One of the more remarkable achievements of Bharrat Jagdeo – a political operator without domestic peer – has been his repositioning of his party away from being a champion of the working class to one that enables and aligns its policies to the aspirations and needs of the petty bourgeoisie.
While race remains dominant in Guyanese politics, the growth of this class with its unique position and interests in the past decades has made it a demographic in its own right.
Defining the petty bourgeoisie can be tricky in any country but it is generally categorised as those emerging from the working class, mostly self-employed, in the trades – electricians, contractors etc or with family-run shops – often not with any tertiary education, but materially better off than many university graduates.
Its history is complicated, dating back – at least in the Western world – to mediaeval European guilds or craftsmen who felt themselves a cut above the peasants and other labourers. With the industrial revolution and urbanisation a class of small landlords and shopkeepers emerged, both serving the working classes but also scorning them. The petty bourgeoisie is not only defined by their position in relation to capitalism but also by their consumer habits, the types of cars they drive, where they dine, or go on vacation as they attempt to distinguish themselves from the working classes.
It is this position sandwiched between the masses and the bourgeoisie that makes the petty bourgeoisie so problematic and unreliable: it can be a powerful political force for change that has at times aligned with the working class but it always stops short of any genuine revolution that would threaten their own status and privileges. That was why Lenin complained “they cannot be ousted or crushed, we must learn to live with them”.
Take France for example which is unique in having a high proportion of petit bourgeoisie, many of whom are strident and often violent in their demands. Pierre Poujade and his post World War II Poujadist movement were the first to protest against corporate globalisation while also being quite conservative in their domestic politics. We see echoes of this more recently in the Gilets Jaunes and in America with the rise of the Tea Party and Trumpism.
But the great 20th century champion of the petty bourgeoisie would be the British grocer’s daughter, Margaret Thatcher who brought about her own worldwide revolution based on an ideology of thriftiness, material individualism and social mobility over community and the common good. This could be seen in such policies which encouraged home ownership while her disdain for the working class saw her crushing the British trade union movement.
For Guyana one might imagine the typical petty bourgeoisie living in the suburbs – one of the schemes that President Ali populated while housing minister, with a couple of reconditioned cars in the driveway. Their ‘above average” children are in one of the less costly private schools; they take a holiday perhaps twice per year making sure it is well chronicled on social media. They constantly aspire for better while worrying they may tumble back down into the jaws of the proletariat.
In many ways there is some of the petty bourgeois in all of us whether we like it or not because we have been conditioned to believe that what we have – what we own – is a measure of our success and happiness as individuals.
PPP/C policies since the rise of Bharrat Jagdeo have looked to nurture this demographic and benefit electorally from its growth, and this naturally continues under the Ali administration. The party still binds itself to the bourgeois/big business class which provides it with the funds to win elections as well as important symbolic political backing in the form of moralising press releases and sycophantic praise at various gala dinners. In turn the party rewards these supporters with lucrative contracts as well as scholarships and cushy contract jobs for their children. It is a self reinforcing cycle. (Guyana is not unique at all in this regard as it is the very essence of democratic capitalism)
We know who is really losing out – the working class. Despite all its pledges, claims and blame shifting, the PPP/C and its predecessor have overseen the downgrading of GuySuCo from a company producing 300,000 tons of sugar in the early 2000s to under 50,000 last year with those workers still left, now wards of the state paid from oil revenues. It is hard not to conclude this is deliberate by Mr Jagdeo who prides himself on his management of the economy.
It has also restricted wages and salaries for public servants, teachers and nurses in part to appease private sector employers. And since the petty bourgeoisie are not in need of public healthcare and education, we have seen the gradual deterioration of those systems in part through an exodus of human resources to the private sector. Why would this be encouraged if not part of some overarching policy?
As for Guyana’s petty bourgeoisie it is politically complacent only until it affects them directly. We saw this twice in recent years with the protest over the city parking meters, and what they felt was their inalienable right to park wherever they wanted for free. It was purely a matter of self-interest and one the PPP/C nimbly used for its political advantage. The contract was subsequently terminated.
In the same period we saw the well-publicised backlash against the coalition’s application of VAT on private school tuition fees with a petition that was supposedly signed by some 14,000 people. Here again this was seen as a great hardship, the PPP/C jumped on this issue, and the VAT was quickly removed. Indeed upon coming into office in 2020 one of the first things the party did was to remove corporate taxes on private schools and hospitals.
The building of highways over public transportation systems such as light rail or even public buses also reflects the party’s prioritisation of the private vehicle owner, the suburban commuter class. The incessant housing drive is another with the gullible poor brainwashed into thinking that home ownership equates to social mobility. So they take on millions of dollars of debt for houses that are not much better than shacks in the middle of nowhere and with zero resale value.
All this points to a ruling party which has strayed far from its roots, and one senses that the recent comments by former President Donald Ramotar over the oil contract offer a glimpse of this old comrade’s larger unease. He expressed as much in 2021 saying he was no longer sure what the ideology of the party was and that “fundamentally the economy is bourgeois”.
Of course The Pragmatists, Mr Jagdeo and Presi-dent Ali, have long ago abandoned any ideology other than how to win elections. Now they probably calculate that with all the oil revenues and their trickle down economics it will result in a dwindling working class making them less of a factor.
They may be right.
