The Sunday Stabroek’s editorial last Sunday, “Democratic values,” stated: “A more predictable viewpoint which he [Cheddi Jagan] never relinquished was that class in Guyana was more important than race, a somewhat tenuous assumption at best and plain inaccurate at worst.” In a letter in the same edition, Dr. Baytoram Ramharak writes: “Despite its obvious urgency, the PPP/C leadership will not willingly move to create an inclusive security and defence force for two reasons. One, Cheddi Jagan bequeathed the PPP/C with an original political sin, namely that politics in Guyana must be understood through the lens of class analysis, despite the primacy of race/ethnicity. This embedded Marxist paradigm reinforces the view that as the economy develops its trickled down effect will render ethnic politics obsolete. So why bother to frontally address the problem?”
These criticisms of Cheddi Jagan’s views, flourishing for years among Indian Guyanese commentators, and now adopted by a mainstream media, appear to contradict writings of Karl Marx’s on race and class. Since my knowledge of Jagan’s extensive writings and of Marx’s voluminous studies are limited, I made some investigations.
I will first deal with Marx and his views on race, ethnicity and class. In “Marx’s intertwining of race and class during the Civil War in the United States” (Kevin B. Anderson 2017) it is stated: “Marx wrote extensively on race and class in the American Civil War. These writings… argue that capitalism was grounded in slavery and that racism attenuated class consciousness among workers from dominant racial groups.” Anderson quotes Marx’s Capital: “In the United States of America, every independent workers’ movement was paralysed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic.” Outside of the context of slavery Marx wrote in January 1870 (Anderson) about the profound antagonism between the English proletariat and the Irish proletariat. “This antagonism…is artificially nourished and kept up by the bourgeoisie. It knows that this split is the true secret of the preservation of its power.” These brief passages, and there are more, contradict the “Marxist paradigm” to which Dr. Ramharak referred. Marx clearly believed that racial and ethnic unity were imperative for the class struggle to succeed.
Writing in the West on Trial, Jagan referred to the PPP’s proposal in August 1977 for a National Patriotic Front and a National Patriotic Front Government as a “winner does not take all” system. He was conscious of the “feeling of ethnic security and fear of racial domination.” The proposals were advanced because the PPP by then believed that “there will be no solution to the economic and social crisis without a solution to the political crisis.” By 1978, the struggle against the referendum was leading to trade union unity, civil society unity and opposition political unity. Of this period, Jagan remarked: “There is growing working class and, what is equally important, racial unity.” It is difficult to comprehend that when Jagan was speaking continuously in the 1970s and 1980s, about ‘working class unity,’ ‘winner does not take all,’ ‘shared governance’ in conditions where the working class was divided, that he was promoting class over race, as alleged. It is now time to dump these myths about Marx and Jagan. They have persisted for too long.
Generations have passed by since the PAC’s ‘scientific socialism’ of 1947, Cheddi Jagan’s presence at the conference of communist and workers parties in Moscow in 1969 and the adoption of the PPP’s Marxist-Leninist Constitution in 1977.
The collapse of the USSR and the communist world transformed the globe politically, economically and ideologically. In government from 1992, economic development rather than ideology took precedence for the PPP. After the passing of Jagan in 1997, the emerging new leadership completely discarded Marxism-Leninism as guiding principles for the PPP. The only conclusion that can be drawn from the persistence of the views above, despite developments since 1989, is that President Irfaan Ali and VP Bharrat Jagdeo are closet Marxists who, because of the importance of class over race, have taken no steps to balance the security forces! Really?
Today, and going back to 1957, the PPP’s governments have followed a left, progressive, social democratic course. This current political/governmental programme, broadly reflects the “Principles and Bases of the Political, Economic and Social System” of the Constitution, and should define the PPP’s ideology, instead of a formula written in its Constitution. Like the version of 1950s PPP, the current one should continue to embrace the left/progressive/social democratic political spectrum and encourage a broad tent of inclusive views, although with the pending departure of the ‘old guard,’ the era of Marxist influence within the PPP has come to an end.
The baffling question is: What is the meaning of Jagan’s decades long appeals for the ‘unity of the working class,’ in the context of Guyana’s ‘racial’ division, if not an appeal for ‘racial’ unity?
Another baffling omission is the failure of the PPP since 1992 to seek a ‘political solution’ to eliminate the drive for ethno-political dominance, having regard to its prior calls for ‘winner does not take all’ and ‘shared governance,’ even as the intensity of ‘race’ in politics is now increasing, to the detriment of the PPP, in and out of Guyana.
This column is reproduced, with permission, from Ralph Ramkarran’s blog, www.conversationtree.gy
