One of the bigger deceptions perpetrated by the bourgeoisie is to try to deny the history of working class revolt. This is particularly the case as far as blacks and women are concerned. The Black Jacobins is an exception to this patter. A Marxist classic, first written in 1938 and now republished, it deals in depth with one great event in the long tradition of struggle of black workers and peasants - the revolt from 1792 to 1805 of the slaves in the French West Indian colony of San Domingo (renamed Haiti).
This revolt was, numerically and politically, the equivalent of the Vietnamese revolution today. The slaves defeated in tum the local whites and the soldiers of the French monarchy, a Spanish invasion, a British expedition of some 100,000 men, and a French army of 60,000 led by Bonaparte's brother-in-law, LeClerc. The latter was proved very wrong in his racist prophecy that. "All the niggers when they see an army will Ly down their arms. They will be only too happy that we pardon them.
IMPORTANT POINTS A number of important points emerge from James's account of the struggle. Firstly, the analogy with Vietnam also extends to the method of warfare; the defeat of LeClere, for instance, was accomplished by a combination of orthodox pitched battles and guerrilla activity. These forerunners of General Giap attacked the French columns on all sides, without respite, disappearing suddenly only to reappear a few miles further on. They hung enormous stones over the roads and dropped them on the troops passing below, rolled rocks down 'the precipices and mountain sides to spread confusion amongst them. They dug ditches in the roads and covered them with branches so that the French horsemen fell in.
James shows that the slaves, although working on the land, were organised in many ways like a modern working class. In fact they were equivalent to a 'rural proletariat" and living together in groups of hundreds on the huge sugar-factories which covered the country. Consequently the eventual rising was a thoroughly prepared mass movement. An appreciation of this can perhaps lead to a better understanding of the great 20th century revolution in the West Indies - in Cuba.
James also demonstrates how the so-called "humanitarian' condemnation by the British bourgeoisie of slavery and the slave trade was in fact a question of material self-interest. It was an attempt to replace French San Domingo (which took more slaves than any other colony) with British India as the world's chief supplier of sugar and cotton which led to British opposition to the slave trade. For the same reasons, the French bourgeoisie supported it. RESEMBLANCES There are some interesting resemblances between the problems of the black revolutionaries in Haiti and those faced later by revolutionaries in another underdeveloped country - in Bolshevik Russia. Thus the slave leader, Toussaint L'Ouverture, recognising the vital need to keep the economy functioning during the course of the revolution, was forced to militarise labour - sending the labourers back to the plantations 24 hours after he assumed control of a district, and authorising the milltary commandants of the parishes to take measures necessary to keep them there. Again, just as the Bolsheviks were forced to rely on members of the old bureaucracy to help administer the country, so L'Ouverture recognised the need to use members of the former white slave-owning class. As in Russia, this forced necessity led to counter-revolutionary forces emerging within the revolution. L'Ouverture's successor was obliged to kill the last remaining whites at a cost to the future development of Haiti.
INTERNATIONALISM As with everything else, the Haitian revolution can only be understood in its international context. It was the existence of the slave economy in the first place which strengthened the position of the French bourgeoisie so that in 1789 it could launch a violent onslaught against the old feudal order in Europe under the slogan of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity' (a slogan which it finally tried to deny the slaves). Again, it was L'Ouverture's fight against the British between 1792 and 1798 which tied up a large section of the British army and hence played a hitherto underestimated role in protecting the revolution in Europe. Toussaint himself was a conscious internationalist, and before his capture by Bonaparte had deposited vast sums in American banks to raise an army to liberate the slave towns of the African coast. What is, however, lacking in the book is an explicit analysis of how Trotsky's understanding of the laws of combined and uneven development" can be applied in this context. This is doubly unfortunate since at the time the book was written James was a co-thinker of Trotsky. This is not an academic point -precisely because what happened in Haiti was a revolution in a pre-feudal slave economy tied to French imperialism, at the same time as the bourgeois revolution was taking place in France itself. It is obviously relevant to know, for example, how the revolutionaries tackled the problem of dividing the land - though presumably what emerged was a new aspiring black bourgeois class. A final omission is that James, even in his postscript written in 1963, makes no mention of how Haiti eventually became tied to U.S. imperialism. For example, George Padmore in his book The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers shows how during the 1920s the General Sugar Company, the largest American concern in Cuba, imported tens of thousands of blacks from Haiti to work on the sugar plantations in virtually slave conditions. Again, during the banana strike in Colombia in 1928 The United Fruit Company, a U.S. corporation, imported thousands of Haitians to break the strike of the Colombian workers. In such ways does imperialism attempt to destroy and subvert any movement aimed at freeing the masses from their oppression and exploitation. Steve Cohen "La Salamandre"
Reviewed by Brian McGregor Occasionally a film appears which, despite the trendy, pretentious way in which it is presented, actually begins to come to grips with social reality in a simple and largely understandable way. Such a one is Alain Tanner's "La Salamandre", a small budget (E26,000) black and white feature now on at the Academy Cinema in London and hopefully due for a wider showing.
