In 1976, President Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham, whom international capital had helped to power in Guyana, felt sufficiently confident to tell the Guyanese nation that: “…the People’s National Congress is seeking to lay the foundation of a socialist society based upon Marxism/Leninism” (Forbes Burnham, “Report to the Nation”).
He had a right to be confident: the international political equation – the containment of international communism – which had placed and was keeping his party in power, appeared stable. By 1975, Burnham’s strident radicalism, partly intended to stun the PPP and other internal leftist forces, appeared to be having the desired effect. In that year, the PPP was forced to give the PNC “critical support” and some of the former’s top ideologues left the party, accusing it of trying to play catch-up.
For example, Ranji Chandisingh told us that “it is the PNC that is taking all the concrete initiatives in terms of social transformation, while the PPP is merely reacting petulantly and seeking in some cases to go one better in words”(Ranji Chandisingh, “Why I Left the PPP”). The economy was just beginning to take a nose dive, which would by 1978 see the regime at the doors of the International Monetary Fund, but this was as yet imperceptible.
It is in this context that Mr. Burnham presented the concept of national unity that was quoted so liberally by Leader of the Opposition Mr. David Granger, when he was delivering his statement to mark the 56th anniversary of the formation of his party, the PNC.
Addressing the 2nd Biennial Congress of the PNC in 1977, Mr. Forbes Burnham argued that “The P. N. C. as a vanguard party that, in addition, holds state power must make it its duty to achieve national unity in the socialist sense”. What did he mean by “national unity in the socialist sense”? He claimed that there was much talk about the need for national unity that was not based on class but ethnicity and enquired “where is the socialist content to such ‘unity’?”
Burnham’s party was building socialism and he claimed that to succeed it needed to consolidate its proletarian base by winning over other sections of the working class as well as small peasants. The need for national unity was axiomatic: the issue was how to attain it. To achieve this socialist notion of national unity, the PNC would carry out a planned and honest campaign to win over all those persons who were supporting other parties for the wrong reasons.
To those who wanted a coalition government between party elites, he argued that such an approach was only superficially attractive. It assumed that these leaders would be able to keep their support bases from being eroded and that their supporters could only be approached through those leaders. Secondly, he argued that there was no guarantee that a compromise among the leaders would lead to unity among the rank and file “unless there is a serious and honest attempt to spread the message of unity further down”.
The apparent conflation of national and class unity; the differentiation between national unity and elite coalition/shared governance and the seeming self-defeating contention that while the latter was superficial it might work if “a serious and honest attempt to spread the message of unity further down” is undertaken should have made Mr. Granger more careful about transmitting this contention of Burnham across decades! That said, as an effort to create policy space in the era of global ideological competition, Burnham’s manoeuvre was masterful!
Sir Arthur Lewis had only a decade previously invented shared governance and intellectual outputs hardly ever seeped down quickly. PPP’s “critical support” indicated that that party was on the ideological ropes.
Some of its senior people had left; others were expected to follow so it was not unreasonable to believe that his PNC could eventually erode the PPP base. Most importantly, the West still had uses for him as a bulwark against Cheddi Jagan’s Soviet communism but he had to be careful! Thus, he also used the occasion to send a message to his jittery benefactors that his Marxism/Leninism was moderate; had nothing to do with Jagan’s Soviet orientation and that he had no intention of making a coalition with the PPP!
But by the time he died the most important aspect of that analysis had changed. By 1984, Ronald Reagan, with his radical no-nonsense anticommunism, was already three years in office and the Soviet Union was in economic and political decline with Reagan bluffing that by way of the strategic defence initiative (Star Wars) its physical annihilation was not altogether impossible. Indeed, the USSR was about to crumble, with Mikhail Gorbachev, glasnost and perestroika only a few years away.
Further, Reagan had already invaded Grenada and the US was putting severe pressure on the Burnham regime. For ‘technical reasons’ it refused to support the application for an MMA, IDB loan and the State Department in its 1982 Country Report was scathing in its commentary on the political situation in Guyana. “The human rights environment has significantly deteriorated over the years from the traditions once respected in Guyana prior to independence.”
Under this kind of pressure, by 1984 Burnham was back at Jagan’s door, proposing the same kind of elite coalition that he had previously dismissed. Was he up to his old trick of dangling Jagan and his communism in front of the United States in the hope of gaining concessions or did he recognise that the international ideological framework that had kept him in office so long was in its death throes and so was making a genuine effort to at least keep his PNC in the game?
Contrary to what Mr. Granger suggested, both an ideological campaign and elite co-operation were posited by Burnham as two distinct but possibly interrelated approaches for achieving national/class unity. I will attempt to argue next week that in our kind of society, the national unity after which Mr. Granger appears to be hankering cannot be achieved without a purposeful combination of the two.
henryjeffrey@yahoo.com
