Part 3 (final)

When in Grenada, I argued with Rodney that he should join with Jagan’s PPP to create a Popular Front to wipe out Burnham’s rigged elections, I know now, after my own experience with the UPP here, that I was dead wrong. Rodney was absolutely correct that he could not join with one Racialism to eliminate the Racialism of the other. Both Racialist elites, however long and patient the labour of the negative. There was no short-cut.

Even now, 20 years after his assassination, I continue to learn from Walter Rodney. He who often thought that I risked too much, engaging the Establishment before sufficiently organised (adventurism), would find himself risking far more than I - his very life. One did not so much engage the Establishment as it engaged you, on its terms. In a way, we literally traded places. But as I said before Burnham was far more specious than Bird. Historical circumstances made him so.

The political type, the conventional West Indian politician, represented by the likes of Balaguer, Burnham, Bird, and Gairy, has to maintain power at all costs. They live by politics. They do not represent a ruling class with economic power and control. If they were such they would have to prove, by their conduct in public office, that they were the best people. And so fit to rule, as all ruling classes seek to do. They are none such. They do not represent the First World compromise between Capital and Labour, and so there are known limits on their political power, since abuse of power would shatter the class compromise, as in the case of Nixon. They, on the contrary, are in office, but not in control of the economy. After politics they have no Boardrooms to go to. No peerages which guarantee their status. They simply represent one section of the working people against the other. Therefore they represent no vested economic interests. They acquire wealth, by corruption, from those they granted state concessions or from State properties. However, if they are out of power they are out of everything. And we all know, "Security is mortal’s chieftest enemy." The conventional political type, in government or opposition, is terribly and terrifyingly insecure. They have to secure power at all costs. Power becomes not a means to an end, but an end in, and for itself. Women’s sexuality, Freud opined, is the dark area of the soul. The insecurity of the conventional male political type, who represents no class interests, is the dark area of the Caribbean national soul.

Burnham maintained power by rigged elections. Bird packed and stacked election registers, gerry-mandering constituencies, in his own party’s words "to suit ourselves". Burnham, Bird and Gairy, would intimidate the truly progressive opposition by the use of naked state power. The police here spy on opposition and report to the government the minutest stirrings of the opposition, routinely. The routine nature of the spying and harassment makes the sham democracy a grinning mask for political brutality. Sinister in its everydayness. Things done by the police here as "duty" would make Nixon’s Watergate burglars, spying on the opposition Democrats, look like Sunday school teachers by comparison. It is proof aplenty, of a debased and degraded political culture. Brought about by a political elite which represents no other interests but their own. Their interest is power, and the maintenance of power, power as an end in, of, and for itself.

Burnham would go much further than Bird or Gairy. Not only would he have a ‘Mongoose Gang’ in the House of Israel, led by Rabbi Washington, an American, in the dregs of American criminal practices. But, he would develop political Hit-squads, in army and police, aimed at the truly progressive opposition. All as part of the scheme of things of maintaining power and intimidating the genuine opposition, truly committed to change. These two nefarious purposes became institutionalised in Burnham’s Guyana. Haiti had gone there before, with its army, police and ton ton macoutes as institutions and instruments of maintaining Duvalier style power. It is a process, known in political science as Haitianisation. Or what Walter Rodney himself labelled as the rule of King Kong.

Besides, Burnham, Bird et al, their posturing notwithstanding, had a total fear of Black Power. They feared, like White Power, our people who refused to see themselves as Africans, because of racist propaganda against Africa and Africans, ever overcoming our deep-seated self-contempt, which negates all collective and co-operative development. If Black Power overcame that degradation of spirit then the debasement of a dispossessed people, outside national ownership and control, for all of our historical lives, would have its death knell sounded. King Kongism would be dead and buried simultaneously.

