Emergence of the Caribbean Empire

Foreword

This volume is crafted by Jerome Teelucksingh, a patriotic historian of Trinidad and Tobago and the wider Caribbean region, whose energy, integrity and insight resonate not only within the islands but also echo across oceans, captivating scholars and community activists alike, even reaching the shores of the United States. A vital resource for those looking towards the heritage of Trinidad and Tobago for vistas of freedom and democracy, this book, by illuminating what we can be and do in our own place and time, not only reminds us of the struggles and triumphs of a small Caribbean nation but also speaks to perennial matters of modern politics on a global scale, of which such imperial centres are but a small fraction.

This study on the origins of party politics in Trinidad and Tobago can be read as a precursor to the heroic mass social movements, wherein themes of labour’s sovereignty and national purpose were championed by the middle classes of Trinidad and Tobago during the electoral campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s. However, this warrants further attention and debate. These earlier campaigns can be read as foreshadowing those launched by the People’s National Movement (PNM), Workers and Farmers Party (WFP) of 1965–1966 and United Labour Front (ULF) of 1975–1977. Teelucksingh’s lucid account of labour’s involvement in party politics in Trinidad from 1925 to 1938 underscores the importance of recognizing the profound role played by ordinary people in revitalizing political processes. But here, a question of principle arises: how should this involvement be interpreted in the twenty-first-century context?

Democracy has two contradictory meanings: the justification of existing and aspiring states and ruling elites versus a tradition of revolutionary popular liberation or direct self-governance. Intrinsic to these conflicting notions of democracy is the meaning of working-class sovereignty or majority rule. Teelucksingh’s book is constructed in such a creative manner that the reader can discern both meanings of labour in this narrative if one peruses carefully.

First, there is “labour” as a Fabian moral economy of the middle classes, where there is an aspiration to a progressive guardianship – a claim to be a defender of the ordinary people who are viewed as agents unfit for self-government. The socialist sentiment expressed by early and later Trinidad politicians primarily manifests as administrative rather than direct democratic content or a vision of popular self-management. This can be lost in a historical context, especially in the period the author discusses, where British colonialism did not view even the colonized middle classes as suited for such a task and condescendingly claimed to tutor the nation of Trinidad and Tobago as a whole. Labour Parties are means through which the middle classes co-opt the democratic significance of the working classes (as embodying majority rule) where subsequent to the election only a minority will directly rule.

This holds true in both imperial and peripheral nations. To not take this proposition seriously is to attribute political power and privileges to ordinary people in imperial nations that they do not, in fact, structurally have. Whatever the aristocracy of political economy, party politics is indeed more “backward” in imperial nations. There is rarely even the pretence of electoral politics being regarded as a social movement. Much like in the Caribbean, electoral politics appear to adopt a radical stance only when independent revolts among ordinary people are pervasive.

In imperial nations, economies can be planned more independently and with less corruption. However, this raises other problematic questions. Is our ultimate version of democracy the wish for an accountable middle class in a bureaucratic office? Is the gravest insult of colonialism that it would not allow the Trinidad and Tobago middle classes to govern themselves as equals in the world and manage and exploit its very own nation’s labour from on high? Which class leads the national liberation struggle? In fact, it is the very notion of Caribbean as well as American populist lamentations that those who govern from on high are not in charge. These politicians, without stepping down, bemoan that they are structurally obstructed from doing their job. Politicians in both the Caribbean and America complain of multinational capital’s insensitivity to the man on the street. And then rejecting real popular self-management, attacks on other ethnic groups and immigrants commence (subtly or overtly). It is a universal feature of capitalist electoral politics that, even at its best, such scapegoating lurks just below the surface.

Second, in Teelucksingh’s account, there is a crowd politics where masses gather to hear what politicians have to say at rallies around and below a platform or podium. Politics for everyday people becomes an “activity” where, only for a time, they can be heard in conversation with those who aspire to represent them. At times, the masses fight through the authority of those on the microphone or with the bullhorn by making some damning and humorous criticism. Although they can judge speeches and programmes, and those who may make policies in the future, as members of a crowd, they cannot, through this format, directly craft and execute politics and govern themselves. This can become obscure if Labour Parties are allowed to be seen as liberators. Further, if involvement of ordinary citizens in mass meetings is viewed as an enhancement of the electoral process, is facilitating such activities a major sign of a “masses-oriented” political party? Or is it a mode of co-opting and bewildering their direct democratic potential?

