The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism;and the Vodou Ethic and the Spirit of Communism

Abstract

This work explores and highlights how the African religion of Vodou and its ethic (i.e. syncretism, materialism, holism, communalism) gave rise to the Haitian spirit of communism in the provinces, mountains and urban slums of Haiti, which would be juxtaposed against the Catholic/Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism of the white, mulatto and petit-bourgeois classes (i.e. the Affranchis of the island). This latter worldview, I go on to argue, exercised by the free bourgeois blacks and mulatto elites on the island undermined the revolutionary and independence movement of Haiti, and made it an apartheid state.