What may have been…

Jun 06, 2017 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

An old trick of the PNC which it never seemed to realize had become stale was to brand Cheddi Jagan as communist. The PNC did this quite successfully in the 1950’s and 1960’s to the extent that it won the support of the West in toppling Jagan.
Burnham even got CIA money for his party as a result of projecting himself as the lesser of the two left wing evils. He called himself a social democrat and said Jagan was a communist.
Jagan, on the other hand, said he was a democratic socialist meaning that while he espoused socialism he was all for civil liberties and free and fair elections.
The irony, of course, of all that ideological masquerading was that the closest any country in the Commonwealth Caribbean ever came to communism was under Burnham and at the time of his death in 1985 had begun laying plans for the implementation of a Cuban-styled local government system.
Jagan, ironically, converted the PPP/C into a full-fledged communist party after the loss of political power to Burnham. The social democrat almost turned Guyana into a communist state and the democratic socialist turned his party into a communist party.
The question has been asked as to how different would have been Jagan’s policies had he been in power during the Cold War. It is rhetoric intended to resurrect the old communist bogey which was all the PNC had in its intellectual arsenal to counter Jagan. All they could ever do was to claim that he was not to be trusted because he was a communist.
Hoyte raised this very issue during a debate with Jagan in the run up to the 1992 elections. Hoyte was incapable of dealing with Jagan on the economic issues, including the huge US$2.1 billion debt which had been racked up under the PNC and which was sucking the life out of the country. Provisioning for external debt servicing reached as high as 94 percent of revenues.
During that debate Hoyte kept pressing Jagan to state whether he was a communist. Imagine a man who used to go to the airport and seize and crush bread out of the suitcases of traders had the temerity to be asking Jagan about whether he was a communist. What could have been more communist that a PNCR regime which had people lining up for food and restricting the importation of flour. You think Venezuela has a crisis? Try the PNC during the 1980s in Guyana.
The old communist bogey is being raised again. But even a rhetorical question can be answered. So how different would have been Jagan’s policies.
Jagan supported the nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy but he would never have created a parasitic state apparatus to manage state corporations. It is the square pegs in the round holes of the parasitic bureaucratic class which ruined the public corporations which were established under cooperative socialist model. Jagan would never have paid the level of compensation which Burnham paid to Reynolds after the Americans read the riot act to him.
Jagan like Burnham believed in the concept of the vanguard party but Jagan was opposed to the idea of party paramouncy. That infamy of the PNC flag flying over the Court of Appeal and public servants being humiliated by having to attend political rallies of the ruling party and go and work on Hope Estate just in order to save their jobs would not have even crossed Jagan’s mind.
Jagan believed in a tripartite economy comprising the state sector, the private sector and workers. Burnham ran the capitalist class out of Guyana. He destroyed private enterprise and replaced it with state domination of the economy. The PPP always drew support from the private sector and Guyana’s private sector would have been much stronger today because Jagan would not have bludgeoned them the way Burnham did using the state.
The Foreign Service would have been different under Jagan. It would not have had to dedicate so much of its energies, as was the case under the PNC, towards legitimizing an illegal regime, because he would not have had to rig elections to stay in office.
Jagan would have pursued socialism through a democratic mandate. This would have course have acted as a counterbalance to authoritarian rule.
It is good that Jagan is still today associated with the communist left. He remains a gigantic figure in Latin America. He has acquired a huge fan following because he was among the left wing leaders who were removed from office with the support of the CIA. He is being branded as a communist today, just like he was then.

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