At issue here is the origin and nature of consciousness and identity in general and black consciousness and identity in particular. Since the 1960s, there have been four similar schools of thought on understanding the origins and nature of black practical consciousnesses, the ideas blacks recursively reorganize and reproduce in their material practices, in the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK), and the diaspora: the pathological-pathogenic and adaptive-vitality school in the US; and the anti-essentialist and anti-anti-essentialist schools in the UK and the diaspora. In the US, the pathological-pathogenic position suggests that in its divergences from white American norms and values black American practical consciousness is nothing more than a pathological form of, and reaction to, American consciousness rather than a dual (both African and American) hegemonic opposing “identity-in-differential” (the term is Gayatri Spivak’s) to the American one (Elkins, 1959; Frazier, 1939,1957; Genovese, 1974; Murray, 1984; Moynihan, 1965; Myrdal, 1944; Wilson, 1978, 1987; Sowell, 1975, 1981; Stampp, 1956, 1971). Proponents of the adaptive-vitality school, building on the work of Melville J. Herskovits, suggest that the divergences are not pathologies but African “institutional transformations” preserved on the American landscape (Allen, 2001; Asante, 1988, 1990; Billingsley, 1968, 1970, 1993; Blassingame, 1972; Early, 1993; Gilroy, 1993; Gutman, 1976; Herskovits, 1958 [1941]; Holloway, 1990a; Karenga, 1993; Levine, 1977; Lewis, 1993; Lincoln and Mamiya, 1990; Nobles, 1987; Staples, 1978; Stack, 1974; Desmangles, 1992; West, 1993). Just the same in the UK and the diaspora, the two main opposing schools of thought are the anti-essentialist and the anti-anti-essentialist (Smith, 1960; Vera, 1960; Gilroy, 1993; Mercer, 1994; Clifford, 1997; Mocombe and Tomlin, 2010, 2013; Mocombe et al, 2014). Anti-essentialists as in the case of the US pathological-pathogenic school argue against any ideas of a black innate cultural phenomenon that unites all black people, and contends that diasporic identities and cultures cannot place African origin at the center of any attempt to understand the nature of black practical consciousnesses in the UK and the diaspora (Mercer, 1994, pg. 3). The anti-anti-essentialist position, in keeping with the logic of the adaptive-vitality school, posits, on the contrary, the idea that African memory retentions exist in diasporic cultures to some degree (Clifford, 1997, pg. 267–268). Contemporarily, all four positions have been criticized for either their structural determinism as in the case of the pathological-pathogenic and anti-essentialist approaches, or racial/cultural determinism as in the case of the adaptive-vitality and anti-anti-essentialist positions (Karenga, 1993; Reed, 1997; Gordon, 1999; Mocombe, 2008, 2012; Mocombe et al, 2014).
In directly or indirectly refuting these four positions for their structural and racial/cultural determinism, contemporary post-sixties and post-segregation era black scholars and critical race theorists, predominantly, in the United Kingdom (UK) and United States (US) attempt to understand black consciousnesses and communities by using post-structural, post-modern, and postcolonial theories to either reinterpret W.E.B. Du Bois's (1903) double consciousness construct as an epistemological mode of critical inquiry that characterizes the nature or essence of black consciousness, a la Cornel West (1993) and Paul Gilroy (1993); or, building on the social constructivist work of Frantz Fanon (1952 [2008]; 1963), offer an intersectional approach to the constitution of black consciousnesses and communities, which emphasizes the diverse and different levels of alienation, marginalization, and domination, class, race, gender, global location, age, and sexual identity, by which black consciousnesses and communities get constituted, a la bell hooks (1993) and Patricia Hill Collins (1990) (Reed, 1997; Gordon, 1999; Mocombe et al, 2014).[1] In spite of their efforts, these two dominant contemporary critical race theory responses to the pathological-pathogenic, adaptive-vitality, anti-essentialist, and anti-anti-essentialist positions inadequately resolve the structural and racial determinism of the aforementioned approaches by neglecting the fact that their theories and the practical consciousness of the theorists themselves derive from the class division and social relations of production of global capitalism or the contemporary capitalist world-system (Reed, 1997; Mocombe, 2008; Mocombe and Tomlin, 2012; Mocombe et al, 2014).
