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