Part 1
Walter Rodney born March 23, 1942 and dying tragically by State terrorism on June 13, 1980 is by far and away the most significant intellectual and political personage of the post-independence history of the English-speaking Caribbean.
Born in Guyana, it could be said that Walter Rodney was born in the most advanced political culture in the sub-region. In that unlike the rest of the English-speaking region where two populist parties, either centrist or centre-right based themselves on dividing the working people and setting them at each other’s throats, the better to allow the persistence of the old colonial economy and new forms of foreign domination, this was not so in Guyana.
In Guyana, au contraire, there were two avowed "socialist" parties. The one the PPP, led by the long-standing socialist Cheddi Jagan, and the other, the PNC, led by Forbes Burnham, who carved out for himself a highly respected place in the ‘non-aligned’ movement, only to end as the architect of most fraudulent elections, and nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy which discredited all nationalisations.
Walter Rodney himself was to lead a third socialist party in Guyana, the Working Peoples Alliance (WPA).
There is no doubt either, that all three of these parties were distinctly anti-colonial, and sought in Martin Carter’s phrase, "to storm heaven," that is, to wage war against the almighty fortress that was British colonialism, and the resultant economic domination.
It must be remembered at the outset that the Caribbean is unique. It was not so much colonised. It was created by colonialism. India was colonised. There a native people, always in the majority, were conquered, ruled and dominated by the British. Africa was colonised. The native peoples, always in the majority, were overlooked by a minority of European settlers who ruled and dominated, extracting wealth and accumulating it in Europe. Rodney himself was to write his magnum opus on How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. It’s value is more and more enduring and marks one of the highest peaks of Caribbean scholarships. China too was colonised by assorted powers, in much the same way as Africa and India were.
But the Caribbean was different. Here the native population, the Tainos, or the Caribs and Arawaks, were ruthlessly exterminated in one of the worst holocausts in all of human history. Hitler’s’ attempted extermination of European Jewry, however horrible, pales by comparison with the 16th century genocide committed in the Caribbean and the Americas by Europeans. The germ of that first holocaust is no doubt contained in the second. History, they say, turns and returns on itself. The extermination of other people practised by Europeans would return, in turn, to plague the inventor.
This extermination of the native peoples of the Caribbean meant that the Caribbean had to be re-populated with all non-native peoples. Africans alien to the Caribbean, were brought not just as slaves, but as chattel slaves. We, were brought and sold as "things". The thingification of an alien people was complete. We were twice alienated. Indians, from India were brought as alien "indentured servants". Both groups of aliens, were set against each other, by the ruling colonials as settlers, or from the Colonial Office. Divide and rule was, at one and the same time, racial division. Racialism was the result. Racialism is the mutual animosity between two dominated races. Racism is the domination of one race or a group of races, by another. The two are distinctly different in name and nature. Though racialism is an off-shoot of racism. We will return to that later.
This alienated character of a whole nation is unique in all history. Furthermore, unlike the Spanish settlers who settled in other parts of the Caribbean and came to stay, the English settlers who settled in the English-speaking Caribbean were here to accumulate wealth and return home, as soon as possible, if not sooner. There to enjoy their new status as part of the new English bourgeois class. The Spanish settlers became Caribbean. They built impressive architecture, as a sign of their permanence. They established universities. The University of Havana is 250 years old. The University of the West Indies is a mere 50 years old by comparison. The Spanish accumulated their wealth in the Caribbean, and became a national bourgeois class in the Caribbean. The English did not. They extracted wealth, accumulated it and re-invested it in England and became part of the English bourgeoisie.
In consequence, no wealth-owning class emerged in the English-speaking Caribbean to this very day. The wealth created in the Caribbean, by dispossessed, exploited, African and Indian labour, was also alienated.
I am going to make a bit of a leap. The whole idea of Parliamentary Democracy is based on a Party representing the wealth-owning class, the Tories, the Republicans, the Christian Democrats in Germany or Italy. And, on the other hand, a Party representing Labour such as the Labour Party of Britain, or the Social Democrats in Europe, or the Democrats in the USA. The compromises between these two parties, constituted politics. The means by which the national bourgeoisie - the industrial class - control their own nations. They are now extending their rule to the whole world, and asking all the world to reproduce themselves in their image and in their neo-liberal likeness.
In straight terms, the objective premises for bourgeois Parliamentary Democracy were non-existent in the English speaking Caribbean. In that there was no native wealth-owning class in control of the economy to be represented by a party. There could only be a party of Labour. So in Barbados we had two labour parties, each dividing the working people in the Barbados Labour Party and the Democratic Labour Party; and in Antigua and Barbuda, there is the Bird Labour and the Walter-Spencer Labour Party, each based on rival sections of the labour movement; in Jamaica there is the Manley Labour Party and the Bustamante Labour Party where the rivalry between both sections of the working people involved so much violence, that the violence has become independent of both parties and an end in itself. Jamaica is proof negative of where such politics inevitably ends, to which end, all other parties in the region, similarly based are tending ineluctably.
In Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana, where the races constitute the working people, the Parties have based themselves each on one oppressed race. Racialism is the order of the day. That is to say, the cultivation of mutual suspicion and even animosity between the two oppressed and labouring races, the better to rule, manipulate and oppress them both. There no significant wealth-owning class made up of Africans and Indians has emerged. Therefore the self-interest of creating wealth does not serve as a glue to unite the races. The politics of racialism, exploiting the suspicion of one race against the other, predominates. Foreign capital rules, accumulates, and exports capital. Or an elite mis-manages nationalised industries bringing them to rack and ruin.
In either case, be it the case of two labour parties based on rivalry between the working people, or two parties based on races set in rivalry, foreign capital and the external accumulation of wealth takes place, and therefore there is no capital accumulation for national development. In the result, we have landed in a post-independence morass, as quick sand. Being convulsed in a political crime wave of corruption at the top, and a social crime wave at the bottom. It is all over the Caribbean, from the Bahamas in the North, to Guyana in the South.
Indeed, what passes for politics in the Caribbean is not development but the distribution of state patronage. Those who are in, get. Those who are out, get not. This has led to wasteful public projects and public enterprises and statutory bodies as instruments of state patronage. In the end, the State becomes bankrupt. It then has to endure IMF or "Home-grown" structural adjustment. The Independence hopes, aspirations and dreams, were thus structurally adjusted into their opposite. That is, cynicism, don’t-give-a-damnism and downright nightmare. Mysticism, fundamentalism and lottery-ism seizes hold of a population who see No Exit. That in plain terms is our current condition everywhere in the English-speaking Caribbean.
But in Guyana things were at first, different. There the PPP of Cheddi Jagan united both African and Indian, in the one Caribbean country, very well endowed with resources of land, labour, and mineral wealth. This unity of the races, in a country well endowed, advocating advanced political ideas, and winning free and fair elections, frightened the living daylights out of both the British and the Americans. They resorted to base criminality as political method.
Cheddi Jagan in a remarkable book, The West on Trial, has recorded how both the British and the Americans disunited the nationalist movement, and set African (Burnham and Hoyte) against Indian (Jagan and Jagdeo).
Now in 1966, Walter Rodney and I, had a tremendous long distance debate. He in London, I in Canada. It went on for over 3 hours (In the end I could not pay my telephone bill, even now I wonder how he paid his for he called me back.)
I was insisting that the time for him to go back to Guyana was at once. He was arguing that after the racial riots of 1964-65, the mutual suspicion between the races had been fanned into red hot heat, and it was impossible to propose or create racial unity, and the politics of both races participating in projects for mutual development. The situation did not allow for it. He contended, with much justification, that I was idealist. In that all I wanted was the unity of the races in Guyana, and an independent Guyana in control of its vast resources, leading the march to Caribbean unity. I plead guilty. I felt then that only Guyana, un-involved in the collapse of the West Indies Federation, could lead the triumphed march to One English-speaking Caribbean.
I, on the other hand, contended that the systematic revelation of how imperialism, through the United States and Britain, had unhinged the nationalist movement, and how the Soviet Union passively collaborated, leaving Cheddi Jagan to twist in the wind, in print and speech of education and agitation would serve to clarify the races in Guyana. And thus prevent the animosities provoked by the gruesome deaths in the race riots of 1964-65, from congealing into permanent attitudes, of irreconcilable differences, more imagined (therefore more dangerous) than real. Walter Rodney countered that after the race riots stimulated and orchestrated by U.S. agents the hatred between the races negated all possibilities of united political action and thought.
He, Rodney, insisted that a sojourn in Africa, after his studies at the prestigious London School of African and Oriental Studies, would give him time and would connect him to the tremendous Arusha movement, which the great Julius Nyerere had set in motion. There he would not only re-connect with Africa but learn first-hand from a transformation process, in progress.
I responded with a stinging criticism of the Arusha Movement, predicting its demise. Rodney retaliated that our mutual mentor, CLR James, had embraced the Arusha declaration. For the first and only time in my life, I brushed James aside, arguing that CLR at the end of a long life, and ever positive, was after the demise of Nkrumah looking for something to affirm, and therefore embraced Arusha. I was brusque, as one is in a heated debate, but not rude. But I do not think that CLR James ever forgave me, as he learnt the story from an objective witness the fine scholar, Robert Hill of Jamaica.
