NO LONGER BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY

Jan 18, 2010 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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All you need to do to bring the WPA defenders out of the woodwork is to criticise, however slight, Walter Rodney. The late leader of the WPA has his own intellectual guardians who brook no possibility that he was fallible.
Of course, his former colleagues have a right to correct revisionism that is based on either a misrepresentation of facts or the disingenuous interpretation of those facts. We saw those high skills very much vaunted in one correspondence attempting to accuse the post Rodney WPA of being viciously opposed to Cheddi Jagan.
In the process, the error was committed to mixing up two separate proposals made by the WPA. The first was a caretaker government made in context of the unacceptability of the voter’s list for the 1990 elections. The WPA, already smitten by Hoyte’s overtures to that party, proposed a caretaker administration to tidy the affairs of the country until elections. It must be said, for the record, that the WPA made an almost similar proposal after the ruling of the 1997 elections petition case when it argued before the court for some sort of shared government.
The second proposal was the rejection of Dr. Cheddi Jagan as the consensus candidate for the PCD in the run up to the 1992 elections. This column has already discussed this matter, and while the logic of the WPA may have been forceful, it surely was not realistic. The PPP was the strongest political force in the country at the time and was likely to bring the largest number of votes to the PCD. The WPA therefore could not have expected the PPP to disenfranchise itself from control of the government by accepting anyone other than Dr. Jagan as the presidential candidate.
The debate on Dr. Rodney was however not initiated on that old theme of the PPP’s relationship with the WPA. The debate was about the use of violence as a solution to the political problem facing Guyana. Dev had quoted CLR James’ alleged criticism of Rodney to argue his own cause about the dangers- and possible futility- of the use of violence to bring about change.
James did set out primarily to assess the death of Rodney and whether specifically Rodney misread the political mood or whether that he was totally naïve about the methods which he was employing. James’ critique was more about the lessons of Rodney’s death for the left in the Caribbean and more precisely about the importance of proper planning when dealing with the management and takeover of power.
James made some salient points but not all of them need to be taken as immutable, regardless of the status in which James was or is still held in the Caribbean. For example, James questioned the readiness of the people to accept political change in Guyana. This argument was consistent with the orthodoxy of Jagan who also made bones about the need for objective conditions. Marxists like Rodney and Che Guevara went beyond this theorising, however, and recognised the importance of creating those conditions through militancy. The WPA’s glorious civil rebellion campaign of the late seventies in fact gave credence to the view that while objective conditions must be right, they can be made right through leadership and organisation of the people.
No one should underestimate or dismiss the catalytic role that the WPA played in changing the political mood in Guyana. But that changed mood, which seriously dented whatever credibility was left of the PNC, was not just attributable to the leadership factor provided by Rodney and his band of intellectuals. And make no mistake about it, Rodney was an extremely gifted individual and stamped his personal mark of that phase of the struggle as no one in the history of Guyana has ever done. He destroyed the myths that had been built around Burnham; he exposed the counterfeit nature of Burnham’s socialist rhetoric.
But Rodney was not the only factor at work. The middle class which was pampered by Burnham during his early years had begun to feel the squeeze of the hardships and it was the middle class that provided the leadership for that struggle. Peoples Power must be understood not in terms of what James argues about the readiness of the people for change but about the need for leadership for any struggle to be provided by the group that has always led such struggles, the middle class.
James also did not fully comprehend what the WPA was attempting to do. It was not in the phase of attempting to seize power; it was in the stage of self-defense and the preparation for a much large struggle when Rodney was cut down.
Rodney was killed at a time when there was a lull in public activity by the party. Also the WPA was under a serious threat of physical elimination. Burnham’s regime had slaughtered Ohene Koama and Edward Dublin as part of a campaign of physical elimination, a campaign confirmed at the highest level of the PNC when Burnham himself warned the leaders of the party to make their wills.
The WPA, it must be recalled was still very much a loose coalition of groups, and individuals. There was not the intermission during the civil rebellion campaign for the party to seriously address the need for a more structured party that would avoid the vulnerabilities to which the original party was exposed, one of which was the degree of infiltration by agents of the PNC.
Rodney was cut down during this period when the party was in a self-defense and rebuilding mode. His death saw the immediate capitulation of the party. Peoples Power, after Roopnarine’s funeral oration, took on a different connotation.
The ideological aspect of the party was also transformed a few years later after the party accepted the doctrine of geo-political fatalism. Not only did the party’s analysis of the implications of the Grenada Revolution cause it to withdraw the notion of change, ‘ by any means necessary’, but it also saw the gradual abandonment of the ideology which was central to Rodney’s heart.
And this brings us right back to the present because since then we have had the dramatic events of 1989, which have posed their own constraints of regime change. It is now no longer a geo-political reality but rather a global one that any regime that comes to power through extra- constitutional means will be deemed as illegitimate by the wider community, thus making the use of violence all the more irrelevant.

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