The old guard is complicit in the betrayal of the working class

Apr 17, 2022 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – Marxism-Leninism was the official creed of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) from 1969. But that was more of an internationalist posture rather than the guiding ideology of the party.
The PPP started out as a nationalist movement with the aim of ending colonial rule and exploitation. Even before the Cuban Revolution, the West had feared Cheddi Jagan more than it had feared Castro. Cheddi Jagan is today still idolised in Latin America as a hero of the anti-imperialist struggle.
But after the success of the Cuban Revolution, the party came under intense pressure from western imperialism. As declassified documents now attest, the territorial gambit was part of a plot to provide the basis for the toppling of the PPP. Plans were even made to kidnap Cheddi Jagan and his wife, Janet Jagan, and fly them to Venezuela as part of the plans to topple him.
After the expulsion of the elements of the extreme Left from the party, the PPP went through a phase in which he became reliant increasingly on the support of the Communist International. As such the party aligned itself as puppet of the Soviet Union but Jagan was widely respected within the non-aligned movement. Onto this day, it aches the PNC to know that Cheddi Jagan was honoured with the Companions of Oliver Tambo Award, by the government of South Africa.
The PPP therefore projected itself internationally as a communist party. Locally, its policies were in support of creating a democratic socialist state. But the international respect it derived was more due to strident opposition to apartheid and imperialism, and its support for the decolonisation process.
After Ranji Chandisingh defected to the PNC, Cheddi Jagan became the undisputed ideologue within the party. But despite the party having an ideological school, Marxism-Leninism was never deeply entrenched within the party, its membership or supporters.
The leadership of the PPP was never properly grounded in Marxism-Leninism. The membership only had a general knowledge of dogmatic Marxism and used it merely as a tool of analyse what the party saw a Burnham’s state capitalism.
PPP supporters were the least interested in establishing a socialist state. They wanted liberation from the PNC dictatorship and saw the PPP as the only hope for removing the illegitimate, corrupt and incompetent PNC regime.
When Cheddi Jagan was restored to office in 1992, he faced a difficult choice. The communist world had already collapsed and the former communist countries were in deep crisis. He could not look towards them for support.
The triumph of the neo-liberal order and its facilitation of free and fair elections also presented a dilemma for Cheddi. The West was still wary of left-wing parties. It was the West which had pressured Hoyte to make electoral changes which led to free and fair elections. The new found friends in the business community convinced Cheddi that he needed to assuage the fears of the West. As such prior to the 1992 elections, the PPP issued a statement saying that it was not contemplating the imminent building of socialism in Guyana.
That was seen more as a tactical manoeuvre by the PPP rather than an ideological shift in the party. Cheddi in fact was forced to walk a tightrope between transformation and adjustment.
There were no powerful left-wing ideologies within the party. As such it was very easy for the party to abandon Marxism-Leninism after Cheddi died. For a short period Janet Jagan attempted to fend off attempts by a small band of persons to remove the reference to Marxism from the party’s Constitution. She viewed this as an attempt to destroy Cheddi’s legacy. Khemraj Ramjattan was expelled for daring to propose that references to Marxism-Leninism be deleted from the party’s Constitution.
This development revealed just how out of touch he was with the ideological character of the party. There was no need to place his political career at such great risk merely to change delete references to Marxism-Leninism from the party’s Constitution.
Those references still remain. But Marxism-Leninism is merely a memory in the PPP. The PPPC is now a bourgeois party which espouses, and has done so since 1999, unabashed neo-liberal economic policies.
The greatest betrayal of the PPP/C, however, was not the shelving of Marxism-Leninism. It was the abandonment of working class policies in favour of measures which profited a small powerful economic oligarchic and the party’s ingratiation with the bourgeois class.
The old guard of the PPP was complicit in this process. But it was even guiltier of allowing a political neophyte to seize control of the party and to align it with the very economic classes which had no time for the PPP during its 28-year long vigil in Opposition.
(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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