History Society recalls the birth of the WPA

Jun 29, 2014 News

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Kaieteur News columnist and former UG academic, Frederick Kissoon, yesterday outlined the context in which the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) was born in the early seventies and why it was able to sustain itself from thereon.
The venue was the National Library which hosted the eighth annual conference of the Guyana Historical and Research Society.
It was at this same conference in 2010 that Kissoon’s presentation on a comparison of Guyanese presidents titled “Ethnic Power and Ideological Racism”, led to a libel suit against Kissoon and the Kaieteur News by then President Bharrat Jagdeo. That trial is ongoing.
Kissoon said that to understand the WPA birth, it is necessary to comprehend the nature of the anti-colonial struggle in the West Indies.
He posited that anti-colonial politics had a polyclass structure. It was led by the mainstream middle class whose ancestral antecedents came from the house slave stratum. These were people steeped in European tradition and were the inheritors of status and wealth.
A faction of this middle class had congenital contradiction. Though they were part of the middle class, their origins were from the upper working class and achieved their class position through academia. These were mostly radical intellectuals steeped in anti-capitalist ideologies, Kissoon contended.
“The other classes making up the anti-colonial rampart were the rural peasantry and the national proletariat with its trade union dimension”, he said.
Kissoon’s adumbration was that the anti-colonial struggle created the idea of “oneness” meaning that many of the classes involved in ousting colonial rule embrace the narrative of replacement of white, bourgeois society by an egalitarian movement. According to Kissoon, things fell apart in the post-colonial environment.
For the mainstream middle class, it was time to have a similar European society but led by local elites. There was need for a standing army, a presidential palace, highways, airports, a central bank etc.
He argued that these things were not pursued for invidious or devious reasons. For the new rulers these institutions were the natural order and the new rulers saw them as absolutely necessary.
The intellectual middle (class?), though not supportive of these European emulations was more concerned with the reorganization of the colonial economy to bring greater benefits for the peasantry and the proletariat. The post-colonial environment in Guyana soon imploded.
“One can cite three incidents that led to class animosities that give rise to the WPA and from thereon, Guyanese society went deep into trouble.
“First, there was a police killing of a Tiger Bay youth outside the then Strand De Luxe Cinema that got the intellectual middle class angry. They marched to Tiger Bay and formed an organization named Movement Against Oppression. For this group, this was colonial police brutality that should have died with Independence.”
It was not coincidental that a trade union incident caused a major split between the working class and the new government. Linden bauxite workers rebelled over the government’s rejection of the demand for the payout of pension money (named the RILA Fund) that was left by the departing foreign owners.
Thirdly, the government made a tragic mistake in denying an internationally respected Third World African-rights scholar, Dr Walter Rodney, a job at the University of Guyana, Kissoon said.
As Guyana settled down as an independent country, the peasants weren’t given the land the English aristocracy left, the trade union movement was still clamouring for workers’ participation in the direction of the economy and governance and the critical intellectual class were talking about socialism, he said.
From hereon, the class unity of the anti-colonial struggle unraveled. The government embraced Black Power and invited its chief American activist Kwame Toure (then Stokley Carmichael) to address Guyanese. American Black Power activists wanted by American police were given sanctuary in Guyana. And nationalization became the essential plank of the economy, Kissoon said.
Still the peasants had no land, still the trade unions had no direct hand in shaping the economy and still the radical intellectuals were demanding a working class power. In these circumstances the WPA was born.  No compromise emerged between the Guyanese post-colonial regime and its former class allies.
The trade union movement split with a critical body named FITUG aligning with the WPA. Linden became a strong base of the WPA.  As the 1970s wore on, the WPA became intolerant of what it saw as the betrayal of the idea of “oneness” and sought a removal of Guyana’s first post-colonial government.
Kissoon said that in 1980, the WPA’s confrontation with this government reached a sad stage when its leader died. From thereon, the WPA lost its scorpion sting. Four and half years later, the WPA’s main nemesis, President Burnham died.

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