The Connecticut River Valley was home to many Indigenous tribes before European settler colonialism. The area now known as Hartford was held by the Suckiag Tribe until they were ethnically cleansed by Dutch and English settlers. Suckiag was valuable due to its prominent position along the Connecticut River. Ever since the displacement of its Indigenous populations, the city now known as Hartford has been a “rearguard garrison”¹ for settler colonialism in Occupied North America and imperialism across the globe. When English Hartford was founded in 1636, the Connecticut colony consisted of scattered settlements along the Connecticut River. These towns acted in self governance for the first time to declare war against the Pequot Nation, which governed what is today southeastern Connecticut. Settlers from the river valley towns sent delegates to Hartford, where the colonial court issued its decree to recruit 30 men from each town to commit genocide of the Pequot. The English also recruited hundreds of soldiers from the Narragansett and Mohegan Nations to assist in the war effort. Together, they killed most of the Pequot and forced the survivors into slavery, with the English seizing all their land. The English successfully took advantage of the competition between Indigenous nations in Connecticut, a tactic of exploiting existing contradictions the modern U.S. state now regularly employs to destabilize nations. Of course, the temporary allies, the Narragansett and Mohegan, also saw all of their land – at first slowly, then all at once – stolen by settlers in the ensuing, decades-long land grab. 

Hartford’s dominant industries at this time were agriculture and rum distillation. Both were dependent on slave labor; in Hartford, Black and Indigenous enslaved people worked the farms, while in the Caribbean they harvested sugarcane that was fermented and shipped up the eastern coast to Hartford and other northern cities. These Caribbean plantations were made dependent on such cities for food supplies, because even though the islands could grow ample food, sugar was the only crop produced on the land since it was more profitable to sell. The Caribbean experienced waves of manufactured famine that continue to this day. Census data for slavery in Hartford only goes back to 1791. In that year there were 263 enslaved people in Hartford out of 2,764 in the state. There were 430 “free persons” (free Black citizens) in Hartford who were members of the city’s proletariat and sub-proletariat. The first recorded murder victim in Hartford was a Black man named Louis Berbice, murdered by his enslaver in 1639. The enslaver, Edward Opdyck, faced no punishment. 

From Garrison Town to Inventor’s Workshop

Hartford became a manufacturing city beginning around the 1850s, when Samuel Colt opened the largest private gun factory in the world. Colt revolvers were key to westward expansion, used by both individual settlers and the U.S. army. A half century earlier, Eli Whitney initiated the local mass production firearms industry with the interchangeable parts design, developed out of a factory in New Haven. A year later, he would invent the cotton gin, kickstarting an exponential expansion of slavery production and New Afrikan misery. Additional companies, such as Billings and Spencer, Spencer Arms, Winchester Repeating Arms, and Smith & Wesson have bestowed a historic tie between settler militarism and Connecticut. 

The city’s role in colonial occupation did not change, but its form of service took on a new, advanced appearance. Amerika’s new settler armies needed advanced, mass-produced weaponry that could overwhelm the western Indigenous nations still fighting for their national territory. Tucked away safely in the Northeast and bolstered by several centuries of superprofits, Hartford was well-positioned to serve as an inventor’s workshop for the next era of military technology. 

We see the same transition fulfilled today by “israel” in Occupied Palestine. The zionist entity is both a garrison launchpad for the U.S. in Asia, and the empire’s principal inventor of military technology. Their weapons are primarily used against Palestinians to continue the Zionist occupation of Palestine. Their secondary purpose is that of testing and experimentation; advanced technology is exported from occupied Palestine to wherever in the world the empire needs them for asymmetric violence, including U.S. cities such as Hartford. 

From Inventor’s Workshop to Financial Hub

Hartford’s modern image as a finance center is characterized by massive insurance companies whose offices take up most of the city skyline. Connecticut’s capital is the birthplace of the insurance business itself. River captains, dealing in enslaved people and foodstuffs for slavery plantations, wanted to avoid the expectable financial hits from the dangerous sailing business; storms, piracy, and disease were threatening enough to the capitalists’ fortunes that it benefited the overall class to compensate one another when an individual merchant lost their investment. Thus, they created a system of profit and risk sharing among the merchant class. The financial logistics of slavery laid the foundation for the emergence of the insurance industry. Hartford is still considered the insurance capital of the world, although there are fewer actual insurance employees working in the city than in the past. 150 of these companies generate $16 billion a year combined. They are centered in the downtown area and housed in the largest office buildings. This industry is, of course, white dominated.

Lastly, Hartford and Hartford county continue to serve the U.S. war machine with several weapons manufacturers. In West Hartford, the Colt factory produces M4 rifles that are continuously sent to Occupied Palestine. The modern “inventor’s workshop” has moved across the Connecticut River to East Hartford, where Raytheon operates a five-story “research” facility to engineer new weapons systems like radars, missiles, and drones for the US and its vassals. A short walk away, Pratt & Whitney builds engines for the F35 fighter jet. While many of these weapons workers are commuters, it is also the perception among community members that the companies are too powerful and entrenched for anti-imperialists to challenge them.  Tracking the city’s development from garrison fortress, to inventor’s workshop, to financial hub of global imperialism, can we really say Amerika was ever not fascist? No, we cannot; it is only the form and proximity to genocide that has changed. 

Demographics

The city has 17 neighborhoods, which are more sharply segregated by national and class contradictions than the average U.S. city. Population maps show that the New Afrikan population is primarily segregated to the north end of the city. The New Afrikan neighborhoods are separated from the Hispanic neighborhoods by insurance offices and the I-84 highway, constructed in 1964 to connect the downtown offices with the white suburbs in West Hartford. As in many cities, the construction of the giant highway through the city devastated the “minority” neighborhoods it crossed over. 

National Groups in Hartford according to 2020 census

Map of the I-84 Highway through Hartford

Although the downtown area saw the highest rate of population growth between 2010 and 2020 (increasing by 53%), this area is still notoriously empty at night and on weekends, when office commuters leave for the suburbs. Downtown is the only neighborhood with a majority white population in Hartford. Note that the North Meadows neighborhood has no official population, since the area contains the Hartford Prison and commercial businesses. (See below.)

Hartford Neighborhoods, Population Change 2010 – 2020

We began our social investigation at the intersection of Park and Main St. In 1969, this intersection was the site of an uprising of the Puerto Rican community against a white biker gang. As the story goes, a white man belonging to the Comanchero biker gang assaulted an elderly Puerto Rican, and the community decided they had had enough. The groups confronted each other in the streets, but Hartford police only arrested Puerto Ricans. This agitated the community even further. The cycle of protesting, followed by police repression, followed by even heavier protesting, would continue for weeks, until an even greater escalation occurred. On August 29, 1969, West Hartford police shot Dennis Jones, a 16 year old New Afrikan, to death. Two days after the murder, a slumlord tenement building burned down, killing three people. These two events were too much for the community to bear, and people took to the streets against both police and white-owned businesses in the north end. But unlike the “Comanchero clash,” this time New Afrikans and Puerto Ricans fought together. The protests spread from the Clay Arsenal Neighborhoods, through downtown, and into Charter Oak and South Green. By September 5, over 500 people had been arrested and 4 people were shot. 

1969 Hartford Uprisings, August-September 1969

This one and a half month period marks the most significant uprising of the oppressed communities in Hartford. Since then, Puerto Ricans have gained representation on the Hartford City Council, giving the community a chance for a larger “piece of the pie” of imperial superprofits. They now have a place in government to address economic inequalities and police oppression. Of course, representation in local politics has not smoothed over the glaring contradictions between different nations in Hartford. Puerto Ricans are still concentrated in specific neighborhoods that receive lower investment ratings than nearby white neighborhoods, and the contradictions of homelessness, drug addiction, and poverty are more present in the Hispanic neighborhoods than in the white-dominated West End. Puerto Ricans make up 74% of the Hispanics in Hartford, but there is a significant Dominican population (8%) now as well. 