The former understanding, Du Boisian double consciousness, put forth by Paul Gilroy and Cornel West, with their emphasis on black improvisation as seen in Jazz and other black musical and religious forms, is not only problematic because it reiterates Du Bois's racial essentialism in constituting his notion of double consciousness (Reed, 1997; Mocombe, 2008). But the scholars are also mistaken because they assume their Cartesian, transcendental, intellectual activity, the epistemological mode of critical inquiry, in the academy as having ontological and epistemological status among the black masses in general in constituting their identity within and by the dialectical racial-class structure of global capitalist relations of production and its ideological apparatuses. In other words, instead of viewing their interpretation of Du Boisian double consciousness, as an epistemological mode of critical inquiry, as being a by-product of a Cartesian transcendental vantage point afforded to them by their academic training and bourgeois class positions as black professors seeking to define black consciousness along the social class language game of the white bourgeois lifestyles of the upper-class of owners and high-level executives as it stands against and in relation to black underclass bodies, material conditions, language, and ideology. Gilroy and West assume their interpretation of double consciousness as an epistemological mode of critical inquiry, which is similar to the negative dialectics of the Frankfurt School, to be how ontologically and epistemologically black people, whether in the US or the diaspora, in general come to constitute their practical consciousnesses within the modern state and the dialectic of the capitalist social structure of class inequality and differentiation of the West. In doing so, however, they neglect the fact that their conception, as was the case in W.E.B. Du Bois’s conceptualization of double consciousness following the American Civil War, derives from the racial-class divisions of the American industrial/postindustrial capitalist social relations of production and its ideological apparatuses, which created two social (racial) class language games, a black bourgeois educated and professional class juxtaposed against the material conditions, practices, language, body, and ideology of a black underclass segregated in the ghettoes of Northern cities where industrial work was beginning to disappear to developing countries following the end of World War II. West and Gilroy, as Du Bois attempted to do for Southern agricultural black Americans following the Civil War, use double consciousness to highlight the contradictions of the society as encapsulated in, and revealed by, the material conditions of the black underclass of Northern cities in order to seek equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution for them vis-à-vis whites and black bourgeois material conditions, bodies, language, etc. in a declining industrial social relations of production.
Just the same, the latter predominantly feminist position, conversely, building on the social constructivist position of Frantz Fanon, in refutation to the assumed hidden logic of heterosexual and patriarchal domination inherent in the theories of Du Bois, Gilroy, and West, attempts to offer an intersectional approach to the constitution of black consciousnesses, which emphasizes the different levels of domination, class, race, gender, global location, age, and sexual identity, by which black communities and consciousnesses get alienated, marginalized, and constituted. This post-structural, postmodern, postcolonial, and black feminist theorizing of bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins, especially, epistemologically dismisses the dominant ontological status of the capitalist system/social structure by which the masses of blacks attempt to practically live out their lives for the theoretical assumptions of the indeterminacy of meaning and decentered subject of post-structural, post-modern, and postcolonial theorizing. They attempt to read back into the historical constitution of black identity and community life within and by the dialectic of a global capitalist social structure of racial class inequality the indeterminacy of meaning and decentered subject of post-structural, post-modern, postcolonial theorizing to highlight the variety of intersecting ways, race, class, age, sexual identity, etc., individual black subjects were and are alienated, marginalized, and dominated. As such, they commit the same bourgeois Cartesian transcendental intellectual fallacy that Gilroy and West do. Both hooks and Collins, from their transcendental vantage points, put the ontological status of the capitalist world-system, or “matrix of domination” to quote Collins, as reflected in the practices of the majority of blacks under erasure for the ontological and epistemological assumptions of post-modern and post-structural theorizing as though their bourgeois epistemological assumptions within a contemporary postindustrial capitalist social structure that attempts to reify and commodify individual identities for capital accumulation, is how all blacks, historically, initially encountered the matrix of domination and came to constitute their being-in-the-world within and by the global capitalist social structure of racial class inequality and differentiation. They fail to realize that intersectionality is a socio-political by-product of a postindustrial capitalist landscape or social structure seeking to decenter the bourgeois subject and allow a diversity of once discriminated against identities to emerge within the class division and social relations of postindustrial capitalist production so as to accumulate surplus-value by catering to the entertainment, financial, and service needs of these so-called new identities and their constructed class-based communities divided between a bourgeois class of blacks, homosexuals, transgenders, women, transsexuals, etc., “others,” amongst the poor of their kind, seeking equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution with whites (Mocombe, 2008, 2012; Fraser, 1994). Ambivalence, hybridity, liminality, créolité, négritude, etc., are the psychological processes, pathologies, and practical consciousness of the “other” bourgeoisies as they desire and struggle for equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution with whites for themselves and members of the underclass of their fictive communities.
