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Whose national movement?
Common SenseJohn Maxwell
Sunday, July 15, 2007
There are many definitions of democracy. One of the most popular in the western world was memorably expressed by Abraham Lincoln: 'Government of the people, by the people, for the people."
John Maxwell
The problem is in arranging for the representation and participation of the people in the decision making. In the western world, parties supposedly representing the will of the people are the mechanisms for decision making, in parliaments and other assemblies.
The problem with most parties is that they are themselves not democratic and over time become merely machines for capturing power and for the expression of the interests that have captured power. Undemocratic parties cannot produce democratic governments.
This transforms the promise of democracy into a lie: government by the people becomes government - or governance - by a small class or cabal.
The governors are not selected by the people but by a self-perpetuating clique of bureaucrats - derived from the class that Michael G Smith called the 'motorised salariat'. We call them 'yuppies'.
In Jamaica we made manful attempts to invent a democracy. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the debating clubs, the Jamaica Agricultural Society and the Jamaica Union of Teachers, the Jamaica Banana Producers Association and Garvey's UNIA, among others, produced a collection of stakeholder interests which was, in its own way, democratic and responsive to the people it claimed to represent. Its power was its moral authority.
This agglomeration of class interests became in 1938 the foundation of the People's National Party, representing the landless and some of the landed, the middle-class and lower middle-class - teachers, clerks and policemen. Their voice was soon amplified by the addition of the unemployed and the workers brought in by the trade unions formed by A G S Coombs, Alexander Bustamante, Ken and Frank Hill, Richard Hart, Florizel Glasspole and others.
The PNP was soon split by the departure of Bustamante and his BITU, mainly because Bustamante (with an English flea in his ear) thought that Manley and the socialists were trying to take his union away from him. What became the BITU was actually formed by Nethersole, Seivright, Hart, and others while Bustamante was in jail, so he may have thought that their selfless action was actually the first part of a plot to separate him from the source of his popularity and power.
'When I say strike, the whole world strike' he said, and he had no intention of surrendering that magical mantra which gave governors fits and unnerved the Colonial Office and Tate and Lyle.
The same sort of class coalitions had given birth to the Congress Party in India, the African National Congress in South Africa, (both inspired by Gandhi) Nnamdi Azikwe's National Council for Nigeria and the Cameroons, the Convention People's Party in Ghana (Gold Coast) led by Nkrumah and Cheddi Jagan's People's Progressive Party in Guyana. These parties, like the PNP in Jamaica, led the fight for independence. They each represented a national consensus.
Some were more successful than others, at least at first. Every one of them was split to produce multi-party situations, welcomed, if not actually incited by the British. In Jamaica and Ghana the splits seemed to be based on personal incompatibilities, in Nigeria on national economic (tribal), and religious interests, in India by class, caste and religion and in Guyana by ethnicity.
In Jamaica, where we prided ourselves - more than most - on the development of a 'two-party' system, we were - more than most - unable to recognise in the splitting of the national movement the fundamental sabotage of national unity and purpose. What at first appeared to be a guarantee of democracy was in fact the opposite: the factionalism allowed the national interest to be cherry-picked to the advantage of those whose economic interests had appeared doomed by the new nationalism.
Today, the so-called development of the former colonial world is, with few exceptions, decided by the bureaucrats in the World Bank and the IMF in Washington and the OECD on the other side of the Atlantic. Political parties dispute only the composition of the debt and the allocation of Pajeros.
The dismemberment of Haitian democracy in 1994 and again in 2004 depended on the 'selling' to the world the perception that the poor peoples' solidarity represented by Lavalas and Aristide were really one-party autocracies, just like Jagan's PPP and Nkrumah's CPP and the rest. National movements - no matter how they evolved - are, in the new dispensation, anti-democratic, communistic throwbacks and by definition, evil.
It is a paradoxical fact that in Jamaica - as in Haiti - the most savage attempt to destroy the national movement has resulted in the creation of an increasingly one-party state - government by the yuppies, of the yuppies and for the yuppies.
