[R-G] Democracy versus the people

[Anthony Fenton]

Democracy versus the people

Slavoj Zizek

Published 14 August 2008
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/08/haiti-aristide-lavalas

A new account of Haiti's recent history shows how the genuinely  
radical politics of Lavalas and its leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide,  
proved too threatening to the country's wealthy elite and their  
foreign backers.

Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment

Peter Hallward, Verso, 480pp, £16.99

Noam Chomsky once noted that "it is only when the threat of popular  
participation is overcome that democratic forms can be safely  
contemplated". He thereby pointed at the "passivising" core of  
parliamentary democracy, which makes it incompatible with the direct  
political self- organisation and self-empowerment of the people.  
Direct colonial aggression or military assault are not the only ways  
of pacifying a "hostile" population: so long as they are backed up by  
sufficient levels of coercive force, international "stabilisation"  
missions can overcome the threat of popular participation through the  
apparently less abrasive tactics of "democracy promotion",  
"humanitarian intervention" and the "protection of human rights".

This is what makes the case of Haiti so exemplary. As Peter Hallward  
writes in Damming the Flood, a detailed account of the "democratic  
containment" of Haiti's radical politics in the past two decades,  
"never have the well-worn tactics of 'democracy promotion' been  
applied with more devastating effect than in Haiti between 2000 and  
2004". One cannot miss the irony of the fact that the name of the  
emancipatory political movement which suffered this international  
pressure is Lavalas, or "flood" in Creole: it is the flood of the  
expropriated who overflow the gated communities that protect those who  
exploit them. This is why the title of Hallward's book is quite  
appropriate, inscribing the events in Haiti into the global tendency  
of new dams and walls that have been popping out everywhere since 11  
September 2001, confronting us with the inner truth of  
"globalisation", the underlying lines of division which sustain it.

Haiti was an exception from the very beginning, from its revolutionary  
fight against slavery, which ended in independence in January 1804.  
"Only in Haiti," Hallward notes, "was the declaration of human freedom  
universally consistent. Only in Haiti was this declaration sustained  
at all costs, in direct opposition to the social order and economic  
logic of the day." For this reason, "there is no single event in the  
whole of modern history whose implications were more threatening to  
the dominant global order of things". The Haitian Revolution truly  
deserves the title of repetition of the French Revolution: led by  
Toussaint 'Ouverture, it was clearly "ahead of his time", "premature"  
and doomed to fail, yet, precisely as such, it was perhaps even more  
of an event than the French Revolution itself. It was the first time  
that an enslaved population rebelled not as a way of returning to  
their pre-colonial "roots", but on behalf of universal principles of  
freedom and equality. And a sign of the Jacobins' authenticity is that  
they quickly recognised the slaves' uprising - the black delegation  
from Haiti was enthusiastically received in the National Assembly in  
Paris. (As you might expect, things changed after Thermidor; in 1801  
Napoleon sent a huge expeditionary force to try to regain control of  
the colony).

Denounced by Talleyrand as "a horrible spectacle for all white  
nations", the "mere existence of an independent Haiti" was itself an  
intolerable threat to the slave-owning status quo. Haiti thus had to  
be made an exemplary case of economic failure, to dissuade other  
countries from taking the same path. The price - the literal price -  
for the "premature" independence was truly extortionate: after two  
decades of embargo, France, the old colonial master, established trade  
and diplomatic relations only in 1825, after forcing the Haitian  
government to pay 150 million francs as "compensation" for the loss of  
its slaves. This sum, roughly equal to the French annual budget at the  
time, was later reduced to 90 million, but it continued to be a heavy  
drain on Haitian resources: at the end of the 19th century, Haiti's  
payments to France consumed roughly 80 per cent of the national  
budget, and the last instalment was only paid in 1947. When, in 2003,  
in anticipation of the bicentenary of national independence, the  
Lavalas president Jean-Baptiste Aristide demanded that France return  
this extorted money, his claim was flatly rejected by a French  
commission (led, ironically, by Régis Debray). At a time when some US  
liberals ponder the possibility of reimbursing black Americans for  
slavery, Haiti's demand to be reimbursed for the tremendous sum the  
former slaves had to pay to have their freedom recognised has been  
largely ignored by liberal opinion, even if the extortion here was  
double: the slaves were first exploited, and then had to pay for the  
recognition of their hard-won freedom.

The story goes on today. The Lavalas movement has won every free  
presidential election since 1990, but it has twice been the victim of  
US-sponsored military coups. Lavalas is a unique combination: a  
political agent which won state power through free elections, but  
which all the way through maintained its roots in organs of local  
popular democracy, of people's direct self-organisation. Although the  
"free press" dominated by its enemies was never obstructed, although  
violent protests that threatened the stability of the legal government  
were fully tolerated, the Lavalas government was routinely demonised  
in the international press as exceptionally violent and corrupt. The  
goal of the US and its allies France and Canada was to impose on Haiti  
a "normal" democracy - a democracy which would not touch the economic  
power of the narrow elite; they were well aware that, if it is to  
function in this way, democracy has to cut its links with direct  
popular self-organisation.

