Critical Interventions in Caribbean Politics and Theory

Brian Meeks

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781626743243
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Lateinamerikanische & karibische Geschichte

These essays by Brian Meeks, a noted public intellectual in the Caribbean, reflect on Caribbean politics, particularly radical politics and ideologies in the postcolonial era. But his essays also explain the peculiarities of the contemporary neo-liberal period while searching for pathways beyond the current plight. In the first chapters, titled "Theoretical Forays, " Meeks makes a conscious attempt to engage with contemporary Caribbean political thought at a moment of flux and search for a relevant theoretical language and style to both explicate the Caribbean's recent past and confront the difficult conditions of the early twenty-first century. The next part, "Caribbean Questions, " both retrospective and biographical, retraces the author's own engagement with the University of the West Indies (UWI), the short-lived but influential Caribbean Black Power movement, the work of seminal Trinidadian thinker and activist Lloyd Best, Cuba's relationship with Jamaica, and the crisis and collapse of the Grenadian Revolution. As evident in its title, "Jamaican Journeys, " the concluding section excerpts and extracts from a longer, more sustained engagement with Jamaican politics and society. Much of Meeks' argument builds around the notion that Jamaica faces a crucial moment, as the author seeks to chart and explain its convoluted political path and dismal economic performance over the past three decades. Meeks remains surprisingly optimistic as he suggests that despite the emptying of sovereignty in the increasingly globalized world, windows to enhanced human development might open through policies of greater democracy and popular inclusion.

PART ONE

Theoretical Forays

1. The Frontline: Valentino, Pablo Moses, and Caribbean Organic Philosophy in the Seventies (2003)

Three Stories

Three anecdotal events from the early eighties serve as an introduction to the purposes of this chapter. The first relates to a close colleague and friend, the late Barrington Chevannes, former dean¹ of the faculty of social sciences at the University of the West Indies, Mona, then a member of the central committee of the Workers Party of Jamaica (WPJ). Barry had delivered a paper on revolutionary music in Jamaica at the Intellectual Workers Conference, held with much fanfare in revolutionary Grenada in 1982. To the great consternation and dissatisfaction of the audience, he spoke about the contribution of the small and relatively obscure musical trends that were emerging around the Jamaican Marxist left, including his own compositions, with very little if any reference to the broader field of reggae music which, even as he spoke, was blazing a trail across the world’s stage. For this elision, he received the opprobrium of many in the gathering, who considered his approach as being contemptuous of those forms that were genuinely popular. The irony is that, among the leadership of the WPJ, Barry was one of the few who really had a handle on the nature and character of the consolidating popular music, which, had it been his intention, he could have elaborated in great detail.

The second and third events are related. The first was the impact of Bob Marley’s funeral on Jamaican politics in 1981. At a time when Edward Seaga’s pro-Reagan Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) had just triumphed, when “deliverance” from radicalism had yet to lose its gloss, when consumerism, America, and the greenback ruled supreme, when Michael Manley’s People’s National Party (PNP) and the broader organized left had been cowed, the massive turnout and enthusiasm for Marley’s funeral reminded all that there was another and perhaps more profound social movement on which the politics of the seventies had built its foundation.

The third event was my own perceived response of some leaders of the WPJ after the funeral. I had written an article for Struggle, the WPJ newspaper, essentially arguing that the size and enthusiasm of the crowd of mourners represented an important watershed, a symbolic reassertion of a popular ethos under the banner of Rastafari and an indication that the progressive forces had not simply dissipated after the recent electoral defeat. For this, a top member of the political bureau of the party roundly attacked me at the weekly study group meeting for overemphasizing the event. After all, I was told, we had to make a distinction between the struggle of the proletariat, led by the vanguard party, and petty bourgeois manifestations of populism, as this clearly was. Truly humbled by this display of superior ideological prowess, I never wrote for Struggle again.