In 1965, when I wrote a denunciation of Edward Seaga in Public Opinion titled Sieg Heil! Heil Seaga!, I was under no delusion that our two-party state was likely to develop into a democracy. I was wrong in one respect - I thought that Seaga and his allies would have been the chief beneficiaries of the process. What happened instead was that Seaga's failure to convert the JLP into even the simulacrum of a democratic party helped to destroy that party's pretensions to be an alternative government to the PNP and helped, simultaneously, to destroy the PNP's pretensions to democracy. Patterson's PNP, faced by Seaga's JLP, discovered that internal democracy had become unnecessary.
'Seaga's JLP' had earlier been Bustamante's JLP, but Bustamante, even in 1962, had become more and more irrelevant. The unobtrusive Sangster was in fact, almost from Independence Day, Jamaica's real prime minister. Bustamante's interventions were sporadic and captious. Sangster permitted him to remain the de jure premier while he, Sangster, was the de facto party leader and leader of the government.
Bustamante's main functions were ceremonial. He became a sort of monument on wheels, a 'Big Bertha' of super-cannon to be laboriously hauled into position when required to bombard and demoralise the PNP and the standard round which the faithful were called to order. And even that latter function was increasingly usurped by Tavares and Seaga.
As Donald Sangster told me on Bustamante's Tucker Avenue verandah, on the occasion of Bustamante's wedding in 1962, he feared and distrusted Seaga and Tavares. Robert Lightbourne put it more forcefully; he thought that Seaga was after what Bob called 'a military solution'. The party leadership revolved round the new leaders - Seaga, Tavares, Lightbourne, Eldemire, and Victor Grant. Along with Phipps, Ramsay, Irvine and Wilton Hill, all except Seaga fell by the wayside.
By the time Seaga formally inherited the party, there was little party left. He promptly stripped Bustamante of his residual honorifics, including his presidency for life. All Seaga had left was the grudging support of Shearer's BITU and the Tivoli pit bulls. He thought that was enough, but, as Shearer got older and the pit bulls bolder, Seaga was increasingly seen as a paper tiger who was becoming P J Patterson's secret weapon.
In attempting to assert his supreme authority, Seaga shrank his own party's leaders into political pygmies who offered no challenge either to him or to the PNP. Pearnel Charles, once rated the JLP's most effective politician, is not now mentioned in dispatches, and few can remember the members of the so-called Gang of Five.
Seaga's solution was not military. It was a 'Seaga solution', that is, more and more Seaga, and it was so supersaturated that it drowned the real leadership of the Jamaica Labour Party, leaving the organisation beached, ready for the man who had been Seaga's most slavish follower and mouthpiece, and who Seaga drove out of the party in which there was room for only 'One Don'.
The result of all of this is that despite the inadequacies of Mr Patterson and some of the more egregious mistakes of his ministers and agents, the JLP still does not present a viable public alternative to the PNP. And the saddest fact of all is that there is nothing anyone can do about it.
Violence a la 1980 will not work, because there is no strong leader in sight to go head to head with Portia. In 1980, Seaga was a viable alternative to Manley because of his history and his demonstrated donmanship.
Bruce Golding once said that he and D K Duncan were the respective ministers of war for their parties, but that is ancient history and irrelevant. The only real alternative to Portia Simpson Miller at this moment is violent anarchy and that will destroy both political parties and produce something altogether stranger and more dangerous for all of us.
The entire world is in one of the historical periods of slack-water, when the tide is turning and there is no clear indication of whether it is coming in or going out. The United States' co-presidents Bush and Cheney have managed to disfigure the American image and to provoke an economic showdown with China and a religious pre-jihad/crusade with the Islamic world.
The Lone Ranger, Mr Bush, has lost his faithful Tonto - Blair. Europe seems confused by one of the great historical waves of migration which is simultaneously transforming their cultures and provoking hysterical over-reaction. Real attention to human rights, real development aid, debt cancellation, would be more effective in relieving the pressure and make much more sense.
All over the world, in China, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, the US, the rich are busily building walled cities to keep out the increasingly desperate refugees from globalisation. Africa is giving a good imitation of a continent in its death throes.
Only in Cuba, Venezuela and India does there seem to be any public idea of a future for the ordinary people of the world. Here, in Jamaica, we seem more concerned with numerology and Ponzi schemes than with planting the food, buying the groceries, protecting local industry and the environment - doing the real housekeeping that we need to become as independent as we claim to be.
And we have scheduled a general election for the height of the hurricane season. Somehow, it seems oddly appropriate.
