The demise of petty bourgeois politics in Guyana: A class analysis

Aug 24, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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There have been four major, third parties in Guyana – the National Democratic Party (NDP), United Force (UF), Working People’s Alliance (WPA) and Alliance for Change (AFC). Two other small parties were energetic, but they did not enjoy protracted existence as the four mentioned here. In the eighties, there was the Democratic Labour Movement headed by Paul Tennassee and ROAR formed by Ravi Dev in the nineties.
None of these are alive today. The WPA became a shell after 1992 and the AFC’s coalition with the PNC and its subsequent identity loss when it got into power in 2015 virtually killed it off. The researcher should pay no attention to the press release politics of the WPA and AFC in the coming weeks and months. There will be episodic press releases in the name of both organizations, but they are really ghosts; a reality the Guyanese people are aware of.
Why the PPP and PNC are still alive and not the NDP, UF, WPA and AFC? Below are brief notes using class analysis. Space is the reason for the truncation. Both the PPP and PNC emerged with middle class leadership. The founding leadership of both the PPP and PNC were replete with unadulterated middle-class professionals with comfortable assets.
Why then did they not vanish like the other four mentioned above? A number of factors are involved but briefly, two are the most important. First, the hierarchy knew that if they were to win national support, they had to join with the trade unions who were essentially working-class oriented. So the PPP courted the sugar unions, the PNC, the urban proletarian entity, Guyana Labour Union. Secondly, they knew survival was not possible without mass mobilization so they fused themselves into the towns and villages establishing roots among the rural and urban masses.
The NDP was an extremely colonial minded party that simply could not survive against the onslaught of the combination of Jagan and Burnham under the PPP. Populated by the Georgetown, light complexioned class, it simply fizzled out as the PPP grew stronger and stronger.
The UF was essentially a party of White and Portuguese businesspeople with no standing whatsoever among the masses. Once Independence came, it lost its raison d’être. The WPA ironically was a left wing version of the NDP but nevertheless highly middle class in its composition. It was its congenital middle-class nature that killed it off.
With the exception of Eusi Kwayana, the WPA was a group of middle-class professionals who was catapulted to fame because of the fading popularity and increasing autocracy of Forbes Burnham. Its instant popularity was confined to Georgetown where it was feted by the urban middle-class who were fed up with Burnham and remnants of the commercial class who wanted Burnham out.
The WPA never thought of mass organizing because key players were hamstrung by the nature of who they were. They just did not have the capacity to ground with the peasantry and the proletariat even though Walter Rodney’s book, “The Groundings With My Brother” was their bible. The one exception was when the bauxite workers formed a group named Organization of Working People. But only Rodney lost himself among these bauxite workers while the rest of the WPA leaders would go up to Linden to discuss politics but never to ground.
Finally, the AFC was the reincarnation of the NDP. Founded by a group of well-oiled Georgetown petty bourgeois people, the AFC was the identical version of the NDP. It declared itself a liberal democratic party and eschewed any mention of terms like, “the masses,” “the working people,” the lower income groups,”. They felt such terms were socialist/Marxist and as a capitalist party, they shouldn’t use those terms.
Apart from not having roots among the masses and avoiding to organize among the masses, the WPA and AFC had a carcinogenic characteristic that was fatalistic. Saddled with a second tier leadership from the urban and rural proletariat, the WPA and AFC could not elevate this stratum into its leadership bosom because their class mentality prevented them from so doing. What you had then was a permanent elite structure in the WPA and AFC that was a microcosm of the society. Inside the WPA and AFC was the replication of the class structure of Guyana.
This is the gargantuan difference with the PPP and PNC. They are serious working-class parties with the ideological orientation of creating a second tier leadership that would naturally move up the ladder. Today, the hierarchy of the PPP and PNC have leaders who came from very, very humble beginnings.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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