What these three reflect in the Jamaican context was the half hidden, intermittent, yet barely recorded struggle for the hegemony of ideas in the radical Caribbean movement of the seventies. Crudely put, while the resilience of the Caribbean revolutionary movement was largely due to an alliance between middle strata intellectual tendencies and popular grassroots supporters, this alliance was fraught with contradictions. These surrounded questions of the appropriate philosophy that would guide these parties, the tactics to be applied to different phases of the popular struggle, and in some instances, which of these social tendencies should lead. Broadly generalizing, the intellectuals were Marxist, more often than not of the Marxist-Leninist variety, and adopted the strategies and tactics of a certain Marxism-Leninism of the seventies. Again, broadly generalizing, the popular grassroots supporters were not Marxist, even when on occasion they supported Leninist tactics, but had their own worldview of African-centered revolutionism.²

The failure to understand that such a worldview existed, much less to comprehend its critical components, contributed in no small measure to the demise of the once vibrant Caribbean left of the seventies. It is this failure that led Mervyn Alleyne, referring more specifically to the academic field, to write: “. . . studies of contemporary Jamaica have failed to come to grips with two fundamental aspects of Jamaican culture: its value system(s) (or ethos) and its worldview or cognitive orientations. But these are the aspects of culture that impinge most on political ideology and clash most with the culture and technology of modernization.”³

This failure is also what Paget Henry, in his magisterial 2000 study Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy, is, in part, trying to correct, particularly when he asserts, “Afro-Caribbean philosophy needs to come to terms with the history of its own historicism.”⁴ The failure to theorize and come to terms with the popular perspective might help explain the early alienation of the NJM in Grenada from grassroots Muslim and Rastafarian elements that had given initial critical support to the revolution.⁵ This sporadically documented event was, in turn, an early portent of the subsequent alienation of the entire party from the Grenadian people and the collapse of the revolution in 1983. Though there are obviously other causative factors, it can help explain the failure of the WPJ, despite (or, on closer scrutiny, because of) its almost hegemonic hold over a generation of young intellectuals, ever to seriously accumulate popular support in Jamaica. The December 1978 “Programme: Workers Party of Jamaica,” for instance, calls for a cultural revolution, including the ending of illiteracy, modernization of the education system, and democratization of the media.⁶ There is barely a nodding recognition of the specific strengths of the popular culture that precedes the revolution and its own potential as a fountainhead for popular organization and post-revolutionary reconstruction.

And, in an ironically contradictory fashion, it can help explain the failure of the revolutionary movement in Trinidad after 1970, where the intellectuals around the National Joint Action Committee (NJAC), unlike in Grenada and Jamaica, readily adopted Afro-Trinidadian cultural forms, but deprived them of revolutionary content. The end result, in a peculiarly convoluted Trinidadian way, was that NJAC lost its sting and evolved into a sort of cultural fraternity.⁷ The reaction to this cultural turn was that grassroots revolutionaries grouped around the National United Freedom Fighters (NUFF) and sought to be Marxist, though with strong Africanist overtones and an uncompromising grassroots militancy, in order to distance themselves from the perceived elitist culturalism of the middle-class revolutionaries in NJAC.⁸ The resulting guerrilla movement ended in a debacle in the mid-seventies, as Trinidad and Tobago segued into the early phases of its long oil boom.

Two Interventions

Radical Caribbean social and political theorizing, particularly around the upsurge and collapse of the popular movement of the seventies, has evolved in two distinct waves. The first, operating within the confines of Caribbean historicist traditions, sought to find essentially institutionalist, geopolitical, or narrowly ideological explanations. Thus, to take the best known instance, the extensive work surrounding the collapse of the Grenadian revolution, while necessarily varied in analysis and conclusion, is largely concerned with the role of parties, the CIA, the Cubans, or narrowly defined ideological issues.⁹ Though it is not altogether absent,¹⁰ there is very little on deeper questions of philosophy, of episteme—in other words, of worldview. A second wave, influenced by, or in opposition to, what Henry calls the “linguistic turn”¹¹ is far more sensitive to these matters.

Two recent and important contributions reflect this new thinking. Henry’s Caliban’s Reason searches for an underlying ethos to Caribbean thinking. Critically scanning a variety of Caribbean theorists, from James to Fanon, Wilson Harris to Sylvia Wynter, and others including Jürgen Habermas, a number of Afro-American philosophers, and Caribbean Marxists, he concludes that this ethos is to be found in a veiled Afro-Caribbean philosophy. The fundamental weakness in Caribbean “historicist” thinking—the term Henry uses to refer broadly to historians, social scientists, and the like—is that it has failed to include in its focus matters of the self, of “ego-genesis” and ego-maintenance. The Afro-Caribbean self is differently constructed from the European self, he posits. It is deeply influenced by African “mythopoetic traditions” that advance the “immanent and transcendent” relationship between the spiritual and material worlds. This has profound implications for how man is perceived in relation to nature and, importantly, for notions of community, which trump the mythical, liberal construction of the unencumbered individual.

