After Disaster: Restoring Power in the Caribbean
In the aftermath of ecological disaster in the Caribbean, we need to ask our friends, family, neighbors, and associates, what is meant by restoring power? After hurricanes, the restoration of electric grids is prioritized alongside delivery of water, food, and emergency medical supplies. But power can be invoked in another sense. Are hurricanes and other disaster events occasions to rekindle the popular democratic power of Caribbean working people?
The loss of life, homes, and provisions at the hands of climate disasters does not appear to lend itself to self-organization. Nevertheless, it is in moments of desperation that Caribbean people are compelled to take matters into their own hands independent of hierarchical governments and political classes. We can cultivate a more expansive vision of disaster preparedness and relief that awards every Caribbean toiler a different lease on life. Beyond the restoration of an electric grid, we can start by taking popular democratic power seriously.
Do we wish to reconstruct society as it was before Hurricane Beryl and future catastrophic storms? Or do we want to rebuild such that Caribbean working people, not their exploitative and brutal governments, have far more power than before?
‘Emergency Preparedness’ or Rulers Publicly Admit Their Fears
Keen social observers, readers of history, and guardians of collective memory know what happens when a major hurricane hits. Despite hierarchical regimes’ efforts to impress upon their subjects that they are in command of the situation and everything is under control, business as usual is smashed.
This can spread fear and insecurity among ordinary people. Surely, we complain about bureaucracies but are far more dependent on them than we might wish to admit. But those who claim to be community organizers and radical political thinkers should confront these moments of ecological disaster as a crisis of legitimacy for abusive, exploitative, and brutal Caribbean police states and the wealthy elites who hide behind the shield of their guns and batons.
In this time of Caribbean disaster preparedness and relief, all professional experts on emergency management in imperial centers, are very clear in their presentations and forums to the public. After any major hurricane hits, everyday people should expect to be without any government assistance (including help with lack of food, electricity, medical attention, clean water, or a roof to protect from the elements) for at least 72 hours. This is the minimum forecast of the coming social relations of power. And in some locations, it can stretch up to a week or ten days. That is a lot of time for official authorities to have no practical power over everyday people. Historical social revolutions have accomplished more with less.
Beyond the Vulnerable and the Brink of Death
Now if fortune shines on the vulnerable, and they are on the brink of death, they may be prioritized for evacuation and care, if roads are passable, if helicopters are available, if hospitals have a bed, if doctors and nurses are not overwhelmed, if cranes can lift the rubble off broken and mutilated bodies. Otherwise, whether people like the worldview of being self-reliant and self-directed with an emphasis on mutual aid or not, that moment will arrive in the most half-hidden places across the Caribbean. Why not embrace it, redefine Caribbean civilization, and discard any notion that the Caribbean faces an existential crisis?
With disaster preparedness, windows could be covered with plywood or plastic, tarpaulins could be readied and put to use, battery-powered walkie talkies and radios could be gathered. Candles, hygiene and medical supplies, bottled water, and non-perishable foods could be placed aside with electric generators, spare fuel, and power saws. Even with disaster relief, these necessities are gathered and distributed, in a relatively short time. After a hurricane, no working person is concerned about luxury all-inclusive hotels, or mines, quarries, and factory farms fashioned for export and foreign exchange.
Self-Direction & Self-Mobilization Amidst Rubble of Official Government
Somehow, with no discussion of budgets, the sustaining of profits, provisions for our basic needs are gathered and distributed quickly. This is a type of “socialism” that appears, disappears, and reappears. On Union Island, Carriacou, and Mayreau, for instance, ordinary people have led reconstruction efforts of their own accord and on their own authority. This, which often goes unacknowledged, is the most crucial part of a future socialist society. It is not administered top-down by elites but is self-directed by ordinary people who combine in formations of mutual aid. Without manifestos or political parties, the self-mobilization of Caribbean people forms its own government where the official regimes hang on for days proclaiming that for a time they are defeated.
In response to the ecological disasters of Grenada, Carriacou, and Petite Martinique, Mayreau, Union Island, Bequia, Canouan, St. Vincent, and Jamaica, we hear the Caribbean political class talking chupid. Their call for national unity reveals the smell of fear in the air. Caribbean elites are afraid of the multitudes who charge ahead with hurricane recovery and relief before the arrival of state provisions. And this crisis that they wish to make national, is, in fact, a crisis of their own legitimacy. It has existed before any past or present specific ecological disasters (whether hurricanes, tsunamis, or earthquakes) and will exist again in the near future.
In Jamaica, a state of emergency is declared to protect property and fight crime. But this is business as usual back a yaad. A state of emergency is declared in many parishes every day by the Andrew Holness administration when there is no ecological disaster.
