Haiti Revolution

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The Haiti Revolution

The Haitian Revolution was one of only successful slave uprisings in history. Guy Endore, a leftist and activist who links capitalism with slave trade, wrote the novel ‘Babouk’, regarding the Haitian revolution after staying in the country for several months. This paper explains the reasons for the revolt by the slaves in Haiti and their success while considering Endore’s specific political viewpoint and historical biases. He believes that, “history was inherently prejudiced: it favors some class and some and some races” (Endore, 1991). As the class and racial struggle surged amongst slaves, this culminated in to an anti-capitalism revolution. Anti-capitalism is a broad range of ideas, movements, and attitudes that are against capitalism.

In his book, much of his findings have been recorded as epigraphs and digressions made from the narrative to support sympathies which are mainly pro-communist (Ramsey, 2008). As Marxism thinks that colonization is mainly capitalism and that the private property involved amounts to capitalism, Endore thus considers the ownership of labor as private property by suggesting that, “ as a man, the negro was made free and equal to all, but as a slave, and therefore property, he was declared to remain the property of his master forever” (Max & Engels, 144) Endore tells the story of Babouk who becomes a good story teller after being captured by French forces and taken to work in the sugarcane plantations situated in San Domingo before later on engaging in a revolution. The story derived its plot from the Marxist ideology which stated that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a...