Cultural contempt in Guyana: The evolution and climax of class structure
Kaieteur News – What follows below is almost an unforgivable truncation of a class analysis of pre-colonial and post-Independence class structure of this country. The analysis cannot be compressed in a newspaper column though I am not restricted by editorial edict on number of words.
The March 2020 election in Guyana proved the critics of Karl Marx right. No detractor of Marx has been more relentless than British philosopher, Sir Karl Popper, in his two-volume magnum opus – “The Open Society and its Enemies.” Popper contradicted Marx on the issue of the dialectical struggle among opposing classes. He argued people’s consciousness inculcate other values than class loyalties. One of those values is ethnic loyalty. If Popper was alive and saw how classes reacted to the March 2020 election rigging, he would have said, “I’m not surprised.”
In the struggle for Independence, the middle class in the less developed Third World countries, like the CARICOM area and the bourgeois class in the developed Third World like Indonesia, India, etc., were the protagonists. The bourgeoisie had status, resources and intellectual acumen to lead the struggle. The workers provided the numbers and the trade unions strategic support.
In the British West Indies, Guyana became a more complex polity than even Trinidad because of the largeness of the East Indian population and the fact that this population had overt mass-based leadership. The struggle against colonialism in British Guiana was essentially a Mullato/Creole middle class movement. Those elites felt that they were the logical inheritors of power when the British were ready to leave because they were the descendants of the house slave stratum (a 1971 book on the West Indies, “Consequences of Class and Colour” remains seminal reading on this era).
A complication arose because the leadership of the Mullato middle class needed the physical presence of a large workforce. Indians occupied a strategic place in the economy – the sugar industry. The solution was a covenant between the Mullato middle class and the political party organising for the rural peasantry and rural working class under Dr. and Mrs. Jagan. This took the form of the Jagan/Burnham covenant.
The British removal of the Jagan/Burnham government in 1953 led to a formidable contest for power separately by the Mullato middle class and the majority Indian masses. The Portuguese petty bourgeoisie under the leadership of entrepreneur, Peter D’Aguair, aligned with the White dominated Catholic Church sought the extirpation of any attempt of Indians to assume State power.
The Indian masses then had four penetrating class enemies – the Creole middle class, the urban African proletariat, the Portuguese petty bourgeois and the British colonial office. In 1964 through systematic destruction of lives and property, the PPP and the majority rule of Indians were guillotined.
More complication arose, this time in the 1970s. The leadership of the urban proletariat, the PNC, gravitated towards state capitalism and began to encroach on the cultural hegemony the Creole class enjoyed in British Guiana. This resilient class then founded a middle class movement to topple President Burnham – the Working People Alliance (WPA). The Mullato/Creole class has serious cultural and class contempt for Indians. An alliance with an Indian party to remove the PNC was out of the question since the urban elites fear Indians could secure state power. The better bet was an African led party whose leadership consisted of majority of middle class people.
More complications came. The dialectics of world politics catapulted Indians in power in 1992 under the PPP. As a reaction to this, the Creole middle class planned a two-prong attack on Indian state power. It birthed another middle class movement – the Alliance For change (AFC) – as it did in the 1970s with the WPA. The AFC and the WPA merged with the Black traditional party the PNC in the 21st century and eventually claimed state power in 2015.
Now in power, the Mullato/Creole class could not manage the state. The only instinct they had was stopping a “cultural inferior” race from controlling state power – Indians. They attempted to rig the 2020 election for five consecutive months. Here is the predictable part. The tempestuous, irrational, emotional embrace for rigging was just as graphic inside the two middle class parties –WPA and AFC as was inside the PNC but for different reason.
The PNC, an essentially working class-oriented outfit, wanted state power for the sake of power. The AFC and WPA wanted the removal of the Indian party for reasons of deep, cultural contempt. This explains why middle class Guyanese society in Guyana and in the diaspora over five months supported the rigging or stayed silent. We have reached the end of history in Guyana as Francis ***uyama puts it. The Creole class and their two parties are dead.
