Engendering Revolt in the Anglophone Caribbean

Organizing the Oppressed for Self-emancipation

Ajamu Nangwaya

Revolutionary or radical resistance, particularly one with a participatory democratic character, will not take place in the Anglophone Caribbean context in the absence of preparing the working class to become receptive to oppositional political ideas. Revolutionary resistance in this article is not about capturing and exercising state power as a means to empower the people. We may easily reference the political outcomes of that approach since the French, Haitian, Russian, Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Grenadian revolutions, and other state-centric paths to supposedly emancipating the oppressed. Revolutions of the twenty-first century should focus on processes of social transformation that are not merely mimicking those from the existing systems of oppression. As a revolutionary who marches under the banner of anarchist communism,1 I am in broad agreement with political scientist and Pan-Africanist intellectual Horace Campbell that the revolution should reflect specific humanistic and transformative sensibilities:

My proposition is that we are not reflecting on revolution in the traditional sense of simply seizing state power; we are talking about a fundamental transformation. These are transformations at the level of consciousness, transformations at the level of material organisations, transformations in the matter of political organisation, transformations at the level of gender relations, new conceptions of leadership and transformations at the level of our relations with the planet Earth and the Universe.2

The people of the Caribbean have a long and rich history of insurrections, revolts, and revolutions, and may call on this tradition to inspire their imagination of the political possibilities for social transformation. It is fundamentally necessary for organizers to carry out organizing work among the people in order to facilitate their entry into radical or revolutionary organizations. Being oppressed does not necessarily lead to an instinctive will to revolt, as can be seen from the imposition of capitalist austerity programs in the region since the 1970s. There are necessary conditions that must be present to enable Caribbean people to rise up against economic and social hardship.

The following factors are vital to facilitate revolt against the exploited in the Anglophone Caribbean: heightened class consciousness by developing people’s understanding and awareness of their distinct class interests, execution of systematic organizing as opposed to mobilizing within the ranks of the oppressed, undermine the perception of capitalism as the only option through mass political education and ideological development, facilitate political engagement of the revolutionary petit bourgeoisie, and organizing around the needs of the people. The petit bourgeoisie and the most politically developed members of the laboring classes are strategically placed to serve as the catalyst to enable the poor to rise up against capitalist, patriarchal, and racist oppression. This essay offers a path toward a politics of awakening the revolutionary potentiality of the Caribbean working class or laboring classes.

The article “Why Don’t the Poor Rise Up?” that is written by Thomas D. Edsall and published in the New York Times3 raises a pertinent question that should be on the minds of those of us who are committed to encouraging revolutions and preparing to exploit revolutionary conditions whenever and wherever they appear. In spite of the devastating economic and social impact of the Great Recession on the laboring classes in the global South and North,4 the sufferers are not storming the barricade and creating a Hobbesian nightmare for the ruling-class. Edsall’s question betrays a popular misconception that people tend to revolt when the economic and social conditions in society become unbearable. There must be the coming together of a range of factors to make insurrections or uprisings possible. While liberal bourgeois or progressive forces might speculate about the reasons behind the failure of the people to rise up in the face of the current onslaught of capitalist austerity, the future incident that might spark spontaneous insurrections may arrive like the proverbial thief in the night.

The desire to see the people “rise up” is not a maximalist expectation. I have the distinct impression that the framing of the people in motion as a “rise up” is simply desirous of a revolt of the poor. But the revolutionary dub poet Mutabaruka of Jamaica kindly reminds us that “A revolt aint a revolution,”5 so we ought to move beyond merely rising up and sitting down after the system has violently repressed the political resistance of the oppressed, or smothered it with a package of reformist measures that does not address the substantive structural problems in society. On the other hand, the “concept of revolution has been intimately tied to the view that [humanity] could change society, that this change was in the direction of progressive steps toward the improvement of [humanity’s] condition, and that this progression was in the direction of greater equality.”6 It is revolution that we must dedicate ourselves to fomenting, revolutions across the world because capitalism and its alliance with other systems of exploitation call for a dramatic, transformative, and forceful economic, social, and political rapture.

A revolution calls for a struggle that will most likely be a protracted one, convinces a critical mass of the oppressed classes that fundamental change is necessary, possible, and worth the sacrifices, and requires a revolutionary theory that articulates the values, political sensibilities, and expectations of the laboring classes or oppressed groups in terms that they can understand and share with their neighbors. Given our experience of post-revolutionary societies wherein the men (and a few women) with effective control over the means of coercion normally substitute themselves for the people, revolutionary struggles must be self-organized or participatory democratic, even when there is an armed struggle component to the process of revolution. The preceding assertion is not as easy as it might seem in stating or reading. Wars engender strong centralizing tendencies, and enemy forces that are the epitome of authoritarianism, centralism, and bureaucratic control will likely confront the revolution. It is likely that the revolutionary forces will emulate the centralist command and control ways of the enemy in pursuit of effectiveness and efficiency on the armed struggle terrain. The will toward centralization and secrecy will likely carry over into the post-revolutionary society in which it will effectively be the counterrevolution—throwing the people off the stage of history, or offering them the peripheral roles of extras and props.

Revolutionaries, of necessity and political obligation, must be interested in the question “Why don’t the people rise up?” They must devote the time and resources in studying why and under what conditions revolutions take place. Once that question has been sufficiently answered, the forces of revolution should go about the task of making revolution irresistible to the people without whom it is impossible.

Contextualizing the Poor and Revolt/Rise Up

We need to engage with the query that animates this book before moving on to the barriers against the laboring classes, in the English-speaking Caribbean, to rising up and creating the path to the emancipated society. The reference to “the poor” is taken here as a euphemism or stand-in reference to the laboring classes or the working class, which implicitly implicates capitalism as the problem. In the centers of capitalism, there is a noticeable reluctance to address the class struggle or the existence of opposing classes as a fact of life. It is for that reason that the ruling class and its agents in academia and the media promote the idea of North America and Europe as being predominantly middle-class.7 The preceding state of affairs informed the Occupy Movement’s popular slogan, ‘‘We are the 99%.’’ If we use the measurement of income or wealth, the slogan includes major chief executive officers, presidents and prime ministers, ministers of government, judges in the supreme courts, and other decision-making agents of the ruling class.8

The poor are seen as a small group that has somehow escaped the generalized prosperity or opportunities that are present in these centers of imperialism. The poor becomes a sociological category that is not implicated in the irreconcilable clash of interests between classes. In other words, the ruling class and even social reformers are peddling the language of “the poor,” “the underprivileged” or “the underclass” as a way not to engage, or to mask issues related to the class struggle, class interests, or class warfare, with respect to the conflict between the working-class majority and the parasitic minority, the bourgeoisie (the real minority). In the United States, the poor is much larger than what the state and capital have conceded. Salvatore Babones argues that the decision of the state’s policymakers to not measure poverty by what is now seen as a decent or reasonable standard of living has artificially reduced the ranks of the poor:

The official poverty line for a family of four is $22,350. Updating that figure for growth in U.S. national income per capita since 1969 would yield a 2011 poverty line of $46,651. By that standard, about 28 percent of American families of four are now living in poverty, almost twice the official poverty rate. If that sounds high, it’s only because we are much more stingy today than our grandparents were in 1969.9

Relative poverty is the measurement used within a country to indicate the level of income that is below that which is needed to afford an individual or family the average standard of living. Based on this definition, Buchheit states that 18% of Americans are living in poverty and 32% of them are in the low-income category, which is twice the level of the official poverty line.10

Capitalist societies might play politics with whom to statistically include within the ranks of the poor, but it cannot objectively exclude them from the laboring classes. When radicals or revolutionaries engage the category “the poor,” they are ideologically or politically obligated to embrace the people in this social grouping as members of the working class or the laboring classes. This positioning allows radical and revolutionary organizers to be programmatically preoccupied with the oppressive condition of the people in the working class who are women, racialized, people with disabilities, queers or LGBTQ (lesbians, gays, bisexual, transgendered, queers), young people, or the elderly. The class struggle and its proponents should not look to members of the laboring classes as if they live compartmentalized lives. They experience exploitation beyond their role within capitalism. The uprising of the poor or the laboring classes must give primary importance to ending racism, patriarchy or sexism, homophobia, colonialism, ableism, ageism, and all other forms of oppression. We should approach the laboring classes in this manner in both the global North and South.

