When the government created the Ministry of Social Cohesion it placed ethnic conflict, the easing of which is contingent upon the behaviour of its mortal political enemy, the People’s Progressive Party, at the centre of its agenda, and some would say that in our circumstances failure is the default mode of any such enterprise. But realism aside, once this dependence is recognised, the government has to be very careful how it proceeds if there is to be the slightest chance of success.
Social cohesion entails our having ‘a common vision and a sense of belonging for all communities; the diversity of people’s different backgrounds and circumstances are appreciated and positively valued; those from different backgrounds have similar life opportunities; and strong and positive relationships are being developed between people from different backgrounds in the workplace, in schools and within neighbourhoods’ (Cantle, T. (2005) Community Cohesion: A New Framework for Race and Diversity. Palgrave MacMillan).
Social cohesion can be related to race, ethnicity, social class, religion, urban and rural disparities, etc. But I agree with the Guyana Chronicle editorial’s response to the minister of social cohesion’s suggestion that her ministry will be dealing with more than our ethnic problem. “While we welcome this broad conceptualization”, the editor stated, “we feel that special emphasis has to be placed on ethnic cohesion. … While ethnicity is not our only problem, to downplay its salience would be tragic. … The biggest obstacle to a national compact is the endemic ethnic and socio-economic inequality that exists in our country. That has to be tackled head on.”
When President David Granger, in his presentation at the wreath-laying ceremony to commemorate the 31st anniversary of the death of the late leader of the PNC, Forbes Burnham, claimed that the late president was the author of social cohesion and architect of national unity, he was being somewhat careless and was immediately pounced upon by those who hold that if anything ‘Mr. Burnham trampled on social cohesion, national unity’ (SN 09/08/2016).
The president was following the biased historiography of the PNC and some of those who sought to take him to task were similarly following the partial narrative of the PPP that claims that Burnham and the PNC were the architects of the disorder and chaos and, therefore, it took no effort on their part to end it.
In fairness, if a case can be made for Burnham an even better one can be made for Cheddi Jagan being the architect of national unity. After all, his Marxists/Leninist worldview would not have disregarded the need for national unity/social cohesion and it was Jagan’s effort to unite and have a socially cohesive working class in Guyana that sent him in search of an African to help him achieve this task, and so facilitated the entrance of Forbes Burnham into national politics.
The struggle of partial narratives only exacerbates conflicts: matters are much more complicated than the propagandists of the PPP and PNC would have us believe. I have already given my position on the activities of those two parties in the immediate pre-independence period (The PPP’s narrative needs major revision’ SN 22/04/15) and I will not be arguing here about who was or was not the architect/originator of attempts at national unity/social cohesion. I will be locating the president’s contention elsewhere to establish that Forbes Burnham and the PNC had a quite comprehensive appreciation of the need for national unity and the factors necessary for achieving it, that might prove useful even today.
The PNC’s approach to national unity and social cohesion was embedded in its ideological commitment to socialism and co-operation and before looking at some concrete interventions next week, I believe that an holistic appreciation requires some understanding of how strategic elements in the PNC viewed the ideological relationship between socialism and co-operation.
Speaking to his party congress in 1970, Hubert Oliver Jack, minister without portfolio and chief political ideologue of the PNC, extolled: ‘If we are to strengthen our party and to enhance the ideological content of the Co-operative Republic then it is necessary for us to examine the question in depth and to come up with answers leading to a positive programme for the acceleration of national unity in our land. The co-operative can be a vehicle for national and social cohesion in our country. It can create co-operation in place of competition between the two main races in this country’ (Policies for the New Co-operative Republic, Daily Chronicle Ltd).
The PNC hierarchy’s attachment to co-operatives was not simply mechanical. Quite the contrary, they attempted to lodge it in Marxist/Leninist utopianism and it suffered a similar spectacular demise. Thus Hubert Jack told us: ‘The socialists in Russia long ago realised that if socialism was to survive it was necessary that there be created a new man, a man with a new set of values. Similarly, we must recognise that for the Cooperative Republic to be a success, we must create a man imbued with the spirit of co-operation, of self-help, of industry and above all (of) self-reliance. If we do not do this, all we will achieve is the promotion of a host of small capitalist parading as cooperators’ (Ibid).
To the contention that co-operatives are prone to oligarchic control, he responded that oligarchies only occurred in co-operatives in capitalist countries because they exist in an atmosphere of domination and subordination where democracy has little premium. ‘[C]ooperative democracy cannot flourish or even survive under capitalism where gain and greed [are the dominant tendencies]’ (Ibid).
On the ideological front, Forbes Burnham played more to the economics and equality inherent in notions of socialism. He argued that Guyana will have to be developed by Guyanese but in a context in which “the small man’s economic power must be in direct proportion to his political power. … The cooperative has been chosen because structurally it lends itself to organizing the small man in groups for economic purposes [and it is also democratic]” (Ibid).
Of course, contrary to Mr. Jack we now know that the stranglehold of oligarchy is no respecter of ideology and the Soviet Union/Russia became a leading example of this both before and after the fall of communism. Furthermore, the Marxist project was not to create new men but to foster social and economic conditions wherein the activities of self-interested man would play out and grow more humanely. Man by nature seeks to protect and improve his condition and particularly in situations of scarcity any attempt to inorganically curtail this self-interestedness must and did end in the Soviet Union, in the proliferation of gulags and in Guyana in ‘a host of small capitalists parading as cooperators’.
