It is generally accepted that the Enmore Martyrs though not as fatally devastating as earlier 19th and 20th century shootings of estate proletariat in this South American (former) colony, served as a major ‘catalyst.’

The shootings in cold blood of the five cane harvesters triggered the forging of class awareness and solidarity, across the coastal belt from Crabwood Creek in East Berbice to Parika and Hubu along the West Demerara/Essequibo Island chain. (Mangar Tota Misir Prem and Rodney W.A).

In talks made to groups of grass roots elements along the Mon Repos/Lusignan communities, Walter Rodney noted that Enmore of June 1948 was amongst the first post WWII industrial conflicts that had exposed and severely put to the test the ‘hegemony’ of absentee plantocracy, namely Bookers and the interlocking interests of sugar producing monopolists, who controlled the sugar industry, shipping and the export of all production deemed as ‘derivative’ from molasses reproduction and its ‘factorisation’.

However it was Dr Jagan who had previously linked the atrocious living and working conditions, the notorious betrayals of the company union – The Manpower Citizens Association (MPCA), as well as the ‘cut and load’ stipulation introduced as part of management objective to extract greater surplus value from the workers, with the broader oppression of the working people in the colony. Dr Jagan systematically narrated, based on his first-hand experience of the sugar industry that at that time sugar workers lived in the logies that were formerly inhabited by the African slaves up until 1938 and possibly sometime afterwards.

In several articles published in the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) Mirror newspaper, there were descriptions of the internal aspects of sugar estate labour on a regular day to day and routine basis. The arrogance and contemptuous attitude of estate managers as well as the intensified militancy of both sugar and non-sugar workers, were additionally placed in social perspective by the PPP leadership.

The formation of the PPP less than two years after June 1948 could be considered as the ‘legitimisation’ of a ‘division of labour’ that united workers, especially estate, tradesmen and ‘hinterland’ labour with traditional small and medium scale agriculturalists. In fact the Political Affairs Committee (PAC) within that transformative process (Jagan West on Trial and Chase, lecture PAC anniversary 1996) retained a substantial trade unionist profile even as the political institution subsumed PAC activism.

A Marxist evaluation would grasp a similar dialectic within the eastern Caribbean where in Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados (according to Susan Craig and Trevor Munroe) powerful Trade Unions either transformed into political parties, or became the labour arms of an independence movement, albeit with the collaboration of either the British Trade Union Congress (TUC Gt. Britain), the United States Trade Union Federation (AFLD) or in the case of the Outre-Mer French territories that remain ruled by the French ruling elite, the Conferation Generale Travalleurs (or CGT).

In political Africa where both political organisations and Trade Unions were banned in many countries, there were historical exceptions in Ghana, Nigeria, Congo Brazzaville. Uganda and Tunisia also Egypt and not dissimilar transitions ensued after the end of WWII (see Rodney. W, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa 1971 and 1974).

The PPP however always sought to preserve and maintain the militant legacy as well as the moral high ground represented by the courage of the Enmore Five. This over the decades and up until the present time, has served to sustain the integrity and resourcefulness of the Guyana Agricultural and General Workers Union (GAWU) and elevate that workers organisation into one of the most respected industrial unions functioning in the western hemisphere.

GAWU maintains at the international level associations with Caribbean, European, Latin American, United States and African Trade Unions that are direct reflections of the militancy demonstrated by the five murdered Enmore sugar labourers. During the protracted struggle for the right of the workers to choose a union of their own through a freely conducted poll in the given sector, the GAWU gained union recognition in 1976 some 28 years almost after the Enmore massacre. But this process carried with it other dimensions including the Reformist Workers Movement in the former Soviet Socialist Republic – namely the USSR, Hungary, the Czech Republic, East Germany and Beijing China, The Republic of Socialist Vietnam, Bulgaria, Poland, Cuba and Nicaragua.

In almost all of these territories powerful workers federations were involved in the process of achieving national liberation, or engaging in the Great Patriotic War (for example anti Hitler fascism) or in the experience of Cuba, leading in the fight against the economic embargo imposed by United states imperialism and its allies. Several of these unions are advanced ‘associates’ of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), and support progressive or workers/peasants governments. These are unions that engage also with ‘intellectual workers’ and workers in the field of science and technology (not exclusively factory or assembly line, or oilfield, mining workers).

Then there has been ‘strategic’ trends brought about by the historical factors that determine proletarian formations in countries such as those in the Balkans (Greece, Yugoslavia and Albania) and the specific direction that the given political class chose at critical junctures during the Cold War and the destabilisation of the socialist/state capitalist structures in Eastern Europe. The Gdansk Movement of shipyard workers in Poland fuelled by anti-Soviet, anti-socialist channelling of funds, developed into the solidarity 66 (or 68) organisation led by Lech Walesa.

Solidarity became a mass movement and a political party coalition that went on to win as well as eventually lose political power as the Cold War ended. All of these are critical experiences that have emerged from the international working class movement and the struggle for empowerment.

Once can either recognise the relevance or relegate the traits to being of lesser or even no significance, as for example those who babble and pontificate about ‘forgetting the past and moving on’.

In conclusion the legacy of Enmore has imprinted upon the way female workers (then predominantly in the Weeding Gang) in the estate structure, came to be regarded by their male counterparts outside of the workplace.

The ‘feminisation’ of labour internationally, the process of gender empowerment as well as the ‘backward’ and reactionary notions of women comprising as male property in both urban and rural situations has also had an impact upon the way the PPP has mobilised over the decades in the struggle for National Democracy.