Saying it For Ryan

17, Apr 2000
There has to be a new politics before there can be any shifting of minds, numbers do not lie. Numbers, can only talk objectively

Numbers do not lie. Numbers, you see, can only talk objectively. The Sara poll, conducted by Dr Ryan, is clearly telling this country a very particular story. But are we hearing it?

Basically the poll, conducted on the basis of random but scientific sampling, suggests that Basdeo Panday, the present Prime Minister and leader of the UNC Government, probably can command at this time the support of some 91 per cent of the Indian populace. On the other hand, Patrick Manning and the PNM can only count on probably some 46 per cent of the African section of the populace.

The numbers do not lie. These two communities, comprising the majority of our one million odd citizens, are far apart in terms of collective consciousness and critical functioning. It has a lot to do with the history and genesis of the two communities and, in particular, the genesis of their vanguard organisations.

In a society like ours that came into being with a clash between East and West as European capital sought to globalise an objective necessity for its own generation and accumulation social development could never be linear and all-embracing but would be fragmented, given the attendant exploitation of human and material resources.

One's self-consciousness, or a people's collective consciousness at any given time, would be dependent on the specific relationship that one holds, or a people hold, to the globalised process of capital generation and accumulation. This is nowhere more true than in the Caribbean, plantation societies created by and for the very global process. We the people, brought here as slaves and indentureds, never accepted our limited prescribed role as objects in context of this huge imperialist construct.

Our natural posture has always been anti-imperialist, hostile to demands of the internationalisation of capitalist production and reproduction.

Our quest has always been to seize some aspect of the process, twist it to suit our own interests and, despite the ups and downs of the process, despite leadership betrayal at crucial points, we have not deviated from the coherency of that historic mission.

The PNM, as the vanguard of the anti-colonial nationalist movement, was then informed by all the progressive modern political trends: the Pan-African movement that sought to unite Africa as the basis to liberate that continent from the clutches of European imperialist domination and manipulation; the independence of India from British rule; and the tenets of African-Asian solidarity and self-determination as prescribed by the Non-Aligned Movement at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia.

The core values of the nationalist movement and its vanguard were informed by these ideas. How the PNM, led by Dr Eric Williams and his cohorts, Solomon, Kamal, Mahabir, Montano, Prevatt, O'Halloran, etc, sought to work this out in practice and the kind of tactical alliances they formed is, in fact, an interesting story.

True to that historic mission of yesteryear, they established a sovereign state that within the global context became the major motor and/or facilitator of public and private entrepreneurship and economic development in the areas of heavy industry, medium and small manufacturing, finance, communications and the service sector, and to a lesser extent agriculture.

They fell short of forging the essential domestic economic sectoral linkages that would have served to break the fundamental relationship between the domestic economy and the international economy and glossed over or ignored cultural differences that otherwise could have provided the social unity required to take the nation onto another level of self-determination.

Once the anti-colonial nationalism played itself out, the PNM as vanguard organisation lost its vision and the society had to face all that had been glossed over by the veneer of "creolisation".

Today we are faced with an intensification of the globalisation process, just as the PNM is in need of a new vision if it is to survive. The PNM therefore needs "politics" not "platitudes" if it is to be a vanguard as before.

On the brink of the 21st century, the nation state and its sovereignty with all its attendant laws, regulations and trade barriers stand diametrically opposed to the demands of capitalist accumulation.

Multinational corporations in their quest for mega-profits, and wealth generation have bridged east and west and north and south, bringing down both the Iron Curtain and the "Bamboo Curtain" and now we will be reduced to a general sameness, to a common cultural denomination as determined by modern technology and Americanisation.

In rebuttal from below there is an intensification of ethnic nationalism all over the world. People are unprepared to give up who they are and what they are. It serves to reinforce the old tribalisms.

Yet, given the context, no moral judgments will be made against ethnic nationalists. To do so is to engage in religion, not politics, as we said elsewhere. People's fears of losing their identity are very real.

In T&T it is a real fear of Indo-Trinidadians. That is what the Ryan poll is saying. The UNC is the vanguard of Indo-Trinidadians and the onus of a vanguard is to work to transform the consciousness of the people it leads. Put another way, the task of all vanguards is to work towards their own demise and their reconstituting at a higher level.

There has never been in the history of the world a progressive ideology or vision based on fear. Fear produces rabid emotionalism and tribal attachments rather that critical functioning. What is needed is real politics, genuine politics, based on hopes and aspirations and a historic mission rather than fears per se.

A lot, therefore, depends on the UNC in power discovering within itself and extrapolating out of the Indian experience both locally and internationally a core of progressive values as the PNM did in '55 and '56.

There has to be a new politics before there can be any shifting of minds across the ethnic and racial divide.