Copyright 2007 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com
Common SenseJohn Maxwell
Sunday, July 15, 2007
There are many definitions of democracy. One of the most popular in the western world was memorably expressed by Abraham Lincoln: 'Government of the people, by the people, for the people."
John MaxwellThe problem is in arranging for the representation and participation of the people in the decision making. In the western world, parties supposedly representing the will of the people are the mechanisms for decision making, in parliaments and other assemblies.
The problem with most parties is that they are themselves not democratic and over time become merely machines for capturing power and for the expression of the interests that have captured power. Undemocratic parties cannot produce democratic governments.
This transforms the promise of democracy into a lie: government by the people becomes government - or governance - by a small class or cabal.
The governors are not selected by the people but by a self-perpetuating clique of bureaucrats - derived from the class that Michael G Smith called the 'motorised salariat'. We call them 'yuppies'.
In Jamaica we made manful attempts to invent a democracy. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the debating clubs, the Jamaica Agricultural Society and the Jamaica Union of Teachers, the Jamaica Banana Producers Association and Garvey's UNIA, among others, produced a collection of stakeholder interests which was, in its own way, democratic and responsive to the people it claimed to represent. Its power was its moral authority.
This agglomeration of class interests became in 1938 the foundation of the People's National Party, representing the landless and some of the landed, the middle-class and lower middle-class - teachers, clerks and policemen. Their voice was soon amplified by the addition of the unemployed and the workers brought in by the trade unions formed by A G S Coombs, Alexander Bustamante, Ken and Frank Hill, Richard Hart, Florizel Glasspole and others.
The PNP was soon split by the departure of Bustamante and his BITU, mainly because Bustamante (with an English flea in his ear) thought that Manley and the socialists were trying to take his union away from him. What became the BITU was actually formed by Nethersole, Seivright, Hart, and others while Bustamante was in jail, so he may have thought that their selfless action was actually the first part of a plot to separate him from the source of his popularity and power.
'When I say strike, the whole world strike' he said, and he had no intention of surrendering that magical mantra which gave governors fits and unnerved the Colonial Office and Tate and Lyle.
The same sort of class coalitions had given birth to the Congress Party in India, the African National Congress in South Africa, (both inspired by Gandhi) Nnamdi Azikwe's National Council for Nigeria and the Cameroons, the Convention People's Party in Ghana (Gold Coast) led by Nkrumah and Cheddi Jagan's People's Progressive Party in Guyana. These parties, like the PNP in Jamaica, led the fight for independence. They each represented a national consensus.
Some were more successful than others, at least at first. Every one of them was split to produce multi-party situations, welcomed, if not actually incited by the British. In Jamaica and Ghana the splits seemed to be based on personal incompatibilities, in Nigeria on national economic (tribal), and religious interests, in India by class, caste and religion and in Guyana by ethnicity.
In Jamaica, where we prided ourselves - more than most - on the development of a 'two-party' system, we were - more than most - unable to recognise in the splitting of the national movement the fundamental sabotage of national unity and purpose. What at first appeared to be a guarantee of democracy was in fact the opposite: the factionalism allowed the national interest to be cherry-picked to the advantage of those whose economic interests had appeared doomed by the new nationalism.
Today, the so-called development of the former colonial world is, with few exceptions, decided by the bureaucrats in the World Bank and the IMF in Washington and the OECD on the other side of the Atlantic. Political parties dispute only the composition of the debt and the allocation of Pajeros.
The dismemberment of Haitian democracy in 1994 and again in 2004 depended on the 'selling' to the world the perception that the poor peoples' solidarity represented by Lavalas and Aristide were really one-party autocracies, just like Jagan's PPP and Nkrumah's CPP and the rest. National movements - no matter how they evolved - are, in the new dispensation, anti-democratic, communistic throwbacks and by definition, evil.
It is a paradoxical fact that in Jamaica - as in Haiti - the most savage attempt to destroy the national movement has resulted in the creation of an increasingly one-party state - government by the yuppies, of the yuppies and for the yuppies.
