By Kevin De Silva
Kevin De Silva, Guyanese, is a graduate of the University of Toronto and is currently engaged with issues related to Guyana and its diaspora.
In Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, the character K. moves through an inn and then a labyrinth-like property as a land surveyor (incidentally the same early life profession of Guyana’s famed author Wilson Harris) in order to meet a character he has never seen. With both twists and turns, breaks, spirals, blockages and dead ends at every maddening stage, K trudges onwards in search of the mystery man. Kafka himself has said the following of revolutionary parties, once victorious, their manifestos crystallized: “Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.” Elsewhere, and in probable congruence with the intuitions of many Guyanese: “Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.”
With the creation of the South American coastal strip and outpost by the Dutch as ‘Guiana’ has come transformations, and rewritings of Guyana’s political and economic structure and function. These include and are not limited to: its prefiguration by the Netherlands with residues of Dutch law enshrined in Guyana’s legal code up to the present day, the domination of British capitalism as well as its mores, etiquette and Christian religiosity, later the supremacy of Booker’s sugar, the importation of enslaved Africans, followed by Asian indentured servants. There were also the collaborative labour riots of the early twentieth century; a socialist apogee in 1953 pin pricked by nervous British fingers via soldiers and the HMS Superb as voyeur; dictatorship, stagnation and today a centralizing, neoliberal regime. In all instances, a profoundly rational element is at work, even in the horrors of slavery and indentureship, where by all scholarly accounts there existed a set of checks and balances that regulated the movement of bodies across oceans, measured them, stacked them, fed them, temporally normalized them through contract (in the case of indentured labour) and even meted out physical harm to them.
Considering this history, it is no wonder that bureaucratic engagement and communal wellbeing are often viewed with not only deep suspicion in the Caribbean imaginary, but as opposing ideas. It is also no wonder that a measure of transgression is viewed more favourably than in a North American context, where the pride of Maroons or the autonomy and grit of Rastafarians (including especially their condemnation of ‘Babylon’) can still inspire Caribbean pride. There too is Anansi of West African origin, and other tricksters and shape shifters who continue to have dramatic potency and even likeability in Caribbean lore. With the increasing depth and breadth of neoliberal capitalism, this suspicion of bureaucratic bodies and those who staff them need not be circumscribed to the Caribbean as its own cultural particularity. Political scientists have increasingly noted the disenchantment of voters in North America regarding their own political institutions. Voter turnout itself is on the wane. Doubt about the efficacy of both politicians and the institutions they inhabit is on the rise. Ideas regarding social cooperation and practices of ‘horizontal politics’ and even empathy have in many (though certainly not all) cases been replaced by chains of specialization and process, as well a certain culture which benignly peddles one version or another of social competitiveness and hierarchy.
In his 1989 book The Cost of Regime Survival, Percy Hintzen outlines the coordinates of post-independence regimes. He notes “three fundamental and immediate needs face a post-independence regime :1) the need to satisfy or neutralize powerful local and international actors, (ii) the need to demobilize or co-opt the organized opposition, and (iii) the need to retain one’s own mass support and prevent outbidding.” Hintzen also notes that particularly in racially mixed societies like Guyana and Trinidad “for the mass population, political support comes to be based upon subjective identity rather than upon an evaluation of the program and performance of political leadership. “Subjective appeal” is therefore an over-identification of racial groups with leaders of the same racial background. It is an over identification precisely because these members take more seriously the category of race than those who are actually in power.
In the case of a polity like Guyana, the small size of the country as a whole has tended to intensify political competition compounded by a Presidential system presaged by the example of long dictatorship. This state of affairs has narrowed the possibilities of expanding bureaucratic functions (i.e. local elections or voting for individual members of parliament rather than for parties which secretly select candidates) and has contracted the engagement of civil society. The important caveat in Hintzen’s post-colonial example too is that regime survival need not entail survival of the members of society which support that regime. More pragmatically, it actually may only entail their opportunistic cooptation.
Hintzen also notes the institutional limitations imposed on states such as Guyana and Trinidad as “mini-states” with a “terminal economic structure”. In these societies the “a) international economic environment plays a much greater role in economic affairs, there is a dramatic b) reliance upon importation for almost all of their consumer needs as well as a c) depend(ence) on revenues and upon business and economic activities generated by the production of a very small number of goods, usually primary goods for export” (in Guyana’s case both gold and timber). Though these factors seem mundane, even imagination has limitations and all emphases on reforming the current system, or in attracting and inspiring newer, younger actors into the political game, will have to contend with these sharp realities and find intelligent ways to minimize their influence.
