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When Cheddi died Stalinism took hold of the PPP

Mar 13, 2011 Letters

Dear Editor,
I would like to bring to your readership’s attention that in 1998, when I gave up my seat as a PPP parliamentarian and resigned from the PPP, calling publicly for reforms in our constitution and new politics for this country and in the PPP also, not one on the present agitators for “change” who were in the PPP at that time ever opened their mouths to support my positions.
Not Ralph Ramkarran, nor Moses Nagamootoo, nor Khemraj Ramjattan or any others who now call for changes in the PPP or the way the country is going.
Mr. Editor, let me share this true story with your readers, about democratic centralism which is the methodology of anti-democratic decision making which exists in the PPP today and which Ramkarran, Nagamootoo and Ramjattan were all comfortable with, up to now…in East Germany in 1989, when there were demonstrations by regular folks all over that country for freedom and the removal of the Berlin Wall, the Central Committee of the S.E.D., the Stalinist communist party of East Germany, met in an emergency meeting where it was disclosed that bankruptcy and chaos faced the country and a confrontation was forced where all the members voted to oust the leader, Erich Honecker, against his will. ( Six months later the whole communist apparatus collapsed and the rest is history)
Before he left that room in disgrace, and in accordance with ‘democratic centralist’ tradition, the General Secretary dutifully voted for his own dismissal!
That is the scenario facing Ramkarran and Nagamootoo – do they continue to be good comrades and bow to democratic centralism which destroys their chances for national leadership or do they force the issue of retention of this anti-democratic feature and change the way decisions are made by going to the party supporters to “revolt” against the cabal who benefit from the archaic and repulsive features of this communist type “democracy”; all the countries whose leading parties practice this concept are dictatorships which care little about the views of their citizens and they include Cuba, North Korea and China; the rest collapsed because decisions were made without the people’s involvement and command type economies (which never work) were set up by the communists; history took care of most of them.
Mr. Editor, the father of revolutionary Marxism, Vladimir Lenin, a great visionary and a practical leader, used democratic centralism as a tool to bring discipline and tight organisation, necessary in the chaotic politics of pre-revolutionary Russia and in the desperate days from 1918 to 1921, when the Soviet Union was in its infancy and a civil war was being waged for the very survival of socialism. But in his last years of power, 1921-1924, he embarked the Soviet economy on a new course to open up the country to foreign trade and investment concomitant with new ideas for the democratic workings of the communist party.
Unfortunately, his death brought Stalin into power and the rigidity of “democratic centralism” was increased a hundred fold; Stalin betrayed all the principles of Lenin to create a party which slowly lost touch with the people it ruled and brutalized the population in ways humankind deplores.
The economic and political changes which were undertaken by Mr. Gorbachev in the 1980s came too late to save that system which the Stalinists destroyed; Gorbachev will go down as the man who tried to change things by implementing more democracy, hoping to salvage socialism. But if the communists had followed the lead of Lenin before he died, the world might have been a different place – a place for socialism to survive, but with a democratic party at the “vanguard”, always close to the people.
That is the kind of democratic centralism President Cheddi was aiming for, and after he died, Stalinism took hold of the PPP, and that is why, in the present period of history of our country, the Ramkarrans and Nagamootoos had better put up (a fight) or shut up in order for the PPP to be where it should be – close to the people with more democracy and less centralism.
Cheddi (Joey) Jagan (Jr.)

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