VEHICLE The film is ostensibly about a journalist, Pierre, and a writer, Paul, who together write a story about a working class girl, Rosemonde, accused of shooting her uncle with his army rifle. In an attempt to place the incident in a context, they proceed to investigate her past and the way she lives her day to day life. This becomes a vehicle for an examination of the repressive nature of bourgeois social relations.
The film uses Rosemond's experiences to explore the problems that confront workers in a capitalist society because of the very position they occupy in that society, i.e. as mere sellers of labour power. This is perhaps most clearly demonstrated by the sequence showing Rosemonde working in a sausage factory performing a repetitive, tedious, alienating task. Her eventual reaction is, as it has been in the past, to walk out of the job.
Such a reaction is, by its very nature, defeatist and incapable of breaking the vicious circle in which she inevitable finds herself; the very drabness of her life broken only by the occasional visit to the swimming baths, "when she doesn't feel too tired", and her mental escape from reality through the medium of rock music. This is set against the fact that to eat and to provide a roof over her head she must submit to the degradation and discipline imposed upon her by the factory and shop.
NEGATIVE Rosemonde's reaction to her situation is negative because it takes place on an individual level. However the film, while making this clear, only touches on the alternative - when Rosemonde eventually realises (with the help of Paul) who her real enemies are. This realisation enables her to begin to examine her position in an entirely different light and to begin to react accordingly.
As for the writers, faced with the realities of Rosemonde's life they are forced to reconsider their attitude towards the working class. Starting with a perspective of writing Rosemonde's Paul Morel 6. WHAT IS ECONOMISM?
A major distortion of revolutionary Marxism is to be found in the practice of almost every group that claims to be marxist. They assert that revolutionaries should involve themselves only in those activities which relate to the economic struggles of the working class, and political activities which aid these economic struggles. This exclusive emphasis on the economy is known as economism. Solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles, and work against the forms of oppression that do not relate directly to 'the economy', such as the oppression of the housewife and the homosexual, are either ignored or approached within a purely economist framework. In addition, economism regards the economic struggles of the working class as a sufficient basis for the development of revolutionary class consciousness. In other words it is implied that the working class will automatically "learn from practice and develop a revolutionary consciousness as a by-product of the economic struggle.
DETERMINIST At the root of the economist approach is the vulgar economic determinist view that 'the economy' is some sort of self-regulating machine which determines the passive response of the entire social and political life of individuals in society. Marxists, according to the economist view, have two entirely distinct tasks. One is understanding and explaining the workings of the economic machine - "theory" The other is becoming involved in the day to day economic struggle - "practice. Economism severs the link between theory and practice because it does not appreciate that a necessary task of the revolutionary party is to provide the proletariat with a new vision of the world. This vision must be based on a scientific understanding of capitalist society, its origins, and the historical role of the proletariat. This is not abstract "preaching' or 'passive propaganda', because a scientific understanding of the world enables revolutionaries to point out that the oppression of the masses cannot be relieved by economic struggle alone. Lenin and the Bolsheviks never confined themselves to struggles for better wages or conditions. Consistent and patient attempts were made to explain to the working class that the struggle must be directed against the capitalist system as a whole. Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, wrote: "Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin) was interested in the minutest detail describing the conditions and life of the workers. Taking the features separately he endeavored to grasp the life of the worker as a whole - he tried to find what one could seize upon in order to better approach the worker with revolutionary propaganda ... Vladimir Ilyich read with the workers from Marx's Capital and explained it to them. The second half of the studies was devoted to the workers' questions about their wo and labour conditions. He showed them how their life was linked up with the entire structure of society, and told them in what manner the existing order could be transformed. The combination of theory with practice was the particular feature of Vladimir Ilyich's work in the circles." (Memories of Lenin, page 21).
NEW SYSTEM OF CONCEPTS Theory and practice can only be linked if it is first realised that the role of Marxist theory is not just to passively describe the workings of the capitalist system. Theory must also challenge the bourgeois common sense view of the world with a new system of concepts. But, secondly, this revolutionary way of looking at the world must be patiently shown -to the workers in relation to their concrete conditions. This can only come as a result of the active involvement and assistance of revolutionaries in all forms of struggle against oppression.
This fusion of theory with practice is a pre-
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The Black Jacobins, by C.L.R. James (Vintage Publications, 95p)