Say what you like about Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham, they and thus their governments had holistic and audacious views of Guyana and its development. Of course, this way of doing politics was not their invention; for the most part they were merely falling in line in an era of grand theories of social change. Some like to refer to this time, and particularly this distinct way of doing politics in it, as utopian. After all, the Soviet Union, rooted in the utopianism of Nikolai Chernyshevsky (Lenin adopted the title of his book for his much more popular ‘What is to be done?’), one of the boldest of the political projects of that era, ended in rubble!
Yet, Burnham and Jagan’s various levels of utopianism offered a panegyric view of man and his possibilities. Jagan’s helped to cultivate a concern for the poor that could be quite daunting to mortals concerned with acquiring and keeping the good life. Perhaps that is why we should not be too hard on his successors. Forbes Burnham’s view of creating the modern Guyanese person, able to confidently help to develop the national and international environments, cannot fail to impress.
Put aside the inconsistencies contained in the theories themselves, the efforts of our founding political fathers could only have emerged from the cauldron of our distinct and most problematical political environment and this
