The protest cry setting the children of Petion against the children of Dessalines still circulates in Haitian political life. Mocombe asks where it came from, using the structurationist and structural Marxist account of consciousness he calls phenomenological structuralism.

The slogan is usually heard in racial terms, with Petion standing for the neoliberal outlook of the mulatto elite and Dessalines for the economic reform and social justice voiced by the African masses. Mocombe's suggestion is that the two figures now function as categories of class struggle within a capitalist world-system under American hegemony, and that the African majority, the children of Sans Souci, bears the cost.