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.
I refuse to fall into the “race” trap of Guyanese politics because of the devastation it has wrought in every aspect of the country’s institutional order and in the understandings, values, and attitudes of the people. I prefer to look for alternative and more rational explanations for party political support and for government policy and practice, both hidden behind race’s illusion. This is not to deny that race pervades our consciousness of self and is a driving force in our behaviour, attitudes, and understandings. However, race is explained by social scientists to be “socially constructed”, meaning it is a product of historical practices and processes of colonial forms of domination and exploitation that serve the interests of the powerful by hiding the true conditions of the lives that we live and by justifying the way our society is ordered. It is in this sense that it is a delusion.
As the modern form of political and economic organization, urban bias systematically destroyed self-sustaining peasant forms of subsistence organized around the production of multiple crops in time (intercropping) and over time (multicropping). Scholars like Michael Lipton attribute it to the “coexistence” of poverty and the modern political, social, and economic order. It relies for its functioning on the development of a transitional middle strata of petite bourgeois managerial, professional, technical, and highly skilled salaried workers, and owners of small businesses and real estate located primarily in urban and semi-urban centers, and dependence on proletarian wage labour. The conversion of traditional peasant production into commercial and industrial farming ensured its reproduction in rural areas. Urban bias has been the primary cause of modern poverty, inequality, and immiseration that precipitated anti-capitalist and anti-colonial mobilization and challenge in Europe and the Global South. Western Europe responded to such challenges by implementing socialist policies of public ownership and control of the “commanding heights” of the economy. This was not countenanced in Europe’s colonies, where the label of “communism,” became transformed into a metonym for Stalinist repressive totalitarianism, justifying campaigns of violent repression against socialism’s advocates in the Global South. The formation of the nationalist People’s Progressive Party in Guyana was influenced by these European forms and by the latter’s rooting in labour mobilization. A division of union organization along the axis that divided agricultural and non-agricultural labour added another tool to strategies of colonial intervention against radical anti-colonialism in Guyana by reinforcing racial difference and its representations and understandings. Charges of communism and racial interpretations of this division fueled colonial machinations that successfully fractured the nationalist movement into competing factions. Leaders opted for protection of the particular and specific interests of their support base that were firmly inscribed in colonial forms of urban bias. Representatives of the predominantly Afro-Creole urban-based workers joined a United Democratic Party (UDP) to form the People’s National Congress, providing the petit bourgeois middle strata supporters of the latter with strategic popular support that secured their preeminent influence over the policies and practice of governance. Nationalist leaders of plantation workers provided unshakeable support for preservation of the sugar industry and for a “kulak” class of small and medium sized commercial rice farmers and miller. Both were central to policies enacted by these leaders while heading a “limited self-government” between 1957-64. They reinforced the dependence of agricultural labor on sugar production while increasing the numbers and influence of the group of commercial rice producers. Their control of governance propelled many of their rural supporters into the middle strata and into non-agricultural proletarian labour. As a constitutive form of urban bias, this laid the groundwork for an emergent pattern of ambivalent support for the two major parties by these rural to urban migrants.
Representations as “Indian” and “communist” combined to fuel a violent revolt against the PPP by supporters of the PNC and an emergent United Force (UF) party representing the entrepreneurial and professional elite. Great Britain and the United States used the accompanying political violence and social and economic turmoil (which they instigated) as excuses to secure commitment by the PPP government to constitutional changes that guaranteed its replacement by a coalition of the PNC and the UF. The coalition used its governing authority over a now independent country to consolidate and strengthen processes of urban bias by solidifying middle class authority. It faced no discernible challenge from the rural agricultural sector. The latter’s integral insertion into these processes foreclosed any meaningful rejection. The decision by the PNC government to nationalize the assets of the sugar and bauxite industries, their marketing and commercial enterprises, and foreign banking enterprises changed this calculus. It was made out of the need to finance the massive patronage demands of the middle strata and the party’s predominantly urban working-class supporters by transferring the exported earnings of these enterprise into the national coffers. Interpreted as a direct attack on international capital, this provoked a U.S.-led bilateral and multilateral campaign of retaliatory sanctions and economic isolation. The ensuing precipitous declines in foreign exchange earnings significantly eroded the material foundations of urban bias, jeopardizing the interests of the middle strata while deepening even further working-class impoverishment. This changed the calculus of generalized accommodation by mobilizing opposition to PNC rule organized around a Patriotic Coalition for Democracy (PCD) formed by groups representing different sectors of society. To stem the tide of the crisis, the regime agreed to a “structural adjustment” program designed and managed by multilateral and bilateral financial institutions centered in the United States. These programs were designed to insert countries of the Global South into a new form of globalized neoliberal capitalism. Calls for “free and fair” elections by the PCD help-ed cast the majoritarian dice in favour of the PPP, posing a direct threat to PNC’s control of governance through electoral fraud. The PPP’S control of governance was restored in 1992, predicated upon commitments by party leaders to the new neoliberal agenda and their renunciation of the very anti-imperialist ideology upon which the party was founded. Democracy became “disciplined” by the forces of urban bias and by international capital that conditioned its processes and practices. As the arbiters of power, these forces combined to protect the PPP’s victory and its claim to governance on the grounds of protecting democracy.
