download PDF version

Haiti: save capital’s property from the wreckage, and leave the proletarians to croak!

Barricades made out of bodies. This is what proletarians of Port-au-Prince erected across the streets eight days after the earthquake. It is said that “they protest against glaring lack of emergency relief”. How not to see, beyond this obviousness that media prefer to hold on to, what these proletarians surviving on borrowed time proclaim to the face of this society, of its dominant class, but also to all of its decent citizens: these are your deaths, they died of the crowding in which we lived, so little has been done the first days to save survivors and since then you are letting us dying in this gigantic mass grave. Indeed, it is not necessary to explain to proletarians of Haiti that the States mobilizing today on the island don’t give a fuck about their fate. As we regularly and strongly denounce in our press, soldiers and humanitarian workers are more than ever both faces of the same state programme aiming at breaking on the spot all class solidarity, all direct actions for survival. In a region historically full of uprisings, proletarians even in “normal” times are in a good position to grasp for which camp the humanitarian sector (independently from individual good intentions) and all the more the United Nations works: the camp of keeping the peace, the social peace, the maintenance of law and order, or also the famous “development”, that is to say the development of profit and exploitation by the destruction of all autonomous practice of survival and struggle of our class. In fact, all these fundamentally capitalistic concerns to frame, to domesticate, to subject to civilization, are inseparable from brutal repression of struggles by weapons and torture. There are not a lot of proletarians who would cry for the deaths from “Minustah”, the UN mission in Haiti.

Facing the disaster provoked by such earthquake in the heart of such merely capitalistic concentration of misery (we emphasize), and while bourgeoisie sheds crocodile tears over what it likes to call a “humanitarian crisis”, the role of its “charitable” agents has been only confirmed. An American aircraft carrier is berthed just in front of Haiti, civilian and military planes are incessantly coming and going on the only operational runway of the airport (that got very quickly under control of the US Army),… but it is not to save proletarians of Haiti that all this abundance of means was mobilized for. There is indeed emergency relief… but for capital: to restore the state, to defend private property, to ensure supplying and logistics of the intervention force (including journalists) and the strategic institutions (UN, embassies,…), to save its own nationals (including debris of luxury hotels), and above all to redeploy a lasting international military presence, with the essential aim not to let revolted proletarians getting organized against their situation, which is the fruit of the yesterday and nowadays international bourgeois hate against them. When food and water will arrive to the gates of destroyed popular districts (and after ten days this is not yet the case!), the miserly distribution will be as always subject to docility and submissiveness of the people who will get these supplies.

While they rescue on TV several survivors from the wreckage and they try to convince us that “every social stratum” is touched without distinction, pictures of proletarians armed with machetes and “laying down the law in the streets” are constantly broadcast on the televisions all over the world. International media and leftist press are in their common action of dividing our class once again in an arrogant connivance to feed us with their racist clichés according to which hordes of Negroid destitute facing the disintegration of the State reverted greedily to their frightening natural state, the cannibalistic war of each against the others. They are described as propelled once by “despair”, another time by “cupidity”, organized in gangs which spread terror to “appropriate” foodstuffs and whose ranks certainly increased by the 6,000 prisoners who had escape under cover of the earthquake. Disgusted by this surging wave of bestiality, we are urged to applaud to the salutary deployment of the so-called “security” forces, all this to make us paying our guilty financial contribution into bank accounts displayed on the screen of television “solidarity” shows.

Behind these hackneyed journalistic phrases of “increasing number of looting scenes” is (badly) hidden the climax of capitalistic cynicism, a considerable degree of advances made in the field of inhumanity by the last –and the most “civilized”- of the class societies: whereas “all is disrupted” and the state is supposed to have vanished into the earthquake, armed cops and soldiers patrol amidst all these rubble and piles of dead bodies in a state of decomposition to prevent (with real bullets) the starving and thirsty proletarians to search in debris of stores in quest of what would allow them and their children not to croak like dogs! Well, that is the prosaic reality of the struggle against the vile gangs of looters! That is what recalls tremendously the situation in New Orleans after passing of hurricane Katrina in the summer 2005.

And as for Louisiana, when the bourgeoisie and its commentators emotionally and obscenely avidly evoke perspectives of “reconstruction”, we cannot doubt that the investments to grant, motivated by the purest selflessness, will zealously follow plans for social cleansing, plans which are developed in the worldwide gendarmerie headquarters.

So, proletarians return these pitiful bastards’ kindness: come yourselves to clear these barricades of dead bodies erected against the murderous hypocrisy of your society, they are not the result of “the Providence’s injustice” or “the nature” but rather and precisely of this society!

*January 22nd, 2010*

Internationalist Communist Group (ICG)

BP 33 – Saint-Gilles (BRU) 3 – 1060 Brussels – Belgium (important: don’t mention the group’s name)
E-mail: info [at] gci-icg [dot] org – Our press on Internet: http://gci-icg.org