Haiti, Feudalism and Capitalism

Re-reading Jean-Jacques Doubout's Haïti, féodalisme ou capitalisme?: Essai sur l'évolution de la formation sociale d'Haïti depuis l'indépendance was a pleasant experience. After not revisiting Doubout (Michel Hector's) work in years, we were afraid that some of his young scholarship that was unabashedly Marxist would not have aged well. However, if one is willing to not interpret literally the allegedly "feudal" character of Haiti's retrograde social and economic structures, the author's argument is still compelling. In short, one can have a society with capitalist penetration (semi-colonial in that it's a form of colonial subordination to international capitalism dominated by Europe and then the US in the 20th century) and very limited industry yet, in the main, the "semi-feudal" relations of the agrarian sector continue to predominate. Thus, the US Occupation may have favored developments like HASCO and expropriated land from peasants without any overall structural changes in the Haitian economy as it continued to stagnate. Haitian Marxists understandably had to develop novel ways to analyze the question of land due to the differences between Haiti and, say, Latin American countries with a more obvious latifundia problem. Nonetheless, Haitian scholars like Doubout/Hector and Brisson have made it clear how large estates or farms have coexisted with smallholder production by peasants, and how peasants are exploited by the grands dons and speculators who, with foreign or semi-foreign capitalists, extract profit from the peasantry. The short essay, as a product of its early 1970s context, ends with the idea of armed struggle and collaboration between the peasantry of Cazale and the PUCH as the path forward for Haiti to truly connect the goals and needs of the Haitian peasantry with a movement that is anti-colonial.