The Haitian Revolution was a successful insurrection by self-liberated slaves against French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue, now the sovereign state of Haiti, initiated by a slave revolt on this day in 1791.

Although the rebellion began in 1791, Haiti didn't achieve formally achieve independence from France until 1804. The Haitian Revolution was the only slave uprising that led to the founding of a state which was both free from slavery and ruled by its non-white former captives.

The revolt began when thousands of slaves began to kill their masters and plunged the colony into civil war after a well-attended vodou ceremony. Within the next ten days, slaves had taken control of the entire Northern Province in a slave revolt of unprecedented scale.

The slaves sought revenge on their masters through "pillage, rape, torture, mutilation, and death". Over 200,000 black people died from the initial uprising until independence thirteen years later.

Toussaint Louverture was a notable military leader of the revolution, but died shortly before independence was won. His former lieutenant, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, became the first leader of the newly independent nation in 1804.

"Of men who had cowered trembling before the frown of any white ruffian, [Toussaint Louverture] had made in ten years an army which could hold its own with the finest soldiers Europe has yet seen."

  • C.L.R. James, in "The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution"

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  • OldMole [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Class could still be tied to the means of production under a reabstraction where service workers are not seen as proletarian. If you for example choose to see the job of baristas primarily as guarding the goods and making sure it is properly exchanged for money (as opposed to operating machinery), one could claim that this is a meaningful enough distinction in their relation to the means of production to analyze them as a separate class from manufacturing workers. Cops and parts of the intelligentsia are sometimes not seen as proletarian for similar reasons.

    Gravity is also reabstracted all the time, as a force pulling things down, or as mass attracting mass, or as curvature of space-time, etc. Reabstraction does not mean ignoring reality, just choosing to mentally divide it into parts differently. Quoting Marx to assert only one abstraction of class is valid is like insisting you must see gravity as the curvature of space-time in all situations.

    • TreadOnMe [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I guess, but most baristas also make food, and clean and operate the machinery. Unless the argument is that cooks are also not proletariat? Or what if you are a retail worker? In retail is the distinction between proletariat and not whether or not you drive a forklift? At this point, you are basically coming down to primary and secondary production categories. Cops and intelligentsia are much further removed from the production process, but I usually argue that engineers are proletariat, if a tendency towards reactionary thought because of the amount that they are paid in the system.

      The reason I use Marx's relationship to production is because it is much simpler and tends towards less absurdity than attempting to find a 'true proletariat'. And this is besides the point that if we REALLY choose to get into it that the U.S.'s proletariat isn't the world's proletariat, as most of that is done in other countries.