Mocombe works from a framework he names phenomenological structuralism, an adaptation of structuration theory, to argue that Vodou supplied Haiti's rural majority with a working set of values: collective living, egalitarian and democratic instincts, openness to outsiders, a sense of balance and of justice among them.

Carried by oungan, manbo, gangan and the granmoun, that outlook produced what he calls the Haitian spirit of communism and sustained in the mountains and the provinces what Jean Casimir calls the counter-plantation system.

Set against it stands a rival ethic, Catholic and Protestant in inspiration and capitalist in aim, held by whites, by the mulatto and gens de couleur elite, and by the free black petite bourgeoisie. Mocombe's charge is that the affranchis who lived by that second ethic hollowed out the independence movement the Vodou practitioners had begun, and that the result was the poorest, most racist and most tyrannical state in the hemisphere.