Beginning each outing with a briefing of goals and logistics, we set out in both directions along Park Street and the surrounding area. Below are the major contradictions we observed. 

A Note On Methodology 

Methodology refers to a system of methods used in a particular area of study or activity. As Scientific Socialists, our area of study is the material world. Our activity is Social Revolution. This means that we study the material world in order to apply the data we perceive — creatively and usefully — towards our material goals. In the context of a social investigation in Occupied North America, our methodology guides us to find those pockets of space and human groupings which could be the situs of a Communist beginning. 

In practice, this means we need to do a cursory study of the local area before committing to a social investigation on the ground. This introductory investigation may require more than just visual information (the phenomena we can see with our eyes in a community). Most often, we will need to study economic and political data as well. For example, studying that an area has an average household income which is significantly less than bordering neighborhoods could clue us in towards an investigation in that area.  

We chose Park St. for several reasons:

1. The area has a high proportion of nationally oppressed people, primarily from Occupied Puerto Rico, but also from the Dominican Republic and other Spanish speaking countries. 
2. ICE has kidnapped more immigrants in Hartford than in any other city. 
3. Most of our political education work occurs in Hartford, making it the best area from which to draw labor. 
4. Visibly, we observe a high degree of homelessness in the Park St. area. 
5. The street has a number of empty residential buildings, indicating ongoing gentrification.

Homelessness

Roughly one third of the people we interviewed were experiencing homelessness of some sort. Some were living in a shelter or a halfway house. Others reported living outside in parks or under building edifices. One person reported an incident of homeless displacement by the city. According to the community member, a group of people were previously sleeping in tents at Barnard Park. The city reportedly moved them and their belongings to a larger park elsewhere in the city, after complaints of drug use. Of course, these community members reported huge difficulties finding housing in Hartford and Connecticut. 

For every one homeless person, there are 28 abandoned properties. At the site of the Comanchero riot, a new luxury apartment building sits empty. Buildings just like it are being built in several neighborhoods, increasing rent beyond what people can afford. For example, in the North End Blue Hills neighborhood, aging and starved of government investment, the Bowles Park Public Housing Complex was torn down to be replaced with Willow Creek. The new development having fewer dwellings is part of the reason why the Blue Hills population decreased 13% between 2010-2020. 

Of the people we spoke to who did have housing, many reported homelessness as the biggest issue in the city. Some had been homeless previously themselves. We also spoke to people who disparaged the homeless, to varying degrees, for presumed drug use and lack of social etiquette. Most, however, assign blame in both directions; they might blame the individual for poor choices, while the government is blamed for not helping them. There was a common understanding that the shelter and post-incarceration assistance programs do not help people find permanent housing. To this, several people brought up abuse that takes place within the shelter system.

In connection with the lack of housing, another major contradiction we observed is the dominance of slumlords. Just about everyone we spoke to who had housing was a renter. Most, if not all, complained about their rents going up every year. We could have asked more follow up questions about people’s specific living conditions, such as whether repairs are made, whether security deposits are returned, etc.  At times, our investigators were too focused on getting a general sense of the neighborhood’s problems, and this likely caused us to leave certain wells of information untapped. One reason for this error was that we were looking for broad themes of oppression, themes that could take center stage in a future agitation program. But any possible theme would depend on the experiences of individuals in the Park St. area, therefore we should have sought a detailed explanation of exactly why housing access is such an issue in the neighborhood. The individual and the whole are two ends of the same dialectic, and we should ruthlessly investigate both if we expect to organize in any community. Going forward, we have a better idea of when we need to ask more follow-up questions, and we declare our intention to do so in the future. As part of our investigation process, some of our investigators created a hotline for community members to report incidences of abuse by the structures that be. People can now report slumlords, police brutality, ICE activity, and other instances of oppression to this hotline. This reporting would not only continue the investigation process, but refer us toward material injustices which could form the basis of a future program. A future program could take on one of several forms: agitation, Mass Meetings, Community Defense or CopWatch, Red Aid (Communist form of Mutual Aid), or another experimental program that solidifies our contacts with the masses. 

Police

Several community members reported feeling a sense of danger on and around Park St., especially at night. They reported high rates of crime and heavy drug use. When asked about solutions to these problems, several responded that more police were needed. This was a relatively prominent idea of a solution for many people. A slightly lower number of people had nothing but bad things to say about the Hartford police. They reported corruption, harassment, and a lack of material assistance from the police. Based on these conversations, the contradiction between police and the oppressed communities is not the sharpest contradiction in this part of the city, currently. However, this is an issue that needs to be “brought back” to the people in subsequent outings. Hartford currently has 3.42 police officers for every 1,000 residents, while the national average in cities of similar size is 1.6. Hartford already has over twice as many police officers as comparably sized cities. The city spends 8.8% of its budget on police. Hartford is happy to throw as much money as possible into the police force. 

However, the community either does not perceive this outsized number of police, or the police do not prevent crime in the way community members expect. We know that the latter is the case, and that police do not prevent crime. In order to bring this issue back to the community, our investigators need to explore some tactical questions that get to the heart of the fundamental antagonism between the community and the police force. Some questions we may wish to put forward are: 

• What kinds of crime do you perceive most in the community? 
• If the current number of police is not enough to prevent crime, how would increasing their numbers address the problem?
• How could the community itself perform the task of protecting local residents?

We should also bring forth the current statistics that show an already outsized police force to cast doubt on the idea that more police would reduce crime.  

Occasionally, the people we were interviewing would ask us about our ideas for solutions to these contradictions. We generally responded with a critique of state institutions and the fact that they do not help the people. We highlighted the need for grassroots organizing that did not simply participate in the election cycle. Most responded positively to these ideas, and were happy to share their contact info to keep up with our progress. On this note, we could have done a better job at seeking the community’s participation in the social investigation itself. A common goal of social investigation is to recruit those you are interviewing – the people who actually live there – into the project itself. 

Individualism 

Individualism was a very common outlook among the people we spoke to. In regards to problems in the city, one person phrased it as “caring but not caring.” We have heard nearly verbatim reports from other social investigations in the past. Previously, someone phrased it as, “It’s like I give a fuck but at the same time I don’t.” This tells us that community members perceive the contradictions around them, but do not believe there is any movement currently capable of addressing them. The result is a recognition of existing oppression, and perhaps feeling bad about it, but not yet taking the crucial step of organizing the community. 

Mutual Aid Groups

We encountered one mutual aid/ charity group, Food4Lives, conducting a free lunch program in Barnard Park. The organizers were from a different area, considering the large amount of cars they brought. They serve meals once a week, drawing crowds of over 50 people each time we see them. We did not interact with the group, mainly because all of the members were busy serving meals to the large crowd. We were also somewhat skeptical of what information the organizers could provide on the local community. In hindsight, this was an error on our part because we should not neglect interacting with organizers who may be from outside the community, especially considering we are also not residents of the Park Street neighborhood. We did speak to some community members who were waiting in line for food, who reported that the group has been serving meals consistently for several months. 

Based on their website, Food4Lives does not appear to have a firm ideological standpoint besides feeding the homeless through regular meal services. Their vision is “a community where homelessness is addressed with compassion, empowering every individual to rebuild their lives.” We will make sure to interact with the group the next time we see them in person. In the meantime, our investigators should brainstorm ways in which we can constructively struggle alongside existing charity groups such as Food4Lives. 

