnicity. Women workers are super-exploited, earning little or no pay and often working under subhuman conditions. All of these divisions are an attempt to circumvent our unity. PLP is fighting to unite workers to challenge the bosses.
Racist Massacres
The recent massacre of Pakhtoons (pashtuns) in Baluchistan, where about 40 working-class travellers were killed brutally after being abducted from two public busses, is another attempt by the bosses to generate perpetual violence. Baluchistan has two main ethnic groups, the Baluchs and Pakhtoons, that lived together peacefully for many years. After killing thousands of innocent working-class people in the name of religion, the imperialist bosses and their puppets launched a new strategy in Baluchistan: to divide these two groups. Baluch separatists, funded by imperialist bosses, executed the killings. PLP asserts that nationalism is a tool used by imperialism to further the bosses’ interests throughout the world.
In 2015, 30 Baluchistan coal miners were killed by terrorists while sleeping in tents in Turbat, Baluchistan. These miners work hard to produce profit for bosses without any safety equipment and with outmoded, dangerous techniques. After this heinous attack, it was proved that security personnel aided the terrorists.
In Karachi, more than 250 workers were burned alive in a Bladia town garment factory after the factory owners refused to pay extortion money to a racist political party. Soon after that barbaric act, the culprit was arrested by some brave security officials, but his affiliation with the party was suppressed. Bosses are always protecting each other one way or another.
Capitalist bosses need profit, above all. By avoiding direct clashes with nationalist and religious terrorists that might threaten their investments, the bosses are protecting their money at the cost of workers’ lives. They are also giving funds and support to the nationalist and religious terrorists because they want to keep oppressing and killing workers.
Capitalism breads nationalism, sexism, racism, fundamentalism and ethnic divisions to keep workers from uniting. Elections are used to deepen these divisions.
We cannot get rid of all these capitalist evils without uniting workers worldwide for an international communist revolution. We know that capitalism has to die. Let us struggle hard under the red banner of the international revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party to make communism a reality.
TEL AVIV, July 10 — Workers here are waging a fight against contract work and demanding direct employment, a boss-worker relationship without an intermediary agency that pay substandard wages. PLP’s involvement in this reform struggle can help win workers to communist politics.
A group of contract workers and fighters of the National Coalition for Direct Employment walked through downtown Tel Aviv, marking the pavement with chalk in front of businesses and government offices that employ contract workers. Several PL’ers, one of whom is active in the Coalition, took part in the activity.
On June 18, we also rode the train from Be’er Sheva to Haifa and back, talking with passengers and showing videos about the contract workers’ plight. The response was enthusiastic. Most passengers were strongly opposed to the capitalist practice of contract employment. Most fighters in the Coalition were social work students and their teachers. Instead of merely discussing the horrors of capitalism inside class, they came out to the streets to challenge this exploitation.
Contract labor is a relatively new form of super-exploitation of workers, first emerging in the late 1980’s after “structural adjustments”—that is, big cutbacks by the racist Israeli bosses. A contractor boss — a wage-slave trader — hires workers, typically for minimum wage or a little more, and rents them out to various businesses and government offices. This outsourcing is designed to cut costs at the workers’ expense. A contract worker rarely gets even those minimal rights prescribed by the bosses’ laws. In addition, contract labor enables bosses to deny responsibility for dangerous and miserable working conditions.
Capitalism Dehumanizes Workers
Contract work, like all wage labor under capitalism, is a way for bosses to dehumanize workers and treat them as commodities. But contract work also is a way to break organized labor and to give the lowest possible pay for the most work they can squeeze out of us. Both the actual employer and the contractor make big profits while we workers pay the contractors to exploit us. That is why the Coalition came to shame these exploiters and mark them in public as the wage-slave owners they are. Of course, the bosses’ state intervened. City Hall enforcement cops fined some of us, but we paid the fine and continued to mark the pavements in front of the businesses.
Fightback is important for building working-class consciousness in Israel-Palestine. The big strength of the Coalition is its inclusive nature. It treats all people as comrades and partners for change. But it does have weaknesses, mainly its reformist focus on changing contract employment to direct employment. It fails to recognize that all work under capitalism is exploitative.
Inside the Coalition, we are building a base and putting forward revolutionary communist politics. Exploitation can be smashed only by a communist revolution. The bosses’ murderous profit system must be replaced by a workers’ state, where we the working class will run society. Friends in the Coalition want our class to work with dignity. For that, we need communism. Through this struggle, we are winning workers to join PLP.
Tokyo, Japan, July 13 — Thousands are rallying here every week to protest ruling-class plans to expand the country’s military.
Led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan’s leading bosses hope to intensify nationalism and its military powers. China and North Korea’s rulers have recently tested the waters long dominated by the U.S. military with island building and military tests. Japan’s bosses are using fear about these growing confrontations to revise Japan’s constitution and long-held position as a “pacifist” country with a tiny military (“defense force”).
Since World War II, Japan has been home to many military bases for the U.S., and provided funding for their imperialist efforts. But workers in Japan are refusing to accept the local bosses’ war plans. Young and old, women and men, rain or shine, they are in the streets saying no to Abe & Co’s plans.
Many of the youth at the rallies connected the growth of war with racism and fascism. Some working-class women took leadership at these marches by giving speeches and distributing fliers.
There needs to be millions of workers in the streets, on strike and refusing orders in the barracks. And even then, capitalism’s relentless drive for profits will lead to war. That’s why from Japan to Iraq, this whole system must be smashed.
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!
