Sunday’s announcement that the PPP’s 32nd Congress had taken a decision to erase Marxism-Leninism and Socialism from its Constitution is epochal in several ways.
It brings to a formal end the long tryst with leftism that defined and at the same time dogged the PPP since its founding in 1950. Nothing in its history up to 1992 could eclipse the repercussions from its doctrinaire and slavish adherence to the tenets of Marxism under the Jagans and the list is long and painful. The suspension of the constitution in 1953 and the dispatch of British troops to the colony, the Kaldor budget and the racial disturbances of 1962, the Anglo-American interference and destabilisation of political life in that period, the slowing of progress towards independence, the imposition of proportional representation for the 1964 elections, the non-invitation to the PPP to form a government that year and the rigged elections that then kept it out of office from 1968 to 1992 until the end of the Cold War. Disputation will no doubt continue on the historical facts but there can be no gainsaying that the PPP’s Marxism-Leninism fed deeply into the Western view that another Cuba could not be tolerated in this hemisphere and that Dr Cheddi Jagan had to be kept out of office at all cost.
Defenestration of its founding ideology on Sunday in one fell swoop seemed anti-climatic, aseptic and dictated. One would have thought that such weighty change would have benefited from deeper exchanges akin to the national consultations on reform of the Guyana Constitution that the majority PPP/C government has embarked on.
Rather interestingly, based on an account in a letter in yesterday’s Stabroek News by long-serving party executive and former General Secretary Clement Rohee, the proposal for the expungement of the `isms’ came from the Leonora Party Group. This is the part of the West Demerara that President Ali calls home and would perforce have carried his weight at the point of debate.
Speaking at the post-congress press briefing on May 5th, PPP General Secretary Bharrat Jagdeo emphasized that while the ideologies were struck from the constitution, the party remained committed to its founding principles, political philosophy, core values, history, struggles and achievements.
“The party’s strategic objective is to create a fair and equitable society. This objective will find expression in the establishment of a national democratic state, which is already in our Constitution, that will embrace political and ideological pluralism”, Mr Jagdeo said.
It, of course, glosses over the fact that the PPP of the Jagans – and the rapidly diminishing number of Jaganites – would not have easily brooked such fundamental changes to the constitution as the Section K Campbellville PPP Group found out to its chagrin and a raking over the coals two decades ago.
Sunday therefore marks another momentous development – the demarcation of the party’s history between the Jagan PPP and the Jagdeo PPP. Not that the line had not been marked out long before. Ever since his rise to the presidency in 1999, Mr Jagdeo had long pushed for recognition in the pantheon of PPP leaders and in the years that followed there has been a clear campaign to install him as primus inter pares.
After not having the opportunity to run for a third term in office, Mr Jagdeo settled for the next best thing: the anointing of his successors and now – in his close partnership with President Ali – an influential role as Vice President with policy control over the oil and gas sector while consolidating his hold on the party. He was duly returned as General Secretary at the first meeting of the new Central Committee last week.
Ideology aside, the Jagan PPP and the Jagdeo PPP are two entirely different machines. One was genuinely committed to the working class – moved by the plight of the labouring masses and the killing of sugar workers in 1947 – and fought tooth and nail for it. The Jagdeo PPP is wedded to the petit bourgeois and the cohort of the established business class who are keen to align with the party so that they can feast on the massive public works contracts that are available.
It would not be a stretch to say that the Jagans would today be astonished as to the manner in which oil revenues – something the late President Janet Jagan could well take credit for as she signed the original ExxonMobil deal – have been apportioned considering the continuing poverty levels in the country and the failure thus far of the Ali administration to provide succour to the deeply impoverished in a structured manner.
The current ideology-less PPP faces grave risks as a result. Runaway corruption as embodied in the assigning of pump station contracts to persons who have never built a proper pavement exemplifies the risks to the country’s revenues and to its standing in the anti-corruption and anti-money laundering firmament. It is a risk that President Ali and the Attorney General’s Chambers would do well to heed.
Mr Jagdeo interestingly signalled the retaining of the Marxist democratic centralism as a method of organization, contending that it promotes robust debate while ensuring compliance with majority decisions.
“So, we’ve defined what we mean by democratic centralism. It’s not something to hold people in bondage… we have defined it as majority rule. Of course, there are several other recommendations. Where, in our Constitution, it said that we had to teach every one of our members the principles of Marxism-Leninism, we’ve replaced that with our party’s founding principles, political philosophy, core values, history, struggles, and achievement. We want our members to know about that. So, we replace teaching our members Marxism-Leninism, which is an alien concept,” he stated. His reference to majority rule is rather revealing.
Democratic centralism clearly remains a tool of choice in dampening debate and exercising control within the party.
The jettisoning of Marxism also ends many internal contradictions in the PPP. Try as it might, ideology, dialectics and class analysis could not supervene the racial divide that had long cleft the country particularly since the split of the PPP into the Jagan and Burnham factions. That cleavage persists today and could potentially be open now to a different type of examination.
The most insuperable paradox for the PPP however was its fight for democracy in Guyana while Communist allies in Cuba, the Soviet Union and China engaged in repression of people and did not hold free elections. The crushing by Soviet troops of uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the failed attempt in the 1980s to stifle the Solidarity movement in Poland stand out.
The 32nd Congress has consolidated Mr Jagdeo’s grip on the PPP. His legacy and whether the party can avoid becoming subsumed by corruption and poor governance are yet to be determined.