From Investigation, to Agitation, to Organization

Social investigation is an important first step to community organizing, but we cannot investigate forever. Once enough information has been gathered and the key contradictions are identified, the organizers should collectively synthesize this information before returning to the community with the “new” information. To “synthesize” means to combine a number of things into a coherent whole. By synthesizing contradictions, we are taking the reported issues and connecting them to the capitalist system as whole. Therefore, when we return to the community with this synthesized information, it is not “new,” but it is being presented in a different form.  

The agitation stage can take the form of speaking with people, posting flyers, or other creative means of propaganda. Whereas social investigation is primarily about listening to the concerns of community members, agitation requires a more mutual conversation. Social investigation is listen, listen, listen, while agitation is listen, respond, listen, respond. It is a conversation in which we expose the contradictions in their barest form, while gauging the community member’s own opinions and political consciousness. 

For example, we know that homelessness is a fundamental law of capitalist development, that this sub-proletariat serves as a reserve labor pool for the capitalist, and that the Amerikan welfare system tries to paper over this contradiction with a small percentage of imperialist superprofits. In the social investigation phase, we hear all varieties of opinion on the homelessness question. We hear both sympathy and chauvinism from property owners. In the agitation phase, we may push back on chauvinist ideas from the petit-bourgeois, in order to investigate which, if any, progressive causes can be used to organize small property owners. For example, a renter may say something along the lines of, “I feel bad for the homeless and I know pushing them out won’t solve the problem, but I hate it when they trespass on my property.” A statement like this shows at least some level of consciousness on the homeless question, but there is still a clear element of respect for private property and a short term interest in labor discipline against the homeless. This sentiment is also another example of individualism; empathy for the homeless person is subverted because they are being personally impacted in a negative way. While we may not fully challenge these ideas on a social investigation, we should challenge them when we return to the community for agitation. 

Among those already displaying a revolutionary, or at least anti-state, consciousness, we can take the conversations much further, and even begin to approach the person’s thoughts on organization. 

We should expect the politically advanced individual to hold unacknowledged contradictions in their ideology. For example, a person may agree with the need to organize the community, and to hold mass meetings outside the electoral framework. In this same conversation, the same community member might express the long term goal of setting up a non-profit organization, applying for grant money, and other forms of integration with the state. We would agree with the need for grassroots organizing and mass meetings, but would almost certainly disagree with the notion of embedding ourselves in the non-profit complex. Those grants generally come with strings attached. The agitation stage is the correct time to pose these problems to the community member, to start a conversation around correct organizing models. 

The agitation phase should be used as a precursor to more grounded and collective forms of organization. We have identified the mass meeting as one possible method having significant potential in many oppressed localities. The mass meeting is not a new concept, having been utilized by Indigenous nations for centuries, as well as among the “heretics” in Medieval Europe. In more recent times, both the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the Black Panther Party (BPP) took their original forms through a series of mass meetings. For more information on the Mass Meeting, read The Mass Meeting by the Red Clarion. 

Investigation Never Truly Ends

While we emphasize the need to create organizing models that extend beyond the initial investigatory phase, there is also the need to continuously analyze the situation through a dialectical lens. The contradictions are fluid; they may be exacerbated or reduced by a number of factors, especially the state, which may or may not make concessions depending on the situation. To say that the investigation never truly ends means to affirm our role as dialecticians, always looking to criticize and improve our past analyses. 

The All-Empire Worker’s League encourages all its member organizations to conduct propaganda among the masses with revolutionary potential. If you or your organization are interested in beginning or refining a social investigation, do not hesitate to reach out. 

Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win!

1. A garrison refers to a fortified location from which military campaigns are planned and enacted against outside groups.
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The United States of America isn’t a nation-state. It never has been; it never can be.

This may be provocative to some, but there is no denying it once the actual structure of the state is understood. This isn’t a historical point of curiosity, but the bedrock on which the United States has been built and continues to stand to this day.

If the United States isn’t a nation-state, then what is it?

Above all, the United States is a settler-colonial state, and it has remained a settler-colonial state for well over three hundred years, going back to when the territories that would go on to form its constituent parts were ruled by the British crown from across the ocean. European settlers of different nationalities crossed the Atlantic, leaving behind increasingly precarious class positions, to seize Indigenous land for themself by force. For this purpose, the Indigenous peoples were murdered, expelled, and forced into unequal treaties that weren’t worth the paper they were written on, until gradually the settler colony turned into an independent, continent-spanning empire that reigned supreme from coast to coast.

In the meantime, the settlement of the so-called ‘New World’ combined with the globalization of trade brought a new horror with it: the transatlantic slave trade, resulting in the abduction, purchase and enslavement of millions upon millions of Africans to provide forced labor on the other side of the world. In the prosperous lands of the so-called American South, ripe for exploitation after the native populations had been expelled or exterminated by the settlers, slavery created the foundation for the quasi-aristocratic planter class. This relation would form the backbone of the southern plantation economy, so vital for primitive accumulation, which paved the way toward fully developed capitalism in North America, by appropriating the labor of the enslaved African masses.

All of this finds its expression through the central ideology of this American settler empire, creating justification for the crimes and consolation through the crimes’ artificially constructed necessity in one: White supremacy.

So far, this should be a relatively agreeable understanding of American history, even if expressed in sharper terms than one would find in the average acknowledgement of historic (always historic, never current) brutality. All but the most reactionary Americans generally conclude that slavery and the genocide of the indigenous peoples aren’t something that should be celebrated long after the fact, and even they will usually admit that racism ‘played a role’ in it. The issue is that the hegemonic narrative starts to become confused and downright bizarre at the latest when assessing everything following the post civil war reconstruction period—a period that is criminally misunderstood by many, which contributes to the confusion—and is given over to historical narratives that are pure expressions of liberal ideology, which insists that equality in the United States is aspirational, and slowly (but surely!) ‘history’ is moving in that direction. Its proponents, often across party lines since internalized white supremacy is genuinely bipartisan, might ask:

Did we not abolish slavery?

(Ignoring the astounding continuity between the modern American prison system and the legal reconstruction of slavery after the Civil War.)

Did we not give the Indigenous peoples rights to their land?

(Ignoring the forced assimilation once the process of extermination was concluded, and the continued existence of the reservation system on tiny fractions of their land.)

Did we not give civil rights to everyone?

(Ignoring the complete banality of formal rights in the absence of equality in all political, economic, and cultural spaces.)

Are we not a nation of immigrants? Are we not all human? Are we not all Americans?

This ‘we’—the worst kind of we, the chauvinist’s national we—is imaginary in all capitalist states, but it is especially empty in the context of the US empire. There is no American national identity with any content beyond propagandized adherence to the symbolism, slogans and personality cults of the settler state, mixed with what is essentially commodity fetishism. The exception is the one identity that outright fascists try to revitalize out in the open, and liberals try to obscure with an incoherent ideology of moral progress: Whiteness—an ever-expanding and yet brutally limited category built around the exclusion of the actual nations within the empire’s borders.

Some of these nations carry names and are recognized by the US as a token gesture, and even that much was often bitterly fought for: Sioux, Cherokee, Shawnee, Navajo, and a hundred more Indigenous nations split into disparate tribal reservations by the process of genocide, displacement and subjugation.

Just as the settler state fragmented Indigenous nations, it forged new oppressed nations through slavery and annexation. Enslaved Africans, ripped from their home continent, transported across the ocean, and over generations deprived of much of their cultural heritage and even their language, formed a distinct national identity through the shared experience of enslavement, liberation and struggle against white supremacy. Similarly, although in less acute circumstances, the people subjugated by the conquest of the western territories once held by the Mexican state were subsumed into the empire, but not into whiteness, and without that, never raised to the status of settlers. When we speak of nations, we mean communities forged by shared history, territory, and struggle—not mere cultural identity. The Black nation in America, for example, like the Indigenous nations in their modern form, was created through violent subjugation and resistance against it. All of this, from the first settlements to the modern condition, exemplified by the underserved reservation and the ‘inner-city’ ghetto, only leaves one conclusion:

The United States isn’t a nation-state. It is a prison—a “prison of nations.”

