The PPP’s Evolution

Aug 23, 2013 Editorial

The PPP is the progenitor of all the modern political parties in Guyana: either the latter came out directly out of its bosom or they were reactions to its positions. A party does not have such an impact unless it was able to adapt to its environment which is always changing. The original PPP was an anti-colonial coalition carefully cobbled together in 1950 to simultaneously address the cross-cutting loyalties of nationhood and ethnicity.
It was immediately caught in the crosshairs of the Cold War between the West and the USSR in which ideology was the trope for defining loyalty to a “side”. Summarily removed and then returned to power, ideology was also therefore the cleavage along which the PPP was putatively split in 1955 as the Cold War intensified and the US began to supplant Britain in exploiting the openings granted during WWII. The PNC supposedly “played the game” and was rewarded with power in 1964 as the US paranoia intensified after its 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle with Fidel Castro in Cuba and the PPP was removed from office once again.
Thus began its “twenty-eight years in the wilderness” which saw the rise and fall of the US’s nemesis USSR and its competing communist ideology. During the interregnum, as early as 1969, the PPP decided it was not going to beat around the bush any longer and declared it was a classic Marxist-Leninist party. It reorganised itself along the approved, cadre-based, Leninist lines which emphasised a hierarchical structure with democratic centralism as its decision-making mechanism. The leader of the PPP, Dr Jagan, became its General Secretary.
In what is more than a footnote, the PNC interestingly insisted that while it was not communist (and most importantly to the US, not an admirer of Moscow) it was going to introduce “cooperative socialism” to Guyana. The PNC went as far as opening ties with Cuba as early as 1972 and the next decade saw the PPP and PNC competing as to which one was “more socialist”. In 1975, the PPP went as far as offering the PNC government “critical support” against what it defined as capitalist manipulations against the “progressive” initiatives of the PNC, such as nationalising the “commanding heights of the economy”.
During its long rule that was founded on always disputed elections, the PNC was offered a role by the PPP in governments of “national unity” own two occasions – in 1977 and in 1985, the year Burnham died. By the time the USSR crumbled in 1989 and the PPP’s ideology did not signify loyalty to the “enemy”, the US was ready to look again at the possibility of the PPP being returned to power. Burnham’s successor Desmond Hoyte had by then accepted the US-approved IMF “Economic Recovery Program” and the economy was duly being retrofitted to the US’s neo-liberal paradigm.
It is clear in retrospect that, even though the PPP did not change its Marxist-Leninist structure or rhetoric, it accepted the neo-liberal paradigm as a condition of returning to office in 1992. Unlike the Chinese Communist party which accepted capitalism as the ideology to develop its economy around the same time, the PPP, however, was in no position to retain its classic Leninist ideology or structure in the face of the wave of denationalisation and privatisation of the economy.
Within a decade, by which time its founder Dr Jagan had phased away, the party’s cadre-centred groups had begun to wither and in subsequent elections, the PPP for all intents and purposes had become a mass-based party, with all that implies, for mobilisation etc. The General Secretary, for instance, was no longer the leader, chief ideologue and head of government.
In the just-concluded Congress, while the PPP did not make any overt changes to its Constitution, it is clear that continued adaptations by the PPP to the dominant economic neo-liberal tenets are moving it away from its Marxist-Leninist orientation. Inevitably this function will have a feedback effect and demand changes in form.

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