In other words, both positions because of their class origins and Cartesian ontological and epistemological (transcendental) activities and vantage points inadequately address the issue of how their intellectual assumptions and the practical consciousnesses in black communities within the global capitalist matrix of domination of the West historically and ontologically became constituted within and by the dialectical unfolding of racial-class divisions and social relations of production organized via mode of production, language, ideology, ideological apparatuses, and communicative discourse. They fail to synthesize their transcendental academic rhetoric with structural Marxist dialectics, which captures the racial-class divisions, ideological apparatuses, and the dialectical economic structure within which the practical consciousnesses of the black masses, the academic theories of hybridity, double consciousness, intersectionality, etc., and the identities of the theorists emerged.
I reject the postmodern, post-structural, and postcolonial emphasis on the decentered subject, intersectionality, ambiguity, hybridity, créolité, and liminality as the constituting basis of all subaltern or postcolonial identities. Again, the aforementioned are the psychological processes, pathologies, and practical consciousnesses of the “other” bourgeoisies and underclasses interpellated and embourgeoised by the ideology, ideological apparatuses, and modes of production of the West. As I see it, the decentered subject, ambiguity, hybridity, créolité, intersectionality, and liminality are relational concepts and processes socially and linguistically created by a structuring structure to interpellate human actors as such (Mocombe, 2012). In other words, they are concepts and processes created and used by the “other” bourgeoisies to highlight their psychology and practical consciousness in their quest for equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution with whites. Whites of the contemporary post-industrial capitalist structuring structure in Europe and America in turn have co-opted and incorporated these processes, pathologies, and practical consciousnesses of the bourgeois other to interpellate and embourgeois human actors as hybrids, postcolonials, ambiguous identities, creoles, etc., in order to integrate them into the Protestant (postindustrial) capitalist world-system under American hegemony (Mocombe, 2012). The once discriminated against others, blacks, women, transgenders, homosexuals, etc., interpellated and embourgeoised by the modes of production, language, ideology, ideological apparatuses, and communicative discourse of Europe and America, internalize these, postindustrial, processes and concepts and recursively reorganize and reproduce them as their practical consciousness, in order to convict whites for not identifying with their ideas and ideals, as they (the “other”) seek equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution with their white counterparts as an “other” within the enframing ontology of the West under American hegemony.
Be that as it may, for me, consciousness and identity refers to (building on the structural Marxism of structuration theory grounded by a Weberian sociology as highlighted in his work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) practical consciousness, the ideas and ideals, stemming from the language, communicative discourse, ideology, ideological apparatuses, and modes of production of a structuring structure, internalized and recursively (re) organized and reproduced in a material resource framework by human actors interpellated by other actors who control the resources of the framework (Mocombe, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015).