And it isn’t the first of its kind.

When the Bolsheviks prepared for revolution against the semi-feudal Tsarist state—the original “prison of nations,” as Lenin referred to it—the task of national liberation was often at the forefront, and often controversial; from the question of how to deal with bourgeois nationalism to autonomy for the colonized tribal nations of Siberia. The experiences of the early Soviet Union show that dismantling empire requires combating national chauvinism with proletarian internationalism, which necessarily includes the right to national self-determination.

Consequently, the nations chained by the empire must be liberated from it—this goes for the less than United States now, as it did for the decrepit Tsarist Autocracy a hundred years ago. Let’s take a closer look at the similarities and differences, and what concrete lessons there are to learn for today’s liberation struggle.

The National Question — From Empire to Union State

Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.

This, in three words, can be understood as the official ideology of the Tsarist state in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and was in many ways its answer to surging bourgeois national movements all over Europe, including within the borders of the empire. We will focus on the “Nationality,” which would be better described as national supremacy and primacy of the “Great Russians”— we simply call them Russians today, and the name already contains a hint of their supposed role in the eyes of Tsarism, as a guiding nationality for the “lesser” peoples.

Lenin describes the use of this supremacist ideology, as it was expressed by the proto-fascist Black Hundreds movement and endorsed by the Tsar:

The conditions of life of this vast population [the oppressed nationalities] are even harsher than those of the Russians. The policy of oppressing nationalities is one of dividing nations. At the same time it is a policy of systematic corruption of the people’s minds. The Black Hundreds’ plans are designed to foment antagonism among the different nations, to poison the minds of the ignorant and downtrodden masses […] This dirty and despicable work is undertaken, not only by the scum of the Black Hundreds, but also by reactionary professors, scholars, journalists and members of the Duma. Millions and thousands of millions of rubles are spent on poisoning the minds of the people. — Lenin, National Equality, 1914

So, how are these conditions resolved, and how do they relate to socialist revolution? The most obvious answer, the “common sense” of today’s liberals, as it was of liberals of the last century, is the establishment of legal equality. This was obvious to everyone except the most reactionary chauvinists. Even the 1906 constitution gave token concessions to the national minorities, and finally, the February Revolution of 1917 abolished the remnants of official national discrimination, especially severe against the Muslim and Jewish minorities of the empire. The success of the Bolsheviks was not needed for this hollow “equality under the law,” instead, they went far beyond. While Kerensky’s government of national defense quickly became a government of national oppression, attempting to keep the prison of nations intact by all means—a cause soon taken up by the White Army, much to their detriment—the Bolsheviks, and Lenin in particular often against fierce opposition, insisted on the uncompromising right to national self-determination and secession by oppressed nations. This position was kept up during the entirety of the civil war—the only debatable exception is the Red Army’s seizure of Baku to secure an oil supply for the nascent proletarian revolution, and even there, a government of Azerbaijani communists took the lead.

For the Bolsheviks, the national right to self-determination was the basis of proletarian internationalism:

In this situation, the proletariat of Russia is faced with a twofold or, rather, a two-sided task: to combat nationalism of every kind, above all, Great-Russian nationalism; to recognize, not only fully equal rights for all nations in general, but also equality of rights as regards polity, i.e., the right of nations to self-determination, to secession […] Complete equality of rights for all nations; the right of nations to self-determination; the unity of the workers of all nations—such is the national programme that Marxism, the experience of the whole world, and the experience of Russia, teach the workers. — Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, 1914

It is no coincidence that Lenin would later stress the negative influences of Great-Russian chauvinism on the early Soviet Union, and, with that, the centrality of combating it. It is no coincidence either, but rather a direct expression of this policy, that the Union Treaty of 1922, which formally established the Soviet Union, enshrined the right to secession for the constituent socialist republics, that the Soviet Union returned land seized from China and Mongolia by the Tsarist autocracy once the revolution took root there, and that where policies of russification or national suppression were implemented the offending members were expelled from the party without hesitation. This program was applied to all colonized nations, from autonomy for the tribal peoples of Siberia to demanding equal rights for those colonized by the imperialist states across the oceans.

The so-called American left should be ashamed that a party leading a revolutionary conflict in one of the most underdeveloped regions of Europe was miles ahead of them when it came to the question of national self-determination over a hundred years ago. In fact, they often reproduce the exact chauvinism so sharply attacked by Lenin.

Of course, not all of this survived into the era of consolidation under Stalin’s leadership, but that is a discussion for another time—the general principle and its importance should be clear:

The October Revolution did not lead to the foundation of a ‘Great Russian Soviet Republic’, and neither can an American revolution lead to the foundation of an ‘National American Soviet Republic’. The right to national self-determination and secession must be upheld under all circumstances. In fact, these rights become only clearer in the American case, because of the class structure inherent to the settler state. Let’s talk about that in more detail.

Facing the Settler — Finding an ‘American’ Proletariat

The argument that is about to follow is the exact type of argument people in the West who imagine themself as prospective revolutionaries don’t like to hear. That makes the argument all the more important, considering most prospective Western revolutionaries never engage in revolution. I’ll try to be gentle.

Unlike in Tsarist Russia, where the ‘Great Russian’ proletariat became one of the chief revolutionary forces for the reasons discussed in the last section, the vast majority of American settlers, even those among them who are supposedly proletarian, have always been complicit in the reproduction of empire. To be clear: This isn’t a moral judgement on individuals, but rather an attempt to approach the objective class relations within the boundaries of the US state, and understand where revolutionary potential can be found and under what circumstances. Without that, making revolution is an impossibility.

To explain the particular class position of American settlers, we should talk about J. Sakai’s often maligned but rarely seriously interrogated polemic ‘Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat’. He didn’t try to be gentle. His fundamental position is that the vast majority of white workers in the US have always constituted a privileged labor aristocracy, ultimately in alliance with the bourgeoisie when it comes to the subjugation of colonized nations. They are settlers, which, in turn, reflects on the self-conception of the American left if they falsely identify them as the primary revolutionary class.

Sakai states this position on the history and present of the American state and with that the American left, explicitly:

The imperialists even concede that their standard ‘U.S. history’ is a white history, and is supposedly incomplete unless the long-suppressed Third-World histories are added to it. Why? The key to the puzzle is that Theirstory (imperialist Euro-Amerikan mis-history) is not incomplete; it isn’t true at all. Theirstory also includes the standard class analysis of Amerika that is put forward into our hands by the Euro-Amerikan Left. Theirstory keeps saying, over and over: ‘You folks, just think about your own history; don’t bother analyzing white society, just accept what we tell you about it.’ — J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

What are we—those of us not interested in reproducing national chauvinism with our analysis of class relations in the US—to make of this? Well, for now, let’s take Sakai’s arguments seriously.

One of the most destructive tendencies of the American socialist movement has been to view the struggle of the oppressed nations against the empire as ‘merely’ an incidental part of the larger struggle against capitalism. This tendency will acknowledge that white supremacy is a central issue, that indigenous self-determination is vital, that reparations for slavery may be necessary, and so forth, while ultimately seeing all of it as an afterthought compared to the ‘real’ fight for socialism. These ‘lesser’ issues are relegated to the eventual destruction of the white supremacist bourgeois state, which will presumably unfold in the revolutionary process that is, for the foreseeable future, exclusively unfolding in their heads.

