Singular Universality as "Slavery in Equality"

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 124-125:

What was it, then, about the Haitian Revolution that went beyond Kantian enthusiasm, and that Hegel clearly saw? What needs to be added here, moving beyond Kant, is that there are social groups which, on account of their lacking a determinate place in the "private" order of the social hierarchy--in other words, as a "part of no part" of the social body--directly stand for universality. Properly communist revolutionary enthusiasm is unconditionally rooted in full solidarity with this "part of no part" and its position of singular universality. The Haitian Revolution "failed" when it betrayed this solidarity and developed into a new hierarchical-nationalist community in which the new local black elite continued the exploitation process. The reason for its failure was not the "backwardness" of Haiti. It failed because it was ahead of its time--its slave plantations (mostly sugarcane) were not a remainder of premodern societies, but models of efficient capitalist production; the discipline to which slaves were submitted served as an example for the discipline to which wage-laborers were later submitted in capitalist metropolises. After the abolition of slavery, the new black Haiti government imposed "agrarian militarism"--in order not to disturb the production of sugarcane for export, ex-slaves were obliged to continue working at their plantations under the same owners, only now as technically "free" wage-laborers. The tension that characterizes a bourgeois society--democratic enthusiasm and personal freedoms co-existing with slave-like work discipline--this slavery in equality appeared in Haiti in its most radical form. What makes capital exceptional is its unique combination of the values of freedom and equality and the facts of exploitation and domination: the gist of Marx's analysis is that the legal-ideological matrix of freedom-equality is not a mere "mask" concealing exploitation-domination, but the very form in which the latter is exercised.