Original sin

Dec 06, 2012 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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This is the continuation of my critique of Ralph Ramkarran’s thesis on the PPP’s faults and future (see my December 4 column). Two theories of mine were posited and needed elongated discussion.
First, I asked the question why the PPP neglected the welfare of the broad masses as conceded by Mr. Ramkarran. I differ from Mr. Ramkarran in that I do not believe the PPP is a working class party.
I will now develop that proposition. The second theory is that the PPP became an authoritarian regime not because of what happened along the way since 1992 as Mr. Ramkarran contends but for reason of its natural authoritarian instinct, or to put it another way, the autocratic political culture it was born into. Adumbration of this point is left for a forthcoming column.
Clem Seecharan’s seminal work, “Sweetening Bitter Sugar” on the life of the Booker chieftain in British Guiana, Sir Jock Campbell, is very instructive. Seecharan argues that the sugar workers were Jagan’s ladder to climb to recognition as a serious contender in the anti-colonial arena. Outside of the sugar estates, Jagan had no constituency. The sugar workers were his tool.
Urban society (both the middle class and the African proletariat) did not offer any prospects neither did the trade union movement outside of the sugar industry. Jagan then saw his survival in the world of the sugar industry. Like most anti-colonial leaders, he had to label himself as a champion of the masses. In this respect Burnham and Jagan and their parties were alike and no different from any other pretender in the anti-colonial milieu.
When power came, the administration of both Jagan and Burnham hardly came across as working class governments. Jagan’s 1962 Kaldor budget was insensitive to the urban proletariat and with the rejection of it by that class he faced horrendous street protests. Burnham’s reign did not see any fundamental shift in the way the working people lived. The tear gassing of bauxite workers over legitimate economic demands was the beginning of the end for Burnham. The bauxite workers embraced Walter Rodney soon after.
Back in power in 1992, Jagan died without abolishing the sugar levy, the implementation of which by the Burnham Government, he called the longest strike in the sugar industry. When his wife succeeded him as President, she did not remove it either. The levy was scrapped twelve years after the PPP came to power strengthening the theory of Seecharan that Jagan used the sugar workers for his own political ambition.
Another graphic example of his betrayal of his so-called working class credentials was his dissolution of duty free concession in 1995 for UG lecturers which President Burnham had instituted in 1973. At the same time his Government had agreed to wide sweeping concessions for the business class which continues up to this day
Jagan proclaimed his party a working class organization but so were thousands of other parties around the world that did not provide for the labouring masses when they came to office. What we knew of Cheddi Jagan and the PPP came from his phenomenal energy in confronting Burnham’s authoritarian government from 1968 to 1985. He came across as anti-capitalist, pro-labour, humanist, anti-dictatorship and moderate.
But there was nothing in those days by which we could have judged his pro-labour credentials
On the contrary, Jagan’s anti-tyranny politics masked his capitalist elitism.
While preaching the virtues of Soviet socialism and the greatness of world communism, Jagan sent his son to Canada for his university education and enrolled him in not one of the most, but the most expensive Canadian institution, Sir George Williams University. One of the iconoclastic revelations research into the politics of the fifties and sixties has thrown up is that of the two antagonists, the PPP, the so-called party of the masses, was more propertied than the PNC.
The PPP had enormous land holdings in Industrial Site, Bel Air Village and on Regent Streets. Many of the PPP stalwarts lived in bourgeois areas with middle class homes. Such a characteristic was missing in the PNC’s leadership
To conclude, it is not tenable to argue as Mr. Ramkarran did that the present PPP leadership has failed the Guyanese working class because the demise of world socialism led the party into a new configuration and that the party had to deal with the harsh reality of global domination of capitalism.
My contention is that the PPP has never been a working class party. No group of politicians in power for over twenty years should be seen as socialist when you look at the mistreatment of the working population as we see in today’s Guyana.

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