On what terms is this real struggle supposed to take place, then? The Bolsheviks understood the necessity of a combined struggle on all fronts, so what do these ‘Euro-Amerikan’, self-declared revolutionaries have to offer? They would never say it out loud because that exposes the blatant white supremacist logic beneath, but ultimately they conceive the revolutionary process as one advanced by the white majority, which should ‘accommodate’ or ‘integrate’ non-white proletarians into the larger struggle. And just in case it needs to be said: No, claiming you ‘don’t see color’ like a caricature of the worst kind of liberal, doesn’t change the ideology of this surface-level integrationist tendency, and its complete inability to conceive of a general liberation struggle against the American bourgeois state by those who are actually subjugated by it.

In reality, and this is absolutely vital to understand, the revolutionary process is one and the same as the struggle for self-determination by the proletarian masses of the oppressed nations. They have never been truly integrated by the settler state, and face it as the most severely exploited people within the empire’s borders.

Ignoring this inevitably reproduces white supremacy, and ultimately is an expression of the settlers’ concrete class interest of maintaining their comparatively privileged position as part of the global imperialist hegemon’s labor aristocracy, petit bourgeois landowners, and at the very top, as the imperial bourgeoisie. This is rarely understood in those terms, but is crystal clear when viewed through the historical failures and capitulations of the American union movement and various communist organizations—as Sakai does—which were dominated by a settler majority.

At best—and it really isn’t good at all—it results in treating the conflicts of the oppressed nations, and with that, the vast majority of the most acutely exploited proletarians, as secondary, as it has been done over and over again by class-collaborationist unions in the United States. Instead, the goal is to win concessions from the spoils of empire.

Sakai makes special note of this in his characterization of early trade-unionism:

Underneath the surface appearance of militant popular reform, of workers taking on the wealthy, these movements were only attempts to more equally distribute the loot and privileges of Empire among its citizens. That’s why the oppressed colonial subjects of the Empire had no place in these movements. —J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

At worst, we can see the results in parties like the CPUSA, which gradually turned itself into a sad, parasitic entity attached to the Democratic Party—and with that to the settler state—by abandoning even the semblance of revolutionary action. Why? Because once the Civil Rights Act established formal legal equality, they had exhausted their wedge issue, which initially led them ‘across racial lines’, and reverted to the lowest common denominator for all practically exhausted and theoretically confused communist parties: reformism thinly veiled by red flags. To this day, the CPUSA blatantly denies that anyone except the American bourgeoisie can be understood as settlers, while appropriating the language of national liberation—they, too, have made the ‘prison of nations’ comparison, abusing Lenin’s work only to retreat to the equivalent of a ‘Great Russian’ chauvinist’s position on the matter.

A crass difference can be seen between organizations taking on the role of de facto collaborators with the empire, and those that actually presented a threat to it by focusing on a proletarian liberation struggle, and connecting it to the larger fight against world imperialism. There is a reason why the Black Panther Party became the most advanced communist organization the US has ever seen before it was suppressed, why militants of the Black Liberation Army were killed and hunted down without mercy, why the Indigenous-led Red Power movement was torn apart with armed force and the violence of courts, and why even the generally more ‘moderate’ Land Back Movement and Chicano Movement are under continued surveillance and pressure by American state institutions. They present a real threat by uniting the proletarian masses of oppressed nations within the Empire’s borders in the struggle against the bars of their collective prison.

These movements prove liberation must begin where the empire’s violence is most acute, not where settlers feel most comfortable.

The Terms of the Struggle — Shattering the Prison

Ultimately, the American left has two choices: continue as the empire’s useful idiots, or finally recognize that liberation won’t come from the settlers, but from those they’ve imprisoned in the boundaries of their state. Of course, it is no coincidence that the largest sections of the so-called left have not recognized this, since it is in their class interest as labor aristocrats to close their eyes, and the others are pulled along by their sway in organizations. Class suicide—actively working against one’s own class interests, in more than words—is rarely an appealing notion, and neither is the prospect of a grueling revolutionary struggle that will, for some time at least, shatter the established value chains, reduce living standards and cause panic among those used to living off the superprofits extracted from the labor of the third world and the land of subjugated nations.

This can be no excuse. Facing reality is always preferable to idealist fantasies and lies, produced to enable a false radicalism that is ultimately destructive. Lenin was quite clear on that matter, and the role of such delusions in revolutionary situations:

After their first serious defeat, the overthrown exploiters—who had not expected their overthrow, never believed it possible, never conceded the thought of it—throw themselves with energy grown tenfold, with furious passion and hatred grown a hundredfold, into the battle for the recovery of the ‘paradise’ of which they were deprived […] In the train of the capitalist exploiters follow the wide sections of the petty bourgeoisie, with regard to whom decades of historical experience of all countries testify that they vacillate and hesitate, one day marching behind the proletariat and the next day taking fright at the difficulties of the revolution; that they become panic-stricken at the first defeat or semidefeat of the workers, grow nervous, run about aimlessly, snivel, and rush from one camp into the other. — Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1918

All of this does not mean there is no role for white Americans in this struggle—quite the opposite, in fact, because they have the veil of protection granted by white supremacy others are not afforded—but without understanding their own position, they are bound to reproduce completely dysfunctional and often outright reactionary tactics. And while whiteness is generalized, there are, of course, differences in the concrete class positions of white workers in the United States, ranging from fully integrated labor aristocrats in the empire’s metropoles to the historically superexploited workers of the Appalachians—the fact that this needs to be addressed is already a concession to white fragility, but I want to anticipate the inevitable outrage in the comments somehow.

At the same time, the objective existence of oppressed nations must be seen as an opportunity. The most elemental task of any revolutionary organization is to find a revolutionary class to make revolution with, not as an appendage, not as an imposition, but as one of them, leading the struggle in the clearest possible terms. This is the task of the vanguard party—not to ‘include’ or ‘consider’ the proletarian masses, but to take a leading position from within the proletarian masses.

Consequently, in the United States, the task of this revolutionary organization is not to convince oppressed nations or settlers that they must work together, on a vague and entirely ahistorical and anti-materialist basis akin to liberal denial of the most severe expressions of white supremacy, but rather that their collective liberation is one and the same task. This is what the most advanced socialist organizations like the Black Panther Party advocated for, despite distortions to the contrary that attempt to deny the colonial nature of the state:

The dissolution of the American settler empire, the destruction of the bourgeois state, the establishment of workers’ power, and the uncompromising right to self-determination, autonomy and secession for the nations imprisoned in the boundaries of the empire.

The terms of this struggle are clear—the prison of nations must be shattered.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Monthly Review at https://mronline.org/2019/09/07/down-with-the-rebels-against-the-bill-of-sale/ . It has been updated by the author for this publication.

Over one hundred years ago, on the morning of October 7, 1919, a group of two hundred to three hundred armed Haitian rebels launched an attack on U.S. occupation forces in Port-au-Prince. Wielding “swords, machetes, and pikes,” these cacos (as they were called) entered the city with hopes of national liberation, driven to insurrection by a brutal, racist U.S. occupation.1  This occupation had subjected Haitians to the hated forced labor system of the corvée, seized control over Haitian finance, and rewritten the Haitian Constitution at gunpoint, enabling foreign companies to acquire land in the country.

