Eric Huntley Speaks Truths - What are the Lessons to be Drawn?

 

Eric Huntley Speaks Truths - What are the Lessons to be Drawn?

The PPP then and to this day has shown a recurring weakness – an inability to resolve internal differences within the framework of party democracy. Differences are diagnosed as contradictions to be resolved by splits and/or expulsions. Once the right-wing moderate group had split from the PPP, the differences within the left became exposed and further aggravated.  

In the country at large, contrary to Jagan who found the news of the impending rape of the Constitution ‘too fantastic to be true’, the people’s worse fears were justified. From time to time voices were raised asking whether we knew what we were doing. Many asked, ‘You think ‘dem white people go give up so easily;’ or in another vein, ‘If yo’ know yo’ got yo’ hand in de lion’s mouth, pat de head.’ As has been seen, the political spectrum of Guyanese politics has always been radical – that is, radical in that the demands attempted to alter the status quo. 

The period up to the victory of the PPP (1953) should therefore be seen in this light. At that particular juncture of our history, the urban and rural masses and their representatives were for measures of reform which would provide work for the unemployed, alleviate land hunger, offer houses at reasonable rents, Guyanese the Civil Service and Trade Unions, introduce social welfare legislation and liberalise trade. It is not without significance that nationalisation or social ownership of the sugar plantations was never proposed even at the zenith of the party’s strength. Rather, the struggle sought to weaken the ‘expatriate interests’ to the advantage of ‘native interests’ in keeping with the struggles of the 19th and early 20th centuries. 

The PPP, while initiating modern political organisation, has confirmed (unfortunately) all our fears. We have experience of the tactic of the Colonial Office in handpicking representatives of the people, and placing them in positions where they are not responsible but where they share the onus of unpopular decisions. Such a manoeuvre deflects the rage of the masses towards the local lackeys and away from the real enemy, who in turn rewards the scapegoat by mentioning him or her in the Honours List. For Dr Jagan and the PPP, this meant deciding to accept office despite the well-known fact that they did not possess even the shadow, let alone the substance, of power. 

By doing so the PPP was merely accepting the peculiar logic of its own momentum which was pushing it to the ‘right. Once the PPP was in office (1957-64) the British and US governments were free to tighten financial control and use other forms of sabotage to force the Government to take unpopular steps and bear the consequences. Faced with such a situation, the reaction of the PPP was to make the necessary concessions to consolidate its own mass support (the rural sector, mainly people of Indian origin) for electoral purposes, while at the same time alienating itself from the urban masses and Afro-Guyanese in the countryside. 

Many of those who were forced out of the PPP, as well as others, have recently founded the Committee for National Reconstruction and publish the fortnightly bulletin Simara. The emergence of a new left will ensure that henceforth the platform of the left will be enriched by drawing on the experience of both those of the pre-PPP and also of the post-PPP era, a left unencumbered by much of the debris we encountered, some of which still remains. - 

Eric Huntley, Guyana: 26 May,   International Socialism, No.26, Autumn 1966, pp.24-27.

Updated Nov 06, 2020 12:19:11am

Oct 22, 2013 8:27:42pm