PPP Congress votes to fight back against critics using social media and AI

May 06, 2024 News

…ditches ‘cold war era’ Marxist, Leninist, Socialist ideologies

Kaieteur News – The Peoples Progressive Party (PPP) yesterday concluded its 32nd Congress, adopting a menu of measures including the abandonment of the cold war era Marxism, Leninism and socialism philosophies to instead pursue a new path of democratic centralism–a philosophy that will be shared with the party membership in the coming year.

This in addition to the adoption formally the use of social media more robustly in order to propagate its message of achievements and to fight back against the “naysayers”, which according to General Secretary Bharrat Jagdeo, left unchecked led to the party being portrayed in an undesirable light by its detractors.

To this end, he spoke to the adoption by the party’s delegates of a resolution that its membership use social media more. To this end, the General Secretary disclosed that the party in this effort will even be training its younger members to ensure that social media presence is felt, not to “criticise people or engage in nastiness” but ensure the party propagates its achievements and robustly fight off the critics.

As it relates to the decision to completely remove Marxism Leninism and Socialism as core tenets of the party, Jagdeo said this was in keeping with the reality of today’s world and should not be taken to mean that the party was not still pro-working class. “We will be organised based on democratic centralism, majority rule, not something to hold people in bondage,” the General Secretary, explained, noting that what the party has done is to replace the alien concept now, not relative to the existing realities.

He said what the amendment does in fact provides for is to bring its constitution in line with that of the government of the day that is to, embrace pluralities, religious harmony, racial diversity and other such phenomena that more accurately reflects the country. “We believe that this is political democracy that we have in the amended constitution; something we embrace fully,” the General Secretary stated as he reiterated the party’s tenets of cultural diversity, racial equality and shared resources.

Elaborating on his party’s concretising of its newer ideologies he explained that democratic centralism says people will have robust debate if there is an issue however at the end of the day if a decision is made everyone has to comply with that decision.

“We don’t find it very different from democracy in the boardroom or any other organisation; if you sit on a board and you have diverse views you have to allow the sharing of the views,….but when a decision is made by a majority not a single individual; and everyone says this is what we will do at the company level then you have to comply.”

To this end, the General Secretary retorted “I don’t know how people get this notion it will invoke the view they don’t get to participate; they get to participate but they have to follow the majority rules; it’s a normal democratic principle.” Emphasising the need for a formal shift in ideologies the Party’s General Secretary again pointed to the ever growing youth base of the party many of whom are unaware of the principles of Leninism, Marxism and Socialism.

According to Jagdeo however, the younger members of the PPP of today are not passive members; they are very vocal on issues and they come from every one of the regions. As such, “now we need to equip them more with the tools; we need to train them more on social media, and (AI) Artificial Intelligence (AI), and all the things that matter most to the propagation of the party.”

Referencing the initial pushback, the General Secretary conceded there were some of the older folks that felt by including more and more younger persons in the party their ideologies would somehow be diluted but he pushed back saying “if you look at the membership of the party, the party’s ideology and its beliefs cannot be divorced from the reality of the country, the reality of the world and the reality of our own membership, the world has moved on from cold war era; so in that sense we are bringing our constitution with the prevailing ideology in the world where you do have parties that practice working class ideology without an ism.”