Dear Editor,
The decision by the PPP at its 32nd Congress to remove all references of Marxism-Leninism from its Constitution is timely and strategic. It is an established fact that the Party had been a victim of the Cold War multiple times during the immediate pre- and post-independence period due mainly to its perceived embrace of the Marxist-Leninist ideology. Indeed, the PPP was denied an opportunity to take the country into independence precisely for that reason, despite an earlier commitment by Britain to confer independence status to whichever party won the 1961 elections. As it turned out, independence was withheld until the PPP was engineered out of office in the 1964 elections, in what former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson described as ‘a fiddled constitutional arrangement’. The PNC-UF coalition was catapulted into office with Forbes Burnham as Prime Minister and Peter D’Aguiar as Finance Minister. The rest is now history.
The global environment has changed since the collapse of the USSR in the late 1980’s and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Cold War for all practical purposes has ended. It is imperative therefore for the PPP, as the largest political party in Guyana, to re-strategize and align its political strategy to accommodate this new and changing dispensation. This is not to suggest, as pointed out by the Party’s General Secretary, Bharrat Jagdeo, that the PPP has abandoned its working class and pro-poor orientation. Socialism, at the conceptual level, still holds out the promise of a society in which there is economic and social justice for all and an end of exploitation of man by man. However, at this conjuncture in time it remains at best a theoretical construct, the full realization of which may not be possible in the foreseeable future.
Sincerely,
Hydar Ally
