HAITI: What Does the World Capitalist Crisis Mean for Haiti?

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HAITI LIBERTE
"Justice. Verite. Independance."

* THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

October 8 - 14, 2008
Vol. 2, No. 12

WHAT DOES THE WORLD CAPITALIST CRISIS MEAN FOR HAITI?
By Kim Ives

World capitalism is in a free fall. Tens of thousands of North Americans
have lost their houses and increasingly their jobs. This week the Dow Jones
Industrial Average plummeted below 10,000, a benchmark it first passed
almost a decade ago. The S & P 500 Index, meanwhile, fell below 1000 for the
first time in five years. The economic crisis has now spread to Europe and
Asia. Almost all economists agree that the world's capitalist economies,
which have become tightly interwoven by the past three decades of
accelerated globalization, are entering a deep recession. Billionaire
financier George Soros predicted that the downturn could be as severe as the
Great Depression of the 1930s, calling it the "worst financial crisis of our
lifetime."

What will be the effects of this financial meltdown in the world's richest
economies on that of the poorest? How will the headline-dominating bank
failures and bail-outs in New York and Washington impact the lives of
slum-dwellers in Port-au-Prince or peasants in Plaisance?

In the short term, there will be more hunger and pain because working-class
Haitians, primarily in the U.S. and Canada, are enduring more lay-offs and
cut-backs and therefore have less disposable income to send back to their
families in Haiti. According to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB),
Haitian expatriates worldwide sent home some $1.65 billion in remittances in
2006, a figure which dwarfs the $200 million or so provided annually by the
U.S., Haiti's largest foreign aid donor.

Haitian expatriates, which sent on average $150 home ten times a year in
2006, according to the IDB, now are sending less. A Brooklyn office of
C.A.M., the most popular money transfer service, reports that in recent
weeks the average transfer amount has slipped from $100 to $50.

There is however a possible silver lining to this cloud. Historically,
periods of recession and war in the First World bring eras of opportunity
and advance in the Third World.

In Haiti, for instance, the first U.S. occupation of Haiti, which began in
1915, was ended in 1934 by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in large
measure due to the constraints the Great Depression imposed on the U.S.
economy. The U.S. government simply could not afford to keep thousands of
U.S. Marines overseeing occupied countries like Haiti and Nicaragua, where
troops were pulled out in 1933.

Today, the U.S. is using the misnomered United Nations Mission to Stabilize
Haiti (MINUSTAH) - a supposed "peace-keeping force" - as a proxy to
militarily occupy Haiti with the same goal as the 1915 - 1934 occupation: to
command Haiti's economic and political direction and options. U.S., French
and Canadian troops collaborated in the ouster and kidnapping of President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide on February 29, 2004. They militarily occupied Haiti
the same day. While Washington, Paris and Ottawa have overseen Haitian
affairs for the past four and a half years, they replaced their occupation
forces with U.N. troops in June 2004.

The current Security Council mandate for MINUSTAH expires on Oct. 15, 2008.
The Council is expected to renew the mission, but the U.N.'s budget
shortfalls, which were already severe before the financial crisis, may
curtail and help end unpopular military occupations like that in Haiti, just
as in 1934.

Meanwhile, periods of economic contraction and war in North America and
Europe have historically allowed an opening for national democratic
revolution in their former colonies. In the 1930s and 1940s, as North
America and Europe were gripped first by a Depression and then the Second
World War, nationalists began to raise their heads and flags in Latin
America.

Brazil saw the emergence of Getúlio Dornelles Vargas, who was president from
1930 to 1945. Vargas' government laid the groundwork for the emergence of
Brazil's bourgeoisie with nationalist policies which shunned imports and
capital from abroad.

In neighboring Argentina, Juan Perón came to power from 1946 to 1955. He too
promoted nationalist development through such measures as nationalizing
railroads and promoting the development of national industries.

Vargas was again reelected as Brazil's President in 1951 and pursued
nationalist policies such as the formation of the Brazilian state oil
company, Petrobras. But by this time, U.S. imperialism was newly dominant
and regaining its strength after the World War. Foreign-stoked political
strife led Vargas to commit suicide while in office in 1954. "Behind him he
left a document," writes Peter Gribbin in CounterSpy (April-May 1979), "in
which he blamed outside forces for helping to create the circumstances that
drove him to take his life: 'The foreign companies made profits of up to
500%. They demonstrably deprived the state of more than $100 million dollars
by false evaluations of import goods.'"

