Bogus Marxist analysis

Feb 14, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor,
I refer to Freddie Kissoon’s “Elected dictatorship and semi-fascism in Guyana: A ‘Marxist’ analysis” (Kaieteur News, 12-02-10).
I must say at the outset that Freddie has us all confused here. Only recently he insulted Ravi Dev, Randy Persaud and Prem Misir for relying too much on philosophers when writing about Guyana.
His take on the matter back in late January was that the writers noted above should write facts, instead of drawing on the works of people such as Hobbes, Rawls, and Foucault. I did not take that piece seriously because it was clearly a product of street-corner populism.
But here we are now in mid February and Mr. Kissoon has presented us with a sudden awakening of his. Out of nowhere he wants to embark on a writing programme that is driven by the political theory and philosophy of Hamza Alavi, Lloyd Best, Walter Rodney, CLR James, Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, Nicos Poulantzas, Jean Paul Sartre, and Louis Althusser.
Freddie’s tells us that his first piece is informed by the work of Hamza Alavi and that through Alavi’s work he is offering a “Marxist analysis” of the Guyanese state.
That sounds quite sexy but, in fact, the only concept he uses from Alavi’s work is the ‘overdeveloped colonial state’. He then abandons everything else Alavi wrote and ends up with the predictable unscholarly and un-academic pronouncement that there is no democracy here.
Here is my take on this. If you want to use the work of scholars you must actually construct your ‘problem’ in terms of the framework of analysis of the relevant literature.
It is not sufficient to say this one says and that one says. That is just name dropping behind which the writer takes cover. It is a form of hiding – as in caack-a-deeloo.
Given the above, I would really like to know Freddie’s take on Alavi’s claim that peasants lie outside of class relations. Alavi actually developed a rather Fanonian perspective on classes and class struggle.
Fanon himself rejected Marx’s notion of frontal opposition among classes and relied rather more on Aristotle’s notion of reciprocal exclusivity in theorizing the general structure of domination as well as the strategies of emancipation.
The index of domination for Fanon was spatial. This is why Fanon constantly referred to the colonized as being ‘compartmentalized’, ‘hemmed-in’, and ‘set apart’.
Fanon suggested that in contradistinction to the consciousness of peasants, urban classes are more within the spatio-cultural ambit of colonial governmentality. (I borrow the notion of governmentality from Foucault here as it is more apposite. Fanon used the notion of cultural legitimation). On account of this, Fanon theorized that only peasants and the ‘lumpen’ classes are capable of transformative action.
The urban ‘classes’ according to Fanon had mortgaged their revolutionary potential, while those outside of capitalist social relations (peasants in this case) had preserved what I suppose Carl Schmitt once called the specificity of the ‘political’.
Let me explain the relevance of this in plain terms. Freddie presents his writing as purpose driven, that is, it is a form of praxis.
He wants change in Guyana and he specifically wants the removal of the PPP from office. But if that is the case how can he use the work of Alavi who specifically theorized, like Fanon, that the urban folks cannot successfully embark on transformative action? The answer for Alavi is to be found in peasants.
I need to ask a simple question here. Does Guyana have a real peasantry? Freddie must remember that Alavi’s work was very much informed by the colonial political economy of Pakistan and of African social formations.
Unlike Guyana, these societies have large peasant populations, most of them living far away from urban areas. Where in Guyana will you find the peasants Freddie? A careful reading would suggest that Freddie’s use of Alavi in the context of Guyana is fundamentally wrong.
Yes, while some aspects of the overdeveloped state may be pertinent to Caribbean countries like Guyana, the political aspects of Alavi’s unique brand of Marxism makes him almost irrelevant to this country.
Freddie should know that most small farmers in Guyana own their own (small plots of) land and/or their ‘means of production’.
Freddie must also know that the organisations like the AFC and WPA are dominated by lawyers and urban intellectuals, not peasants or even small farmers.
Funny enough these organisations are after the middle classes, something Freddie says we do not have in Guyana! What a bind to be in! The WPA has often stated that it is not interested in electoral politics. That is their choice. The AFC on the other hand wants power but is too restricted to Georgetown. It may very well be called the Urban Party of Guyana.
People like Hamza Alavi and Frantz Fanon were actually very much against urban-based petty bourgeois intellectuals who think they truly know what the masses want.
On a lighter side – I have always felt that Freddie is a closet Marxist.
Dr. Randy Persaud

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