BY RUEL COOKE Contributor

In my last contribution to this the only independent newspaper since Public Opinion with an overtly progressive agenda, I was at pains to point out that political garrisons were an inevitable by-product of political clientilism and indeed were necessary for the preservation of the prevailing economic and social order. This was reinforced by Professor Rupert Lewis in a recent public lecture in which he analysed The West Kingston Crisis and Political Parties. Lewis expressed the view that both parties might have become so compromised that they “lack the capability for internal regulation or party cleansing”. Reform of this political system can only come about with the rise of a popular social movement focused on an agenda for change. The movement, whether initiated from within or outside one or both of the parties, “must have some objective, some project for change or conversation to which it hinges its organizational wagon”.

So what is preventing the unleashing of such a movement? The conditions could not be more ripe for its appearance at this time. There is no shortage of aspirants for leadership of this movement for change – what is lacking is a convincing statement of the objective and strategy.

Contenders include: progressive elements within both parties seeking to purge their respective party of “gangster capitalism”; the National Democratic Movement (NDM), struggling for legitimacy; the (apparently short-term) alliance of civil society organisations formed in the wake of the Dudus/Manatt affair; the group of concerned citizens who met and declared their intention to prepare a manifesto to “Take Back Jamaica”; and the natural organs for people power – the JCTU, MSME Lobby, JAS and the still un-federated community-based organisations (CBOs) – who all seem to be wary of expressing a political agenda for themselves. This “conversation” proposed by Dr. Lewis must take place both publicly, such as within the pages of this newspaper, as well as internally within the above organisations.

The university community has taken tentative steps to resume its traditional and long neglected role of initiating public discussion on strategies for change. The Sunday Herald needs to assume the mantle once assumed by Public Opinion in its advocacy of self-government and independence. It is to this end that I wish to facilitate access to the public of the analysis of our political parties and system coming out of the university community and extend it as well as initiate discussion on the fundamental principles of the sorely needed social movement capable of effecting social transformation.

Political Analysis

In his analysis of the political parties, Lewis claims that the PNP had been a social-democratic party until 1989, when the shift to neo-liberal politics resulted in its abandonment of traditional party-building work and it became a pure electoral machine.

The JLP under Bustamante espoused, or better, practised a conservative nationalism and moved from a trade union based structure to a political machine organised around Election Day workers, who also dispensed state patronage. However, according to Lewis: “…both parties have degenerated and have no other focus but to gain control of government”.

One could add to this that the NDM raised expectations for the emergence of a qualitatively new kind of politics, but rapidly lost legitimacy among the people as it abandoned its role as a social movement and opted to become a party and contend for state power, where it could become a participant in the distribution of scarce benefits, thus perpetuating the system rather than seek to empower the grassroots organisations of the people.

Dr. Obika Grey describes the current political order as the emergence of a “predatory state, which increasingly corrupts and violates existing democratic attributes”. The state, which everyone is clamouring to empower over the community dons, has itself been criminalised, exercising control by foul means, and has lost legitimacy among the people to rule by democratic means. Brian Meeks describes this as “a moment of hegemonic dissolution”, where “…the social bloc in charge of the direction of Jamaican society is no longer ruling over a people convinced of its social superiority and its inherent right to ‘run things’”. In short, the middle-class, creole nationalist system initiated by Norman Manley and Bustamante has been superseded in the era of globalisation by a system of political gangsterism in peaceful coexistence with national and global capital. It can be successfully “dismantled” and upended only by a movement for the construction of a democratic state/system that puts power in the hands of the democratic organs of the people at the levels of the community, the workplace, the commodity associations and the organisations of civil society.

The Movement and its Ideology

A re-examination of our history from the point of view of the oppressed people from slavery to neoliberal globalisation will reveal that such a movement has always existed from the time of the anti-slavery movement until the neoliberal era, initiated in 1989 as “liberalisation” by Michael Manley in his second coming and consolidated by PJ Patterson. Its political vehicle has changed form several times, from the fighting maroon bands; the Baptist freedom fighters led by Sam Sharpe, among others; the peasants fighting for “full freedom” under Deacon Bogle and the Black Church; the Garveyite movement advocating selfreliance and Black Nationalism and its cultural offshoot, the Rastafarian movement; the workers’ movement of 1938 under Bustamante and St. William Grant, the (creole) nationalist movement under Norman Manley, the short-lived Black Power movement of the 1960s, and the movement for national democratic transformation (labelled “democratic socialism”) under the first Michael Manley.

This movement for national liberation and social “livity” has been preserved to the present day only by the Rastafarian movement; but this latter movement has not assumed a political form.

A common ideological thread can be discerned through all the above-mentioned movements, which can be termed “social libertarianism”: the free association of people living together and cooperating in free communities through direct democracy. It was this burning desire for freedom which inspired the fighting maroons and numerous slave uprisings.

The newly freed slaves set off in droves for the mountains of the hinterlands to establish their free villages, reminiscent of the tribal villages of pre-colonial Africa.

Paul Bogle and the free-holding peasants of St. Thomas insisted on the right of blacks to become “full free” by being given fair access to land and other productive property and paid the ultimate price for their unquenchable thirst for true liberty of all their kith and kin. Even the Colonial Government could not ignore this quest of the masses of the Jamaican people for liberty, selfreliance and economic democracy and organised land settlement schemes and established the Jamaica Agricultural Society (JAS) for the direct management of agricultural production and marketing by the toiling farmers. Note that this was at a time when Jamaica had an agricultural economy and so this amounted to participatory democracy in the management of the national economy.

The JAS became known as the “small man’s parliament”.

This essentially social-libertarianist system came under serious and sustained threat with the monopolisation of productive land and mineral resources by North American capital in the early twentieth century, especially after the First World War. Modern Capitalism and American-type industrial racism had arrived and the countryside began to empty out and the towns fill up. Marcus Garvey inspired the more progressive of the newly created working class to engage in selfreliant production through family- based and other cooperativetype enterprises.

The UNIA itself was organised as a provident society for the collective development of the African people. Norman Manley also sought to preserve this communitarian tradition from the onslaught of foreign capital by negotiating a form of peaceful coexistence between foreign capital and the newly dispossessed, where the former would donate some of its income to funding the development of the rural poor through their own production cooperatives and community councils.

The early administrations of self-governing Jamaica, led first by Bustamante and later by Manley, sought to promote and strengthen the programmes of these and other democratic organisations of the people, while the two parties struggled on the ground to control them. Political tribalism started with the struggle for trade union control of the new factories, bauxite mines and sugar estates, in order to be able to distribute jobs.

CONTINUES NEXT WEEK