The AFC needs to read the German contribution to philosophy.

Oct 25, 2019 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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This analyst is pellucid, unambiguous and graphic – the AFC is virtually dead. The AFC cannot cause the PNC to win the 2020 election if it stays in coalition because it cannot bring votes. And why not? Because of the dialectic.
It was Marx who popularised the term dialectic, which was articulated brilliantly by the German philosophers Kant, Fichte and Hegel before, Marx. The dialectic has become basic to understanding philosophy and this columnist would go on to state that nature and life rest on the movement of the dialectic.
Marx simplified the dialectic and popularised more than any philosopher before him.
We will use Mark’s articulation, which he borrowed more from Fichte than Hegel. In life, contradictions are basic in both the natural and the social sciences. Contradictions work themselves out and produce fundamental, earth-shaking changes through a three-fold process.
A contradiction begins with a thesis and through its antagonism with its antithesis gives birth to the synthesis, which is the climax of scientific and social changes. The synthesis is the negation of the antithesis, which had earlier negated the thesis. Hegel used the three-fold process like Fichte and Marx but did not refer to it as thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
Hegel triad was abstract- negative-concrete. Through this three- fold process changes come about.
One of the fundamental, permanent laws of the dialectic is that changes cannot be stopped. They are inevitable.
When the USSR and world communism collapsed, American scholar, Francis Fukuyama, applied Hegel to the nature of liberal, capitalist democracy and claimed the dialectic has culminated in the triumph of capitalist, liberal, democracy.
In his breathtaking book, “The End of History,” that won international plaudits, Fukuyama turned Marx on his head by asserting that the dialectic in history did not climax with communism but capitalism. Fukuyama proclaimed in his book that as Hegel once predicted, history will end in some form, that form is liberal capitalism in the 21st century.
Critics of Hegel and Marx have confronted the inexorability of the dialectic by arguing that it does not necessarily evolve from lower to higher, that the dialectic can produce retrogression.
Fukuyama came under intense criticism for his Hegelian assertion and virtually admitted that the dialectic has not as yet resulted in the end of history.
One of the seminal contributions to understanding the dialectic is that of France’s most famous philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre. Sartre made a point that philosophical debate is still not given prominence.
In his “Critique of Dialectical Reason” Sartre argued, (contrary to what we continue to read in Fichte, Hegel and Marx) that the dialectic is not essentially a one-way street in social evolution.
Sartre asserted that within a certain field of possibility, the individual can step outside social limitations and make of the dialectic what the dialectic makes of him. Examples would be Obama and Gorbachev (for the most simple explanation of Sartre on the dialectics see the 1969 book that has no further editions, titled, “Philosophy of World Revolution” by Franz Marek).
How does the dialectic apply to the Alliance For Change (AFC) in Guyana? The answer is easy if you understand the way the dialectic works. Since 2015, Guyana’s historical transformation has stagnated primary through the retrogression of the AFC. The AFC was seen by many as Fukuyama’s Hegelian progression.
It was liberal, multi-racial and progressive. When it triumphed in 2015, it was seen the way Fukuyama saw the collapse of world communism. Racially inspired governance, state intransigence, democratic deceptions, authoritarian rule, financial corruption, incestuous politics had collapsed. Guyana was on a new horizon.
This was not to be. The transformations, innovations, racial equality and popular rule failed to emerge. The nation lost faith in the AFC. The AFC supporters either disappeared or made an atavistic return to their natural habitats. The dialectic has overrun the AFC. The dialectic has long rendered the AFC stale and bereft.
This quick-sand that the AFC is now swimming in is the direct and poignant reason for the PNC’s refusal to award the PM slot to the AFC. The thinking is clear on the part of PNC leaders – this is not the dynamic, charismatic, energised, innovative AFC of 2006. It has lost its raison d’tre and no longer has a niche in the electorate.
From its press conference yesterday, it seems the AFC has accepted its fate. There are only two roads left to travel; one invites certain death that is, going into the election alone.
The AFC will not win a seat. The other pathway is to hang on to the coattail of the PNC and accept some crumbs which in fairness to the PNC is all that the AFC is entitled to.

 

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