Consciousness and identity defined as such, against the once prevailing view that Africans in the diaspora maintained their African traditions in the form of Africanisms during and after slavery this work argues the contrary (Allen, 2001; Asante, 1988, 1990; Billingsley, 1968, 1970, 1993; Blassingame, 1972; Early, 1993; Gilroy, 1993; Gutman, 1976; Herskovits, 1958 [1941]; Holloway, 1990a; Karenga, 1993; Levine, 1977; Lewis, 1993; Lincoln and Mamiya, 1990; Nobles, 1987; Staples, 1978; Stack, 1974; Desmangles, 1992; West, 1993). Outside of Haiti, the majority of black practical consciousnesses throughout the globe, contemporarily, are a dialectical by-product and differentiation of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism of European societies. That is, interpellated, integrated, embourgeoised, and differentiated, via its languages, communicative discourse, modes of production, ideology, and ideological apparatuses, in the capitalist world-system following slavery and decolonization, the majority of black people in Africa and the African diaspora, contemporarily, internalize and recursively reorganize and reproduce a European way of life as black (other) agents of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism seeking equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution with their former white colonizers (Elkins, 1959; Frazier, 1939,1957; Genovese, 1974; Murray, 1984; Moynihan, 1965; Myrdal, 1944; Wilson, 1978, 1987, 1993; Sowell, 1975, 1981; Stampp, 1956, 1971).
In Africa and the black diaspora, an administrative bourgeoisie, interpellated, embourgeoised, and differentiated by the modes of production (agribusinesses, tourisms, manufacturing, call centers, industrial, postindustrial, etc.), languages (French, English, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, etc.), ideology (conservative, liberal, and radical Protestantism), ideological apparatuses (churches, schools, prisons, laws, the streets, etc.), and communicative discourse of their former white slavemasters and colonizers, emerged against a structurally differentiated underclass in poor material conditions who shared, due to the ideological apparatuses (schools, churches, prisons, urban street environments, police force, laws, etc.) and modes of production of slavery and the colonial system, in the ideology of their bourgeois counterparts whom they seek/sought to emulate. Hence amidst white racism, slavery, and colonialism, the majority of Africans, interpellated and embourgeoised by the language, mode of production, ideology, ideological apparatuses, and communicative discourse of their white masters internalized the ideas and ideals of the social system or structuring structure. They sought to recursively reorganize and reproduce these ideas and ideals as their practical consciousness for equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution with whites by dialectically convicting European/white society for not identifying with their norms, values, and regulations, which the Africans, in a national position of their own, embody as an “other.” Postmodern, post-structural, and postcolonial theorizing as encapsulated in the works of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Du Bois, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, Patricia Hill-Collins, etc., captures and highlights the concepts, psychological processes, and pathologies of their desires and practical consciousness amidst white racism and discriminatory effects.
Like the rest of the black/African diaspora, in Haiti the administrative bourgeoisie, Affranchis, seeking equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution with whites, would emerge and develop prior to, during, and following the Revolution. However, the majority of the Africans in the provinces and mountains of Haiti, as highlighted by Jacques Roumain and Jean Price-Mars, were not a structurally differentiated black other as one would find throughout Africa and the diaspora (I do recognize the minority of Africans—Santería, Candomblé, Obeah, etc.—in the Diaspora and Africa who attempt to maintain their Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism but as in Haiti this is done against the practical consciousness of the administrative bourgeoisie in control of the state and the structurally differentiated others of their nation-states, which they attempt to interpellate and embourgeois). On the contrary, the majority of the Africans on the island maintained their African structuring structure, what I am calling here the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism social class language game, which they reified as the nature of reality as such via the language of Kreyol; the ideology of Vodou; its ideological apparatuses, i.e., lakous, peristyles, ounfo, lwa yo, herbal medicine, songs, dances, and zombification; and modes of production, i.e., komes, husbandry, and subsistence agriculture. Interpellated and ounganified/manboified by the ideological apparatuses of this structuring structure or social system, the African people of the island internalized and recursively reorganized and reproduced the ideas and ideals of the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism as their practical consciousness in the provinces and mountains under the leadership of oungan yo, manbo yo, gangan yo/dokté fey, and granmoun yo against the practical consciousness of agents (Affranchis) of the Catholic/Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism who controlled the state, its language, ideology, ideological apparatuses, and communicative discourse at the expense of the control of the material resource framework and the mode of production, which the Africans controlled and dominated.