There are “Third World” (meaning tri-continental) alternatives to the Western European form of socialism. Some of these inspired leaders of the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa (ASCRIA) who used their positions in the PNC administration (before they split with the party) to introduce a program of peasant production, universally displaced by urban bias, to feed, clothe, and house the country through local resources. It was an attempt to hone a Tanzanian cooperative variant of forms of “Third World socialism” that were being adopted by radical governments in the tri-continental (meaning Asia, Africa, Latin-America/Caribbean, and the Middle East) Global South. The attempt quickly fell victim to urban bias after the party’s middle-class supporters used the program to establish small and medium-sized urban businesses, many of which failed, and to acquire land in rural villages, which they quickly transformed into suburban dormitory enclaves.
Third world socialism has succumbed to the inexorable forces of neoliberal globalization despite past histories of success in stemming the juggernaut of urban bias. China, Viet Nam, and for a very short period, Grenada provide examples of its vulnerability. But there are current calls for reintroduction of the traditional forms that were destroyed by urban bias. These have come in the wake of existential threats posed by environmental crises and climate change. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization has been a major advocate for such reintroduction. It has concluded that modern form of production, predicated by urban bias, has been the major driver of conflict, climate change, human insecurity, malnutrition, hunger, and inequality. Guyana needs to heed these calls. The country is well positioned to use modified forms of “debt for environment” swaps that forgave foreign debt accrued by countries in the Global South in exchange for environmental preservation. Financial transfers equivalent to projected revenues from anticipated commodity exports and mineral extraction can be easily negotiated by Guyana’s leaders in exchange for preservation and protection of its ecosystem that occupies a significant portion of a Guiana Shield Precambrian formation located in northeastern South America. The “Shield” has been described as the last best hope for human survival. Its diverse ecosystem and its absorptive capacity function as “the lungs of the world.” This is certainly preferable to the historical commitment by both parties to a colonial-like dependence upon earnings from the export of timber, gold, and crude and upon rapidly declining sugar and bauxite revenues. This can provide the basis for transformation to self-sufficient sustainable forms of domestic production while guaranteeing continued inflows of foreign exchange. For those who reject such a proposal on the grounds of its financial impracticality, here are some pertinent facts. The most optimistic revenue projections from oil are calculated to be $U.S.10 billion annually, amounting to U.S.$100 billion over the next 10 years. This compares with an annual military expenditure by the United States of U.S.$800 billion. The cost of that country’s so called global war on terror is estimated to be U.S.$8 trillion and growing. The country’s congress has appropriated more than $112 billion to support the year-long the war in Ukraine. Perhaps the U.S. government might consider diverting some of these investments in global violence, that are pitted primarily against people of the Global South, to save humankind from the catastrophe that is sure to come if alternatives to global bias are not pursued. And perhaps that country’s leaders can be forced to do so by global forces engaged in efforts to restore traditional forms of production destroyed by urban bias. Or perhaps, the global community can conscript the deployment of the tremendous power of the United States to this project of transformation. The government of Guyana should consider joining these efforts rather than pursuing a path of human self-destruction. Perhaps we Guyanese are too blinded by our insertion into its practices and processes of urban bias to contemplate such possibility. Just saying!!