The election yesterday was a sham.

Preval’s credentials and intentions are irrelevant, and they will remain so. Whomever is president now is taking orders from the US State Department, or they will be removed. The government of Haiti is now in Washington DC.

That’s why the most positive developments in Haiti are the continuing urban intifada in the capital, the anti-imperialist guerrilla movement taking shape in the northern Artibonite (the ADLN), and the movements on the left in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil to pull their occupying troops out of Haiti.

Preval is not the lodestar now. Dessalines is.

Hoping to see some commentary from you about the current election in Haiti. Appears Preval is in the lead. What is your take on him? Is this a positive development for the poor people of Haiti?

Regards from Baghdad,
Ed

Goff is right to point out that the Left has historically _understated_ the racist element of class rule — but by definition, he himself clearly and obviously _overstates_ the same. Class does indeed “trump” race fundamentally and strategically — but of course it is right and proper to immediately get into the messy concrete details, as he does. And we’re not solving this problem unless we take racism-on, head-on.

But I ask Stan Goff: what other way is there to reach across all divides, unless it is welcoming all fellow workers as komrads, regardless of race, color or creed (ya — religion fits in this argument too, Hint. Hint.)? And note too that there’s *one* divide that won’t go away right now, and which we in fact *organize around*: the divide between the rich class and all the rest of us (keeping it simple and fundamental here: forest/trees stuff).

Let me also note that one of the ideological dead-ends keeping north american blacks from progressing, is their increasingly futile countering of a ‘black nationalism’ to the racist status quo — a racial “answer” to a racial problem (which seems logical, oddly enuff, in a superficial way) — when the way forward is clearly by dealing with racism *by reaching across the class divide*; i.e. you don’t fight a racialist program by countering with your own racialist program — something the i.e. NOI also refuses to countenance — and thus their own AFAIC terminal irrelevance.

Race may indeed be writ large because of 4 centuries of wild propaganda and vicious practice — but this has always been _fundamentally_ about *class* (your proviso well-taken), Stan.
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