In other words, two social systems or structuring structures representing the nature of reality as such emerged on the island following the revolution, the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism social class language game of the Africans and the Catholic/Protestant Ethic and spirit of capitalism social class language game of the mulatto elites and petit-bourgeois free blacks. The originating moments of the Haitian Revolution as initiated on August 14th, 1791 at Bois Caïman by Boukman Dutty, Cecile Fatiman, and Edaïse was led by Africans under the leadership of oungan yo, manbo yo, gangan yo/dokté fey, and granmoun yo anti-dialectically, seeking to constitute and recursively (re) organize and reproduce their African Kreyol and Vodou practical-consciousness, the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism social class language game, in the world via the ideology of Vodou; its ideological apparatuses, i.e., lakous, peristyles, lwa yo, herbal medicine, proverbs, songs, dances, musical instruments, ounfo, and secret societies; and modes of production, subsistence agriculture, husbandry, and komes. This latter worldview (form of system and social integration) stood against the bourgeois Catholic/Protestant liberalism of whites, the mulatto elites and petit-bourgeois free blacks or Affranchis class of Haiti, who would subsequently, with the assassination of the oungan, Vodou priest, Jean-Jacques Dessalines on October 17th, 1806, undermine that attempt for a more dialectical liberal purposive-rationale, similar to the rest of the black/African diaspora. The latter’s, Affranchis, failure to effectively enforce and establish ideological apparatuses in the provinces and the mountains to interpellate, embourgeois, and differentiate the masses as agents of the Catholic/Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism against the mode of production, ideology, ideological apparatuses, and communicative discourse of the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism of oungan yo, manbo yo, and granmoun yo undermined their attempt, however. Albeit they would subsequently work with foreign white merchants to underdeveloped the provinces and mountains by undermining the subsistence agricultural, husbandry, and komes of the Africans through taxation, importation of cheap foreign goods, and silencing their history and historical narratives through the hybridity, créolité, négritude, etc., logic of postmodern, post-structural, and postcolonial theories as embedded in the works of Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, among many others (Trouillot, 1990, 1995; Du Bois, 2012; Ramsey, 2014).
It is this initial divergent path against slavery and liberal bourgeois Protestantism that would come to constitute the identity of the Haitian masses under the leadership of oungan yo, manbo yo, gangan yo/dokté fey, and granmoun yo, and sets the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution and Haitian practical consciousness apart, as a distinct anti-dialectical phenomenon, from the dialectical desires and purposive-rationale of an elite liberal hybrid group, the mulatto and black petit-bourgeois elites in Haiti and liberal black Protestant bourgeois males of America and elsewhere in the diaspora. The latter two sought and seek to serve as the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination for the black masses in both countries, respectively, by dialectically recursively reorganizing and reproducing the agential moments of their former white slavemasters and colonizers—for equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution—via the state and its ideological apparatuses as opposed to reconstituting their being-in-the-world from an African worldview as the Haitian/African maroons did in establishing the counter-plantation system via the language, communicative discourse, ideology, ideological apparatuses, and modes of production of their Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism social class language game.
Hence, against contemporary postmodern, post-structural, and postcolonial theories, I am not suggesting that the Africans of Haiti syncretized the Africanism of their African Vodou practical consciousness with that of the Europeans, and the ambiguity, hybridity, créolité, and liminality of that syncretism provided them the space to speak as subalterns. On the contrary, at Bois Caiman, the Africans rejected the European worldview and oungan yo, manbo yo, bokor yo, gangan yo/dokté fey, and granmoun yo (elders) syncretized their African worldviews with native Taino traditions, which paralleled the African. They reified and sought to institutionalize it in the material world via ideological apparatuses, Lakous, peristyles, herbal medicine, lwa yo, and proverbs used to interpellate and ounganify/manboify the African masses against that of the European worldview or language game of the Affranchis. Créolité, hybridity, intersectionality, ambivalence, liberal bourgeois Protestantism, etc., is the practical consciousness of the Affranchis and the structurally differentiated black others interpellated and embourgeoised by the ideologies, ideological apparatuses, and modes of production of their former white and black colonial slavemasters amidst their continual experiences of racism and discrimination as they seek equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution.