Therefore, such as Rodney rooted in African history, became a threat of grand proportions, just by being there. He had to be decapitated. The consciousness he represented threatened the old self-hatred, alienated consciousness. Though appearances made Bird and Burnham, look like "African conscious" persons, the very economy they presided over, made them, in fact and in substance, the security-guards of White Power. Burnham postured against White Power. But, in fact, he himself had been brought to power by White Power, through the CIA and British intelligence manipulating racial insecurities – racialism.

Whatever level of organisation one achieved, at whatever time, once committed to liberation of the mass from dispossession, the earlier the surer, the Balaguer, Burnham, Bird, Gairy State would come at you, with sledge-hammer force against an ant. It was not a question of adventurism. It was a question that the new consciousness which Rodney represented, threatened the old consciousness. In Rodney’s case, he threatened, in his person, his own individual being in history, the racialism on which Burnham had his foundation, in essence, his political Being.

In the case of Bird, the faithful defender of white economic control, any new consciousness among the people, other than the Bird vs Walter-Spencer syndrome, would be the undoing of both self-perpetuating elites. Hence the spiteful use of state power by either, or both, against those committed to liberation of the mass of people from alienation, caused by our long historical dispossession.

Those who accuse Rodney of "adventurism," ignoring that he sought to build forces against his own elimination, miss the point by more than a mile. They fail to see the State and its para-statal bodies (House of Israel, etc) with Burnham paramount, as being exclusively organised or manipulated towards one end - Rodney’s elimination. Either to starve him into submission or into exile. Or, failing that, his physical death.

Against insuperable odds then, Rodney had to fight back against the state as a ruthless King Kong tied to no interests except power, and aimed at the elimination of all representatives of fundamental change in the neo-colonial arrangement of society. And Rodney’s personal elimination moreso.

In the while, Rodney saw how this degraded politics of Bird, Balaguer, Burnham etc., etc., degraded people. One had to engage it, or be consumed by it. Rodney, like Ché Guevarra, was consumed in resisting it. However, he developed a political theory and practice - a praxis - which is a profound lesson for the present and future, especially to those who wish to overcome the degraded politics which now threatens to overwhelm us all.

Let Martin Carter, the political poet laureate of the region, with his amazing gift to grasp and express essentials out of he muddle of events, define the politics of degradation:

"The PNC’s method of ensuring self-perpetuation consists of indulging in a deliberate policy of degrading people. And the reasoning behind this, is that degraded people are incapable of effective resistance.

"Of this policy, the following examples should be kept in mind. Item: In the rigging of elections in which many ordinary and by no means vicious people were cajoled into doing indecent things, and were thereby compromised.

"Item: In corruption as a way of life in which people are made to accept that stealing, cheating, lying, bearing false witness, informing on each other was a positive sign of loyalty to the regime…. And the greatest damage done … is to young people who are led to believe that they can do anything, no matter how selfish, how intolerant, how mindless, how coarse, since they identify this attitude with the attitude the regime underwrites."

Frankly, I know of no finer empirical analysis of our current situation in the region than this. All over the Caribbean in Tiny Turks and Caicos islands as in Continental Guyana there is an ever mounting crime wave. It is as mindless as it is intolerant. It is as selfish as it is mindless. It is as coarse as crocus. It produces at the base a domestic murder by a man named Toussaint, named after the greatest hero of the region, the creator of the first successful slave Revolution and the first Black Republic, mindlessly killing his wife. It produces near the top, the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition - the holder seems to glory in this obviously colonial title - firing his once loyal deputy, "with immediate effect", while giving no known reason and certainly without rhyme. A man, himself a trade unionist for 30 of his 52 years, firing another, without notice, without cause, and without reason. Without too even the pretense of a hearing. It is not just mindless. It degrades each and every single leader and every single member or supporter who has to live with it. It is the action of a self-perpetuating elite, unprincipled to the max, with no regard whatsoever, for the elementary principles of natural justice: the right of the accused to be heard in his own defense or explanation. When that is accepted "as politics" civilisation degenerates into the shoot-first-ask-questions-never life of the brute modern, concrete jungle.

