Notwithstanding the present stagnation in the area of political reform, I believe that our political parties are on the cusp of major restructuring and that John Maynard Keynes was perhaps correct when he claimed that: “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood”, for even today, notions like “democratic centralism” and “party paramountcy,” rooted as they were in autocratic political cultures that are either dead or in their death throes, are still being used to explain contemporary issues. We therefore need to sensibly situate these ideas lest they re-emerge and continue to adversely affect the way forward.
Like most third world leaders of his time, Forbes Burnham was a socialist but, given his geo/political context, in the early days he was much more cautious than some of his contemporaries. In 1970 the PNC designated Guyana a Cooperative Republic and placed its faith in the “cooperative as the instrument for making the little man a real man.” The fact that the PNC kept itself in office by rigging elections had already begun to delegitimize it in the eyes of many, particularly those Indo-Guyanese who were supporters of the PPP. But what about those in the Marxist countries who ran atrocious dictatorial “vanguard” type regimes, and their Leninist aspirants and supporters, of which there were many in the third world? Actually, Burnham became quite popular with them as his cooperative socialism, like Julius Nyerere’s Ujaama socialism, even if thought wrongheaded, appeared quite quaint.
Burnham’s growing international acceptability meant that the opposition was faced with a major internal and external ideological problem and so had to attempt to delegitimize cooperative socialism and its accompanying party paramountcy.
In 1892, Marx’s collaborator, Friedrich Engels, in his “Socialism: Scientific and Utopian,” labeled the originators of the international co-operative idea (Robert Owens, Charles Fourier, Saint Simon, etc.) as “utopian socialists.” He also laid the foundation for Marxism to become “scientific socialism” – socialism that was inevitably taking us to a classless communist society. Thus, the late Brindley Benn, then an executive member of the PPP, was not being prescient when he boasted that: “It is easier to stop tomorrow than to stop communism.” We now know that talk of history being scientific in the way Engels did is nonsense but he provided a good intellectual backdrop for Burnham’s cooperative socialism to be labeled as “utopian socialism” – something to be avoided at all costs.
Make no mistake, Burnham’s paramountcy was intended to dominate the political landscape of Guyana. His conceptualization may have been more in keeping with what Marx and Engels intended precisely because the latter did not believe that, at least initially, the communists would be able to cause a revolution and create a one party dictatorship in Western Europe, where they expected the socialist revolution to begin, without being at the head of a mass movement. Vanguard parties of the type created by Lenin could only exist where political competition was absent as its dominance would not be tolerated by other political parties. The hypocrisy of the PPP of which I spoke in my previous article, resulted not from the fact that it opposed Burnham but because at the same time it was doing so, it was supportive of similar but much worse regimes elsewhere!
The usual understanding of party paramountcy in Guyana can be equated with the Marxist/Leninist extreme type of party dominance, which still exists in communist societies. But this has not been its only historical expression. The introduction of universal adult suffrage and the consequential establishment of mass political parties to win government in Western societies gave rise to tensions between parties in public office (government) and the party in central office (the ruling party secretariat). One of the first expressions of the concept of paramountcy of the party came at the turn of the twentieth century with the formation of the British Labour Party and its later coming to government.
The question was whether the Labour government must follow the policies established by the party that had brought it to government.
One school of thought believed that the Labour Party’s programmes should be paramount with the government, for a party can only win government if it is in sync with what appeals to a majority of the electorate. Others argued that the party was by definition only a part of the nation while the government must be a government of all the people and must therefore give prime consideration to what is in the interests of the nation. Over the decades since their establishment, party organisations have evolved differently in their various socio/political conditions. Indeed, as I have argued before, in presidential systems such as that in the United States of America, the party system has remained weak in comparison to its Western European counterparts.
However, it is still the case that: “In the mass party, the party in public office is instrumental to the achievement of the goals of the party organization. In this respect, the party in central office has another function, that of supervising and controlling the party in public office on behalf of the party on the ground.” (Richard Gunther, et al (2002) “Political Parties: Old Concepts and New Challenges” Oxford University Press).
To conceive of every attempt by the party membership to have a level of control over the government as an expression of Guyanese/Marxist type party paramountcy is to reject the more subtle tradition and the legitimate demand of party members to have some leverage over the government they caused to be elected. Indeed, it is to leave them as pawns in the hands of the various expressions – democratic centralist or otherwise – of oligarchy.
As Richard Gunther et al also contended, in “Parliament elections, the voters do not limit themselves to holding representatives accountable for their performance …. but use those elections to express their dissatisfaction with the national government, the central party leadership, and national Parliament.”
We need to understand and take seriously this dimension of party membership/government relations as we try to restructure for the future.
