Dr. Cheddi Jagan and the world crisis

Mar 08, 2009 Editorial

Last Friday marked the 12th anniversary of the death of President Cheddi Jagan. As the pre-eminent leader in the struggle for our country’s independence, there are many lessons that can be gleaned from his more than half a century of activism in a mind-boggling array of roles. Political leader, trade-unionist, parliamentarian, internationalist, Premier, President and, not to forget, dentist, were only the more visible ones. Throughout his life he was a committed student of the human condition, and as committed a teacher of his hard-earned lessons to all who came in touch with him.

Seeking an analytical tool to make sense of the degraded social conditions he found on his return to Guyana after dental studies in the US in 1943, Marxism provided him with the best answers. One lesson he absorbed, and used tirelessly for the rest of his life, was Marx’s insight that capitalism was a world movement.
Applications of its logic in Guyana could therefore never be disjunctured from what was going on in the wider world. He prefaced every speech of his – especially those to political gatherings – with an explication of global events that remarkably presaged the reality in Guyana.

Today, both the global financial meltdown and its horrendous impact on the developing world, including Guyana, would not have surprised him. In fact, during the last year of his life he summarised his views of the precursors of this self-same crisis and presented it in a remarkably prescient document he labelled: A New Global Human Order (NGHO). Many derided his exposition, claiming that it was not the business of a leader of a small Third World nation to lecture the giants of the world.

Today, the chickens are coming home to roost and the G-7, the cosy old developed-world club, has suddenly expanded itself to G-20, and are desperately looking for a way out of the mess they created. Dr. Jagan would have told them, as he did in the NGHO, that unless they included the rest of the world in their deliberations and programmes (within the UN’s ambit, for instance) their solutions will be merely stop-gap and transitory. A global problem demands a global solution. G-20 will be meeting in London next month, and maybe the Government should submit a copy of the NGHO to them.

Dr Jagan called for a return of the IMF/WB to their originally designated roles of dealing with international financial crises and fostering development of the poorer nations. He criticised their capture and control by a few developed countries. Today, this call is echoed within even the halls of IMF/WB, not to mention the old G-7 club. Dani Rodrik, a Harvard economist has even called for the creation of vast amounts of SDR’s to replace the US greenback as the world’s fiat currency.

Another proposal favoured and promoted by Dr Jagan was the imposition of a .five per cent Tobin tax on speculative transfers of currency. These speculations have been one of the major causes of the collapse of the global financial system – the first one, a dress rehearsal so to speak, devastating the Far Eastern economies in 1997, the year after Dr. Jagan announced the New Global Human Order and the year of his unfortunate death.
With the extraordinary explosion of international currency transfers since 1996, the funds from a Tobin tax could have financed the global stimulus needed at this time.

While Dr Jagan vigorously supported the idea of “sustainable development”, he criticised the inordinate emphasis by the developed nations on environmental sustainability while downplaying social and economic sustainability. As we, the people and government of Guyana, attempt to grapple with the battering of our financial system occasioned by the inter-linkages of some local and foreign firms, we should heed Dr Jagan’s old warnings of the nexus of local and global capital.
The logic of capitalism, fuelled by greed, if not tempered with a concern for the “human or social”, will consume us all.

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Dr. Cheddi Jagan and the world crisis

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