By Percy C. Hintzen
Percy C. Hintzen is a native of Guyana. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of California Berkeley and, until recently was Professor of Global and Sociocultural Studies in the School of International and Public Affairs at Florida International University.
Editor’s Note: The point is not to enter and reproduce the terms of a bankrupt conversation. It is to change that conversation altogether.
French social scientist Michel Foucault has focused his scholarship on explanations of the way the powerful convince those whom they exploit and rule to accept a system of governance that violates their fundamental interests, beliefs, and values, forecloses satisfaction of their needs, and undermines their well-being. He explains this by what he terms “the speaker’s benefit,” which represses conscious awareness of their needs and their desire to have them satisfied. These are displaced by internalized interests of the powerful and an emotional commitment to their satisfaction. The speaker’s benefit is realized through mobilization of the sentiments of the governed. In Guyana, this is accomplished by tactics employed by a multi-racial, multi-cultural political class comprising political executives, legislators, politicians, government administrators, professionals, scholars, and commentators who are local beneficiaries of the global system of human and resource exploitation. They share a consensus, forged out of notions of legality and constitutionality and commitment to representative democracy, that the country’s system of governance and politics is legitimate, necessary, and unassailable. When popular challenges emerge to its processes and practices, members of this class engage in ritualistic efforts of reform to ensure the maintenance of order, the preservation of loyalty, and the management of discontent.
Deus ex Machina is a Latin phrase that refers to an intervention, through mechanical means, of a god-like figure to stave off what would otherwise be an inevitable, inescapable, and unpreventable tragedy. Guyana’s tragedy is engendered by persistent and generalized crises resulting from systemic and fundamental violations of the right, as human beings, to sustenance and to the satisfaction of basic needs. The speaker’s benefit represses conscious awareness of its pervasive presence. Its crises are disarticulated from their source in the country’s system of governance. Established in the nineteen fifties and consolidated in the sixties, this system was organized and effectuated through the mobilization of racial animus. It was fashioned out of the cultivation of fear and hatred. It justifies the use of any means necessary, including violence, intimidation, and fraud, for an illusion of protection of abstract racial interests by preventing political representatives of other racial groups from gaining and maintaining control of the governing apparatuses of the system. The speaker’s benefit of racial politics upon which it depends is fraught with the certainty of political disorder. This needs to be contained within manageable limits. Political reform is proposed and enacted when these limits are crossed. It is a technique of intervention employed by members of the political class to mitigate its consequences.
Guyanese are trapped within this speaker’s benefit of racial politics. They live in an ossified history that is the product of the bad faith of a politics of coloniality frozen in the fifties and sixties. It is this politics that authored and orchestrated the violent fissure in the organization of the nationalist challenge to the interests of colonial power, which culminated in the mobilization of Black and East Indian racial sentiment against each other. It employs the magician’s trick of diversion of the political popular away from the apparatuses and technologies of the system of governance whose function it is to serve the interests of powerful external actors. The speaker’s benefit set the stage for the normalization and generalized acceptance of the tragedy of unbearable suffering and degradation that has forced many to flee the country to escape its consequences. Those left behind engage in survival strategies that degrade their humanity. Everyone, however well off, suffers from the forms of lack that it engenders in the material conditions of their lives, from the inadequacies in health care and health delivery and in access to treatment, from the limited and highly unequal access to education and training, from job, income, food, and nutritional insecurities, inter alia.
The idea of collective generalized racial interests serves as a distortion of popular consciousness. Do we seriously believe that the interests of the East Indian business and professional elite are congruent with the East Indian small and mid-scale farmer? Or with the East Indian laborer, or wage worker? On the other side of the “racial” divide, do we seriously believe that the interests of the black laborer, the urban and semi-urban poor, the unemployed, and those working in the “informal” sector are congruent with the “Afro-Creole” bureaucratic, professional, political, and administrative class? The East Indian and Afro-Creole elite share identical interests. Both are members of the political class that exercises authority. They work in synergistic complementarity with each other and are equally ensconced in the transnational system of power and exploitation. They use their collective authority to support and protect the interests of powerful global actors who exploit the country’s people and resources. They benefit equally from this system of exploitation, which is the source of the country’s crises and the tragedy that they engender. And both mobilize their racial supporters as the prerequisite for the system’s maintenance and perpetuation.
