Clive Thomas: Transformation into dependency

Feb 19, 2019 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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A well known columnist in observing the 30th anniversary of the Stabroek News wrote the following recently; “Its pro-business orientation has survived to the present, and is not as out of place today as it was in the 1980s…”
The Stabroek News was founded by two left-wing lawyers, David de Caires and Miles Fitzpatrick. In fact Fitzpatrick was an avowed Marxist and was a longstanding member of the PPP from the late fifties until the 90s. Both de Caires and Fitzpatrick were joint editors of the radical, left-wing Guyanese journal, “New World Fortnightly.” In 1988, they birthed the Stabroek News which took on a pro-business orientation.
I grew up knowing these two gentlemen as left-wing lawyers hardly advocated of capitalist economics, more so Miles Fitzpatrick. I remember in the mid-seventies, Rupert Roopnarine produced a film, “the Terror and the Time” about the left-wing/socialist struggle against colonial rule in British Guiana. Fitzpatrick rented the film for a special showing over cocktails at his home. It was an interesting event. Fitzpatrick invited the crème de la crème of urban Georgetown. But the bourgeois gathering was more interested in social gossip than watching the film.
I pen the paragraphs above, because it is absorbing history of people who underwent a total metamorphosis; a complete personality transformation. Imagine a Marxist founded a newspaper that was essentially pro-business.
As a growing activist, I never cared for Fitzpatrick, Roopnarine and de Caires; serious elitists that were proud to belong to bourgeois society. But I did care for and admire Clive Thomas. I did not have even a modicum of surprise of who Fitzpatrick, de Caires and Roopnarine turned out to be. But Clive Thomas has been a soulful disappointment to me and has left me with a tinge of philosophical sadness.
Thomas is one of the persons that shaped the ideological foundations of my praxis. His 1974 book on socialist economics, “Dependence and Transformation: The Economics of the Transition to Socialism” had a profound influence on me as a UG student. The book was an international hit, because it was published at a time when Keynesian and other types of economic paradigms that the Left embraced, were being confronted by the Dependence Theory of radical economics professors at the world’s prestigious universities.
Thomas’s book entered the pantheon of economic polemics that postulated that in the world economy, the Periphery (the Third World) will always be exploited by the Core (the advanced capitalist, West) unless it breaks away from the world economy or change the world economy completely.
I first met Thomas when I was a scrawny, half-starved youth that went into the Movement Against Oppression (MAO – a deliberate acronym to coincide with Mao Tse Tung’s first name) formed in Tiger Bay in 1972. I studied for my GCE, was successful, went into UG to read for a history degree and met Clive at UG. I became close to him when MAO morphed into the WPA.
I have always liked and admired Clive Thomas from the time I met him. My three favourite WPA leaders were Brian Rodway, Moses Bhagwan and Clive, in that order. I like all three more than Walter Rodney. I never cared for Roopnarine. It is a huge psychological dent for me what Thomas has turned out to be. I no longer respect and admire Clive.
I was walking my dog on the seawall and had my eyes on the ground. When I looked up, Clive’s deputy at SARA, Aubrey Retemyer, was in front of me. I knew Aubrey during the struggle against the PPP’s autocracy. I told Aubrey I feel disgusted that Clive could rent a house from one of the Caribbean’s richest families to house SARA, when he could find similar spaces from small landlords who could do with the money. Aubrey suggested that I go and see Clive. My reply was; “What for, I have nothing to say to Clive Thomas.”
David Hinds wrote that the WPA has two representatives in the government – Clive Thomas and Rupert Roopnarine. These were radical socialists I knew from my WPA days in the seventies. Today, they are unashamed supporters of neoliberal economics.
Thomas has a weekly column in the Stabroek News and does not pen even a passing sentence on the neoliberal economics of the Granger government or even a hint at some economic mistakes.
Thomas, who gave forty years of service to UG, has never mentioned, since 2015, one word on the madness that takes place in the administration of UG.
I thought long and hard about ending this column with an appropriate quote. I settled on Shakespeare from Julius Caesar. “Oh judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts. And men have lost their reason.”

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