(Later CLR James would say to me that I was dead wrong in what I said in this debate with Walter Rodney. Wrong not necessarily in what I said, but wrong in that I said it. I should have written it.)
I put it to Walter Rodney, that Guyana was far better suited to an Arusha Movement than was Tanzania. There in Guyana I said, the plantation could be transformed into Co-operatives bringing Indians and Africans, who were modern and not semi-feudal as in Tanzania, into active co-operation in enterprise development. I saw Bookers taken over and run not as a State-Capitalist enterprise, but the factories and fields vested in public companies, with worker-shareholding, and national shareholding. Otherwise Burnham would nationalise to advance his so-called socialist credentials, and Booker and Alcan would become, as so-called nationalised industries, mere cesspools for party hacks, with the attendant degeneration into mis-management waste and corruption. On that I was proved right. (Incidentally, Franklyn Harvey, a brilliant engineer and thinker and I had met with Burnham in Canada to propose what became CARIFESTA and we had learnt of Burnham’s nationalised plans.)
I insisted that what was most needed is to shatter completely the conception that socialism means the nationalisation of all means of production. This had to be exposed for what it is – State Capitalism. Nothing less and nothing more. That under State-capitalism the workers would be just as much exploited, only that the surplus would be wasted until there was no surplus. And workers would be reduced to refugees in other lands.
In fact Burnham went further, than I had predicted in proclaiming the paramountcy of the Party over the State, and therefore paramountcy over State enterprises. The Party substituted itself for the nation! And Burnham substituted himself for the paramount party.
Even more importantly, Rodney himself was to extend the analysis and become the foremost theoretician in active politics in the Caribbean when he returned to Guyana in 1974 - in my view too late, but not, definitely not, out of time.
Rodney, of course, saw the class of lawyers, trade unionists, university graduates, small businessmen, middle management and restaurateurs as being too small to form a class. Nevertheless as the petty-bourgeois, they would seek to constitute themselves as a elite. As such they would use the Party-in-Power, as the vehicle to accumulate private wealth through public office and public procurement policies.
As Rodney himself would write: "Various combinations of the above elements aid the implementation of policies which allow the reproduction of the petty bourgeoisie as an elite in the midst of declining material standards for the vast majority and simultaneous with the accelerated expatriation of surplus by the foreign and multinational corporations."
One thing is clear no matter how the post-independence elite use political power as a means of plunder, they are utterly incapable of using this plunder as a base for industrialisation. It is therefore no accident that these modern political pirates do not own a single industry anywhere. They bank their money abroad, in millions, tens of millions, and some say hundreds of millions. The plunder is ceaseless, even when their economies have been structurally adjusted downwards.
(When all the obsequies were observed no one dared to say how much Sir V.C. Bird had accumulated as his Estate. It was probably more than the annual Budget of Antigua and Barbuda. He would not declare his huge assets in life and not even at his death.)
To return to Rodney’s analysis he pointed out that the new elite, which was dominant in the Caribbean, in the absence of a genuine and native wealth owning-class had "no immediate base in production and hence their need to maintain political hegemony."
Politics would become their careers. And they to perpetuate themselves in power would do anything and everything as if there was no morality in public affairs. A nation would be demoralised.
Burnham was to maintain political hegemony by outright rigged elections. In other places like, Antigua & Barbuda, the new elite would maintain power by extensive state patronage, maintaining a mass of livelihoods in dependence on the state in direct state employment; or hand-outs from the state; or allowing the evasion and avoidance of taxes. All this would be completed by the most gross manipulation of election registers. The Antiguan state cannot now maintain the mass of livelihoods in the bloated public service, and cannot retrench; cannot allow the tax evasion and avoidance to continue, but cannot discontinue it; cannot allow the arbitrary granting of duty free exemptions, but cannot discontinue it. They are trapped in an "I will, but I won’t" dilemma. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t. But damned whether they do, or whether they don’t.
Nor did Rodney confine himself to a Burnham or Guyana based analysis. He extended it.
The Trinidad and Tobago, African petty bourgeoisie "maintained a firm hold of the PNM (Peoples National Movement) on the unwritten but widely understood premise that they were supposedly operating in the interests of the African minority. The Indian petty bourgeoisie was dissimilar only to the extent that it had a strong commercial orientation. Both sectors of the petty bourgeoisie treated the workers and peasants, in an arrogant, bullying, contemptuous way - resorting to outright gangsterism on many occasions.
Rodney was careful to point out that "the better established sectors of the West Indian petty bourgeoisie, such as the Syrian, Jewish or Indian merchants and the French Creole or Indian landed proprietors" did not behave with the arrogance, the bullying and contempt of the new petty-bourgeoisie. They would go along to get along.
