The muddle school

By Bukka Rennie
June 11, 2003

We have to distance ourselves from those who project the view that we are a society of "impotence", that we are "half-made", lack politics and are "aimless" because of our "recent origins" and our "lack of a ruling class".

When put together, all that this would seem to suggest is that crucial to T&T becoming "fully-made", T&T must somehow first throw up a genuine "ruling class" that will provide us with "aim" and purpose.

Put another way, the eventuality of a "ruling class" would be the signal that T&T has finally emerged as a "rooted", settled environment, no longer denoted by the psychology of transience.

Strange, that emphasis placed on the emergence of a ruling class, since this is the very same school that has always suggested that "class" is a formulation of 19th century European epistemology that is irrelevant to the realities of T&T.

Instead they recognise "tribes", some eight of them, so one is now left to wonder whether a transformation from "tribes" to "class" will be considered a spinal prerequisite in our process of becoming and thereby suddenly made us fit the bill of European cognition.

Especially so since elsewhere another key person of that school intones the following: "...The impotence with which we are today approaching our range of simultaneous crises is due largely to our failure to produce that responsible elite and officer corps which would necessarily be a vital link between all the different domains of our existence as a community..." and that at one time (probably 1969-1970) there were signs on the campus at St Augustine of "...decided impulses in the direction of radical critique and possible paradigm shift... but such tendencies were negated by the triumph of street activism, quasi Marxist ideology and Black Power slogans..."

And they go and on ad nauseam in this vein with the latest salvo being that "...the Black Power movement, which understandably rejected the parliamentary option, provided no alternative, however, except the fantasy of popular revolution. It never seriously thought about modes, means or aftermath. It was pure millenarianism...".

"Millenarianism" suggesting a kind of blind faith in a futuristic utopia or the coming of happiness, euphoria and prosperity for a period of a thousand years.

Such a view is rather bothering and disconcerting particularly since it emanates from an otherwise powerful school that has been pinpoint accurate and deep in its analysis of the effects and results of "imperial schooling"; the refusal or lack of will to see with our own eyes; the inability to provide education for living within this specific environment, rather than the mere providing of "certification" for jobs; the inability, for instance, to consider the concept of "schools in pan" – "pan" representing only one of the most powerful of all our creations from below and an embodiment of art/craft, business acumen and engineering – and instead opting for only a static, one-dimensional vision of putting "pan in schools".

The logic of the two approaches stands in complete variance.

If you are saying that T&T is a society that is aimless because there is no "ruling class" or that T&T comprises a society that is impotent in dealing with the ongoing crises because of our failure to produce a "responsible elite and officer corps", then how much different is that to the old-school Marxists of yesteryear who were wont to say that the people of T&T are backward and not politically conscious because there is no Communist Vanguard Party, such a party being just another form of an "officer corps".

The inference, for example, was that Guyana was more advanced because of the existence of Cheddi Jagan and his bunch.

The question is why such an in-depth, acute insight on the one hand in regard to how people come to know what they know, while such befuddled myopia exists on the other hand. That being the case one may as well stay with the administrative bureaucrats and their static concept of "pan in schools".

Our point of departure lies in an entirely different way of viewing history. We reject the "super-human" theory that suggests that social development is the result of the activity and thinking and tinkering of super-individuals who happen to appear on the scene, or that history is about the lives of kings and queens or even that of "validating elites".

Again, in a muddle, the advocates of this school pay recognition in T&T to what they term "validating elites", then turn around and maintain that precisely because of "imperial schooling" these "validating elites" cannot validate one damn thing.

We recognise leadership that is thrown up in the course of movement from below. We recognise such leadership intervention as a subjective variable that from time to time may synchronize with the objective movement on the ground to provide the essential co-ordination that fuels the powerful lurches forward in the struggle to transform the human condition.

The coherent universal logic of all human activity and combativity is the ongoing quest for total freedom and with this freedom the responsibility of all and sundry to engage in the designing of destiny.

But the process of social development is never linear. It is not a straight line process. People move in fits and starts. Sometimes they end up right back from whence they started but nevertheless with added dimension arising out of the experience of engagement. People come to know from self-activity and self-organisation, much moreso than from what the "super-humans" and pundits spout.

It is important to note that nobody at any one stage holds the whole picture, however over time there emerges a cogency in the logic of what people do, what people create, and most times what they demonstrate even more than what they articulate.

How can anyone view the recent history of T&T from Independence to the present and conclude that there is no "politics" here or that we are "aimless"? What are they, who advocate such, seeing when they do see?

True, those who have emerged as "representatives" make governance synonymous with "politics" since governance and only governance is their raison d’etre but that is far removed from the reality below.

As we said elsewhere: "...Day to day governance can be as far removed from politics as hell is from heaven. Politics is the exercise of putting vision and meaning and coherence to the struggles and sacrifices we undertake in daily existence. Politics places the options, the choices, the parameters, as to what is possible at any given moment, before us.

"Politics answers the following questions: for what are we to sacrifice? What are we to put aside today in order to build tomorrow? What is the nature of the tomorrow that we envision?..."

And as we said before, no one has the full picture of that tomorrow, but politics is the process of "engaging to see", as CLR used to say.

The muddle school - 2