This is not a book review. It does, however, ask you to read The Making of Haiti by Caroline Fick. This book could be a start of collectively re-evaluating the Haitian revolution as not just a successful revolution against chattel slavery and colonialism but also against the mass institutions (the plantations) of wage slavery. Perhaps the Haitian revolution which also abolished night work some 70 years before the Paris Commune should be placed among the great working-class revolutions of history.
The book is an important starting point because it makes the masses the makers of history. It is the story of the development of an heroic mass line. It throws light on the field slaves' organizations, ideological struggles, skills, development and achievements. You are one-third of the way through the book before there is even mention of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the famous general. He is mentioned then because as a free black he could travel openly from one plantation to another carrying news of upcoming, or accounts of past, night-time secret meetings. Yet even at that time Toussaint had his feet in both camps, with connections to the French royalists (not the French revolutionaries).
By any objective point of view, Haiti in the late 1790s was the most unlikely place to project a successful revolution against slavery. Plantation slavery was central to the worldwide development of industrial capital. It provided super profits (a slave ship could return a profit of 300% on one voyage). It provided the new European industries with cheap raw materials. It provided them markets for their manufactured goods. It even developed their banking system since the volume of the trade, and the time it took to sail the circuit from Europe to Africa to the Americas and back to Europe, demanded the creation of a credit system the likes of which had never been seen.
In all of this, Haitian plantations were the most profitable in the world. Controlled by French colonialism, they were coveted by both British and Spanish imperialists. In short, the armed might of three of the most powerful nations in the world wanted slavery in Haiti. But Frick's book doesn't spend much time on this "objective" situation. Her book deals with the key "subjective" factor – the slaves themselves.
The struggle against Haitian slavery is a long, rich and complicated history, which we won't go into here, except to highlight three points which suggest that a study of the revolution will help us today realize key features in the development of a mass revolutionary line.
First, in the late 1790s many of the slaves bought from the Kongo were soldiers who had been captured in a civil war. Their military skills undoubtedly helped in securing the first stunning victories of the revolution. Military work is key.
Second, at a crucial point after the defeat of the French, Haitian leaders like Toussaint tried to re-impose the plantation system, offering the workers a quarter of the profits as wages. The ex-slaves refused. The similarities between the work-discipline rule of chattel slavery and wage slavery help illustrate the deep connection between racism and capitalism (a scenario that is playing out again today in South Africa).
Third, the power of the mass line. Toward the end it was Christophe, a black general who turned and sided with the French, who finally assessed the hopelessness of the French position. It was not the military might of the revolutionaries that would win the day. In fact he thought they could be defeated. "The danger [to the French]," he pointed out, "was in the general opinion of the blacks." It was a concept Marx was to point out years later: "Ideas, when grasped by the masses, become a material force.