To sum up, whereas Haitians, sixty-seven percent were directly from Africa when the Revolution commenced, because of their early freedom from slavery and white colonial rule were able to maintain their African material practices and consciousnesses which they synthesized with Taino practices and reified via the ideology of Vodou, ideological apparatuses such as lakous, peristyles, subsistence agricultural mode of production, husbandry, and komes under the leadership of oungan yo, manbo yo, and granmoun yo. The petit-bourgeois blacks and mulatto elites, Affranchis, like their African, black American, and diasporic counterparts for example, given their interpellation, differentiation, and embourgeoisement via the mode of production, language, ideology, ideological apparatuses, and communicative discourse of the West, sought to dialectically adopt the Catholic/Protestant Ethic and spirit of capitalism of their former European colonizers (as a Francophile neocolonial oligarchy) by which to constitute the nation-state of Haiti. Unlike the other black administrative bourgeoisies in America and the diaspora, however, the Affranchis did not encounter a structurally differentiated black other in the provinces and mountains. They encountered an African people with their own structuring structure (form of system and social integration), i.e., language, communicative discourse, mode of production, ideology, and ideological apparatuses. As such, the Affranchis, like their white counterparts, attempted to, via racism, slavery, and colonization, recolonize the African people of the island. It is their, Affranchis, attempt, as a Francophile neocolonial oligarchy, to convert the Africans, by undermining their history, historical narratives, language, ideology, ideological apparatuses, communicative discourse, and modes of production, into a structurally differentiated black other, i.e., masses, peasant class, laborers, creoles, hybrids, etc., within the capitalist world-system under American hegemony, which have led to the misery and poverty of Haiti and the Haitian people. As previously highlighted, the Africans,
[t]ook over the land they had once worked as slaves, creating small farms where they raised livestock and grew crops to feed themselves and sell in local markets. On these small farms, they did all the things that had been denied to them under slavery: they built families, practiced their religion, and worked for themselves…. Haiti’s rural population effectively undid the plantation model. By combining subsistence agriculture with the production of some crops for export, [komes,] they created a system that guaranteed them a better life, materially and socially, than that available to most other people of African descent in the Americas throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But they did not succeed in establishing that system in the country as a whole. In the face of most Haitians’ unwillingness to work the plantations, Haiti’s ruling groups retreated but did not surrender. Ceding, to some extent, control of the land, they took charge of the ports and the export trade. And they took control of the state, heavily taxing the goods produced by the small-scale farmers and thereby reinforcing the economic divisions between the haves and the have-nots (Du Bois, 2012, pg. 6).
Hence, the Affranchis, following the Revolution, did not reproduce and enforce the ideological apparatuses of the West throughout the island to interpellate, embourgeois, and differentiate the masses as agents of the Catholic/Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism as was done throughout Africa and the diaspora by whites and the black administrative bourgeoisies who would replace them following slavery and decolonization. Instead, they sought their interpellation, embourgeoisement, and differentiation by silencing their history, historical narratives, and subverting their komes, husbandry, and subsistence agriculture for those, i.e., agribusinesses, manufacturing, and tourism, of the West in order to build their (Affranchis) own wealth and payback the independence debt to France at the expense of the well-being of the African masses and the country. Haiti’s contemporary milieu of poverty and political instability is a result of the continual struggle between those, agents of the Catholic/Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism, seeking to reproduce it as a simulacrum of the West, a periphery state (the Taiwan of the Caribbean) within the capitalist world-system under American hegemony, and those, agents of the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism, seeking to constitute it as sovereign state where the resources are shared democratically and equitably amongst its citizens.
