Class struggle in Guyana: Marx versus Popper

Mar 24, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Like Sigmund Freud, the philosophical contributions of Karl Marx have come in for widespread questioning in the second half of the 20th century. Some scholars have gone so far as to reject the actual fulcrums on which the theories of the two German thinkers rest. Freud contended that human psychology essentially revolves around the power of the sexual instinct. Marx argued forcefully that history and society are driven by class struggle.
I have read some formidable critiques of Freud and Marx, for example. Freud’s account for the meaning of dreams has faced devastating assaults. And the attack on Marx was led by eminent philosopher, Karl Popper (a German too). In his book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper adumbrated the point that Marx was wrong to attribute to class struggle the dialectical force that moves history. Popper traced history and showed that intra-class warfare has been just as important as inter-class battle-grounds.
I am not convinced after reading countless rebuttals of Freud and Marx that their quintessential findings have been defeated; far from it. Marx’s seminal contribution to philosophy has been his elaboration of the role of economic classes and how it shapes a nation-state. Popper is right about intra-class confrontations throughout history; I’ve read a fascinating account of the application of intra-class fighting in 19th century Chile in South America but Marx is equally right about inter-class struggle.
We see the dialectical working out of class struggle daily in perhaps all the countries of the world. Thomas Piketty’s huge best seller, Capital in the Twenty First Century, is a virtual re-write of Marx with breath-taking statistics to show how for the past one hundred years, the income of the lower classes in the major advanced capitalist countries in the world has worsened in comparison to the upper classes. The recent American presidential election was about class differences which ended in a fantastically extraordinary irony – the working classes put their faith in an unapologetic worshipper of big profits.
In Third World countries, the ubiquity of class struggle is graphic; Guyana is no exception. There are important lessons to be learnt from the recent successful pressure the middle class and commercial stratum brought to bear on the State over the parking meters and the virtual defeat of the Stabroek vendors.
Anyone familiar with the shape and physiology of the anti-parking meter protests would know it is the business sector and elements of the middle class that are the protagonists. They pump resources in a struggle that they feel is justified and is in fact justified.
The State buckled in this relentless energy of the commercial petty bourgeoisie to stop the parking meter operation which has its egregious and depraved dimensions. If one thinks that the government got up one morning and decided that the parking meter project was a financial burden on people and it must end then they are foolishly deceiving themselves. The project will never be restarted in its original form because the classes that were affected confronted the State.
But the State did not give in to the street vendors throughout Georgetown. They were defeated. Their unceremonious removal from Stabroek Square has few parallels of nasty repression in Guyana in recent memory. The vendors’ protest outside the office of the President petered out after the first day. The resources to maintain class struggle was simply not there. The resources that fuel the weekly, justified anti-parking meters demonstrations are in abundance. Those resources have been employed to keep this aspect of the class agenda going.
The point being made here just in case one misses it is that the weaker classes lost out in their contest to fight oppression. The stark contrast in the outcome between the battle against the parking meter operations and the battle of the vendors to ply their trade is one of class struggle. The parking meter system as we have come to know it when it hit the road eight weeks ago is dead and the classes that protected their interest in that fight have gone back to their privileged positions in society.
The struggle of the lower classes against the overdeveloped, post-colonial state will continue. It was the vendors last year, it may be them again. It is an ongoing contest with the displaced sugar workers. This week it was university workers and academics. The public servants and teachers are in an uneasy mood. Whatever stratum it is, class struggle will live on because wealth is never distributed in a fair manner, perhaps it never will. Therefore class struggle will never die.

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