Dear Editor,
First, let me commend you for allowing publication of letters both sympathetic to Mrs Janet Jagan as well as critical of her politics.
Now, in the Kaieteur News editorial, ‘Janet and Capitalism,’ (March 31), the late Janet Jagan was said to have predicted during a speculative run on the currencies of several Asian economies, which sparked the 1997-1998 Asian crisis, that capitalism, as a system, was in deep trouble, and now that the current state of the world economy is standing on shaky legs, she has been vindicated.
This is the second PPP politician in Guyana who appears to have been publicly ‘vindicated’ in the last six weeks. The President said he was vindicated for recalling Major David Clarke from an overseas course after Clarke was arrested in America on a cocaine trafficking charge, even though the President and Commander-in-Chief who was in possession of ‘confidential information,’ dropped the ball when he failed to have Clarke court-martialled for allegedly associating with Buxton-Agricola criminal elements.
And now the KN editorial writer says Mrs Jagan has been vindicated, even though the writer does not tell us what tangible benefits have accrued to Guyana from Mrs Jagan’s rabid anti-capitalist rhetoric. If the writer, like Mrs Jagan, believes capitalism is in trouble, then what system kept the world economy moving after the USSR collapsed?
Moreover, what has communism or socialism done for Guyana since Mrs Jagan arrived there in 1943? I don’t know if the writer expects us to give Mrs Jagan a standing ovation or prolonged applause for her prediction, but the truth is, long before her 1997-1998 prediction, and right after the former Soviet Union’s collapse ended its global efforts to promote communism among nations, international political analysts were already hitting the print and electronic media making predictions that the capitalist system would also collapse. It was just a matter of time, they predicted!
As a matter of fact, the editorial writer even cited Karl Marx’s age-old critique that claimed the boom and bust cycles of capitalism are inevitable because they are precipitated by the inherent compulsion of capital to seek the greatest gain, so, unless the writer was looking to score brownie points for Mrs Jagan, her 1997-1998 prediction really was not groundbreaking news!
I am not going to get into a extensive debate about the merits or demerits of Mrs Jagan’s disdain for capitalism and love of communism and/or socialism, but let me be brutally frank and state my belief that many ‘leftists’ like Mrs Jagan have spent the last several decades actually preaching and praying for the collapse of capitalism just so they could jump up and start hollering, “We told you so!”
In the intervening period, though the PPP was sidelined for 28 years because of its irrevocable communist embrace, it seems unaware the world has changed so dramatically that there actually is no longer a global competition between communism and democracy or socialism and capitalism, so it returned to power in 1992 with no real change in its own ideological vision for Guyana’s economic recovery and development.
Over the course of the last 16 years it had myriad opportunities to attract foreign direct investments (FDIs) when the conditions were ideal for investments so Guyana could develop its infrastructure to cater not only for income-generating projects and job creation, but to also cushion the impact of any global economic meltdown. Instead, the PPP remained locked in its ’50s and ’60s communist frame of mind by refusing to trust Western capitalists, who had the capital to invest, even as it contented itself to allow its government to rely on foreign loans and grants and foreign remittances originating in the West and money laundering from drug smugglers with access to Western markets. So, even in a backhanded sense, the West was still critical to Guyana’s survival!
The editorial writer also dared to pronounce on the commitment of the Jagans to Marxism as always being “based on their concerns for the impact of the workings of capitalism on the ordinary folks – the working class.” Now, you’d seriously have to wonder where the writer has been living in the last 16 years, because right before our eyes and under the working class PPP government emerged a class of highly questionable rich Guyanese, yet apologists for the PPP government are still pedalling the line that the Jagans were Marxists who were concerned about the working class. This makes me remember the mockery of the PNC motto: ‘The small man is the real man.’ Truth is, the working class in Guyana is just that: the working class. There is no serious plan to move them from that level or else how will the PPP keep boasting of being a working class party?
At last check, Guyana’s informal economy was around 40 to 60 per cent of the formal economy, which means the ideological vision of the PPP under Mrs Jagan from 1997 onward did not cater for genuine economic reforms based on major FDIs, and now that the effects of the global economic meltdown are being felt, Guyana still does not have a developed infrastructure; it does not have huge income/employment generating projects and it certainly does not have any so-called ‘firewall.’ So Mrs Jagan’s prediction that capitalism is in trouble falls flat, given the PPP had no viable vision or plan of its own for over 16 years to extricate Guyana from its own socio-economic trouble!
Finally, I beg to differ with the editorial writer’s assertion that Mrs Jagan was never a “doctrinaire ideologue,” but that “she would have agreed on economic matters with Deng Xiaoping who constructed the new China [and said] ‘It matters not what colour the cat, it matters only whether it catches mice.’” Again, there is a profound disconnect here, because while Deng took steps to ‘construct the new China,’ Mrs Jagan took no new steps to construct a new Guyana. There was no noticeable change in her husband’s presidency from 1992 to 1997, and neither did she make any changes when she became President from 1997 to 1999, nor after her party catapulted Bharrat Jagdeo to the presidency in 1999. If anything, he seems to be operating these days from a helter-skelter script totally different from the PPP!
So while China was able to set aside aspects of its ideological differences with the West and benefited immensely from the FDIs, Guyana under Mrs Jagan’s PPP did not replicate the same mindset as Deng Xiaoping. An honest assessment shows Mrs Jagan spent the last 60 years fighting an ideological battle rather than a battle for Guyana’s socio-economic development, and that clearly identifies her as more of a ‘doctrinaire ideologue’ than a political pragmatist with her ears to the ground. Simply put, she was out of touch with the Guyanese situation: racial unity and the economy.
Yours faithfully,
Emile Mervin