Though well-armed with grievances, the rebels were outgunned. American troops and their Haitian gendarmerie decimated them with rifles and automatic weapons. Rebel leader Charlemagne Peralte was able to escape (for the moment), but dozens of rebels were slaughtered, their base camp overrun, their one field cannon seized.2

By November 1919, Peralte himself would be betrayed and assassinated, his lifeless body strung up and photographed by his killers as so-called proof that resistance was futile. The American occupiers deliberately spread the photo of Peralte’s corpse across Haiti, attempting to demoralize supporters of the uprising. But standing stripped to the waist, strapped to a door with his arms flung wide, the slain Peralte resembled nothing so much as a victim of crucifixion, martyred by the American Rome. The propaganda image boomeranged on its makers, creating an unintended consequence: Charlemagne Peralte became hailed as a national hero.3

As many as three thousand Haitian people would be killed in what has been called the Second Cacos War (1917–20). Yet despite such repression, Haitian resistance to the U.S. occupation would continue for the next decade among students, peasants, and workers alike, until the exit of U.S. troops in 1934. As Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat put it in a 2015 New Yorker article:

During the nineteen years of the U.S. occupation, fifteen thousand Haitians were killed. Any resistance to the centralized, U.S.-installed puppet governments was crushed, and a gendarmerie—a combination of army and police, modelled after an occupation force—was created to replace the Marines after they left. Although U.S. troops officially pulled out of Haiti in 1934, the United States exerted some control over Haiti’s finances until 1947.4

The distorting and oppressive impacts of the U.S. occupation have been felt in Haitian society ever since. As scholars such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot have shown, the restructuring of the Haitian state during this period—from its financial institutions to its dreaded military police—created an enduring and corrupt governmental entity that answered less to the Haitian people than to local elites and foreign interests.5

The American occupation of Haiti (1915–34) had unintended consequence in the United States itself as well, where it spurred anti-imperialist consciousness and organizing. As Steve Striffler reviews in his critical history, Solidarity: Latin America and the U.S. Left in the Era of Human Rights, resistance in the 1920s was first centered in the African American and Haitian émigré communities, with figures such as James Weldon Johnson of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) playing a critical role. The focus on U.S. abuses in Haiti encouraged greater internationalism within the existing “Negro” rights movement, while drawing together a broad anti-imperialist tendency that included magazines like the Nation as well as elements of the radical socialist/communist left. “Such efforts,” Striffler writes, “made the occupation increasingly unpopular in the United States by the mid-1920s, and created space for expanded opposition in Haiti,” ultimately making the formal military occupation untenable.6

One legacy of this oppositional movement can be found in the work left behind by politically engaged authors, who, in their creative and critical writings of this period, foreground Haiti and the burning issues its history raises. Across the 1930s, U.S. radical writers looked to Haiti not just to dramatize Black victimization or American brutality, but for insight and inspiration that could empower progressive labor, antiracist and antifascist struggles in the United States and worldwide. As Benjamin Balthaser has shown in his recent book Anti-Imperialist Modernism, left-wing writings from the period of the U.S. occupation of Haiti often emphasized the historical, revolutionary agency of this long-oppressed people.7 Against the grain of dominant North American discourses that routinely depict the Haitian people as helpless victims, unruly mobs, postapocalyptic zombies, exotic-erotic tourist attractions, or raw human material ripe for exploitation, anti-imperialist literary representations of Haiti from the 1930s treat Haitians as potential revolutionary subjects. The now-well-known work of C. L. R. James’s Black Jacobins (1938) was not alone in its insight, but rather emerged from the crucible of a broader radical movement that sought to put Haiti front and center—both as capitalist profit center and as site of revolutionary ferment.8

Among the all-but forgotten figures in this underappreciated anti-imperialist movement was the writer Guy Endore (1900–70). Turning to study the history of Haiti just as the formal U.S. military occupation was coming to its end in 1933–34, Endore was inspired to create one of the great neglected, anti-imperialist works in twentieth century U.S. literature, his historical novel of slavery and revolution, Babouk—a book that is still in print, thanks to socialist Monthly Review Press. Born in Brooklyn, raised partly in Europe, partly in an Ohio orphanage, fluent in French as well as German from youth, Endore lacked a sense of a stable social position. He would state later that he had “never been able to discover exactly where I fit in…everything sort of cancels out in me. I’m neither European, nor American; neither Jew nor Christian; neither of the country nor the city; neither of this century nor the last; neither rich nor poor; and even in my studies, I was always divided, always torn between the sciences and the arts.”9 By the mid–1930s, Endore was, like many young writers of his generation, turning to the left. He would spend two decades as a committed member of the Communist Party (CPUSA)—finding there a kind of home for his homelessness. However, though his political awakening was shaped by the Great Depression and the rise of fascism, “it was when I studied that Haiti business,” Endore recalled, “that I really began to take a side and began to see that there were exploiters and exploited.”10 In Babouk, “my intention,” he wrote, “was to make the reader feel and smell and taste the crime of slavery, until he abominated it; and not only historical slavery, but all those too-numerous characteristics of it that have survived into our own day.”11

Such comments make clear that while eighteenth century Saint Domingue was Endore’s immediate focus, his aims extended beyond that singular situation. He sought to intervene not only in the historiography around Haiti, but also in contemporary 1930s struggles for social justice. To pursue this split purpose—addressing not just “historical slavery” but its present surviving aspects—Babouk deploys a self-conscious narrative voice that frequently “interrupts” the action of past events to comment directly to the modern reader, drawing parallels to more contemporary injustices and pointing out the failures of traditional history or literature when it comes to representing such issues. While working closely from primary historical documents—thanks to his fluency in French—Endore crafted a meta-historical form that could simultaneously do justice to the historical reality of Haiti, while also allowing the fires of exploitation and revolution there to illuminate a broader contemporary web of capitalism, racism, and empire. Babouk thus deserves attention today not only as a historical document of the “Hands off Haiti” movement, but also as a provocation to revolutionary thought and practice more generally.12

To be sure, this radical book emerged from an unlikely quarter.

Originally, Endore had been commissioned in 1933 by a commercial publisher to write a “Caribbean romance” set against the horrifying “backdrop of tom-toms.” Exoticizing travel narratives of Haitian “voodoo” had been in vogue since the U.S. occupation 13 and Endore was at this time best-known as a horror writer, especially for his New York Times bestseller Werewolf of Paris (1933). But Endore’s research, which included an extended trip to Haiti, led him to produce a very different kind of book, one that not only brings the horrifying “backdrop” of Haiti into the foreground, but inverts the nature of the “horror” we encounter. The horror here is not on the side of ‘native savagery,’ but of so-called ‘civilization’.

From its first page to its last, Babouk confronts us with the callous strategies and often monstrous technologies of physical and ideological repression that were building blocks of colonization and slavery. Readers turning to Babouk for a glimpse of the ‘monstrous Other’ are likely to be surprised, for the book compels us to recognize how the true monstrosity afflicting Haiti were the products of capitalist ‘reason’ in the service of profit and empire.

And so, sent to Haiti to write a romantic/horrific page-turner, Endore wrote instead a masterpiece to overthrow masters with, a horror tale in which the three-headed monster is capitalism, racism, and empire, and the heroes are slaves in revolt. His commissioned employer, Century Press, seeking a different kind of horror, refused to publish the book and other major commercial publishers followed suit. Clifton Fadiman, then editor at Simon and Schuster and lead book reviewer for the New Yorker, wrote Endore privately to compliment him, “Babouk is a powerful, moving piece of work,” but he added that “it won’t sell because it’s just too horrible. The reviews would warn people away from it. We would be afraid to handle it.”14

Fadiman was not far off in his commercial estimates—though considering his position of influence, his lament was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Brought out by the small radical press Vanguard, Endore soon found his novel denounced by the New York Times as an attempt to inspire a “race riot,” and criticized in the New Republic by reviewer Martha Gruening, who charged Endore with producing not a novel at all, but a mere “calendar of horrors.”15

Make no mistake: there is plenty in Babouk that could be seen as “horrible,” beginning with the history itself—enslavement, resistance, and ruling-class repression. Moreover, the writing in the text often retains an element of the sensationalist horror style that put Endore on the map. The very first page of the book contains a detailed discussion of the “work” done by a “genius,” a so-called professional “nigger taster” whose trained tongue helps tell which of the enslaved are healthy enough to be purchased, and which not. (The slave traders after all, are interested in cheating one another as well, hiding the illness of their captives with perfumes and make-up and even fake teeth.) Later chapters detail grotesque diseases and conditions aboard the slave ship, the torture techniques used to punish rebel slaves, and even the brutal pike-impaling of a white infant at the height of the slave rebellion. The book at times seems to sarcastically revel in revealing the historical monstrosities that enslavers and colonizers devise to manage and rationalize their vicious regime.