What exactly do we have in mind when the poor of the Caribbean are called on to rise up or revolt against oppression or class inequality? Is rising up or revolting against oppression exclusively an issue of the enactment of insurrections, rebellions, uprisings, mass demonstrations and/or other public protest actions? The act or process of rising up or revolting against the neoliberal capitalist regimes across the Anglophone Caribbean must take on an overt, public, oppositional, and mass character that engages a critical cross section of the people. Demonstrations, rallies, occupations, marches, press conferences, and vigils are useful instruments in expressing the people’s objection to inequities in society. It is generally a good thing when the people are in motion.

However, if the laboring classes and radical and revolutionary elements of the petit bourgeoisie are only reliant on demonstrations, rallies, occupations, marches, press conferences, and vigils as the tools of revolt or rising up for a just and equitable society, they would simply be engaged in the mobilizing of the people. Mobilizing actions tend to be episodic or take place infrequently, and the people serve as props or extras in the scripted, ritualized, and predictable drama of public protests. The oppressive system is carrying out acts of injustice every second of the day. But the apostles of the mobilizing approach to resistance are unwittingly telling the people that resistance to exploitation is not a 24/7 engagement.

Mobilizing endeavors impose minimal commitment on the oppressed or activists; while equipping them with the comforting illusion that they are involved in important or substantive acts of resistance to domination. An example might concretely illustrate the case being made against the mobilization approach. In most cases of alleged unlawful or extrajudicial killing of people from Jamaica’s working-class communities by police, the residents tend to block roads or engage in public marches and hold public space for a few or several hours.11 However, the politicians and the police know that the people will surely stand down after venting their anger at routinized police violence and their deadly use of force against members of the working class. Momentary acts of rebellion are insufficient to the task of building a counterforce to the existing neocolonial regimes across the Caribbean. It takes more than instinctive lashing out in anger or frustration to enable the people to rise up.

When the people rise up, the expectation is that they are seeking a qualitative change in the operation of society, or the destruction of the existing one. If a critical mass of the people has risen up for policies and programs that are not substantively different from those of the status quo, the people in motion are not really rising up. They simply want to join what is the societal norm with some adjustments. The act of truly rising up by the oppressed is fundamentally progressive or emancipatory in goals and demands. Nothing less than revolution or the process of making the revolution should serve as the people’s festival of resistance!

Context of the English-speaking Caribbean

The Anglophone Caribbean includes the islands of the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean as well as territories on the mainland (Belize and Guyana). This sub-region is often invisible or excluded in economic and political discussion of Latin America. In a recent conversation with a comrade, he told me that some Canadian-based activists from Latin America do not view the English-speaking Caribbean as a part of that region. These South American and Central American mainlanders argued that these Anglophone countries did not wage wars of independence but had their independence “given” to them by British colonialism. It is on the preceding basis that, unlike Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, the Anglophone Caribbean has been willed out of Latin America. It is not clear to keen observers how the legacies of wars of independence have positively mediated the neocolonial status of the Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking territories and the exploited economic, social, and political condition of their laboring classes. These politicos are infatuated with a political game that is a futile exercise in the valorizing of a distinction without a difference.

The Anglophone Caribbean is very much a part of Latin America. It shares in that larger region’s experience of genocide, enslavement, patriarchal domination of women, European and American imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism, and ecological destruction. The countries that constitute the English-speaking Caribbean occupy islands in the West Indies and territories in Central America and South America. These territories encompass politically independent states as well as those that are colonies or “overseas territories” of British colonialism and are as follows: Anguilla, Antiqua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and The Turks and Caicos Islands and Trinidad and Tobago.12 These territories have adopted the Westminster political system to the Caribbean environment and have engaged in the constitutional transfer of power through periodic elections to the victorious parties. D’Agostino cautions us not to be fooled by appearances because “Such systems boast formal democratic institutions and processes, yet in practice they tend to operate on the basis of personalism, patron-client relationships, and the exclusion of the popular classes.”13 The Anglophone Caribbean’s adaptation of the Westminster tradition made the region an anomaly in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s when other regions in the global South were largely dominated by one-party regimes or military governments.

D’Agostino acknowledges the authoritarian political tradition of British colonialism that has been practiced in the region for centuries,14 but he (un)wittingly implies that the Westminster political system of governance in Britain is a paragon of democratic virtues over which the British popular classes rule supreme. It is a different type of authoritarian system of governance that is effectively controlled by the middle class or the bourgeoisie. Mars appears to fall for the same argument when he refers to the Anglophone Caribbean’s “institutionalization of a rather truncated form of Westminster democracy with its inherent tendency to foster autocratic types of rule.”15 At best, we might assert that the political elites in the English-speaking Caribbean adopted a vulgar form of an already established authoritarian political system.

These countries also embraced the capitalist economic model since the British ensured that its own political system served as a way to tutor and groom the local elite to accept liberal capitalist democracy and its accompanying economic model. When the Marxist People’s Progressive Party won the 1953 elections in British Guiana under the internal self-government regime, the American and British fear of communism led Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill to declare that “We ought surely to get American support in doing all that we can to break the communist teeth in British Guiana.”16 Britain eventually suspended British Guiana’s constitution, dismissed the government, and arrested Premier Cheddi Jagan and his wife, Janet Jagan. British colonialism made it clear that they would not tolerate a government that might follow the path of socialism. American imperialism then demonstrated to people in the Caribbean that even a regime committed to a reformist social democratic economic, social, and political program would not be tolerated. The United States, through its Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), allegedly sponsored and armed lumpen criminal elements that destabilized the regime of Prime Minister Michael Manley in the 1970s.17

The government of the United States and international capital engaged in political and economic warfare against Jamaica’s democratic socialist regime that included measures such as “production cutbacks and transfers, lawsuits, and a media campaign designed to undermine the tourist industry.”18 The International Monetary Fund (IMF) played a major part in the economic destabilization of Jamaica by way of its punishing structural adjustment program (capitalist austerity measures) that weakened the reformist capacity of the government. Perry Mars documents Western imperialism’s hostility and active undermining of “socialist oriented” regimes in this sub-region from the 1950s to the 1980s.19 American imperialism had no desire to see another Cuba established in its sphere of influence, notwithstanding the desire of the people for just and equitable societies.

Besides the present dependent capitalist character of the Anglophone Caribbean, these countries also share critical features on the economic front. They experienced plantation slavery that depended on the labor power of enslaved Afrikans who were kidnapped and sold into the European slave trade that resulted in millions of them being transported to the Americas. Enslaved Africans were used to facilitate capitalist development and prosperity in Europe and for the economic exploitation of the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas. In the Caribbean, the economic patterns imposed on the region gave rise to what the late Caribbean economist George Beckford calls the plantation society, with their tendency toward dependence on one major agricultural staple (for example, sugarcane in the case of the Anglophone Caribbean, or cotton in the Southern United States) and an economy that is highly dependent and vulnerable to political and economic events in imperialist or metropolitan centers. The proponents of the plantation economy school argue that the legacy of this non-dynamic economic arrangement is still bedeviling the Caribbean’s development prospects and informing the services, manufacturing, and mineral extractive sectors of this region.20

Caribbean economies are reliant on natural resources as the primary source of their export earnings.21 This state of affairs places the region in the unenviable position of contracting economic pneumonia when the economies in North America and Europe catch the cold. The economies in the Anglophone Caribbean were designed from the early days of colonialism and plantation slavery to export raw materials and semi-processed goods to Europe. As a part of the mercantile capitalist outlook of the imperial centers, the colonies were discouraged from engaging in the manufacturing or processing of raw materials, because this higher valued-added process and accompanying industrial and financial sector development were reserved for the metropolitan economies. This pattern of economic development is still a feature of the Caribbean, despite the prevailing free trade ideology of economic imperialism. The dependence on the export of natural resources and the vagaries of the international commodity markets have made the Caribbean susceptible to the economic and political machinations of imperialism.

