“The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!”
Outdated perhaps, but these words from the 161-year-old ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’ have brought hope to the hearts of many and more than most documents of its kind, has popularised the genre. Interestingly, it is said that when Frederick Engels did the first draft, he called it “The Communist Confession of Faith”, but that Marx changed it. This was, after all, an odd title choice for a man who more than Marx thought of their socialism as a ‘scientific’ doctrine. Engels’ choice may however be excused as this was 1848, only 4 years after Marx’s humanistic “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts”, with its focus on alienation, rather than his later dialectical revolutionary trajectory that suggested the inevitability of communism and freedom.
As Janet Lyon has noted, manifestoes were coeval with the rise of capitalists and the working class in seventeenth century Europe with the intention of “…. creating audiences through a rhetoric of exclusivity; parceling out political identities across a polarized discursive field, claiming for “us” the moral high ground of revolutionary idealism, and constructing “them” as ideological tyrants, bankrupt usurpers, or corrupt fools.” (Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern – 1999 – Cornell University Press, Ithaca).
In the next few weeks we will be bombarded by political manifestoes from the various parties which, for the most part, have remained within this general tradition. Put simply, in order to gain our support at the next elections, the manifestoes will outline the basis of a programme of action which their proposers claim to believe will best improve our life opportunities. I said “claim to believe” because manifestoes are usually constructed in an optimizing process that seeks a balance between what is deduced to be attractive to the average voter and what is practical from the standpoint of the given political leadership. It is therefore appropriate at this stage for us to have some understanding of the history, purpose and shortcomings of manifestoes.
The internet now allows many more people to access manifestoes but the evidence is that generally most voters neither read nor pay much attention to them and it is a fact that in Guyana most people vote according to race. So, do they really matter?
Manifestoes do serve some purpose. Firstly, they provide governments with a mandate. Once a measure is included in a manifesto, a government can claim to have been given the electorate’s authority to proceed and implement it. This is particularly important in countries where referenda are rarities. There is the view that once a party wins government, it can do almost anything in the name of the people. However, modern democratic practice requires additional affirmations by the populace, particularly when novel and important programmes are to be implemented. I have argued before that one of the problems with the Low Carbon Development Strategy is that its general thrust was not legitimised at an election or by way of popular discourse. The discussion that did take place was not a substantive one as to whether or not such a policy should be adopted but merely an instrumental one about how the policy should be implemented.
Manifestoes also provide us with a proposed programme against which we may hold our political leaders accountable. As a result, at election time we are likely to hear the government claiming that it has fulfilled this or that aspect of its manifesto, and the opposition claiming quite the opposite. When we hear a government claim that it has fulfilled 90% of its manifesto promises, we usually need to ask ourselves whether those were the important commitments. Inquiries sometimes show that the 10% that was not implemented comprised the more important promises.
Manifestoes also provide a programmatic platform from which our would-be parliamentarians can quarrel with each other in their effort to impress the electorate. Since from a general psychological standpoint, people tend to be impressed by “newness”, one of the more usual accusations is that a given manifesto contains nothing new, which in itself may not necessarily be something to be disparaged. For example, from the standpoint of general economic policy, consistency has been the order of the day for every government since about 1989.
All have remained committed to IMF/World Bank programmes, which, at the very least, insist upon the maintenance of macro-economic stability, limited government involvement in the economy and the containment of public sector spending.
Claims that one party has copied its policies from another and that opposition groups are merely mouthing government policies are already being heard and must be taken with a grain of salt. The question for the electorate is: if we expect optimal proposals and outcomes from the parties vying for our support, how different could the various manifestoes really be? In the field of education, for example, all the manifestoes are likely to emphasise policies to generally improve educational quality, maintain teachers, make technical and vocational education more accessible, introduce some kind of moral education, deal with dropout rate, etc. etc. One would need the kind of details that manifestoes usually do not provide to make more than cursory policy judgments.
Finally, even in a society such as ours, where ethnic voting is rife, manifestoes can also provide communal opinion with documentation against which to judge the political parties to which they are committed.
Political manifestoes are the most comprehensive outline of political intentions we are likely to be provided with before an election, and some future presentations will deal with topics raised in the various manifestoes. However, until those documents are made available, there are a few related issues that I believe are sufficiently important to be considered and possibly contained in the 2011 manifestoes of the political parties. Of course, political manifestos are minor complements to experience: the electorate usually cast their votes based mainly upon what they know or believe they know about the contending parties.