In 1955, a military coup d'état also removed Perón from power in Argentina.
He was at the time a concern to Washington and still a hero of the Argentine
masses, although his nationalist credentials had been compromised and his
popularity hurt as he had begun to bow to resurgent U.S. imperialism in his
second presidential term by opening Argentina's doors to foreign investors
like automakers FIAT, Kaiser Motors, and Daimler-Benz as well as Standard
Oil of California.

Meanwhile, the U.S. through its newly formed Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) was organizing coups to overthrow other emerging nationalist leaders
such as Mohammad Mosaddeq in Iran in 1953 and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in
1954. In the same way, Washington orchestrated the overthrow of President
Aristide in September 1991 and February 2004.

Thus, the coming period of capitalist crisis may offer an opening for the
advance of Haiti's national democratic revolution. For example, the push for
privatization of Haiti's state industries is likely to lessen as the "New
World Order," announced by President George H. W. Bush in 1991, rapidly
collapses. "Under the banner of 'globalization' and 'opening up of the
markets,' imperialism has forced through a policy of lowering the tariff
barriers and privatization of the utilities throughout the Third World,"
wrote Ted Grant and Alan Woods of the Britain's International Marxist
Tendency in 1998. "These policies are a result of the crisis of capitalism
in the West which forces it to constantly look for new markets and fields of
investment. But they spell bankruptcy for the local industries of the
countries affected which cannot compete unaided against the big
multinationals."

But now, with those multinationals severely weakened and credit and capital
tight, local industries may find the space to emerge.

However, the forces representing Haiti's embryonic and potential national
bourgeoisie, like those of most Latin American nations, are politically
stunted and compromised. "The national bourgeoisie in the colonial countries
entered into the scene of history too late, when the world had already been
divided up between a few imperialist powers," write Grant and Woods. "It was
not able to play any progressive role and was born completely subordinated
to its former colonial masters. The weak and degenerate bourgeoisie in Asia,
Latin America and Africa is too dependent on foreign capital and
imperialism, to carry society forward. It is tied with a thousand threads,
not only to foreign capital, but with the class of landowners grandons - HL], with which it forms a reactionary bloc that represents a
bulwark against progress. Whatever differences may exist between these
elements are insignificant in comparison with the fear that unites them
against the masses. Only the proletariat, allied with the poor peasants and
urban poor, can solve the problems of society by taking power into its own
hands, expropriating the imperialists and the bourgeoisie, and beginning the
task of transforming society on socialist lines."

In Haiti, the proletarian and peasant masses first expressed their power
with the Lavalas movement, which burst onto the scene with dictator
Jean-Claude Duvalier's overthrow on Feb. 7, 1986. That movement eventually
resulted in Aristide's election as president for the first time on Dec. 16,
1990. Imperialism quickly responded to that democratic vote with the Sep.
30, 1991 coup d'état, which killed some 5,000 Haitians and sent Aristide
into exile for three years, only to be returned under the aegis of a U.S.
military occupation of 20,000 troops. Washington hamstrung Aristide and
pushed him from office in 1996, but the Haitian masses demonstrated their
power and resiliency by again electing him in 2000, despite U.S. opposition.
Once again, U.S., French and Canadian imperialism united with Haiti's ruling
classes to oust Aristide in 2004.

Since that time, Haiti's national democratic movement has been in a state of
disarray, although still combative. Giant anti-imperialist demonstrations
still fill the capital's streets on significant anniversaries such as Sep.
30 and Feb. 29. But Aristide's Lavalas Family party (FL) remains decapitated
and divided; other progressive parties, such as the National Popular Party
(PPN), still play a secondary role.

However, there is a new international rapport de force. In Latin America
particularly, progressive, anti-imperialist and pro-socialist regimes have
been elected to power in Venezuela, Bolivia, Equador, Nicaragua and
Paraguay. These regimes offer a new source of political and economic support
for the national democratic forces emerging in Haiti.

It is sure that the Haitian masses are fatigued after two coup d'états and
two military occupations in the space of only 13 years. But those masses,
with the organizations and parties that represent them, are the only forces
which will have the will, interests, and fortitude to lift Haiti out of its
current neocolonical morass, which bears many similarities to
pre-revolutionary Russia, China and Cuba.

Can Haiti's anti-imperialist and nationalist forces coalesce into strong
organizations and a working coalition which can seize the opportunities that
the new era will bring? This will be their challenge in the tumultuous weeks
and months ahead.

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