The region’s defenseless economic status can be seen in its elite’s politically suicidal adoption of neoliberal capitalist orthodoxy from the 1970s to today under the guidance of the IMF, the World Bank, and U.S. imperialism. In order for these Caribbean territories to receive access to loans from private international financial institutions at relatively reasonable rates, they must get the seal of approval from the IMF. With a steady diet of IMF structural adjustment programs that demand the disinvestment in health care, education, and other social programs, the political elite are eroding the patron-clientele character of its version of the Westminster political system and undermining the very basis of their power:

The adoption of neoliberal economic policies has limited the ability of Caribbean governments to fund social welfare programs and thereby maintain the statist bargain. This has had a deleterious impact on the quality of life for millions across the region, a problematic trend given the heightened expectations held by increasingly mobilized populations. The failure to fulfill such expectations, drastically exacerbated by global economic crisis in the first decade of the twenty-first century, has undermined the public’s faith in political parties, popularly elected leaders and democratic politics in general.22

In the face of this attack on the laboring classes through the implementation of structural adjustment programs, one regime in the region was almost thrown into the cesspool of history by way of a coup. The people of Trinidad experienced a reduction of over 50% in the per capita Gross National Product between 1982 and 1987, and the state’s structural adjustment program in the period 1982–1990 threw an additional 66,000 workers into the ranks of the unemployed, which led to an estimated rate of joblessness of 22% to 25%.23 The government of the day was widely unpopular, and many of the civil society groups that supported it had abandoned the regime.24 It was in this atmosphere that the Jamaat al Muslimeen formation carried out an attempt to overthrow the A.N.R. Robinson-led government. The Jamaat al Muslimeen had a property-related dispute that served as a triggering cause for the insurrection, but its leader Abu Bakr clothed the uprising in language that suggested a non-sectarian, universal basis: “The people don’t know how to use a gun. All free men have guns and land. There must be a vanguard. Somebody must take the lead.”25 This religious organization directly linked its coup attempt with the people’s resultant suffering from the state’s capitalist austerity program.26 The people did not rally to the side of the insurrectionists, but sections of the poor took the opportunity to liberate goods from stores as a payback for the years of economic warfare against it.27

Why Don’t the Poor Rise Up in the Anglophone Caribbean?

There is a constellation of factors implicated in the failure of the people to rise up against the punishing blows of the longstanding capitalist austerity program in the Anglophone Caribbean and the fallout from the Great Recession. If the working-class in Europe and North America are reeling from the social and economic hardship that came about as a result of the Great Recession of 2008, the laboring classes in the open, dependent, and export-led economies of the Caribbean should be suffering much more than their counterparts in the global North. After all, the Caribbean does not possess the highly developed social welfare programs of the global North, which can absorb some of the blows of severe economic downturns in the capitalist business cycle. Some of the crucial factors that have worked against the people rising up against capitalist austerity are the legitimacy of the regimes, self-employment in the informal sector, massive inflow of overseas remittances, absence of a permissive external environment, and political irrelevance of the radical petit bourgeoisie.

Legitimacy of the Regimes

The governments in the English-speaking Caribbean are seen as somewhat legitimate in the eyes of the people. They are the outcome of an institutionalized process that is grudgingly accepted despite the corruption, ­political victimization, patron-clientelism, and democratic deficit with which it is associated. The Anglophone Caribbean, since the introduction of universal adult suffrage in the 1940s, has been largely defined, politically, by their competitive elections, constitutional transfer of power, active political parties, and electoral outcomes that are generally accepted by the opposition and the people. Guyana under Forbes Burnham (with the active and tacit support of Britain and the United States) and Grenada under Eric Gairy and the People’s Revolutionary Government under Maurice Bishop, are the exceptions that confirm this general tendency. According to Jorge Domínguez, “The Caribbean achievement is far superior to that of Latin America and also to that of countries of Africa and Asia that acquired their formal independence from European powers after the Second World War.”28 However, the political acceptance of liberal capitalist democracy by the laboring classes is a reflection of the ideological hegemony of the ruling-class over the former’s worldview and this is, in part, a continuation of a process that started during the enslavement period.29 The acceptance of the liberal capitalist democracy and its procedures is not unlike the situation in the capitalist democracies in the centers of imperialism, North America and Europe.

D’Agostino identifies the forces at work that have made the Anglophone Caribbean the most successful and stable global South region under liberal capitalist democracy:

With respect to the former British colonies, many observers point to nature and duration of colonial rule as key to the region’s success. The introduction of the Westminster-style parliamentary system provided the necessary framework within which Caribbean democracy could flourish, and the liberal political culture that would sustain this system became deeply rooted in West Indian societies. The long, gradual process of decolonization in the Anglo-Caribbean differed markedly from the experiences of British colonies in Africa and Asia, providing opportunity for institutional development, nation building, and “tutelage” in the way of democratic governance.30

British colonialism did not independently figure out the best way to provide “tutelage” to its colonized “Afro-Saxons.” It was forced to decolonize and offer internal self-government by the mass labor rebellions of the 1930s in the Anglophone Caribbean, which gave birth to modern mass-based political parties and trade unions. These parties and trade unions emerged as organs through which the laboring classes felt that their economic and political aspirations could be represented in society.

D’Agostino points to how liberal capitalist democracy became institutionalized in these Caribbean societies and why its outcomes would still be legitimate, even when the masses are not satisfied with its actual performance:

Among the pillars upon which Caribbean democracy has rested is a well-established institutional infrastructure. The emergence of strong political party systems, regular competitive elections, and vibrant civil societies (including labour unions, professional associations, and the like) has done much to bolster the cause of democracy in the Caribbean.31

The cause of democracy, bolstered by the African petit bourgeois political elite that emerged from the labor rebellions of the 1930s, was acceptable to British colonialism and Western imperialism after independence because they accepted the “basic philosophy of free market capitalist development.”32 It is the hegemony of the economic and political elite that is evident in the working class’s embrace of liberal capitalist democracy and its use of elections to change political parties when they are not performing to expectation. Despite the legitimacy of these regimes, the laboring classes are still experiencing democratic deficit and the lack of political efficacy. In Jamaica’s general and local government elections in 2016, only 47.7% and 30% of eligible voters went to the polls, respectively. Just like in the United States and Canada, the political elite governs with a very narrow base of support. If the people were presented with a one-party system, they would have likely linked their economic marginalization as being the result of not electing the government of the day.

Politically Stabilizing Effect of the Informal Economy

The deterioration of the economy in the Caribbean is due to the bitter medicine of the IMF’s structural adjustment programs that prescribe attacks on state ownership of productive assets, withdrawal of subsidies on basic needs, goods, and services, and the slashing of social program spending in education, health care, social housing, and social services. The onslaught of imperialism’s economic globalization policies force these import-dependent, open, vulnerable, and weak economies of the Anglophone Caribbean to one-sidedly expose their societies to the full competition of imported goods, lower taxes to attract foreign investments, overly generous investment packages offered to international capital, and removal of trade measures that once encouraged international businesses to produce inside national borders in order to access domestic markets. The sum total of these neoliberal policies are high unemployment and underemployment and people’s entry into the informal economy as micro-enterprise and small- and medium-sized business entrepreneurs.

But entering the informal sector in order to survive provides hope for a better tomorrow, which limits the possibility of rising up or giving the time of day to political forces that are advocating revolution or radical social change. The Caribbean states such as Jamaica and Guyana have experienced unimpressive economic performance over the last three decades, and that state of affairs drove many people into the informal sector. The late George Girvan, a progressive intellectual and economist, suggested that the informal sector reinforces certain conservative inclinations with respect to capitalism:

We also need to consider the impact of the flourishing of self-employment and informal sector activities, which has been a major survival mechanism of the people in response to the crisis of the 1980s. Judging from casual observation in countries like Jamaica and Guyana, this development has strongly reinforced the tendencies towards economic individualism which, it may be argued, has been a prominent feature of Caribbean culture ever since Emancipation.33

Capitalist entrepreneurship is associated with economic independence and control, which suggests that members of the laboring classes will develop a stake in society when they have investments in the economy. They are unlikely, then, to find rising up against the established economic order very appealing, and might actually serve as stout defenders of the status quo.