Is Kafka right? In the current ‘post-political’ or ‘post-industrial era’, there has been a palpable cultural turn away from ‘big’ institutions and ‘big’ projects, particularly where the loci of such projects are state led. Incidentally (though maybe not accidentally) there has not followed a simultaneous shift or loss of trust of big financial institutions and MNCs (multinational corporations), nor a more skeptical gaze and concern about their power, role and control over our lives. There has been an increasing academic outpouring surrounding actions and ‘agency’ motivated in ‘locality’ or by local actors through grassroots participation (including NGOs), loose networks, ‘multitude’, as well as an upsurge in intellectual focus regarding race, gender, identity, sexuality and other categories. Though these areas of inquiry cannot be excluded, they nevertheless have moved focus away from issues of resource mobilization, building state institutional capacity to service citizens, infrastructural development and civic empowerment and engagement.
It is important to note that Guyana’s economic outlook is an outlier relative to other Caribbean economies, making its position on the international market dramatically unique, albeit for all the wrong reasons. Though generally the 1960s are viewed as the traumatic forerunner of the political factionalism and social disunity in the decades following, I would argue that the stagnation and unprecedented emigration in the 1980s has been equally if not more impactful, principally as a lost period in what should have been the formation of a stable middle class and an upwardly mobile working class.
According to the American diplomatic service, “Guyana has lost almost half of its generation born from 1961-1980 to emigration, individuals who are now in their prime productive years elsewhere.” Further “The UN predicts that Guyana’s population will be 488,000 in 2050 (a 35% reduction of the roughly 750,000 people who live there now). An IMF study in late 2005 revealed that 86% of college-educated Guyanese have left, leading to a severe shortage in professionals and even basic skilled-workers.” Moreover, “the country is one of the most remittance-dependent countries in the world, accounting for nearly 25% of the country’s GDP.” A sober and not very profound question should probably be posed here. If these figures are true, who currently does Guyana, as even a legal construct (its flag, boundaries, seat in the United Nations etc.), function for?
Though a cultural reference point with nostalgia for many Guyanese overseas (Guyana flag cardboard air fresheners, dares of swigging High Wine as wagers of genetic authenticity, Guyanese inflected curses in fits of anger), it’s very hard not to suggest that ‘Guyana’ materially functions for a small milieu in one way or another connected to Guyanese state power, or individuals locally allied to international capitalism. The Guyanese working class displaced and sprinkled in the pockets of the diaspora (exiled in factories in Toronto, London, NY, other institutions, elsewhere) is quietly sophisticated enough to assimilate this without the whimper one expects from those who have lost something very precious.
Imagination is a wellspring not for conditions radiating with hope but rather despair. The island of Grenada under the hopeful revolution that brought the New Jewel Movement to power, though never escaping the envies and jealousies inherit in ‘big man’ politics described above, relied on the creation of administrative bodies responsive to social movements. In Jeffrey R. Webber’s Red October: Left Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia the powerful, vista altering role of social movements is cited through the work of Robin D.G. Kelley: “The best social movements do ‘what great poetry always does: transport us to another place, compel us to relive horrors and, more importantly, enable us to imagine a new society. We must remember that the conditions and the very existence of social movements enable participants to imagine something different, to realize that things need not always be this way’.”
For the New Jewel Movement and Grenadian Prime Minister Maurice Bishop (1979-1983), certain material realities could be altered using a combination of righteous anger by citizens as well as the steering of the seemingly non-existent and pathetic resources available to the Grenadian state, back towards the public. The building of its airport in collaboration with European firms is proof of a pride in authorship and openness to collaboration. Though romanticism and outrage are necessary ingredients, intuitive thinking as well as improvisation and institution building were also central to protect the gains of the revolution. This was all the more necessary in similarly hopeless conditions of nutmeg monoculture, poverty, international humiliation, microstate status and obscurity. Bureaucratic praxis therefore can (and has) been infused with a revolutionary or activist focus that has at its best, created improvement in living standards and at its worst, still concretized collective respect and dignity.
A couple of months ago the Guyanese Attorney General was heard in a recording soliciting a female for his relative and lauding his thoroughbred Indian roots and Vedic-Hindu, Kshatriya status. Across the Atlantic in Italy, media mogul turned President Silvio Berlusconi was charged with sexual offences against underage women and in Canada, only a short time ago, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford made international headlines for being a crack-cocaine user. There is definite room for a standard. All instances (and even the plenitude that are unreported) suggest the elements attached to excess in political power for its own sake as well as a jouissance in corruption and being corrupted. More importantly there is a shadowy nihilism when there is no mandate to serve the public as the highest possible good. Reimagining civic participation as well as the morality achievable in participating in bureaucracy or the state, is crucial, not just for ourselves but for others.
