Ricky Singh proved Karl Marx wrong

Jan 12, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Just in case you are too young to know, Rickey Singh was a journalist with the Guyana Graphic. He sought refuge in Barbados in the seventies claiming persecution from the Forbes Burnham Government. When the PPP came to power in 1992, he became a Chronicle columnist and has been writing since then in support of the PPP Government, disparaging the PNC, WPA and the AFC in the ascorbic ways. Mr. Singh is in his mid seventies.
Mr. Singh is an Editorial Consultant to the Chronicle. In 2011, Mr. Singh openly embraced political campaigning, contrary to the principles of journalism and became a Consultant to the PPP’s 2011 election campaign; few in Guyana knew this.
It remains a mystery how someone in Barbados who hasn’t been to Guyana in decades could have helped the PPP election campaign. To avoid being in Guyana for the election, Mr. Singh wrote that he was too sick to travel but this columnist was reliably informed that Mr. Singh was alive and kicking in Barbados during the Guyana 2011 election.
In studying ethnic support for PPP’s authoritarianism, I find the psychology of Singh a most productive subject, thus I have done several columns on him in the past of which two easily come to mind; July 10, 2010, “Rickey Singh is the world’s most shameless journalist/columnist.” And April 2, 2014, “I repeat; Rickey Singh is the most shameless journalist in the world.”
Singh is fascinating research material for analysts who explore the shameless embrace of the PPP’s dictatorship based on ethnic solidarity. In studying Singh, one goes back to the perennial criticism of Marx by his critics who took him to task for his study of history and sociology. Marx died believing that class instincts will result in people from the same economic strata forming international bonds of solidarity.
Many thinkers call Marx naïve because he ignored the relentless role culture, religion and race played in history in shaping the psychology of humans in ways that class solidarity did not. In fact, Sir Karl Pooper, the distinguished British philosopher, in his seminal work (which is a direct rebuttal of Marx), “The Open Society and its Enemies,” argued that Marx was completely wrong about the power of class allegiance. Popper goes back in history and showed that the bourgeoisie in many instances throughout history weakened itself through intra-class devastations.
This country has so many ironies in its historical complexities that if Guyana was Singapore or a Barbados or a Jamaica, leading social scientists from all over the world would have done countless books on this country. Take Cheddi Jagan. Jagan in the eyes of any researcher would come out as one of communism’s most faithful adherents. Jagan was in the class of fanatical communists as portrayed in the classical movie, Dr. Zhivago.
Jagan, however, was happier with ethnic politics than working class activism. When he came to power in 1992, Jagan basically pursued policies that lacerated the political economy of African Guyanese. It can be argued that Jagan set in motion the racist train that Jagdeo literally drove over African Guyanese. Perhaps the second greatest irony of Guyanese communism after Jagan himself is his party, the PPP. The party’s constitution stipulates it is a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party. But Marxism/Leninism and racism are antithetical. Try telling that to African Guyanese especially after Nandlall’s caste system remark.
If Rickey Singh was living in Guyana and was a fierce critic of the PPP Government as he was of Mr. Burnham’s in the seventies, as sure as night follows day he would have been oppressed and harassed in ways deadlier than anything Mr. Burnham did to Singh. In fact, all Burnham did to Singh was to endanger his employment at the Guyana Graphic. Burnham never physically touched Singh. Singh was never arrested for anything by the Burnham Government. Tell me about physical attacks and arrest.
Today Singh is happy to live in Barbados and enthusiastically support a government that the eminent Economist, Clive Thomas referred to a criminalized regime. Singh has to be fundamentally an indecent human to even contemplate saying that the ambience of the Burnham touch was more tyrannical than the Jagdeo/Ramotar phantasmagoria.
But Singh, like David Dabydeen, like so many other middle class East Indians, would say that the PPP Government is a democratic entity. They would make that description because they want to see Indian domination in Guyana. They want Indians to have both economic and political power.
Rickey Singh has had three by-pass surgeries, is moving towards his late seventies. And at that age, it is doubtful whether we would see an attitudinal metamorphosis in that faded, jaded journalist. His ethnicity will prevent him.

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