C.Y. Thomas was dismissive of the scope of the informal sector by stating that it reflects “a small minority … (who have) been able to ‘capture’ supplies for themselves and to monopolise the scarcity values these commodities generate in the market place.”34 Thomas could not be further from the truth in characterizing the informal sector as the preoccupation of “a small minority.” In 2001, the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) reported that informal economic activities were the equivalent of 43% of Jamaica’s official Gross Domestic Product (GDP).35 The estimated size of the informal sector in Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and Guyana is 25%, 36%, and 55% of the official GDP figures, respectively.36 Jamaica’s informal economy has absorbed many workers, and an investigation of this phenomenon in the 1990s estimated that it provided jobs to between 24% and 39% of employees in the non-agricultural workforce.37 The massive 62% reduction in poverty between 1991 and 2001, and the fall in inequality could have been partly the result of activities in the informal sector.38

It is not the reduction in relative deprivation that makes the informal sector a factor in the people not rising up. The informal sector provides the entrepreneurs and workers with the opportunity to put bread on their table for another day, and it is the source of hope that better days are ahead of them. The entrepreneurs in the informal sector might be able to see a way out that is better than their prior condition as workers in the formal sector. In the IADB’s study about 33% of the business owners in the informal economy had a university education, which was higher than that of workers in the formal sector.39 Some of these petit bourgeois entrepreneurs might have been catalysts for social change, if they had not found self-employment in the informal sector. Neville Graham, a Jamaica Gleaner reporter, captures the politically stabilizing effects of the informal economy when he writes, “He [Ralston Hyman of Jamaica’s Economic Programme Oversight Committee] says that the fact that so many of our economic statistics are adverse and the county is not falling apart is directly attributable to the informal economy, simply because people can get by using informal activity.”40

Massive Inflow of Remittances

The massive inflow of remittances to the English-speaking Caribbean has tempered the economic and social grievances that might have been expressed through attraction to radical or revolutionary ideologies or mass protest actions. Migration has historically functioned as a safety valve for potential social disruption from high unemployment and limited social and economic opportunities in the region. This migration has served as the conduit for the injection of hard currency into these economies. In 2012, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) states received US$4.5 billion dollars in remittances, and three of these states (St. Kitts and Nevis, Jamaica, and Guyana) were among the ten highest per capita recipients of remittances across the globe in that year.41 Jamaica received over US$1.13 billion in remittances in 200242 and is a member of the “Billion Dollar Remittances Club.” In 2014, Jamaica received US$1.92 billion in net remittances (gross remittances were US$2.15 billion), which comes in second to tourism that normally nets over US$2 billion annually.43 Remittances are significant to the Anglophone Caribbean, and they exceed the total value of official aid and direct foreign investment (FDI). In the case of Jamaica, FDI came in at US$595 million in 2015, while gross remittances to the island were US$2.16 billion, which was three-and-half times the inflow of the former.44 According to the World Bank’s report on migration and remittances, for the first eight months of 2016, Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados generated US$2.4 billion, US$296 million, US$128 million and US$106 million in remittances, respectively.45

Based on my personal experience with sending remittances, and my knowledge of others who do, most of the funds are used for consumption purposes. Lim and Simmons’s study of the use of remittances in thirteen CARICOM countries reveals that “remittance inflows into the Caribbean are mostly to finance consumption needs rather than investing in growth-enhancing projects which may accumulate the capital stock in the economies.”46 Remittances enable some working-class recipients to escape relative poverty, and governments may opportunistically trumpet poverty reduction statistics as if their policies are the primary source of poverty alleviation. Remittances weaken the resolve to engage in collective political action or confrontation with the state over the provision of public goods or advancing programs to facilitate economic equity. People are able to access the consumption of goods and services courtesy of relatives and friends who are overseas.

Absence of a Permissive External Environment

The Anglophone Caribbean represents plantation societies whose political economy is unavoidably impacted by economic and ideological currents that emanate from imperialist North America and Europe. In other words, this region does not operate in an environment of its own making. This situation has been the status quo since Europe colonized the region and integrated the Caribbean into the economy of that metropolitan region. In the 1960s and 1970s, imperialism was on the defensive with the political struggles and national liberation processes across the Third World. At this same time, the former Soviet Union was a source of political, economic, ideological, and military support for states or guerrilla movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that were seeking a path of liberation away from Western capitalism and imperialism. In North America and Europe, they were also experiencing internal political challenges and rebellions from women, racialized groups, and students, the elderly, sexual minorities, and national minorities who were actively fighting oppressive conditions. The preceding enabling factors created a permissive external environment for progressive nationalist, anti-imperialist, or state socialist developments in the Caribbean and Latin America, Africa and Asia.47 John Foran refers to the permissive external environment as a “world-systemic opening (a let-up of external controls)”48 by the major powers.

The Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Grenadian revolutions, and the socialist orientation of the Michael Manley regime, were possible because the external geopolitical environment was a politically enabling one (in addition to internal factors that were germane to these societies).49 In the current geo-political environment of the Caribbean, American imperialism has strongly indicated that it will aggressively undermine any radical social transformation, as exemplified by its behavior toward the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela.50 The United States financed and carried out a low intensity war against the revolution in Nicaragua, and it invaded Grenada and put an end to its revolution after a violent split in the leadership.51 America is the sole global superpower that is violently opposed to socialist-oriented or explicitly revolutionary socialist governments in the global South. In the current period, there is no countervailing power from which material assistance may be procured for the pursuit of a non-capitalist or revolutionary socialist development path. The United States stands ready to use the full weight of its economic, political, diplomatic, and military might to thwart or frustrate such a development in the Anglophone Caribbean.

In the context of such a hostile environment, it is understandable if the people view capitalism as the only permissible game in town. The global financial institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, and IADB that are controlled by global North states are only positive toward regimes that are on the capitalist development path. Furthermore, in the context of the English-speaking Caribbean, many radicals and even mass publics were deeply disturbed by the violent implosion of the Grenadian revolution. The way that the revolution ended probably created deep reservation among the Anglophone Caribbean people about violent, revolutionary experimentation. However, the attitude of the United States toward anti-capitalist political and economic events in the Caribbean is much more of a deterring factor than memories of the Grenadian Revolution.

Political Irrelevance of the Radical Petite Bourgeoisie

The radical petit bourgeoisie in the English-speaking Caribbean have virtually abandoned organized political resistance and have retreated into various pursuits that are not necessarily committed to destroying the existing hegemonic capitalist and state forces. It is reasonable to assert that the English-speaking Caribbean Left experienced an ideological crisis of faith with the collapse of the Grenadian Revolution. According to Caribbean academic David Hinds, “The demise of the Grenadian Revolution left the Caribbean Left in disarray. The revolution had become the hope for fundamental transformation in the Anglophone Caribbean. It was a popular revolution whose effects went far beyond the shores of Grenada.”52 In 1998, Mars outlined a number of paths that the embattled Caribbean Left might take, and it has definitely embraced “a process of self-liquidation by acknowledging defeat and the impossibility of realizing egalitarian socialism in the teeth of a more powerful capitalist system.”53 The year 1983 marks the start of the slow decline and extinction of radical and revolutionary left parties in the region, with the vibrant and seemingly strong Workers Party of Jamaica becoming defunct in 1992.