This degradation is at the very top too, in the other section of the political elite. This, as ruling elite, keeps a mass of livelihoods in the most absolute dependence on the State. Revenues cannot meet the demand for regular wages, or even overtime, let alone back-pay. So nurses are denied an increase for six years. CBH workers are owed back-pay for months with no prospect of their just due, except after strong and sustained protest. Tax evasion and avoidance have become monotonously commonplace, officially approved by the same self-perpetuating elite. Now this same elite is at its rat’s end, purple in the face, lecturing the nation about ‘the principle’ of citizens paying taxes. The totally unprincipled, the killers of morality in public affairs, calling on principle for their own corrupt self-perpetuation in a-moral power!

And so we have a State, which regularly resorts to cheating, arms-trafficking, lying, money-laundering, Rolls Royce revenue robbing, stealing, land-grabbing, presiding over a populace who have had to resort to hustling, to dependence on state patronage - Check your Minister - to lying, to bearing false witness to get some puny advantage or other. It is a clear situation of a degraded elite, on either side, degrading a whole people, with ceaseless unprincipled conduct, in government and opposition.

Rodney was to note that such a degraded situation, as obtains all over the English-speaking Caribbean today, structurally adjusted downwards, compels us:

"To express not only ridicule, but anger and disgust. The self-perpetuating elite has reduced us all to such a level that the situation can be described only in terms of filth, pollution and excrement.

"Even our deep-rooted sense of modesty cannot stand in the way of rough words to describe the nation’s shame." In such a situation are we now.

Rodney went on to say that the self-perpetuating elite, led by Burnham, reminded of the legend of King Midas, "who was said to have been able to touch anything and turn it into gold. That was called the "Midas Touch". Now Guyana has seen the "Midas Touch," in reverse. Anything Burnham touches turns to shit."

This is as true today of all the self-perpetuating political elites in the region. Nothing they do, in Government or Opposition, inspires anyone to reach for higher heights. Nothing. The paramount party over the State, has become the paramount leader over party and state, with all its institutions reflecting his need for self-perpetuation, by any means necessary. King Kong was upon us, as neo liberalism, known as globalisation, sweeps us, already on the periphery, outside history, uncompetitive, unproductive, and in a sham democracy besides. Sham from beginning to end.

How did Rodney respond to this degradation in Guyana where it occurred first, only to sweep through the rest of the Caribbean with the hurricane force of Luis and Mitch, combined?

Rodney responded this way just before his death:

"One of the more rewarding achievements of recent weeks is that I have been able to start Marxist study groups: one at my home and another at Linden. The latter is purely working class and was at the request of some very advanced workers who have already done a great deal of reading. The one at my home is more diluted with respect to class elements, but the whole society can and will benefit from more scientific insights."

Now this is the only method for overcoming a degraded society where no social force has the power to stamp its authority on the country and lead it out to a more harmonious relation, with a new sense of purpose. Then and therefore, creating meaning out of the seemingly meaningless, dread scene.

This is the most profound lesson Walter Rodney has left us. Faced with self-perpetuating elites, deracinated from all interests, the task of the moment is to educate. To educate at the level of the workers and farmers, as well as among teachers, small business, vendors, and the un-organised, (sometimes un-organisable) intelligentsia.

The point is, to uncover by scientific analysis, the real conditions of life, the forces external and internal, which have combined to bring us to this degraded impasse. And therefore, the way out, and up – Civil Society though its own organs exercising the power once exclusively reposed in the King Kong, anything-goes State.

My only slight, very slight, difference with Walter Rodney is that politics is an activity. It involves the activity of study, as well as the application of knowledge acquired by developing projects. Projects in which the rank and file participate fully. With the rank and file, at times, taking the lead because of their particular skills. Thus, and only thus, an irreversible process is set in motion, which, as it strengthens itself, will overcome Degradation. Overcome, as it teaches every cook to govern, in his or her community, as in the national administration, as well as in Regional affairs. The Regional must be the concern of the community at the base. While the base, the self-governing community, is the constant preoccupation of the Regional.