By placing psycho-existential matters on the agenda for legitimate Caribbean social theorizing, Henry has opened up an entire field. Future analyses of the Grenada crisis, for instance, can no longer ignore hypothesizing on the character of the Grenadian ego, its autonomous intervention, and its role as contributing element in the tragedy. Important, too, is that Henry maintains a space in his ideational framework for Marxist political economy and its respective categories, though the exact modalities of how, from the perspective of critical analysis, they operate within and around his notions of ego-genesis, are not sufficiently elaborated.

The most serious weakness, however, in an otherwise stimulating presentation is that Henry focuses too much on the ideas of the traditional intellectuals. Despite a promising start, in which he locates African philosophy as arising out of popular traditions, he then, in the Caribbean center of his study, largely elides discussion of popular philosophic forms. His only sustained discussion in this sphere—around Rastafari—ends up being less nuanced than his textured critiques of the “formal” intellectuals. Thus, for instance, while Henry considers Rastafarianism as being a “powerful and legitimating force for black identities,”¹² he argues unconvincingly that “Rastafarian historicism leaves the social and developmental problems of Jamaican society largely unaddressed.”¹³ This, as I have argued elsewhere,¹⁴ fails to appreciate the extent to which Rastafarian notions of “livity” speak to an alternative relationship of individual to community, of community to environment and of humanity to commodity, countering, in significant respects, Western individualism and materialism. Henry’s failure to seriously engage Rastafarian philosophy¹⁵ reveals a critical weakness in an otherwise insightful study with broad theoretical implications.

The other perspective I wish to focus on is that of David Scott. In Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (1999), Scott engages in an equally, if not more ambitious attempt to redefine the parameters for radical thinking and (presumably) action in the contemporary world. Using his Sri Lankan and Jamaican roots and experiences as points of departure, Scott develops his perspective through a series of elegantly argued theses. First, the old narrative of revolution, associated with the myth of rapid social upheaval and cataclysmic change, if it ever had any real meaning, is now largely empty of content. This is a result both of geopolitical shifts that have transformed the terms of reference of that narrative and of new criticism that has undermined its philosophical assumptions. In his words, “Many of the epistemological assumptions that held (that narrative) together and guaranteed the salience of its emancipatory hopes—assumptions about history, about culture, politics, resistance, freedom, subjectivity—have been steadily eroded by the labour of antimetaphysical and antiteleological strategies of criticism.”¹⁶ Second, in the world that is emerging, the old dominant, hegemonic ruling alliances are collapsing and space is opening up for autonomous popular movements and strata to flourish and engage in their own self expression and “self fashioning.”¹⁷ Third, this New World requires new thinking. Scott codifies and encapsulates his approach in what he sees as a folding together of Fanon and Foucault.¹⁸ By this, he means a borrowing and incorporation of Foucault’s concern with power over the self and autonomy from overarching notions of domination, whether they are statal in origin or incorporated within the framework of societal norms.

Scott, however, is sensitive to the nihilistic dangers inherent in a certain interpretation of Foucault, in which there can be no emancipation, as all emancipatory projects ultimately end up reasserting dominance through power. The answer then, is to preserve a space for Fanon, who in The Wretched of the Earth epitomized the notion of anti-colonial revolution. It is a Fanon, however, from whom the state and the nation have been expunged. Instead, the notion of liberation is preserved toward the end of establishing vaguely defined communities of “self fashioned peoples,” or as he describes it in his analysis of contemporary Jamaica:

This will enable me to think of political society in Jamaica not as a domain centered on the state and the competition for its offices, but as a field of interdependent pluralities governed simultaneously by a desire for settled identities and by an unsettling genealogical ethic of pluralization. . . . On the one hand, I want to imagine spheres or constellations...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface: Dreaming to Change the World
• Acknowledgments
• Part One: Theoretical Forays
• Part Two: Caribbean Questions
• Part Three: Jamaican Journeys
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Credits
• Index