This new strata in control of political power, and using it for the accumulation of private wealth and State patronage had to become more and more involved in corruption, growing levels of repression and fraud, political and financial. This "social and political repression" Rodney wrote "in the English speaking Caribbean arises directly out of the material conditions of neo-colonial underdevelopment and the lop-sided division of the social product."
So it is then that in this "lop-sided division," ruling politicians declare "economic growth" without in any way saying how much of this "growth" went to re-investment, and how much, (the lion’s share) went to the foreign owners, who, in turn, repatriated it, as it was in the beginning. This economic growth meant greater underdevelopment. In the beginning it was outright colonialism. Now under independence this process of growth without development is best known as neo-colonialism. This lop-sided division of the social product means that local workers get wages, while foreign capital gets all the concessions and then repatriates the profits. Self-expanding capital, or re-investment, is thus thwarted. A nation is stunted. In such a condition the backward political elite looks for new foreign owners to begin the vicious cycle all over again.
This neo-colonial politics had some distinct features which Rodney outlined with clinical precision (1) the concentration of power in the hands of an executive, and then into the hands of a single maximum leader (2) the destruction of popular political expression and participation [for everything, one checks one’s minister, resulting in powerless mass and all powerful ruling political elite]; (3) the manipulation of race and other divisions amongst the people. (4) The institutionalisation of corruption. [The opposition not allowed to participate in organs of the State such as statutory bodies in proportion to the votes cast for it. Or, in public media. And the ruling political elite using the media to justify its plunder of the state, its projects and resources.
The opposition in turn, drawing a line in the sand, and having nothing to do with things national. In the case of Antigua and Barbuda, Lester Bird becomes synonymous with the country. So that representing the country becomes, at one and the same, time representing Lester Bird. Either way the peoples consciousness is twisted and distorted] (5) the extension of political repression and victimisation [government supporters get tax breaks to avoid or evade taxes and duties]. (6) The vulgarisation of national culture as a test for class rule. [The Burning Flames becomes the exclusive preserve of the ruling party or public media put in the hands of party goons and used exclusively by the ruling political directorate. A society accustoms itself to this vulgarisation and calls these patently anti-democratic re-arrangements of society by its opposite - Democracy.]
Most significantly Rodney analysed, using empirical observation, that for neo-colonial politics to thrive both parties are populated by "a large proportion of the most reactionary and right wing elements in the country". People who spout the Bible as a substitute for political ideas and policy, and as right-wing populism "Groups that used to oppose even the nationalist struggle back in the 1950’s. That is not to say that any given individual is incapable of transformation. But we are talking not just of one individual, but of a large number who are opposed to all progressive ideas, who keep the people discussing nothing of value, who spurn all ideas people who have given no indication, public or private, of any transformation in their world view, their life-style or their social objectives. They are encrusted within the party and the government." Such do nothing more and nothing less than to stimulate hatred for the other party or the other race, and any education of party members, internally or on the public platform, is non-existent. All organs of such parties are mis-educated to have no respect for any kind of principle, be it observance of the elementary rules of natural justice, or accountability for Party or Public finance.
Rodney and the Working Peoples Alliance broke sharply with conventional neo-colonial politics whether in neo-capitalist garb or neo-socialist garb. The break was sharp, precise and clear.
The idea of a rotating chairmanship, Rodney and Roopnarine, meant that there was no single leader, and the maximum leader, appointing and disappointing, unaccountable in all essential matters was discarded by rotating the Chairmanship or the leadership. The bi-racial character of the WPA leadership could better represent the society itself and escape the racialism which plagued Guyana’s politics. Few things were more novel or more creative in Caribbean politics. Rodney not only analysed and re-conceptualised, he practised the new, making word correspond to deed. He is a rarity, the theory corresponding to the praxis. Of very few Caribbean leaders that can be said. Walter Rodney is one of those very few. Not only was he clear in analysis, but he was tireless in teaching the working people and learning from them.
Rodney’s problem was he could not break through the two-party syndrome which in Guyana’s case had hardened into racialism and not racism.
To a people, unlike the Indians of India, the Chinese of China and the Africans of Africa, without traditions of their own, Walter Rodney established a new tradition and style of leadership in sharp contrast to the swaggering bluster and empty-headed populism which passes for politics in the Caribbean. It is a most viable tradition of educating the membership and being educated by it. In that process the scholar loses his elite orientation and the mass become learners, activists and themselves educators, irrevocably committed to ending their dispossession by a new system of social ownership. Long live Walter Rodney.
TO BE CONTINUED