Endore’s wager seems to have been that his talent for the graphic and gothic could be leveraged to bring a broader popular readership to confront uncomfortable social and historical truths. He had clear political motivations for Babouk , but, as he put it, he also “wrote the book to sell.”16 In 1934, somehow, it had not seemed impossible for a book to be both an anti-capitalist horror and a commercial hit. After all, hadn’t his 1933 horror novel Werewolf of Paris topped the best-seller lists, despite (or perhaps because of) its class-conscious account of the Paris Commune?17

But it would be a mistake to write off Endore’s vivid depictions of violence as mere sensationalism, or as a left-wing replication of the “exotic discourses” that predominated in U.S. depictions of Haiti at the time.18 Similarly, it would be a mistake to see Endore’s representation of the repressive effects of imperialism and slavery as a gratuitous objectification of black bodies, aimed at stirring the sentimental emotions of (predominantly white) readers. Rather, Endore’s goal in so vividly depicting historical horror is to bring to consciousness the ways that the most seemingly extreme and “monstrous” acts of the slave system—for instance, the public burning of slave rebels, the clipping of ears from runaways, elaborate regime of torture, and so on—were in fact ‘logical’ and ‘rational’ outgrowths of the capitalistic logic of profit-maximization and social control. At the same time, Endore draws out the ways that such extreme measures of repression testify to the pervasive resistance of the enslaved; had the enslaved ‘accepted’ their dehumanized lot, such brutal techniques would not have been deemed ‘necessary.’

As an exploration of history, Babouk remains remarkable for the way it explores the dialectic of oppression and resistance, foregrounding how contradictions among the ruling classes themselves (such as the contradiction between maximizing short-term profit and sustaining long-term social control, or the contradiction between different blocs of rival property owners), opened space for resistance from below. Even such a totalitarian system as racialized chattel slavery had its cracks and weak links. At the same time, Endore zooms in on slave resistance, emphasizing the importance of cultural practices—and especially practices of collective story-telling—as a crucial site of mass resistance and revolutionary preparation.

Through the story-telling gifts of his eponymous character Babouk, Endore suggests the ways in which the verbal arts can be used strategically, raising the consciousness and sustaining the spirit of the oppressed, while puncturing the myths of racial or class superiority that seek to naturalize ruling power. Thus, at the same time as it confronts us with the stark limits of traditional Western historiography, Babouk—as imaginative fiction—explores the importance of creative culture for preparing the path to revolution. Babouk himself might be read as a figure for the radical artist that Endore may have aspired to become, working with complex inherited cultural materials—African trickster stories and European Bible tales alike—to forge unity among the oppressed and to clarify the need for a general revolt.

Thus, while Endore constantly exposes the background apparatus of exploitation, the main story of Babouk reimagines the leadup to the Haitian Revolution, through the coming-of-age story of a character based loosely on the historical figure of Boukman Dutty. Remembered as a crucial catalyst of the early uprisings of 1791, known for his key role at the ceremony of Bois Caiman, Boukman’s early death left subsequent leadership to other, now better-known figures, such as Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. It also left Boukman himself something of a historical mystery, creating room for much subsequent historical debate, while providing Endore with the space for reimagining the unrecorded pre-history of the revolution.19

Endore presents Babouk as a field slave, emphasizing his talents as an unconventional, yet popular story-teller. In stark contrast to those nationalist writers of the 1920s and ’30s who sought to champion Haiti in the face of imperialist degradation by celebrating its long line of strong black military men, from Toussaint and Dessalines to Henry Christophe, Endore chose instead to foreground a lowly field worker, whose only power among the Haitian masses comes through his well-chosen words. Though Toussaint and Dessalines are never mentioned by name in the book, Endore implies a sharp distinction between Babouk and those leaders who were “as astute as the whites” and would come to dominate the Haitian state after the revolution. Emphasizing the “gold bedizened uniforms” of leaders who seek to imitate their former masters, Endore reminds us that some of these figures were all too eager to compromise with colonial powers, some even proposing the reintroduction of slavery. “Babouk,” Endore writes, “had nothing to do with these.”20

Babouk thus attempts a tense balance: conjuring the emancipatory spirit of slave insurrection and emphasizing the revolutionary importance of storytelling, but without romanticizing the contradictory aftermath of a revolution that—despite its historic achievements—would leave in place new forms of egregious exploitation and inequality. Recalling Peralte’s attack on Port-au-Prince, Endore chooses to focus Babouk’s climax not on a heroic moment of victory, but on an insurgent attack that fails…but that (like this historical uprising led by Boukman in 1791) helps usher in a broader mass upsurge. As we finish Endore’s novel, we are still in 1791, the Haitian Revolution represented not as monumental accomplishment of the past, but as an insurgent necessity of the present. He leaves us looking at the burning sugar cane fields beyond the walls of the city; the horizon of emancipation remains a future to be fought for: What side will we be on?

In this way, Endore distinguishes his narrative from accounts that portray the human aspirations of the Haitian Revolution as fulfilled with the achievement of national independence alone, as if the formal rejection of foreign rule had thereby ended economic exploitation and extreme social inequality in the formal colony.

In his critical report from Haiti in 1934, “Haiti and U.S.A. Occupation,” published concurrently with Babouk, Endore specifically targets the ruse of bourgeois nationalism as a main danger to the cause of liberation. In this (nonfiction) piece, published in the antifascist magazine Fight, Endore offers a sharp class critique of Haitian nationalism (and the U.S. liberalism that embraces it), taking aim at the notion that rule by the local elite represents genuine progress as far as the working Haitian masses are concerned. This local elite is a class of exploiters, he underscores, just as much as U.S. financiers and occupiers, notwithstanding their claims to the contrary.

At the same time, Endore’s essay makes an effort to understand why well-intentioned liberal or African American intellectual observers feel the impulse to rally to a nationalist defense of Haiti, as “the last refuge” of “Negro pride” in a world dominated by European colonialism. But to identify Haitian elite rule with a refuge from racism or class domination, Endore argues, would be not only “erroneous” but “vicious.” “A Negro bourgeoisie can and has in some places replaced a white bourgeoisie with no improvement in the lot of the majority,” as he points out. “Such are the fruits of Haitian nationalism acquired so painfully at the price of the lives of a hundred thousand Negroes.”21

Nor is Endore’s problem only with the nationalism of the Haitian elite. Rather, he generalizes the point, arguing that “national prejudice is only a different form of the class system by which the ruling class is assured of always having someone to remove its garbage or do its unskilled factory work, someone whom the ruling class will despise and keep in his ‘place.’” Whether in the United States or elsewhere, Endore writes, race prejudice is “fostered by capitalism to disrupt the strength of the proletariat by preventing the oppressed white worker from acting in concert with the Negroes.” (We can hypothesize that Babouk was aimed in part at helping those oppressed white workers to see why they should act in concert with their black brethren and reject the racist bait of their own ruling class.)

