Dear Editor,
The 32nd Congress of the PPP has come and gone. Constitutionally, the Congress should have been held in 2019 but COVID and other matters of national interest prevented the holding of the event. There were two important highlights at congress, first was the presentation of the Central Committee Report; the second was a resolution from the Leonora Party Group that proved historical. It exhorted delegates to expunge all references to ‘Marxism-Leninism’, a ‘socialist Guy-ana,’ a ‘socialist society’ and ‘socialism’ from the Party constitution. Notice was given at the 31st Party congress held in 2016, and in the years that followed that the time had come to expunge the “isms” from the constitution of the Party. It was not surprising, therefore, that on the eve of the 32nd congress, a formal resolution from a basic unit of the Party emerged. It sought to bring to an end, to the interminable debate, exclusively at the leadership level about the relevance and application of the ‘isms’ in general and Marxism-Leninism and socialism in particular to present-day Guyanese reality.
Without any resolution or unanimous conclusion during an exchange of views on the subject, the Party’s Central Committee, agreed to put the draft resolution to congress for consideration with the expectation that its passage will bring closure to the matter. Notwithstanding, a brief back and forth arose due to some interventions from the floor drawing attention to misgivings about the resolution, delegates agreed to the proposed constitutional amendments and the resolution was passed. While some political parties who once had references to socialism and Marxism-Leninism in their political lexicon but have since expunged it, resulting in splits or break-away factions or expulsions in some cases, there continues to be debates, writings, publications of books and teachings at institutions of higher learning about the relevance of 19th century economic and social scientific thinking of Marx in the 21st century. Guyana will be no exception. People who are in the business of reading widely are likely to butt heads with Marx at some point in time.
While Guyana’s ideological landscape appears scorched at this historical juncture, and with an unknown number of ideologues who count themselves as Marxists, it should be borne in mind that ideology became a material force during the colonial era in British Guiana. It was that force, influenced primarily by the introduction of Marxist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist thinking of overseas trained Guyanese including Cheddi Jagan, Forbes Burnham, Jocelyn Hubbard, Ashton Chase and many others that inspired the Guyanese working people to vigorously oppose the vestiges of colonial rule and to struggle for a better life that remains necessary up to today. Poverty and inequality have been with us for a long time. Neither slavery, colonialism nor industrial capitalism did away with them, and present-day finance capitalism is not reversing them either. The only thing that can reverse them is political action aimed at changing systems that seems to many people to be simply the way things have to be. The student protests in America against the war in Gaza, the protest demonstrations by European Union and Indian farmers, protest actions by doctors and nurses in Korea, the UK and Kenya attest to humanity’s desire for change.
Working peoples’ desire for change for the better is founded on the access to information, on an unimaginable scale never seen before offering socio-political alternatives to what obtains today. It is in that context we should salute Marx as the ‘founder of a discourse’ based on the enormous body of thought named after him that created the discourse that continues to this day, though a lot of the significance of his work lies in its downstream effects.
Sincerely,
Clement J. Rohee