In spite of the blanket anti-petite bourgeois prejudices among many people who are politically aware, a sustained revolutionary resistance will not likely take place under current conditions, without the catalytic or triggering role of the radical or revolutionary petit bourgeoisie or middle-class. Since 1789, how many national liberation struggles or social revolutions have not been led or initiated by the radical or revolutionary petit bourgeoisie? The Haitian Revolution and the Mexican Revolution are probably the only two cases that were not led by petit bourgeois forces that committed Amilcar Cabral’s “class suicide” and joined the ranks of the laboring classes as agents of the social revolution.54 The radical or revolutionary petit bourgeois has acquired knowledge, skills, and attitudes in the universities and other post-secondary institutions that are essential to the people rising up for justice and equity. It is for this reason that Frantz Fanon called on this class to put these critical resources at the disposal of the people.55

In the late 1960s, the radical and revolutionary petit bourgeois elements (both students and lecturers) at the University of the West Indies (UWI) embraced the political trajectory advocated by Frantz Fanon56 and the revolutionary Marxist historian Walter Rodney.57 However, the students and lecturers are currently absent from overt and oppositional organizing for socialism or revolutionary political projects. The UWI is the premier English-language university in the Caribbean and is the principal manifestation of regional cooperation. According to Brian Meeks, a former member of the communist Workers Party of Jamaica and current university-based intellectual:

At the UWI, the pendulum has swung dramatically from a point at which a critical mass of students and academics were concerned with issues of transformation to one in which the vast majority of students seem obsessed with certification and career, while the academics have retreated from the public sphere and focus on consultancies and salary increments.58

The neoliberal capitalist turn, with its glorification of the ethical “me-myself-and-I” stance, has infected the ideological sensibilities and political behaviors of many academic workers and students. This development has effectively neutered any inclination toward the revolution. If the lecturers, as a group, have abandoned revolutionary agitation and organizing, it is unlikely that corrupting the minds of the learners and turning them against the gods of social conformity will be the animating thrust of their activities as academic workers.

In addition to the above reality, the political tendency at the UWI seems to have been impacted by the “‘cultural’ turn within the social sciences”59 and the humanities. Identity politics has superseded the focus on the interaction between the political and economic structures in maintaining capitalist hegemony in the Anglophone Caribbean. In the introduction to a 1997 double issue of Caribbean Quarterly, Barry Chevannes celebrates the establishment of culture as the ascendant force in Caribbean scholarship. He claims that the plenary speeches in that double issue of the Caribbean Quarterly “represented a powerful symbol of culture coming (back) in from the cold where it had been thrown out by a social science that had lost its bearing and wandered far afield in realms of vanguardism and name-calling.”60 The leftist intellectuals who came out of the social sciences in the 1970s and 1980s at UWI, Mona, did more than just condemn capitalism and imperialism. The Jamaican Marxist revolutionary intelligentsia engaged in organizing around women’s liberation, expanded trade union terrain, and organized junior medical doctors. These leftists also gave critical support to the Michael Manley administration and engaged in public education around the need for socialism, the class struggle, and the development of working-class consciousness.

While Meeks is critical of the failure of Caribbean Marxism to adapt itself to the specific conditions of the Caribbean, he acknowledges an endearing feature, which “was its orientation toward activism and a healthy notion of praxis.”61 To what extent is the cultural turn among intellectuals in the Anglophone Caribbean fostering an enabling environment for the people to rise up? They are not engaged in the organizing work that the revolutionary intelligentsia of the 1970s and 1980s was actively involved in, whether the 1970 February Revolution in Trinidad, resistance to the Burnham regime in Guyana, or seminal roles played in the Grenadian Revolution, as in the case of Maurice Bishop, Phyllis Coard, and Bernard Coard. Close to two decades after Chevannes publicly gave his blessings to the “centrality of culture now replacing the centrality of politics,”62 I would conclude that the cultural preoccupations among most intellectuals in the English-speaking Caribbean is a sort of “counterrevolution,” when compared with the anti-capitalist or socialist political activism of the petit bourgeois actors who were shaped by the social sciences and its radical political imperatives. The forces of capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and imperialism are not fazed if the proponents of the cultural turn engage in the researching, documenting, and celebrating of the Caribbean’s creative arts, birthing rituals, musical genres, African-Caribbean religions, Rastafari as culture bearers, and numerous other cultural phenomena. Instead, they would have a problem if the cultural-privileging petit bourgeois forces engage with questions of political economy from a socialist perspective and attempt to organize the people behind revolutionary political programs by way of social movement organizations. The issue is not a problem of focusing on the culture of the people; it is a matter of being divorced from organizing with the people to bring an end to class exploitation and other forms of oppression.

Engendering Revolt by Di Suffrahs and Allies

It is always easier to articulate the reasons why social, economic, and political conditions are the way they are, than to engage in solutions to eliminate the undesirable conditions. In the section below, an attempt will be made to address this shortcoming (insufficient attention to the practical matter of social transformation) that affects many activists or organizers. This section addresses several activities that might facilitate the people becoming self-consciously and actively opposed to their oppressive conditions by incorporating the following into their resistance strategies: fostering memories of resistance; developing “political cultures of opposition and resistance”; encouraging political education and fostering class consciousness; and organizing around the needs of the people.

Instilling Memories of the Tradition of Revolt and Revolution

The African working-class and other oppressed peoples in the Caribbean, who are the creators of the national cultures of the respective Caribbean territories and the popular culture of the Caribbean, are peoples of memories. It is fundamentally necessary to bring the tradition of revolt and revolution to the center of the organizing and political education work that is carried out among the people. After all, it is their history, and it is important for them to institutionalize the appropriateness of using any means necessary to remove oppressive conditions into their worldview. Mutabaruka’s poem “Revolt Ain’t a Revolution” informs the people that “we have to remember what happened in slavery / so as not to repeat that history.”63 He makes it explicitly clear to the African-Caribbean people that “we have to seek shaka [and] hannibal / in these times of aggression /and understand what was their mission.”64 Shaka Zulu of South Africa and Hannibal of Carthage are as seen as military and historical figures that are worthy of emulation in the present. Mutabaruka calls on the Caribbean revolutionary tradition when he asserts that:

If some thing is not worth dyin for

it is not worth livin for

but if it takes war to free us

then it is just WAR….65

Mutabaruka is showing us the gold mine that is the collective memory of the people of the Caribbean people. He and his fellow cultural workers and organic intellectuals are instructing the people on the value of the past in the present and the realizing of the future.

When the Trinidadian calypsonian The Mighty Sparrow recounts his experience of being purchased in Africa, journeying through the brutality of the Middle Passage, toiling hard under the watchful eyes of the slave masters, and then living through the farce of Emancipation in the song Slave,66 he is demonstrating the role of memory as a tool of resistance and documentation. When the former I-Three (back-up singer of Bob Marley and the Wailers) Judy Mowatt recalls the suffering, exploitation, and abuse of African women during the Holocaust of Enslavement in her popular song Black Woman,67 she is calling forth memories in her testimony on the trials and tribulations of this group. When the reggae cultural worker Burning Spear asks us, “Do you remember the days of slavery?” in the song Slavery Days,68 he is testing our memories of the horrors of chattel slavery. When Bob Marley states in the song Crazy Baldhead that “I and I build the cabin / I and I plant the corn / Didn’t my people before me slave for this country? / Now you look me with scorn,”69 he is invoking memories of the economic exploitation of slavery and capitalism and linking it to the continuing racist and capitalist oppression in contemporary Caribbean society. When Marley asserts that “We’re gonna chase those crazy baldheads out of town,” he is relying on memories of revolts in fighting chattel slavery. The non-scribal, folk philosophers, and cultural workers of the Caribbean are the major forces who articulate and remind the people of the pain of the past and its relevance to their present and future. The Akan’s adinkra symbol of the Sankofa bird looking backward while projecting a forward movement, while also holding an egg (symbol of the potentiality of a new life) in its beak, is a popular symbol among African-centered Diaspora Africans. It is an appropriate symbol to invoke and center for the Caribbean revolutionary or radical organizers who want di suffrahs to become conversant with the tradition of revolt and revolution in the region. There are two contrasting historical memories that confront the oppressed in the Caribbean. Campbell states that there is the memory of the fight against genocide, slavery, and indentureship, and it provides the potentiality for liberation.70 The other memory pertains to the experience of slavery, colonialism, capitalist economic exploitation, imperialist wars, and cultural imperialism, which serves as the social reaction in the path of revolutionary possibilities and counterhegemonic developments.71 The organizers in the Caribbean should not shy away from an open discussion of revolutionary organizing as an option in seeking a substantive transformation of society. These organizers must consistently commemorate anniversaries of revolts, uprisings, revolutions, and the exemplary contribution of individuals and groups that reflect a revolutionary or oppositional legacy. These commemorative moments should strive to make credible and relevant links to the social, economic, and political issues that are germane to the lives of the Caribbean laboring classes.

