The ruling class

By Bukka Rennie
July 23, 2003

It is essential to insist that the ruling class of T&T is the international wielders and managers of capital accumulated on a world scale.

That propels us therefore to recognise all the positives and negatives of the social impact on T&T of the activities of the organisational manifestations of this international ruling class, eg the multinational corporations such as Texaco and Tate & Lyle in an earlier time, bpTT of today, and the multilateral agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank.

The purpose certainly is not to demonise these corporate organisations and agencies, but to explore the realities of their subjective and objective roles in the extraction and expropriation of local material resources and their intervention and penetration of our space.

It is an exercise that serves most of all to provide us with a more indepth comprehension of the nature of our past and present struggles for a better day. An exercise that certainly will indicate to us what we have done and why we have done what we have done and, moreover, are still inclined to doing.

It was Tubal Uriah Butler, considered by elites here as uneducated and unlettered, who, on his death bed, best summed it all up when he said that eventually there must come a "marriage between capital and human reason." Finer words have not been spoken anywhere.

Butler, after all his trails and tribulations demanding home rule and West Indian unity, after brutally confronting the political and economic structures of colonialism as manifested here and throughout the Caribbean, summed up for us what all his activities had taught him and what he had come to know in this life: the objective dictates of capital, the process of generating surpluses and concentrating and accumulating social wealth, must be brought to heel and be subjected to the reason of humanity.

Butler told us in no uncertain terms what all the struggles that had gone before him and all that would come after him were geared to achieve and must eventually achieve.

We have advanced the view over and over again that there is a connection to all that we do, that there is a cogent vision, despite all the ups and downs and turn-arounds, minor victories and major defeats.

Social development is never linear, it does not go in a straight line, but there is coherency over various epochs in terms of what people demonstrate and articulate.

Such proletarian consciousness as exemplified by Butler could only have developed as a result of the legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave who was brought here in chains to be both private property and socialised labour, and who, by dint of such a specific predicament, could only envision freedom and self-actualisation through subversion, a private act, and revolution, social action and transformation.

The wielders and managers of international capital who set the parameters of property relations the world over are our ruling class and comprise the major impetus to our particular skewed social development as well as the major obstacle to the full-fledged well-being of Caribbean humanity. And saying this is not equivalent to saying that there have been no positives arising out of the relationship to international capital.

In August 1998, Henry Coolidge, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in T&T and general manager of Powergen, took umbrage to people here seeing multinational corporations as "ruthless exploiters".

Mr Coolidge pointed out that US direct investments in T&T stands at approximately US$4 billion and growing and that there were some 60 US companies operating in T&T in the energy and energy related sector, so he wondered how such a negative perception of these companies could still persist, "...considering (their) significant contributions made to the national Treasury, local communities and cultural and charitable organisations..."

Most of all he alluded to the development that accrued from the training of locals and the hiring of local skills to install and maintain plant and equipment which multinational corporations readily do because the utilisation of "expatriate staff is expensive."

No one can deny that T&T does not possess the level of financial resources to extract and process our material resources, and that if these resources are left in the ground they will be of no help to national development.

All that is fine. We need the input of the foreign corporations and lending agencies but what is essential is the nature of the relationship and how is this relationship to be determined. That was Butler's point.

Mr Coolidge conveniently disregarded the fact that at present the dependent countries, countries dependent on foreign direct investment, are faring worse, getting poorer and poorer, and the trading patterns between the industrialised countries and the dependent ones are becoming more and more unequal or inequitable as time moves on.

Something has to be fundamentally flawed when, in such a mix, even food itself is made a political weapon.

In their 1975 analysis of the deliberations at the World Food Conference held in November 1974, the Gatt-Fly group said "...just as eight multinational oil companies dominate the world petroleum market, six grain companies exercise similar control over the marketing of cereals and related crops."

And they proceeded to show how the US Food for Peace programme was geared to "preserve markets" for US grain abroad, moreso in the dependent countries. Food shipments were cut off from any dependent country that sought to set policy to become self-sufficient in cereals and gain.

Bringing the international ruling class to heel over the years since the mid-70s has been translated into a demand for a "new international economic order."

All the dependent countries, including T&T, have been attempting since then to work out a "mutual partnership" for development with the industrialised countries. The major planks have been as follows:

That the power of multinationals must not be allowed to subvert the laws and policies of dependent countries and each State must have the right to regulate the activities of the MNCs.

That the growing disparity between the price of raw materials and primary commodities and the price of manufactured goods and machinery must be broached through negotiations, eg OPEC, an association of oil commodity exporters, came into being at this point, as a result of which T&T, though not a member, profited from higher oil prices. That debt-forgiveness be seriously considered.

That the transfer of technology be a crucial segment of the relationship between industrialised and dependent countries.

That there be a new law of the sea in which the sea-bed, ocean floor, sub-soil and resources there, beyond the limits of national jurisdiction, be declared the "common heritage of mankind"; and so on and so forth.

The point is made that since the '70s some attempts, by far not enough, have been made to bring mutual reason to bear on the inequalities and "ruthless exploitation" the powerless have had to face.

The people of the world with collective voice have not been all that impotent as we may wish to believe. Yet if despite all this more dependent countries are plunging beneath the poverty line, then the question has to be asked: what will be the nature and tendency of the next onslaught by human reason on international capital?