Endore closes his Fight article by asking readers to “strip the bright paint of patriotic idealism off the Haitian upper classes and reveal what is beneath,” while at the same time forging a “Hands off Haiti” movement that sides not with the “gros negre kulaks,” (that is, the wealthy Haitian landowners), but with the “cacos spirit” for the “realization of full social justice.”

Clearly, Peralte’s Cacos insurgency of 1919 was not far from Endore’s mind as he attempted to articulate a class-conscious anti-imperialism.

While Endore abstains from commenting directly on the U.S. occupation in Babouk itself, there can be no doubt that what he learned from Haitians themselves had a major effect on his novel.

For instance, during his trip to Haiti, Endore learned of how the U.S. military occupation facilitated massive land theft, turning literacy itself into a weapon against the Haitian masses. It was “easy” to steal local peasants’ land, Endore recalled:

You just go up to a man and you say, “Who owns this land?” He’ll say, “I do.” Then you go to the land records office and you record your name for that land, and then you go to him and you say, “I’ve got a record for this land. I own it. Where’s your record? Let’s see which one is the real one.” Of course, he hasn’t got a record.… If the man refused to leave [the land] the American would threaten him with a gun, and if he was halfway decent, he’d give him a job. So, in this way, a number of plantations were built up.22

Acutely conscious of the power of written “records” backed by guns, it is surely no coincidence that, near the climax of Babouk, as the Haitian masses set fire to the sugar fields outside the capital, Endore champions the insurgents, not merely as race rebels or as black workers, but as “rebels against the bill of sale.” Employing his ironic narrator to ventriloquize a self-righteous ruling class, he sarcastically declares:

           Here is our bill of sale! Flag of the unmapped land that covers the earth!
           Revolt against that if you dare and you will be broken on the wheel!…
Millionaires! you true internationalists who regiment your workers into countries, hoist aloft your flag: the bill of sale!
           You wretches out in the burning plain before Le Cap, where is your bill of sale? 
           What! Have you [slaves] taken your liberty and you have no bill of sale?
           Then beat the general alarm!… Down with the rebels against the bill of sale!23

Reframing the historic slave revolt this way, Endore distills from the rebellion of 1791 a universal meaning that can resonate with readers in other places and times, beyond the immediate context of the fight to end chattel slavery or colonialism. To be sure, as is now widely known, generations of Haitians have been burdened with a massive and odious “bill of sale” forced on them by French gunboats and U.S. banks after 1804, as penance for its costly “theft” of property in flesh, (a debt the equivalent of $21 billion today).24 But Endore’s “bill of sale” frame resonates even more broadly, allowing us to see a kinship to other struggles as well, wherever the militant movement of the people comes up against the sacred “property rights” of their would-be masters—whether that be in the form of an eviction blockade, a workplace occupation, or the expropriation of the expropriators of Marxist prophecy.

In such a way, Endore implies that the mass of humanity—across the illusory lines of race and nation—is still in a sense enslaved to the domination of “the bill of sale.” At the same time, he suggests that the kinds of brutal repression brought down on eighteenth century Haitian rebel slaves may lie in wait for all those who are serious about depriving the ruling class of their most precious property. Babouk thus asks readers to see in the revolt of Haitian slaves the vanguard of a more general and global revolution, while confronting us all with the sobering fact that, if the goal is revolution, righteous grievances alone will not be enough.

The second to last chapter of the novel ends with a description of how Babouk’s slain body is decapitated, dismembered, and publicly displayed—not unlike Peralte’s own—as a warning to those who would challenge the masters’ power. But like the photo of the martyred Peralte, the displaying of Babouk’s corpse does more to incite rebellion than to quell it. In this way, Endore pays closing honor to the cacos martyrs whose brave attack on imperialist occupation—however ill-fated—nonetheless helped raise the consciousness of people who came after them, including North American writers and activists such as himself. Perhaps Endore wagered that, like the death photos of Peralte, the depicted brutalities of his own book would help inspire new waves of revolt.

Coming off Babouk, in 1935, Endore seemed to be full of the sense of radical possibility, publishing a vision for what he called a “new school of Marxian historical fiction,” whose principal aim would be “the revelation of the hidden but unending class struggle of the ages.” His enthusiasm for the work to be done is palpable as he lists what might have been his next series of books: “Gracchus [Babeuf], Spartacus, the Crusades, the Peasant Wars, colonial expansion—history is replete with magnificent untouched material that the old novelist bent on portraying love triumphant, picturesque adventures or some trivial plot, could not use.”25

But, sadly, Endore would not complete—indeed, would hardly even begin—the avowedly revolutionary literary project he outlined. Quickly, he fell from this vista of enthusiasm; Babouk sold only a few hundred copies, met mixed reviews, and soon went out of print. Even sympathetic comrades failed to grasp the richness of his radical work. African-American Marxist literary critic Eugene Gordon praised the book in The New Masses as the “best of its kind” and yet, notwithstanding Endore’s comments to the contrary, criticized Babouk as “too nationalistic,” suggesting that it implied a modern world driven by racial resentments, rather than the systemic forces of capitalism.26

Having his forgotten masterpiece fail to connect was a profoundly deflating experience. By 1941, while still publicly identifying as a communist, Endore wrote not to herald a new revolutionary genre, but to lament a radical conundrum:

The writer’s task is to amuse, to interpret, to exhort. It is my aim to do all three together, whenever possible.… The predicament of the writer is that the average person wishes to be amused and not instructed in his short leisure; he does not wish to be made aware of his misfortunes; he wants something to help him forget; while the upper classes threaten to tear the social structure down with them, if, by interpretation or exhortation, their privileges are attacked.27

Still later, Endore lamented: “I wrote [Babouk] to sell, but I misjudged the people, I misjudged the time, everything. So, I turned away from that kind of writing and worked on motion pictures.” (Soon after he would be blacklisted from Hollywood for his communist political affiliations.) Chastened by Babouk’s failure, Endore would later refer to himself as a “hack writer” who wrote only “for money to support myself and my family, and that’s it.” It is important to underscore that Endore would remain active for decades, as a writer of Hollywood screenplays and popular novels, and as a communist activist, authoring pamphlets against racism and teaching writing in CPUSA-run schools near Los Angeles. But the revolutionary fusion of literary and political intervention that Babouk represented was no longer on his agenda. Yet decades later Endore would still refer to Babouk as his “forgotten masterpiece.”28

But though it failed commercially in Endore’s own time, Babouk deserves renewed consideration in ours, from those interested in reimaginings of slavery and the Haitian Revolution, and more broadly. For by closely studying the singular history of Haiti, Endore presents us with broader insights about the ongoing class struggles that continue to drive world history, while offering a radical critique of the ways that inherited literature and dominant history tend to hide those struggles from view. At the same time, Endore points us towards the need for a different kind of historical imagining—and a different kind of story-telling—that might become a weapon in the revolutionary struggle. At one point in the novel, Endore apostrophizes his own main character, confronting the paradox of recovering voices of resistance that all too often have been lost to written history:

Babouk, we have gone beyond your century. Your voice is lost in the past. Your wavering voice is lost in the steaming field of Saint-Domingue. It is lost both in time and space. And yet it cannot be lost altogether, Babouk. It cannot die in a void. Oh, no. All the wavering voices of the complaining Negro, be they of the dead or of the living, of Africa or America, yet they will someday be woven into a great net and they will pull that deaf master out of his flowery garden and down into the muddy stinking field.29

If studying Haitian history helped inspire Endore to take the side of the exploited and oppressed, Babouk weaves together stories of struggle, arming readers for the battle to come. Whatever we ultimately make of the literary weapon he forged, Endore’s own story reminds us that, by confronting the horror and hope of history, it is possible for people (even from ostensibly ‘privileged’ groups) to transform themselves and their work in solidarity with the oppressed.