How Haiti's uprising is reflective of the Petrocaribe Venezuelan agreement and other colonial emancipations

The Haitian uprising is contingent on a long history of trying to overpower European selective exploitation.  The human rights movement of 1797 in Haiti that paralleled the French revolution is comparative to Louis Hartz's description of the U.S. in the 1850s in which immigrants wanted liberation from the feudal, oppressive class system of Europe and create a pluralistic society in which people were cooperatively trying to build a country of effective social mobility without restraint.  Listen to this episode of Political Gravity with Jane, Albert and Don.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/tabernaclefaith/2019/02/18/port-au-prince-protests-overcoming-a-feudal-society-of-european-dominance


Hartz’s 1950s characterization of America as unconsciously and compulsively wedded to liberal values retains today the quality of an orthodoxy which many argue with but few ignore. I will shortly consider why Hartz’s thesis has been so durable, but first I want to examine its principal features.

According to Hartz, America was born in the flight from European oppressions by settlers who took the classical liberalism of Locke as a self-evident belief system. Having rejected the feudal ethos intellectually, and never having had to battle against the power of the aristocracy and the clergy, Americans were ‘born equal.’ Because of this absence from America of feudal structures, and because of the overwhelming predominance of liberal values, the American political universe, though rich in conflict, lies almost wholly within the horizons of liberalism, a consensus which remains largely invisible precisely because it is virtually universal, uncontested, and taken-for-granted. Thus as Eric Foner puts it in his own summary of Hartz, “Without a feudal tradition, and a sense of class oppression in the present, Americans are simply unable to think in class terms.” For Hartz, though, the inability of Americans to think in class terms is not a matter of ‘false consciousness’ because American society is not, in fact, structured by class. The American ideals of “social mobility, individual fulfillment, and material acquisitiveness” (Foner, 62) have been sufficiently fulfilled to render a class-based view of American society unfounded.   The absence of feudalism means that socialism can gain no hold in America. It requires the existence in society of both actual class structures and of the complex of beliefs associated with the hierarchic and corporate societies of medieval Europe. Remember, in very different ways liberalism and socialism both seek to establish classless societies. For Hartz, liberalism and socialism emerged in Europe to battle feudalism, but due to the timing of the colonization of America--prior to the flowering of socialist movements and ideologies--only liberalism became influential across the Atlantic.

Because of this historical accident, American society is exceptional--unlike those of the ‘Old World.’ Not only does it lack “a genuine revolutionary tradition” (5), it also lacks a classically conservative one. The older conservative notion of an organic society never took root here, since it depended upon the permanence of a set of hierarchic relations through which people were, in general, located for life in a particular niche within a set of classes, orders, and corporate bodies. In America, as Hartz puts it, “men began to be held together, not by the knowledge that they were different parts of a corporate whole, but by the knowledge that they were similar participants in a uniform way of life” Indeed, Hartz believes that it is not the middle-class but the upper-class that is frustrated, “trying to break out of the egalitarian confines of middle class life but suffering guilt and failure in the process”

The establishment of a liberal way of life in America was made much easier by what Hartz calls “the magnificent material setting . . . found in the New World” (17). By this he means, first, that material abundance offered positive inducements to abandon the localistic barter economy of the village in favor of opportunities for commercial gain in a wider market economy and, secondly, that this abundance and the option of frontier settlement provided an economic basis for socio-economic mobility and belief in the capacity of individual achievement to overcome disadvantages of birth or circumstance.