Book Reviews
LEFT, RIGHT CENTRE?
Review of Perry Mars, Ideology and Change: The Transformation of the Caribbean Left.
by David Hinds - Posted February 24th. 2003
Perry Mars' Ideology and Change: The Transformation of the Caribbean Left is a path-breaking work. There has been some examination of the Left and Radical movements and political parties in individual Caribbean countries, but this is the first pan-Caribbean study, even if the bulk of it covers only four states--Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago and Grenada.
Mars locates the left parties in the region in three categories: Reformist, Radical and Revolutionary. The first category includes Guyana's People's National Congress (PNC), Jamaica's People's National Party (PNP), Barbados' Barbados Labour Party (BLP), and Dominica's Dominica Labour Party (DLP). The Radical category includes Guyana's Working People's Alliance (WPA), Grenada's New Jewel Movement (NJM), Trinidad's United Labour Front and National Joint Action Committee (NJAC) and Antigua's Antigua Caribbean Liberation Movement (ACLM); while the Revolutionary category includes Guyana's People's Progressive Party (PPP) and Jamaica's Workers Party of Jamaica (WPJ).
The significance of Mars' effort is the fact that he correctly makes the case that leftist ideological orientations have been a dominant political tendency in modern Caribbean society. This is, or course, a bold conclusion, especially when one considers the prevalence of rightist or right-of-center governments in post-colonial Caribbean societies. The big question is this regard, therefore, is: Why, despite this preponderance of leftist ideological activism, have the governments of the region been so conservative?
According to Mars, the answer lies in the fact that the Caribbean Left has experienced "rightward shifts" engendered by the region's proximity to the Cold War theatre. This "transformation" of the left, he argues, results from external influences, which responded negatively to otherwise democratic actions by the Left. As Mars puts it:
Even when the Left engages in the most benign forms of protest and resistance available within Caribbean political culture, of which political ridicule, rumour-mongering, propaganda, and street corner meetings are the most prominent examples, these varying "everyday forms of resistance' more often than not invite the most extreme and violent forms of resistance from ostensibly democratic regimes in the region (p. XIV).
The principal argument of the book, therefore, is that the global political environment or international capitalism, along with the elitist nature of its leadership and the consequent factionalisation have been the major causes of what Mars calls the Left's "debacle." The author, nevertheless, identifies a tendency towards conformity by the "reformist" wing of the Caribbean Left that has controlled governmental power. This conformity has had the effect of pulling even the radical and progressive wings of the movement towards the Right. Mars shows how, in the circumstances, even the Radical Left has had to compromise its radical principles in order to appease external forces, escape repression, and position itself to gain state power.
Mars also takes the leadership of the Left to task for the "problematic relationship between the elitist leadership style of the Left and the increasingly alienated masses of the Caribbean population" (p.105). He berates this elitist leadership, which he correctly points out is dominated by the professional and intellectual class, for the dissonance between their promise of mass empowerment and their pursuit and accumulation of centralized power, and the ease with which they have been "co-opted into the economic and political establishment". He itemizes the "limitations and shortcomings" of this leadership regardless of where the leaders stand on the ideological spectrum as follows: inadequate mass work, ideological conformity and vanguardism, ethno-political mobilization and electoral patterns, and an over-emphasis on internationalism at the expense of nationalism (p.106).
And what about the author's thesis that the Caribbean Left has moved to the Right? There can be no doubt that the governing parties in the region have dropped their Left rhetoric and embraced the neo-liberal approach. But were these parties every leftist? This raises the biggest concern with the book: the categories Mars employs. The PNP definitely exhibited Left tendencies during the Manley (1972-1980) period, and the PNC throughout its tenure employed socialist rhetoric and policies in the process of accumulating exclusive power in Guyana. Neither of these parties, however, could reasonably be called Leftist. The BLP definitely is not leftist. These parties can be called Reformist, but not Left. The real Reformist Left party in the region has been Guyana's PPP whose only "radicalism" was its embrace of Marxism.
However, this does not detract from a tremendously important work on a most important aspect of Caribbean political reality. As a scholarly text, it ranks with the best, and is a valuable addition to the literature on political culture and movement politics-- two understudied areas of Caribbean political science. Obviously drawing on his long years of observing the Guyanese Left, Perry Mars, does justice to the subject.
1998: Wayne State University Press and University of the West Indies Pres, 238 pp.