On whose behalf?

Jul 11, 2010 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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The issue of the creation of a band of nouveau riche during the last decade has been raised. If the present trend continues, it is claimed, a small clique may end up owning most of Guyana.
Since the accusations are that Indians are the primary beneficiaries of the state largesse creating this new stratum of wealth and power, from one perspective, the new dispensation intensifies the ethnic imperative that has bedevilled our political and social relations for the past half a century.
From another, it represents a resurgence of the class question and its attendant dangers, which became blurred during the Burnhamite dictatorship that brought even the elite to subsist at best, in a state of genteel poverty.
During the anti-colonial struggle, our modern politicians had honed in on the inequities engendered by the vast disparities in wealth, concentrated as it was in the hands of expatriates and a small stratum of locals. Deploying the analytical tools of Marx (and certainly his vocabulary) they pronounced themselves “socialists” on the side of the “working class” that were being exploited by these “bourgeoisie” and consequently remained mired in poverty. “Class” was the measure. The promise was that when they ousted the imperial power, they would govern on behalf of the “working class”.
There was always some ambiguity about the status of the local “bourgeoisie”, dubbed the “comprador” class. To the party with which it collaborated, they were “progressive”; to others, “exploiters”.
After the split of the PPP in 1955 into the Jaganite and Burnhamite factions, Dr Jagan defended the entry of members of the Indian “bourgeoisie” into his camp on this basis – even as he noted that Burnham took most of the African support base with him. The apple of race had entered our politics.
The ground for ethnic political mobilisation was set even firmer after Burnham’s faction formed the PNC by coalescing with UDP and NDP – both scions of the “bourgeois” and race-conscious League of Coloured People. Yet both parties steadfastly maintained their “socialist” label.
The PNC’s subsequent Cooperative Republic promised “to make the small man, the real man”: the “big man” – the “bourgeoisie” – was evidently supposed to wither away both literally and figuratively.
In opposition, however, the PPP studiously insisted that the PNC regime was a “bourgeoisie” outfit, much to the chagrin of the latter.
The PPP occasionally raised the issue of discrimination against Indians but were checkmated when Mr Burnham inquired as to “the socialist content of race”. As such the question of race was elided by both the PNC and PPP.
Few would dispute George Lamming’s assessment of CLR James as the greatest intellect the British Caribbean has produced in 300 years. He was a committed Marxist but in his seminal meditation on the Haitian Revolution, he noted presciently, “The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics…but to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.”
It was an error that both the PNC and the PPP committed in Guyana – and in so doing allowed the question of race to fester like a sore in Guyanese politics.
The WPA, while also Marxist-oriented, with Eusi Kwayana (the pioneer of factoring in the impact of race in Guyanese politics) and Dr Walter Rodney (who was greatly influenced by James), gave greater credence to the problematic of race.
However, with their leading Indians – Moses Bhagwan and Dr Rupert Roopnaraine – focusing solely on the political exclusion of Indians and not on questions of their culture, consciousness and identity etc, the full contradictions of race were never dealt with fundamentally. They resurfaced after the murder of the emblematic Dr Rodney.
It was this orientation we sought to address on our entry into the Guyanese political and social milieu in the late ‘80s.
The point we made was that race/ethnicity and class were dynamic social categories and as to which one predominated at any particular conjuncture depended on the concrete conditions and experiences on the ground.
What we found was that rather than disappearing as the surviving WPA maintained, race had trumped class even as the collapsed economy impoverished practically everyone. However, our proposals to deal with the Ethnic Security Dilemmas undergirding the political problematic of race/ethnicity always also addressed the question of economic justice.
We should not be surprised that class contradictions are rising to the fore after 20 years of the neoliberal market fundamentalism of the IMF and the World Bank – dubbed the “Washington Consensus”.
Why are we complaining about “crony capitalism”? Isn’t this a tautology under the economic regime that has been imposed on us?
What regime has plunged the US and the EU into the greatest recession since the 1930s? Who are the nouveau riche (64 billionaires and 875,000 millionaires – right behind the US – at last count) in Communist China that has paradoxically adopted the same economic formula?
Marx famously pointed out: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”
Today, we are attempting to make our history under conditions of simultaneous free market fundamentalism and heightened ethnic/racial consciousness: this is the “problem space” in our socio-historical conjuncture.
Even though the PPP has stressed “racial and class unity”, its “Civic” innovation has not deal with the ethnic imperative and the new economic dispensation has degutted its class protestations.
Politically, the fundamental question that must be answered is this: “On whose behalf will the governors be ruling?” We believe that we have known all along that what is needed is a government that can effectively address both our class and race/ethnic contradictions.
In our long and tortured political history every major party has accepted (grudgingly) that Guyana needs a government of national unity.
This must once again become our horizon of expectation. Only under such an arrangement, when the government talks about representing the “national” interests will it be literally capable of doing that – but even more importantly be seen by the nation, as capable of doing that.
What has been lacking is the political will to do the right thing: too many entrenched interests would need to be jettisoned.
Is the PPP willing to take the leap? The opposition parties not only have an opportunity of winning the next elections – but can performatively demonstrate the precursor of a government of national unity if they can coalesce.
Neither can do so, however, if they sweep race and class under the rug. On whose behalf will the next government be ruling?

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