Develop “political cultures of opposition and resistance”

In the social struggle in the Anglophone Caribbean, it will be necessary to develop the cultural revolution in order to give birth to the political revolution. When the intellectuals or petit bourgeois forces in the Caribbean talk or write about the centrality of culture, they are on to something. But if their cultural thrust is divorced from political organizing and a revolutionary program, culture becomes celebratory in their hands and useless to the emancipation of the people. Fanon alerts readers to the problem of the colonized intellectuals and organizers who are estranged from actual political organizing:

When the colonized intellectual writing for his [or her] people uses the past he [or she] must do so with the intention of opening up the future, of spurring them into action and fostering hope. But in order to secure hope, in order to give it substance, he [or she] must take part in the action and commit himself [or herself] body and soul to the national struggle. You can talk about anything you like, but when it comes to talking about that one thing in a man’s [or woman’s] life that involves opening up new horizons, enlightening your country and standing tall alongside your people, then muscle power is required.72

It cannot be overemphasized that “One cannot divorce the combat for culture from the people’s struggle for liberation.”73 A critical source of ideas for the development of the “political cultures of opposition and resistance” is the culture of the people.

A theorist of revolution, John Foran developed the notion of political cultures of opposition and resistance, which is a critical component of his model of the coalescing of factors that are necessary in affecting successful revolutions. Foran describes political cultures of opposition and resistance as the “process by which both ordinary citizens and revolutionary leaderships came to perceive the economic and political realities of their societies, and to fashion a set of understandings that simultaneously made sense of those conditions, gave voice to their grievances, and found a discourse capable of enjoining others to act with them in the attempt to remake their societies.”74 Given the religious, ethnic, racial, and political diversity present in contemporary societies, especially in the global South, this reservoir of oppositional, anti-regime ideas is presented as a multi-source one. The political culture of opposition and resistance might emerge from religious sources such as Rastafari75 and Native Baptist religious expression that informed the 1831 Emancipation Rebellion and the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica, as well as from the idioms of the people such as the numerous proverbs across the Caribbean that speak to justice, fairness, and retribution. Historical memories of experiences, conflicts, or revolts76 may be used to generate ideas of political resistance. In the foregoing case, chattel slavery and the numerous uprisings against it, and the success of the Jamaican Maroons in winning their freedom from slavery, might serve as examples of the possibility of victory through militant organizing.

In the English-speaking Caribbean, the reggae and calypso musical genres are bountiful resources for the extraction of ideas for the construction of an “independent culture of resistance” that is essential to countering the ideological hegemony of the ruling class.77 In Jamaica, organizers who are working with reggae and dancehall artists must find ways to introduce them to revolutionary social theories, as well as encourage these working-class cultural workers to read political ideas. The level of their political analysis as reflected in the insufficient ideational sophistication of their currents songs would be greatly expanded. The current reggae artists who are seen as a part of the “Reggae Revival”78 movement represent a political maturity or edginess in their lyrical construction and social commentary on oppressive conditions and liberation. This youth-led, Rastafarian roots reggae renewal movement makes explicit critiques of capitalism, racism, imperialism, and life in general in Babylon.79 Cultural workers such as Chronixx, Jesse Royal, Proteje, Jah9, and Kabaka Pyramid are members of this reggae renewal movement. This development is welcome, given the domination of the socially backward ideological themes in many of the dancehall songs over the last thirty years.

Political Education and Fostering Class Consciousness

In preparing the laboring classes to self-organize or self-emancipate and rise up against their oppressive situation, the revolutionary organizers will have to engage in mass political education and ideological development in all available spaces in society. It is an open secret that the members of the working class have a low level of class-consciousness, or awareness, of themselves as a distinct class with interests that are irreconcilable with those of the bourgeoisie or capitalist class. The Anglophone Caribbean’s working class is politically divided between the two bourgeois-led major parties that are normally present in the region’s Westminster political system. It is middle-class political actors who are chief enablers of capitalism in the region. According to Mars, “it should be recalled that the real power of the Caribbean middle-classes inheres in their connections with international capital. Not only does the commercial section of the middle-classes live by this international connection, but it is through the connection of the middle classes that capitalist domination of the Caribbean is facilitated and advanced.”80 The populist orientation or patron-clientelistic nature of the political systems in the Anglophone Caribbean tend to mask the capitalist and imperialist commitments of the middle class or petit bourgeois characters who run these mass-based political parties.

The revolutionary intelligentsia at all levels of the educational system should use their position as educators to open the minds of the students to revolutionary ideas by cultivating critical thinking, strong problem-solving, and organizing knowledge and skills. Paolo Freire and Amilcar Cabral’s use of the problem-posing or Socratic Method of questioning should be a central pedagogical tool in the educational process. The central purpose behind using this approach to teaching and learning is the cultivation of the people’s capacity for critical inquiry and prejudicing their minds toward praxis or social action to change the world. This dialogic pedagogical approach will prove useful in the teaching and learning experiences in workshop settings or doing outreach in communities, workplaces, schools, and other spaces where a large number of people congregate. Given the commitment to struggle that is opposed to a vanguard leadership over the people, the capacity building, or community development workshop, will become the principal instrument that is used to provide the people with knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are needed to run their self-managed organizations and institutions. If we are going to eliminate dependence on petit bourgeois organizers for critical organizational skills, it is essential that the movement develop practical resources that will enable the people to be the true architects of the revolution. Education for mass critical consciousness is still necessary.

The broad Anglophone Caribbean Left has a tradition of carrying out political education programs. The radical and revolutionary organizations of the Left, and its middle-class forces, have engaged in mass political education within the population, with the goal of facilitating a heightened awareness of oppression.81 They are in a position to initially function as public ­educators-cum-organic intellectuals. This relatively privileged class tends to have a higher level of access to different media spaces and are in possession of the knowledge, skills, and attitude to carry out public lectures, deliver community development or ­capacity-building workshops, write op-ed articles for national and local newspapers as well as ­internet-based publications, and fulfill the role of guest on news programs. It is essential for today’s organizers to learn from the missteps of the past with respect to implementing educational programs as highlighted by Mars:

The first is what could be termed the Procrustean bed, or vice-like, effect of Marxist-Leninist theory and socialist ideology on the overwhelmed mass public, in the sense that there is an apparent forcing theory down the throats, so to speak, of the masses. The second is what appears to be in effect intellectuals speaking only to themselves since much of the theoretical underpinnings are graspable only at their level of training and preparation. The third is the probable exclusion of the rich experiences of the masses from playing a necessary part in the educational content and curriculum.82

The organizers should emphasize developing the capabilities of the members of the laboring classes and other oppressed groups to competently and effectively function as public educators-cum-organic intellectuals. Furthermore, the content of the educational program ought to be relevant to the lives of the people, a critique raised earlier in this essay by Brian Meeks. The organizers must approach public education as an instrument to lead the masses to the path of self-emancipation and organizing (24/7) to rid the world of capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and imperialism.

Organizing Around the People’s Needs

In fighting to create the classless, stateless, and self-organized (communist) society, twenty-first century activists and organizers in the Caribbean must prioritize organizing, and not mobilizing, the people, and should do so around their self-identified and objective needs within today’s oppressive conditions. The organizing approach to building the capacity for revolution must be elevated over simply embracing the mobilizing approach to resistance, which merely brings the people out for a show of force against oppression. Under the latter approach to rising up against oppression, the organizational and movement leaders—not the rank and file—monopolize the ideational, strategic, and operational leadership roles. In an essay on organizing versus mobilizing approaches, I outlined a few of the features of organizing:

When I raised the issue of organizing the oppressed, this project is centrally focused on building the capacity of the people to become central actors on the stage of history or in the drama of emancipation. The socially marginalized are placed in organizational situations where they are equipped with the knowledge, skills and attitude to work for their own freedom and the construction of a transformed social reality.