In 1965, when I wrote a denunciation of Edward Seaga in Public Opinion titled Sieg Heil! Heil Seaga!, I was under no delusion that our two-party state was likely to develop into a democracy. I was wrong in one respect - I thought that Seaga and his allies would have been the chief beneficiaries of the process. What happened instead was that Seaga's failure to convert the JLP into even the simulacrum of a democratic party helped to destroy that party's pretensions to be an alternative government to the PNP and helped, simultaneously, to destroy the PNP's pretensions to democracy. Patterson's PNP, faced by Seaga's JLP, discovered that internal democracy had become unnecessary.
'Seaga's JLP' had earlier been Bustamante's JLP, but Bustamante, even in 1962, had become more and more irrelevant. The unobtrusive Sangster was in fact, almost from Independence Day, Jamaica's real prime minister. Bustamante's interventions were sporadic and captious. Sangster permitted him to remain the de jure premier while he, Sangster, was the de facto party leader and leader of the government.
Bustamante's main functions were ceremonial. He became a sort of monument on wheels, a 'Big Bertha' of super-cannon to be laboriously hauled into position when required to bombard and demoralise the PNP and the standard round which the faithful were called to order. And even that latter function was increasingly usurped by Tavares and Seaga.
As Donald Sangster told me on Bustamante's Tucker Avenue verandah, on the occasion of Bustamante's wedding in 1962, he feared and distrusted Seaga and Tavares. Robert Lightbourne put it more forcefully; he thought that Seaga was after what Bob called 'a military solution'. The party leadership revolved round the new leaders - Seaga, Tavares, Lightbourne, Eldemire, and Victor Grant. Along with Phipps, Ramsay, Irvine and Wilton Hill, all except Seaga fell by the wayside.
By the time Seaga formally inherited the party, there was little party left. He promptly stripped Bustamante of his residual honorifics, including his presidency for life. All Seaga had left was the grudging support of Shearer's BITU and the Tivoli pit bulls. He thought that was enough, but, as Shearer got older and the pit bulls bolder, Seaga was increasingly seen as a paper tiger who was becoming P J Patterson's secret weapon.
In attempting to assert his supreme authority, Seaga shrank his own party's leaders into political pygmies who offered no challenge either to him or to the PNP. Pearnel Charles, once rated the JLP's most effective politician, is not now mentioned in dispatches, and few can remember the members of the so-called Gang of Five.
Seaga's solution was not military. It was a 'Seaga solution', that is, more and more Seaga, and it was so supersaturated that it drowned the real leadership of the Jamaica Labour Party, leaving the organisation beached, ready for the man who had been Seaga's most slavish follower and mouthpiece, and who Seaga drove out of the party in which there was room for only 'One Don'.
The result of all of this is that despite the inadequacies of Mr Patterson and some of the more egregious mistakes of his ministers and agents, the JLP still does not present a viable public alternative to the PNP. And the saddest fact of all is that there is nothing anyone can do about it.
Violence a la 1980 will not work, because there is no strong leader in sight to go head to head with Portia. In 1980, Seaga was a viable alternative to Manley because of his history and his demonstrated donmanship.
Bruce Golding once said that he and D K Duncan were the respective ministers of war for their parties, but that is ancient history and irrelevant. The only real alternative to Portia Simpson Miller at this moment is violent anarchy and that will destroy both political parties and produce something altogether stranger and more dangerous for all of us.
The entire world is in one of the historical periods of slack-water, when the tide is turning and there is no clear indication of whether it is coming in or going out. The United States' co-presidents Bush and Cheney have managed to disfigure the American image and to provoke an economic showdown with China and a religious pre-jihad/crusade with the Islamic world.
The Lone Ranger, Mr Bush, has lost his faithful Tonto - Blair. Europe seems confused by one of the great historical waves of migration which is simultaneously transforming their cultures and provoking hysterical over-reaction. Real attention to human rights, real development aid, debt cancellation, would be more effective in relieving the pressure and make much more sense.
All over the world, in China, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, the US, the rich are busily building walled cities to keep out the increasingly desperate refugees from globalisation. Africa is giving a good imitation of a continent in its death throes.
Only in Cuba, Venezuela and India does there seem to be any public idea of a future for the ordinary people of the world. Here, in Jamaica, we seem more concerned with numerology and Ponzi schemes than with planting the food, buying the groceries, protecting local industry and the environment - doing the real housekeeping that we need to become as independent as we claim to be.
And we have scheduled a general election for the height of the hurricane season. Somehow, it seems oddly appropriate.
Copyright 2007 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com
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