In Chapter 3, Teelucksingh focuses on the crowds that attended the aspiring middle-class Labour campaigns in Trinidad and Tobago. These parties function as vehicles of ethnic patronage and tend to be owned by families with business interests, however small in the world economy. These parties are erected and dissolved to comment on national purpose, taxation, infrastructure-building for industry, utilities and roads as a means to rally the masses around themselves as paternalistic guardians, which serves their business interests well even if state power is not achieved.

But this does not explain the most heroic moments of electoral campaigns as expressed by the early PNM, WFP and ULF. They were perceived as heroic precisely for their aspirations for multiracial unity, and their business interests did not appear to be a major preoccupation of its leadership. Certainly, these campaigns too raised the banner of labour as merely a theme of working-class sovereignty fomenting no more autonomy than the crowd politics of this earlier period discussed in this volume. The personal integrity of the leading individual politicians and organizers cannot be the standard of understanding. One must look at their political thoughts and practices that reflect on labour’s relationship to national purpose for demystification.

Undoubtedly, C. L. R. James’ Party Politics in the West Indies (1962) is the gold standard for critical political thought on electoral parties in the Caribbean. It is conventional wisdom that this text documents James’ rift with the first Premier and Prime Minister, Eric Williams. The book has a certain reputation as a radical document because previously the author had a long career as a revolutionary socialist (not a Stalinist, Social Democrat or Fabian) in Britain and the United States. Williams refused to implement his prescriptions for making the PNM a mass party after independence. Such a party would, through a cultural apparatus, legislate the popular will of a people with a dual character.

James attests that it is people’s self-mobilization, not that of their leaders who embody it briefly, which has contributed significantly to the history of freedom struggles in Trinidad. However, these ordinary people do not know exactly what they want and hence must be encouraged to build their independent organizations where they can develop unique programmes and perspectives. This implies the dual nature of middle-class bureaucracy in James’ politics for peripheral nations.

This mass orientation, James says, would enhance what the government can do and is not a threat to Williams’ party. In the same breath, he concludes that politics merely imagined as an election is a form of degradation. But, in fact, while Williams did not take up James’ suggestions, James merely sees the working masses as an appendage to an aspiring progressive developmental state and its leader if they are smart enough to orchestrate their popular self-activity instead of calling for the army and police to smash them from time to time.

Franklyn Harvey’s classic The Rise and Fall of Party Politics in Trinidad and Tobago (1974) critiques his mentor James and his concept of the mass party. If independent popular committees and assemblies of the working class are not organized independently of the middle classes, Harvey concludes, their sovereignty will be perennially stolen. Thus, electoral politics, even at its best, is an inherently compromised medium.

The New Beginning Movement, of which Harvey was a co-leader with Bukka Rennie and Wally Look Lai, lent critical support to the ULF to educate the Trinidad and Tobago public in another fashion. The ULF, like the early PNM and the WFP, was an opaque coalition of the middle and working classes, despite suggesting labour could hold the reins of society. At their best, the ULF would have allowed workers’ sovereignty indirectly. If the ULF had achieved state power, any independent organizations of the working classes would likely have been viewed as a threat. Thus, in any Labour Party campaign where there was significant mass “involvement,” the urgent task was for everyday people to defend their autonomy in popular committees within that movement from the middle classes as well as to be prepared to break away from those who aspire to enter the rules of hierarchy despite their claims of being labour’s champion.

From ancient Greeks to the Soviets in the Russian Revolution in 1917, from the Indo-Caribbean heritage of the panchayat to the Afro-Caribbean tradition of maroonage, in addition to the general strikes of the turbulent 1930s, there has always been more to the Jamesian adage that “every cook can govern” in popular councils and committees. The limitations of direct democratic forms (not the ideal), including mass assemblies and popular committees, need further study. They can have a populist and indirect hierarchical character of their own, even independent of electoral politics and representative government, when distinguished by professional politicians who rule as a class above society.

Darcus Howe, a radical activist based in England, has posited that James’ ideal was “every cook can govern” not must or ought to govern. This interpretation shouldn’t be read as sophistry on Howe’s part; rather, it can be seen as a profound insight into James’ most radical inclinations. This reminder should broaden the significance of Teelucksingh’s work which critically examines early electoral campaigns that captivated the masses for a time in Trinidad and Tobago’s history. The vibrancy and objectivity of the author’s account allow readers to go back in time, become immersed in these campaigns and crowds as well as decide for themselves whether labour can truly hold the reins through electoral politics.

Matthew Quest*

United States

* Dr Matthew Quest has taught history and political thought at the Empire State College in New York City and Lewis University in Illinois, United States. He was a visiting lecturer in the Department of History at Georgia State University. He is a member of the editorial board of the CLR James Journal and has published articles on C. L. R. James, George Padmore, Frantz Fanon and Tim Hector.