Under the organizing model the people are the principal participants and decision-makers in the organizations and movements that are working for social change. The people are not seen as entities who are so ideologically underdeveloped that they need a revolutionary vanguard or dictatorship to lead them to the “New Jerusalem.” The supreme organizer and humanist Ella Baker took the position that the masses will figure out the path to freedom in her popular assertion, “Give people light and they will find a way.”83

The organizing approach is the preferred way to demonstrate to the Caribbean people that they will have to create the path to emancipation with their own brains, hearts, and muscles. It must be done through their autonomous, self-organized organizations because “It is impossible to fight capitalist exploitation, police violence, the oppression of women, white supremacy, homophobia, and other forms of dehumanization outside of collective action and organized structures—organizations and movements.”84

It is through the formation of organizations that the people will be able to give concrete forms to organizing around their needs, such as education, employment, housing, financial services, collective self-defense, restorative justice, and food security. Organizations call for greater commitment of time and other resources of the people than showing up for a demonstration, march, rally, or vigil. However, membership-based organization with the needs of the people centered and guided by a transformative vision of justice, respect, dignity, and self-determination opens up the possibility for the people to create self-managed economic and social institutions and institute participatory democratic practices. In this vein, the organizers must draw on the sugar workers’ cooperatives that were established during the democratic socialist administration of Michael Manley as an instructive of labor attempting to exercise control over capital. The text A New Earth: The Jamaican Sugar Workers’ Cooperatives, 1975–1985 is an excellent source on this experience of worker control and the lessons that should be drawn from it for the current phase of the struggle. It is essential that the organizers work with the people in developing the supporting structures and organizations to make economic and social cooperation and alternative institution building a material reality in the lives of the people.86 A necessary part of rising up against oppression and preparing the oppressed in the Caribbean for rising up is the formation of self-managed alternative institutions to hold territory and serve as incubators of the values, sensibilities, and practices of the future anarchist communist society. Therefore, as the people are meeting their needs, developing a critical ideological and political understanding of oppressive conditions in society, acquiring the knowledge, skills, and attitude of self-organization, they are building the embryonic structures and enabling conditions for the just Caribbean society of the future.

Concluding Words

The revolutionary organizations and organizers in the English-speaking Caribbean are faced with the daunting task of organizing in an environment in which American imperialism is strongly opposed to the development of counterhegemonic national projects. Given this state of affairs, the revolutionary or progressive forces must continue the anti-capitalist and anti-­imperialist tradition of radical thought,87 and cultivate movements to defend the Anglophone Caribbean from the full onslaught of imperialist aggression.88 A permissive external environment is critical for fomenting revolution in dependent capitalist societies, such as are present in the Caribbean. We need effective anti-­imperialist activism inside North America and Europe to support the self-emancipation initiatives of the people of the Caribbean. We are fighting common enemies of human emancipation; resistance in the Caribbean is a contribution to the fight for freedom in Europe and North America, and vice versa. Amilcar Cabral shared the same outlook on the worldwide fight to defeat imperialism, in a meeting before a group of African Americans.89 The people themselves must make the revolution, through self-emancipation rooted in a prefigurative politics of liberation. Oppositional economic, social, cultural, and political institutions must function as tools of resistance and laboratories of experimentation for how we will live politically transgressive lives for the anarchist communist societies of the future.

Endnotes

1 Peter Kropotkin’s essays “Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and Principles” and “Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideals” provide a good introduction to anarchism, and they are included in his Fugitive Writings (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1993).

2 Horace G. Campbell, “The Grenadian Revolution and the Challenges for Revolutionary Change in the Caribbean,” Journal of Eastern Caribbean Studies, 35, nos. 3 and 4 (2010): 37.

3 Thomas D. Edsall, “Why Don’t the Poor Rise Up?,” New York Times, June 25, 2015. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/24/opinion/why-dont-the-poor-rise-up.html?_r=0.

4 United Nations, The Global Social Crisis: Report on the World Social Situation 2011, (New York: United Nations Publication, 2011), Available online: www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/docs/2011/rwss2011.pdf.

5 Mutabaruka, Mutabaruka: The Next Poems (Kingston: Paul Issa Publications, 2005), 20.

6 Brian Meeks, Caribbean Revolutions and Revolutionary Theory: An Assessment of Cuba, Nicaragua and Grenada (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2001), 7–8.

7 Michael Lind, ‘‘Are We Still a Middle-Class Nation?’’ The Atlantic, January/February 2004. Available online: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/01/are-we-still-a-middle-class-nation/302870/.

8 Ajamu Nangwaya, “Why are we afraid of naming and confronting capitalism?’’ Pambazuka News, January 15, 2015. Available online: https://www.pambazuka.org/global-south/why-are-we-afraid-naming-and-confronting-capitalism.

9 Salvatore Babones, “America’s Real Poverty Rate,” Inequality.org, November 14, 2011. Available online: http://inequality.org/americas-real-poverty-rate/.

10 Paul Buchheit, “The Real Numbers: Half of America Is in Poverty -- and It’s Creeping Upward It’s much worse for black families,” AlterNet, January, 20, 2015. Available online: http://www.alternet.org/economy/real-numbers-half-america-poverty-and-its-creeping-upward.

11 Jamaica Observer, “Wakefield residents protest against police killing,” Jamaica Observer, May 11, 2016. Available online: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Wakefield-residents-protest-against-police-killing-------_60503; Paul Clarke, “Hannah Town residents block road to protest against police killing,” Jamaica Observer, January 19, 2006. Available online: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/96852_Hannah-Town-residents-block-road-to-protest-against-police-killing.

12 Thomas D. Doswell, “The Caribbean: A Geographic Preface,” In Understanding the Contemporary Caribbean, eds. Richard S. Hillman & Thomas J. D’Agostino, 2nd ed. (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2009), 21–22; Perry Mars, Ideology and Change: The Transformation of the Caribbean Left (Kingston, Jamaica: The Press University of the West Indies, 1998), 18–19.

13 Thomas J. D’Agostino, “Caribbean Politics,” In Understanding the Contemporary Caribbean, eds. Richard S. Hillman & Thomas J. D’Agostino, 2nd ed, 98.

14 Ibid., 98.

15 Mars, Ideology and Change, 19.

16 Associated Press, “MI5 files reveal details of 1953 coup that overthrew British Guiana’s leaders,” Associated Press, August 26, 2011. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/26/mi5-files-coup-british-guiana; Agostino, “Caribbean Politics,” 115.

17 Casey Gane-McCalla, “Jamaica’s Shower Posse: How The CIA Created ‘The Most Notorious Criminal Organization,’” Global Research, June 3, 2010. Available online: http://www.globalresearch.ca/jamaica-s-shower-posse-how-the-cia-created-the-most- notorious-criminal-organization/19696.

18 D’Agostino, “Caribbean Politics,” 114.

19 Perry Mars, “Destabilization and Socialist Orientation in the English-Speaking Caribbean,” Latin American Perspective, 11, no.3 (1984): 83–110.

20 Dennis A. Pantin & Marlene Attzs, “The Economies of the Caribbean,” in Understanding the Contemporary Caribbean, eds. Richard S. Hillman & Thomas J. D’Agostino, 2nd ed., 135.

21 Ibid., 135.

22 D’Agostino, “Caribbean Politics,” 127.

23 Brian Meeks, “Caribbean Insurrections,” Caribbean Quarterly, 41, no. 2 (1995), 13.

24 Ibid.

25 Brian Meeks, Radical Caribbean: From Black Power to Abu Bakr, (Kingston, Jamaica: The Press The University of the West Indies, 1996), 85.

26 D’Agostino, “Caribbean Politics,” 124.

27 Meeks, “Radical Caribbean,” 86.

28 Jorge I. Domínguez, “The Caribbean Question: Why Has Liberal Democracy (Surprisingly) Flourished?,” in Democracy in the Caribbean: Political, Economic and Social Perspectives, eds., Jorge I. Domínquez, Robert A. Pastor, and R. DeLisle Worrell, (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1993), 3.

