The social media call to protest (“Operation Airport Lockdown”) included a suggestion that marchers bring “ti chez” or “little chairs” along with them so that once they have taken over the runways, of which there are not many, they can hold a comfortable sit-in for the day. The digital image for the march shows an airplane in flight over a runway, with the motto: “The Only Plane That Will Land is the One That Will Take Away Jovenel,” a reference to Jovenel Moïse, the country’s president, who has become the focus for popular anger and dissatisfaction.

As you watch what’s happening in Haiti today, and read the front-page coverage, it’s important to remember that the massive unrest in the streets is not powered by emotion only. The people you see out there are not thoughtless and they’re not simply angry. There is a logic to what’s happening; there’s a history and so many reasons why. There’s a plan, a hope. There are ideas. There is need and desperation, definitely. But implicit in what’s happening is a rejection of a long-standing system—and a dream of what another Haiti could look like.

I don’t say this as a romantic. I’m not saying that there aren’t subtle forces at work behind the scenes. Of course money is changing hands somewhere, to influence the moment and its outcome. There is always money coursing through protests, especially in poor countries. But recall that Haiti has always been a leader in seismic shifts in how the world functions. Remember the revolution of 1791–1804 that ensured that slave capitalism would eventually be doomed all over the planet? I’m reminded now of that revolution, which took a long time to accomplish. Remember that Haiti was the first nation to cast off an American military occupation, in 1934. Besides frustration about infinite corruption and zero leadership in Haiti, there is a lot of thinking now about how the country might survive outside globalized markets, and how it could return to an agricultural system of updated, modernized, self-sufficient small farming. Changes like these take a long time to accomplish, and require the support of huge majorities willing to work for these goals or other grand changes. It’s a demanding job, to tire out an enemy who has every advantage. But it can be done—and has been done before in Haiti.

The situation that has been unfolding over the past year is the long, drawn-out, tortuous result of a concerted attack on popular democracy, and of the Haitian elite’s reluctance to allow any political or economic space for the masses entrenched in generations of poverty. The international community has followed along with the English- and French-speaking Haitian business and political elite—whose word on Haiti is taken as gospel by foreign officials who don’t speak Creole—and has also often taken the lead. This elite-sector-first strategy worked as long as people could still live in the Haitian countryside. But as Haiti joined the global economy and its agricultural system failed to compete abroad and was undersold at home, urban migration with all its concomitant ills began to impinge on the ease of the Port-au-Prince elite.

Now, with real unemployment running at historic highs and a corrupt government in complete shambles, the predatory system, having stolen everything it can steal, is showing its radical illogic. Unless you run a slave nation, you can’t endlessly run a state off the backs of a people from whom you’ve taken everything, a people who have nothing. Try to see Haiti as the United States today, as run by Trump, but concentrated into a thimble. Income inequality is far more visible and insane than it is here in the United States, because the country lacks a cushioning working or middle class. The Haitian middle class now lives where middle classes like to live: here, in Canada, in France, and in other remaining bits of the late Francophone empire—places where there are still at least remnants of economies that function for most of the population and where a Haitian refugee can get a job.

Without its working middle class (some still remain, but very few), Haiti has become a land of millions of the virtually homeless living in shantytowns built with their own hands, and a few millionaire and even billionaire elite families who live behind barriers and barbed wire toward the top of the mountain that overhangs the capital, keeping a stranglehold on political power and on all the country’s wealth—a wealth that comes largely from a demoralized, mistreated, and grotesquely underpaid shantytown population, as well as from some lingering tourism, some lingering agriculture, international mineral extraction, drug-trafficking, and corruption. For the Haitian people, there is almost no public education, no public sanitation, no fire safety. There is also no social security, no subsidized health care. Plus right now there’s often no gas, no electricity, no water and no food.

Without its working middle class (some still remain, but very few), Haiti has become a land of millions of the virtually homeless living in shantytowns built with their own hands,