It is my contention, note well, with the benefit of hindsight which is 20/20 in its vision, that Walter Rodney met his untimely death because, he did not fully set in motion this work of national education, organisation and mobilisation. Before the work of organisation by education, and interracial development by projects, was really off the ground he was compelled, or felt compelled, to tackle King Kong.

Now Andaiye, a most remarkable woman by international standards, and even more remarkable as a beacon of modern womanhood in Guyana, provides an analysis of the cause of Walter Rodney’s death, which, to my mind, has to be learnt and incorporated into the personality by every progressive activist in these degraded societies. It is absolutely important.

Here is Andaiye : "For me what Walter misread wasn’t Burnham [and the degradation he represented]. What worried me was his misreading of that category of person called lumpen. Always open. Rodney was very excited by people who had come to see that Guyana was dread. [That is, degraded.] A category that would get to speak to him quite easily was the ex-soldier, which is what this boy [Rodney’s killer and Burnham’s instrument - Gregory Smith] claimed to be, and from a relatively poor background and so on. He had all the things to attract. Rodney misread him. He had mentioned him to me, a few weeks before, as an ex-soldier who had electronic skills. He [Rodney] knew he was walking a thin line but he felt so strongly that the awe and fear of Burnham had to be combated."

Therefore did Rodney fall into the hands of Burnham’s instrument of assassination - the lumpen, the dread Gregory Smith, with the so-called electronic skills. He it was who would plant a device on Walter Rodney, which Walter believed was an electronic device that would enable him to listen on the secret plans of the House of Israel, of Rabbi Washington, of the Hit-squads in Burnham’s institutionalised self-perpetuation. It was not to be.

This device was in fact a bomb which Walter - very proud of his manhood - tested, in of all places, his lap! Aye! The tragedy of it all still reverberates. But the analysis that precedes from it is the living, undying value.

The self-perpetuating elite in power, against the traditional or conventional opposition uses manoeuvres and manipulation of the state machinery to keep it as the "official" opposition. It seeks really to preserve it as "official" opposition. Because that "official" opposition is its guarantee of maintaining full power. The ruling elite preserves its counterpart in order to preserve itself in power.

But, against the political forces or elements struggling to ensure that the dispossessed come into actual control and possession, the self-perpetuating elite in power resorts to the most ruthless measures. It will prosecute and persecute, or as a rabid Birdite said here, it will seek to make sure that such liberators, with such policies, "evaporate" "vanish" or "disappear". Thus disappearances in Latin America were commonplace, under the military as self-perpetuating elite. In Guyana Burnham too, was intent and persistent in his efforts to ensure that Walter Rodney "evaporated", "vanished" or "disappeared." His assassination plot, by way of a lumpen worked to its terrible end.

However, the conventional or official opposition will watch those irrevocably committed to ensuring that the dispossessed, possess direct control through new organs of civil society and new forms of social property, twist in the wind, literally and metaphorically.

For example, the traditional opposition here, after Outlet was destroyed by official arson did NOT, as Opposition Party, contribute A SINGLE CENT to Outlet’s restoration. Not a cent. It did not even make the official arson against Outlet an issue! Even though the Deputy Leader was also the Editor of Outlet, which gave unlimited coverage to that very opposition! It did not even pass a token resolution condemning this official arson on Outlet! Not even that, as gesture! Objectively, it is at one with the self-perpetuating elite in power to keep down, or even to eliminate, those committed to ending our historical dispossession. The malice in the heart and head is the same on either side. It is historical though, not personal. That historically deep-seated malice and fear saw to the elimination of Rodney by Burnham as a self-perpetuating elite in power. The traditional opposition, except for some weak protest, were quiescent when Walter Rodney was blown away. The behaviour occurs and recurs like a recurring decimal. It is part and parcel of a degraded society. Rodney fell.