29 Ian Boxill, “The Two Faces of Caribbean Music,” Social and Economic Studies, 43, no. 2 (1994): 36–37.

30 D’Agostino, “Caribbean Politics,” 126.

31 Ibid.

32 Boxill, “The Two Faces of Caribbean Music,” 37.

33 Norman Girvan, “C.Y. Thomas and the ‘The Poor and the Powerless’: The Limitations of Conventional Radicalism,” Social and Economic Studies, 37, no. 4 (1988): 270.

34 Cited in Girvan, 270.

35 Inter-American Development Bank, The Informal Sector in Jamaica, Economic Sector and Study Series – RE3-06-010, December 2006. Available online: https://publications.iadb .org/handle/11319/4326.

36 Kevin Greenidge, Carlos Holder & Stuart Mayers, “Estimating the Size of the Informal Economy in Barbados,” Business, Finance & Economics in Emerging Economies, vol. 4 no. 1 (2009): 9209–10.

37 Ibid., 7.

38 Ibid., 7.

39 Ibid., 2.

40 Neville Graham, “From the womb to the tomb via Jamaica’s $800 million informal economy,” Jamaica Gleaner, November 1, 2016. Available online: http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/news/20161101/womb-tomb-jamaicas-800-million-informal-enonomy.

41 Sokchea Lim & Walter O. Simmons, “Do remittances promote economic development in the Caribbean Community and Common Market?,” Journal of Economics and Business, 77 (2015): 43.

42 Alleyne Dillion, “Motivations to Remit in CARICOM: A GMM Approach,” Social and Economic Studies, 55, no. 3 (2006): 71.

43 Steven Jackson, “Remittance flows up by 5.6%,” Jamaica Observer, March 27, 2015. Available online: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/business/Remittance-flows-up-by-5-6-_18645126.

44 Avia Collinder, “Total remittances climb to $2.23 billion in 2015,” Jamaica Observer, April 1, 2016. Available online: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/business/Total-remittances-climb-to--2-23-billion-in-2015_56253.

45 News Americas, “Six Caribbean Nations See The Highest Remittances For 2016,” News Americas, October 14, 2016. Available online: http://www.newsamericasnow.com/six-caribbean-nations-see-the-highest-remittances-for-2016/.

46 Dillion, “Motivations to remit,” 57.

47 Meeks, Caribbean Revolutions, 31.

48 John Foran, “The Comparative-Historical Sociology of Third World Revolutions,” In Theorizing Revolutions, ed. John Foran (New York: Routledge, 1997), 228.

49 Meeks, Caribbean Revolutions, 61–63, 103–106, and 154–55.

50 Francisco Dominguez, “Is US-Funded Destabilization in Latin America Now Paying Off?,” Telesur, April 14, 2016. Available online: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Is-US-Funded-Destabilization-in-Latin-America-Now-Paying-Off-20160413-0028.html.

51 Glenville Ashby, “Revisiting the Revolution,” Jamaica Gleaner, January 17, 2016. Available online: http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/art-leisure/20160117/revisiting-revolution.

52 David Hinds, “The Grenada Revolution and the Caribbean Left,” Journal of Eastern Caribbean Studies, 35, nos. 3 and 4 (2010): 104.

53 Mars, Ideology and Change, 174.

54 Amilcar Cabral, Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 110.

55 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004).

56 Ibid., 145. He projected that “Each generation must discover its mission, fulfil or betray it, in relative opacity.”

57 Walter Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers (Chicago: Research Associates School Times Publication, 1990), 31–32. Rodney posed the following question to his audience of students and lecturers at the University of the West Indies in the 1968: “Trotsky once wrote that Revolution is the carnival of the masses. When we have that carnival in the West Indies, are people like us here at the university going to join the bacchanal?”

58 Brian Meeks, Critical Interventions in Caribbean Theory and Politics (Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 73.

59 John Foran, “Discourses and Social Forces: The Role of Culture and Cultural Studies in Understanding Revolutions,” in Theorizing Revolutions, ed. John Foran (New York: Routledge, 1997), 203.

60 Barry Chevannes, “Introduction,” Caribbean Quarterly, 43, 1 & 2 (1997): iii.

61 Brian Meeks, Critical Interventions.

62 Chevannes, “Introduction,” iii.

63 Mutabaruka, Mutabaruka: The Next Poems, 20.

64 Ibid., 21.

65 Ibid., 21.

66 Mighty Sparrow, “Slave,” The Slave, RCA, 1963.

67 Judy Mowatt, “Black Woman,” Black Woman, Shanachie, 1980.

68 Burning Spear, “Slavery Days,” Marcus Garvey, Island Records, 1975.

69 Omnibus Press, Complete Lyrics of Bob Marley: Songs of Freedom (New York: Omnibus Press, 2001), 34.

70 Campbell, “The Grenadian Revolution,” 43.

71 Ibid.

72 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 167.

73 Ibid., 168.

74 John Foran, New Political Cultures of Opposition: What Future for Revolutions? February 7, 2007. Available online: https://www.academia.edu/1277296/ 15_New_political_cultures_of_opposition.

75 A good source on the theological aspects of the Rastafari movement is Noel Leo Erskine, From Garvey to Marley: Rastafari Theology (Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2007).

76 Foran, “Discourses and Social Forces,” 208.

77 Boxill, “Two Faces,” 44.

78 Abby Aguirre, “Reggae Revival: Meet the Millennial Musicians Behind Jamaica’s New Movement,” Vogue, October 28, 2015. Available online: http://www.vogue.com/projects/13362670/reggae-revival-jamaica-chronixx-protoje-roots-music/.

79 There are multiple meanings for the Rastafari use of the term “Babylon.” Velma Pollard provides a listing of the various ways that it is rendered: “police; policeman; soldier or people who are called wicked by the Rastafari; place of wickedness; oppressors; to do with an unprincipled way of life usually in reference to the white man’s culture,” in Dread Talk: The Language of Rastafari (Kingston, Jamaica: Canoe Press, University of the West Indies, 1994), 41.

80 Mars, Ideology and Change, 27–29.

81 Ibid., 119–20.

82 Ibid., 121.

83 Ajamu Nangwaya, “If organizing is the weapon of the oppressed, why are we stuck on mobilizing?,” Rabble, August 21, 2014. Available online: http://rabble.ca/news/2014/08/if-organizing-weapon-oppressed-why-are-we-stuck-on-mobilizing.

84 Ajamu Nangwaya, “On the rebellion in Ferguson, Missouri: Organizations are the lifeblood of social change,” Rabble, August 20, 2014. Available online: http://rabble.ca/news/2014/08/on-rebellion-ferguson-missouri-organizations-are-lifeblood-social-change.

85 Monica Frolander-Ulf and Frank Lindenfeld, A New Earth: The Jamaican Sugar Workers’ Cooperatives, 1975–1981 (New York: University Press of America, 1984).

86 Ajamu Nangwaya, “Seek ye first the worker self-management kingdom: Toward the solidarity economy in Jackson, Mississippi,” Pambazuka News, September 18, 2013. Available online: https://www.pambazuka.org/governance/seek-ye-first-worker-self-management-kingdom.

87 Rhoda Reddock, “Radical Caribbean social thought: Race, class identity and the postcolonial nation,” Current Sociology, 62, 4 (2014).

88 This article on building solidarity inside imperialism for Africa provides proposals that are relevant to the Caribbean: Ajamu Nangwaya, “Afrikan Liberation Day and the Commitment to an Anti-imperialist Pan-Afrikan Solidarity” Dissident Voice, May 23, 2014. Available online: http://dissidentvoice.org/2014/05/afrikan-liberation-day-and-the-commitment-to-an-anti-imperialist-pan-afrikan-solidarity/. This article on solidarity with the Haitian people contains organizing ideas for the creation of an anti-imperialist constituency inside North America and Europe: Ajamu Nangwaya, “Transform your Global Justice Sentiments into Action to End the Occupation of Haiti,” Dissident Voice, October 23, 2014. Available online: http://dissidentvoice.org/2014/10/transform-your-global-justice-sentiments-into-action-to-end-the-occupation-of-haiti/.

89 Amilcar Cabral, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral (Monthly Review Press, 1973), 76.