It is interesting to note that this US-French co-operation took place  
soon after the public discord about the 2003 attack on Iraq, and was  
quite appropriately celebrated as the reaffirmation of their basic  
alliance that underpins the occasional conflicts. Even Brazil's Lula  
condoned the 2004 overthrow of Aristide. An unholy alliance was thus  
put together to discredit the Lavalas government as a form of mob rule  
that threatened human rights, and President Aristide as a power-mad  
fundamentalist dictator - an alliance ranging from ex-military death  
squads and US-sponsored "democratic fronts" to humanitarian NGOs and  
even some "radical left" organisations which, financed by the US,  
enthusiastically denounced Aristide's "capitulation" to the IMF.  
Aristide himself provided a perspicuous characterisation of this  
overlapping between radical left and liberal right: "Somewhere,  
somehow, there's a little secret satisfaction, perhaps an unconscious  
satisfaction, in saying things that powerful white people want you to  
say."

The Lavalas struggle is exemplary of a principled heroism that  
confronts the limitations of what can be done today. Lavalas activists  
didn't withdraw into the interstices of state power and "resist" from  
a safe distance, they heroically assumed state power, well aware that  
they were taking power in the most unfavourable circumstances, when  
all the trends of capitalist "modernisation" and "structural  
readjustment", but also of the postmodern left, were against them.  
Constrained by the measures imposed by the US and International  
Monetary Fund, which were destined to enact "necessary structural  
readjustments", Aristide pursued a politics of small and precise  
pragmatic measures (building schools and hospitals, creating  
infrastructure, raising minimum wages) while encouraging the active  
political mobilisation of the people in direct confrontation with  
their most immediate foes - the army and its paramilitary auxiliaries.

The single most controversial thing about Aristide, the thing that  
earned him comparisons with Sendero Luminoso and Pol Pot, was his  
pointed refusal to condemn measures taken by the people to defend  
themselves against military or paramilitary assault, an assault that  
had decimated the popular movement for decades. On a couple of  
occasions back in 1991, Aristide appeared to condone recourse to the  
most notorious of these measures, known locally as "Père Lebrun", a  
variant of the practice of "necklacing" adopted by anti-apartheid  
partisans in South Africa - killing a police assassin or an informer  
with a burning tyre. In a speech on 4 August 1991, he advised an  
enthusiastic crowd to remember "when to use [Père Lebrun], and where  
to use it", while reminding them that "you may never use it again in a  
state where law prevails".

Later, liberal critics sought to draw a parallel between the so-called  
chimères, ie, members of Lavalas self-defence groups, and the Tontons  
Macoutes, the notoriously murderous gangs of the Duvalier  
dictatorship. The fact that there is no numerical basis for comparison  
of levels of political violence under Aristide and under Duvalier is  
not allowed to get in the way of the essential political point. Asked  
about these chimères, Aristide points out that "the very word says it  
all. Chimères are people who are impoverished, who live in a state of  
profound insecurity and chronic unemployment. They are the victims of  
structural injustice, of systematic social violence [. . .] It's not  
surprising that they should confront those who have always benefited  
from this same social violence."

Arguably, the very rare acts of popular self- defence committed by  
Lavalas partisans are examples of what Walter Benjamin called "divine  
violence": they should be located "beyond good and evil", in a kind of  
politico-religious suspension of the ethical. Although we are dealing  
with what can only appear as "immoral" acts of killing, one has no  
political right to condemn them, because they are a response to years,  
centuries even, of systematic state and economic violence and  
exploitation.

As Aristide himself puts it: "It is better to be wrong with the people  
than to be right against the people." Despite some all-too-obvious  
mistakes, the Lavalas regime was in effect one of the figures of how  
"dictatorship of the proletariat" might look today: while  
pragmatically engaging in some externally imposed compromises, it  
always remained faithful to its "base", to the crowd of ordinary  
dispossessed people, speaking on their behalf, not "representing" them  
but directly relying on their local self-organisations. Although  
respecting the democratic rules, Lavalas made it clear that the  
electoral struggle is not where things are decided: what is much more  
crucial is the effort to supplement democracy with the direct  
political self-organisation of the oppressed. Or, to put it in our  
"postmodern" terms: the struggle between Lavalas and the capitalist- 
military elite in Haiti is a case of genuine antagonism, an antagonism  
which cannot be contained within the frame of parliamentary-democratic  
"agonistic pluralism".

This is why Hallward's outstanding book is not just about Haiti, but  
about what it means to be a "leftist" today: ask a leftist how he  
stands towards Aristide, and it will be immediately clear if he is a  
partisan of radical emancipation or merely a humanitarian liberal who  
wants "globalisation with a human face".

Slavoj Zizek is the author of "In Defence of Lost Causes" (Verso,  
£19.99)