What is demanded for the country is not “good government” but “government that is good.” The former is measured against indices of macro-economic performance and demonstrated successes in efforts to maintain political order and stability. These demand effective and efficient management of people and resources in the service of an economic system, that, in Guyana, is organized almost exclusively for commodity extraction and export. By contrast, if a government is to be good it must guarantee the fundamental needs of people so that they can live fruitful, joyful, and satisfied lives of conviviality consistent with their diverse beliefs, values, and cultures. A government wedded to commodity exports and extraction can never realize these prerequisites of goodness. It failed to do so when Guyana was a primary exporter of sugar at a time when the latter was the “king” of commodities. It failed when the county was the primary exporter of metal grade and calcined bauxite at the time when the latter was one of the most strategic minerals in the world. It continues to fail, notwithstanding ongoing exports of its timber and gold. Now the political class is putting all its eggs into the basket of oil at a time when the use of fossil fuel is under severe challenge. Placated by the politics of race, Guyanese patiently await magical intervention by the macro-economic development gods, bearing their gifts of the prerequisite technical and professional skills and training for the production and management of oil reserves and of the latter’s anticipated windfalls.
Guyanese live their lives in diverse communities where they manage to bridge their differences in their everyday encounters—because that is the only way they can function effectively. For the government of Guyana to be “good,” it must free itself from the magic trick of the speaker’s benefit of racial politics by harnessing the conviviality of these encounters and articulations derived from joint histories forged in the crucible of their common experiences of colonization. Once the political energies of the people are freed from the tactics deployed by the political class, they can turn their attention toward systemic transformation of governance in ways that deal effectively with the real causes of the tragedy engendered by the crises that they face.
Progressive thinkers are proposing what is known as “subsidiarity,” where authority rests with those whom it affects directly, and where governance is organized for the satisfaction of the fundamental needs of people. They argue that these can be best achieved through a shift, as much as practically possible, away from “representatives” who exercise near absolute authority over national apparatuses of governance. They propose replacement of the system of national governance by forms of “participatory-democracy” organized in localized communities.
They believe that the role of government should be to develop and enhance the capacities and capabilities of people so that they can live the lives of their own choosing. For this to be accomplished there needs to be guarantees of equity in the allocation of the material conditions of human sustenance and of protection and enhancement of cultural, social, and economic rights of everyone. Transformation to participatory democracy can occur only through devolution of governance to village and city councils that have become mouribound under the current and the elimination of the fiction of regional government. While a functioning national authority is a prerequisite for participation in the current global order, its role needs to be confined to management of transnational relations and of the transfers that accrue from these relations to local communities.
Rather than electoral reform, what is demanded is a strategy for transformation to participatory democracy. Under the existing party-political system, such a transformation is foreclosed, unless its advocates and adherents organize themselves into a national political entity to satisfy the prerequisites of the country’s party-political electoral system. Once elected to the National Assembly in enough numbers, they can become transformative agents of change. To do so, they must find an alternative to the speaker’s benefit of racial politics. There is considerable cultural and social diversity and differences of beliefs and values within each of the country’s six racial groups enumerated in the official demographics of governance. Diverse voices within and among these groups are silenced by the politics of race. These voices must be harnessed and mobilized to replace the distorting narratives of race. The indigenous “First People” can offer salvation because of their refusal, by and large, to succumb to the ruses of European violent commandment to which everyone else seems to be wedded. Challenges, replicated in Guyana by groups such as Red Thread, are being mounted against transnational neoliberal capitalism by the global women’s movement. A global environmental movement is posing similar challenges with similar resonances in Guyana. Collectively, these might become the deus ex machina that ends the tragedy of Guyana. They may be able to stimulate the requisite popular support for transition to participatory democracy organized around the principles of subsidiarity.