The way we are: Class

Feb 19, 2012 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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It is difficult for young Guyanese today to appreciate the hold that Marxism and its worldview once exerted over our leadership – political and otherwise. ‘Class divisions’ at once purported to describe our society and provide the imperative for change. This worldview had profound implications for political mobilisation and group consciousness in Guyana, but what is the story today?
Classes, according to Marx, were economically based groups, defined by their relationships to the means of production. Class defined your interests and views. I can still hear Cheddi denouncing the arch-capitalists such as the sugar conglomerate Bookers with their local ‘compradors’ such as Peter D’Aguiar etc. They owned the means of production and exploited the labour of their employees who were the “working class”.
The presence of professionals, landlords and peasants were discerned and positioned in procrustean fashion on one or the other side of the capitalist-working class dichotomy. The existence of racial/ethnic groups were obviously acknowledged but disparaged as symptomatic of ‘false consciousness’ which would soon disappear after the inevitable victory of the working class. Yet the racial/ethnic identifications were incorporated in mobilisation efforts: Jagan for Indians, Burnham for Africans etc.
But with all of that, in the 1957, 1961 and 1964 General Elections, each election was increasingly determined by ethnic not class cleavages. In fact the 1964 election, following foreign-fostered communal riots between Africans and Indians, with a turnout of 96.9% was appropriately dubbed a “racial/ethnic census”.
The PNC’s rigged elections from 1968 clouded the reports but not the reality. The free and fair 1992 elections, and every subsequent one, were again dominated by the ethnic vote. Ethnicity continued to supersede class, contrary to all the protestations of our politicians. What happened? With the exception of Dr Walter Rodney, the latter had all not heeded the caution of CLR James – made since the thirties: ‘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.”
The fact of the matter was that our politicians had equated epistemology with ontology: both ethnicity and class were dynamic categories and which one predominated at any historical juncture was a contingent issue. Obviously (excepting to the politicians) there were factors giving life to ethnic orientations. And Guyana was not alone in demonstrating the dominance of ethnicity over class. In fact, ethnic interests now energise practically all political struggles in multiethnic states – the vast majority of states in the world system. There had to be strong structural underpinnings to the submergence of class by ethnicity.
But the ascendance of neo-liberalism from the eighties– with its dogmatic insistence in viewing society as an agglomeration of atomised individuals, threw out the baby and the bathwater. Both class and ethnicity were discarded as problematic constructs. Ethnicity’s expressive facet to satisfy the need of individuals to belong, to feel as part of a whole, to be emotionally connected, escaped them. The instrumental drive of class was too conflictual. Both were swept under the rug, but the realities they describe did not disappear.
As a social construct, class had been proposed in a 19th century Europe that had dealt with questions of identity for over four hundred years via the “nationalist” route. Especially in Western Europe, “ethnic” questions had transmuted themselves into “national” questions through efforts that built emotional solidarity through songs, literature, myths, etc. By the time the issue of economic justice surfaced during the expanding Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century, a great disparity had developed between the haves and the “have-nots’. Karl Marx was to discern several wider societal effects from that unequal economic relationship.
In Guyana this was not our history; we had inherited a state and not a nation, but the early politicians insisted on behaving as if we had – albeit a class-dominated one. The society was actually stratified in a “reticulated” pattern, that is within each ethnic bloc there are distinct classes but these classes do not take concerted action across the ethnic divide. It is quite unfortunate the present crop of politicians simply rail at our ‘ethnic voting proclivities” while eliding the question why this is so, even though class divisions have increased.
Part of our dilemma is that identity in Guyana (and the modern world) is heavily influenced by the insidious discourse of “race and racism” that was part and parcel of the “Western Enlightenment.” Exported as one weapon in the European arsenal of imperialistic conquest, it persists in the totality of its relations that have become imbricated on the sinews of the “Guyanese” culture that we all practice. So the ‘races’ of Guyana battle for economic justice (class interests) within an overarching White-Black dichotomy where we are all, ironically, subsets of the “Black” (ethnically).
Politicians and other elites cannot ignore the invidious effects of these discourses on our identities and behaviour.  We need to confront, unravel and in some instances, reverse – rather than just bemoan – those effects.

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