With more innovativeness we could have been far better off

Mar 27, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor
A letter in your newspaper by Nigel Jason dated March 22, 2010 and captioned “Guyana’s leadership deficit” questions the relevance of the Marxist Leninist ideology.
First I would suggest that Nigel seems to have no idea as to what this ideology entails. Marx concluded that capitalism resulted in fantastic production machinery, but he also predicted that the very competition that would lead to innovation and technological advancement would, like previous systems be highly exploitative, but the nature of the exploitation would be hidden by the slogan “fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay”.
In his historical materialism, Marx expounds his theory of historical transformation of socio economic systems.
Marx concluded that if everyone was given what was put into the production process then there would be no profits. In his “Theory of surplus value Marx demonstrated how the exploitation takes place and that it is the workers who produce value but only receive a part of that value. The rest is appropriated by the capitalist.
His book “Das Capital”, a critique of capitalism, is recommended reading in Universities. Marx demonstrated the shift of wealth to the capitalist class and predicted the concentration and centralization of capital. A phenomenon that is glaring today as we speak of not only monopolies but oligarchies. The financial oligarchies are the truly parasitic of them all as they sign chits and make profits having under their control trillions of dollars of everybody’s money deposited in them.
Lenin wrote the book “Imperialism the highest stage of capitalism” which showed how the capitalist moved from the extraction of natural resources from the colonies and the export of finished goods to the export of capital. Capital is inherently exploitative and so in addition to exploiting local labour, the exploitation of labour of other countries commenced. That is why decolonization did not really help as it simply saw extraction with responsibilities by the colonial countries transformed to the hidden exploitation by capital, and there were no corresponding responsibilities.
The extraction from these countries assisted in the funding of the welfare states which are now projected to prove how good capitalism is, forgetting the corresponding other side of the capitalist coin.
The widening gap between the rich and poor capitalist countries is a reality. I guess we have rich and poor capitalism.
There is so much to read and learn but unfortunately most simply regurgitate what the capitalist media, publishing houses and film companies have taught them. They have internalized capitalist ideology and do not know this and conclude that the Marxists have ideology but that they are free from it.
Marx contributed the materialist dialectical methodology. Lenin’s book on “Materialism and Emperio-criticism” makes excellent reading on philosophy.
Marx’s contribution to sociology that “man is a social animal” has had a profound effect on the way we view ourselves, as have materialism and concepts like objective and subjective. It introduces concepts like socialization, indoctrination etc. It allows us to understand and discuss concepts like objective laws governing development that are independent of us and in fact shape us. This results in a completely different perspective with which we view the world and ourselves.
So much of our understanding of the world and ourselves comes from the contribution of these two gentlemen, but we do not know of this. While all this good stuff is utilized unconsciously, the capitalist class ensures that they control our minds by ensuring that we are indoctrinated into their ideology and because it’s unconscious and spontaneous we do not realize this. We behave and argue that we do not have an ideology.
We can recall how with the advent of slavery, race as an ideology was introduced in the minds of men to justify this cruel and barbaric exploitation of people by the capitalist class. According to this ideology, Blacks were less than human. And so the capitalist ideologues convinced the god fearing that it was okay to enslave the blacks as they were less than humans.
The writer raised the question of Russia gone capitalist, but the writer noted it was socialism that generated the wealth that was given to private persons and so we have a small number of billionaires and the workers are worse off and have lost all the benefits that workers enjoyed under the socialist system.
You may want to tell me they were poverty-stricken, but who told you that and how do you compare their existence to the poverty of the workers and the unemployed throughout the capitalist world and not America alone?
Funny, the USSR was assisting the ANC of Africa while America put its foot down and blocked sanctions against apartheid while the Soviet Union supported sanctions.
But has the writer forgotten that we were told in the heyday of the cold war that we needed to utilize the better of the two systems. How is it now one is good and the other bad? Were we not told that we had two imperialisms? How is it that one collapsed and now we have none? Is there not a remaining one?
Can you perceive how our minds are manipulated?
The writer in a confused way blames the ideology of Marxism Leninism for our being in poverty, ignoring that 85 percent of the world’s poorest nations are capitalist and locked into global capitalism.
In a much more confused manner he states that the PPP is dishonest when one contrasts “the state of the Guyanese economy, property ownership rights and a plethora of ills … against their stated ideology”.
So Nigel would inform us what has actually caused the ills, as it’s not the ideology.
I will explain to him that Guyana was pursuing a free-for-all market economy, neo liberalism, the “Washington consensus” imposed upon us undemocratically by the undemocratic control “democratic” America has over the IMF.
Nigel will have to explain the fact of over 170 very poor capitalist countries without Marxists ideology governing them.
Having said all of this I want to say that I blame the present leaders of the government for implementing pure dependant capitalism and forgetting to implement the best of the other system. Also within the present system there is no doubt that with more innovativeness, less corruption, less favouritism and nepotism, more inclusiveness and better governance practice, less vindictiveness and pettiness, we could have been far better off.
Rajendra Bisessar

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