Within Mocombe’s (2014, 2015) phenomenological structuralism, this work, against contemporary postmodern, post-structural, and postcolonial theories, seeks to offer a dialectical understanding of the constitution of a minority of Haitian life within the class division and social relations of production of the global Protestant capitalist world-system, which distinguishes it from an anti-dialectical reading of the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution and the constitution of the identity of the majority of the people in the provinces, mountains, and urban slums on the island, which stood and stands against it. I go on to demonstrate how at the heart of Haiti’s poverty is this struggle between these two opposing structuring structures and practical-consciousnesses, the Catholic/Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism social class language game of the mulatto elites and petit-bourgeois blacks, i.e., Affranchis, on the one hand, reified via the French language, ideology of the Republican state, neoliberal capitalism, mode of production, i.e., agribusiness, tourism, and textile industry, and its ideological apparatuses; and the Vodou Ethic and spirit of communism social class language game of the masses, with its own history, language (Kreyol), mode of production (subsistence agriculture and komes), ideology, Vodou, and ideological apparatuses, lakous, peristyles, ounfo, etc., under the leadership of oungan yo, manbo yo, gangan yo/dokté fey, and granmoun yo, on the other.
Lewis R. Gordon (1999) in his short essay, “A Short History of the Critical in Critical Race Theory,” traces two strands as to the origins of the “critical” basis of CRT. The first strand builds on the theoretical discourse of W.E.B. Du Bois (1903), and the second on the works of Frantz Fanon. From Du Bois many critical race theorists (Derrick Bell, Lucius T. Outlaw, Tommy Lott, Robert Gooding-Williams, and Josiah Young) adopt his distinction between identity and policy to constitute their eliminative discourses for racial equality within the liberal democratic state. The Fanonian School (Cornel West, Paul Gilroy, David Goldberg, Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Anthony Appiah, Naomi Zack, Charles Mills, Stuart Hall, Victor Anderson, and many others) represents the postmodern and post-structural strand of CRT, and highlights the constructivity of racial formation. That is, like Fanon, “they bring into focus the tension between structural identities and lived identities and the tension between constitutional theories and raw environmental appeals” to highlight the racism, sexism, etc., by which the West constitute itself against blacks, women, homosexuals, etc., as they experience the material resource framework in their everyday lives (Gordon, 1999). Gordon, goes on to highlight how the latter school is further divided into two camps: those (Anthony Appiah, Naomi Zack, Charles Mills, and Victor Anderson) who hold on to the idea that liberalism can resolve the racial issues and tensions; and those (Cornel West, for example) who are more radical and have lost faith in the ideals of liberalism to resolve them. In either case, both positions represent a fight against the power elites of the West for equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution within its “enframing” logic of organizing and reproducing the material resource framework, not for an alternative constructed identity to it (Fraser, 1994). In other words, critical race theorists are seeking pluralism within the enframing ontology and praxis of the West, i.e., racial “other” agents of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism, not to replace that ontology and epistemology with an alternative practical consciousness upon which to reorganize and reproduce the material resource framework. The reason for this is because the theorists are themselves Westerners and are seeking to dialectically convict the society of not identifying with its values and ideals even though those very values and ideals, which they recursively reorganize and reproduce in their own praxis, threaten humanity and the earth with its consumerist, exploitative, and accumulative logic of organizing the material resource framework. Hence CRT, regardless of its strands, is not critical enough because of its identitarian, dialectical, logic, which is grounded in the negative dialectic of the Frankfurt school, which is not an anti-dialectical logic or constructive identity which opposes the West as one finds in the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism of the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution at Bois Caiman and the contemporary Islamic Fundamentalist movements of the Middle East, for examples. The latter, anti-dialectical logics offer alternative means or constructivity of organizing the material resource framework we call the earth in order to structure lived-experiences around an alternative means of existence, is necessary if humanity is to survive the consumerist, exploitative, and accumulative logic of the West as it threatens the earth and all life on it. Critical Race Theorists are unable to offer that anti-dialectical response because of their incessant claim for equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution within the already existing liberal bourgeois Protestant constructed identity by which the state and their identities are constituted. Albeit, Cornel West’s recent attack against the American and global oligarchs of the capitalist world-system is an attempt to offer that anti-dialectical response. However, given his Western identity, he does not offer a prescription, outside of Jazz improvisation, of what that new “new world order” and its practical consciousness or constructed identity should look like (as one finds in the counter-hegemonic plantation system of Haitian Vodou) if we and the planet will survive in the near future. The Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism of the Haitian Revolution I argue here offer such an anti-dialectical discourse and discursive practice to the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism of the West and CRT.