Add to the Rodney scenario that in the revolutionary climate of 1979-80, with the fall of the Shah in Iran, the ouster of Patrick John in Dominica, the triumph over Gairy and his House of Israel, known as the Mongoose Gang, the fall of Bokassa in Africa etc., etc., Rodney felt the time to topple King Kong was now. The external situation certainly made such an attempt "correct" even if the objective conditions internally were not exactly in sync. But Walter Rodney’s assassination in his historically necessary revolutionary preparation against King Kong, teaches a profound lesson.

There is a recurring tendency to build political parties on lumpen elements because of their apparent courage, their sense of the dreadness of society, and their derring-do which they acquire in the process of hustling to survive. Such people have to be transformed by politics as the activity of study and the activity of practical projects. Or else, they remain French bills, cutting both sides, and always open to the Establishment with its sense of largesse. They betray you, at the critical hour, in deepest consequence - once they have not been transformed by study and activity. That too, is a critical and crucial lesson to be learnt now from Walter Rodney’s assassination.

As CLR James wrote on Rodney’s tragic demise: "Rodney recognised that Burnham meant mischief that he was prepared to use all power, the armed power of the state to destroy the opposition. Rodney knew that and he tried to organise against it. And he organised wrong."

True as that is, Rodney as far back as 1979-80, reached further in organising and educating than any other person or party in the region since. He was up against insuperable odds. In the intensity of the Cold War, and a growing revolutionary tide in Grenada and in Nicaragua, he cannot be blamed as "adventurist" for seeking to seize the time and turn it against the terror. He cannot be blamed for seeking to end age-old historic dispossession by new forms of property relations, which would allow all to participate in ownership and control, with from each according to his or her abilities, and to each according to his or her need.

Then and therefore Walter Rodney lives. He lives in the theory and practice to combat this dread scene: Educate and organise. Above all, create by activity, new projects. And so transform the very people who will themselves transform society. There is no other political method.

Walter Rodney is not a martyr. Martyrdom was by no means his mission. Rodney is not a saint awaiting beatification. Rodney was a world renowned scholar of liberation, who engaged in the patient labour of the negative, seeking to transform people, in order to transform society and so create a Regional State out of the always fragmented Caribbean.

Each and every one of his learned works from Grounding with my Brothers, through How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, to his History of the Guyana Working Class has one purpose – the liberation of the readers from the shackles of domination. It is to his undying credit that he sought by creative political activity, to match word with deed.

Therefore does he belong in that exclusive pantheon of Toussaint, Fanon, CLR James, Ché Guevarra and Fidel Castro – Titans of Liberation.

But Walter Rodney would want me to end this with him as he was. "Nothing extenuate," as he would like Othello say. Walter loved Bruce Lee movies. If you ever went to one with him you could be embarrassed that this highly learned and sophisticated man, this so civilised, slender man of so humble deportment, could so behave - . When the action was at its height he would on occasion rise from his seat. Or he would side-kick you, karate style, but involuntarily so. He was into it. You could even get a punch involuntarily, too. Rodney was not into vicarious experience. He was Bruce Lee. Overcoming impossible odds, but overcoming. I thought the plots simple, even trite. Rodney, a fine art critic, couldn’t care less. The fluidity of the action was the thing.

Looking back at it, I think that by becoming Bruce Lee, Rodney was putting iron into his very sensitive soul. Similarly, Walter would bring the same intensity and sensitivity to Michaelangelo’s works in the Sistine Chapel, to Beethoven’s last Sonatas, as to African art in its simplicity as in its complexity. Similarly, with the subtle insights of Tagore, or Ravi Shankar on the sitar, as to Marley’s Redemption Song. Each was to him part of the same piece, piece of the same whole – the struggle for a truly human society, globally. He incorporated into himself all that was truly human. Not just as learning, but as lived experience.

Walter Rodney then, was a man in joyful and deadly earnest, binding up every sense, every nerve, every sinew, every ounce of dialectical reason to liberating dispossessed and alienated Africans and Indians, into One Caribbean.

Sonnet 30, William Shakespeare.