In Grenada, we are told that it is the superpowers and imperial nations that have caused the ecological disasters Caribbean people face. In metropolitan centres, the industrialists acted irresponsibly. And yet it is their very governments that the Dickon Mitchell administration welcomes on a regular basis, as he did recently to the Caribbean Regional Security Service (the regional military force organized for repression sponsored and trained by U.S., European, and Canadian troops).
In St. Vincent and the Grenadines, “Comrade” Ralph Gonsalves talking about the shame of cyclical rebuilding the nation faces, as he mimicked the rhetoric of Mikhell Menlie (Michael Manley) with the pappyshow of “up the down escalator.” The Caribbean rulers talk of decimal points and numerical indicators of economic development that regress in concert with climate crisis. But in this talk of the wealth of nations and national development, they are concerned only with what is lost by the local elite business sector and ambitious propertied rulers.
Caribbean overlords are not concerned about their personal homes (they have property at home and abroad). They cry tears for the demise of the infrastructure that exploited everyday people’s labor. When the airport’s roof is no more, the barefoot and unemployed do not purchase plane tickets. It is those with relations with global capital whose ambitions have been set back. They talk “nationalism” to mystify this is what they wish to reconstruct.
Caribbean Nationalism Mystifies Before and After Ecological Disasters
The normal authority wielded by Caribbean states is destabilized by ecological disaster. This does not mean that we should cheer on the devastation that they perennially bring down on ordinary people. In contrast, it is an opening we cannot afford to watch passively as the ruling classes seize this moment to fill their own pockets and those of mercenary developers and disaster capitalists. This, for them, is reconstruction of society.
While fake activists who collaborate with “peripheral” police states and a left bloc of capital pen lectures and polemics about empire, genuinely insurgent facilitators of popular self-mobilization applaud the fall of the peripheral elites alongside their friends in Washington, London, Ottawa, Riyadh, and Beijing. That is one requirement of social revolution.
And we are quite aware that when most self-proclaimed Marxists have an opportunity to spread insurgency, they momentarily babble about revolution only to rally around those who exploit and conquer when their regimes are tottering. We must watch and keep score as many join the authoritarian rulers of the Caribbean to work out the terms of reconstruction of the nation after this hurricane season. None shall escape
Beyond Fake Activist Talk: The Requirements of Social Revolution
If one requirement of social revolution is a devastating crisis for the state and rulers, another is preparation for self-directed government. Those who live by a welfare state of mind, who talk about everyday people as damaged and underdeveloped, have not only internalized racism and colonial mentalities. They have internalized a capitalist and republican mentality. Their mind is on ‘rule by the few,’ even if they make a big show of observing everyday people very closely. If one is not paving the way for direct self-government of everyday people, observing the masses very closely is the populism of the surveillance state. There is a relation between the self-mobilization of everyday people and the discarding of their rulers or progressives and socialists are experts in disaster management far more than we realize.
Our smallest Caribbean territories, in contrast to Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad, that most neglect as economically unviable, we know to hold a grand and instinctive vision. Whether ecological disaster or not, these territories like Carriacou, Petit Martinique, Bequia, Mayreau, and Union Island, represent great experiments in popular and direct self-government under adversity.
With (or Without) Ecological Disasters: Self-Directed Small Places
In these experiments, politics and government are practiced separate from institutions that downpress the popular will. They are experiments in self-directed battles for survival and struggles for happiness. These battles are waged daily by toilers, the unemployed, and those with little or no property.
Now in times of ecological disaster, commoners use minimal resources at hand to educate, cooperate, and emancipate. In every neglected district or parish, whether resources come from abroad or official politicians bring aid for a time, this is what is required of the human prospect. Self-mobilization of everyday people exposes those who debate the terms of leadership and policies above society.
There is no economically secure human prospect under the empire of capital — whether before or after ecological disaster. And there is no point talking equality or equity when all we mean is equality among the propertied. And nobody, capitalist schemer or progressive activist for the government, means anything else.
The Caribbean normatively is known by minimal and inconsistent public infrastructure when compared to imperial centers. Whereas the middle classes and formally educated panic regularly — and call this advanced theory — everyday people survive and thrive and do extraordinary things without it before hurricanes hit. This should be the basis of confidence among the social classes below — the part that normatively has no part in official politics.
Our Caribbean moment of ecological disaster and the collapse of minimal and inconsistent public infrastructure means all we have is each other. Those who are propertied, the professionals, the formally educated, the managers of subordinate life, we have a temporary respite from their decadent rule, as everyone tries to reconstruct society. But as there always have been conflicting tendencies in the Caribbean region, everyone will not rebuild with the same mentality.
Rebuilding the Caribbean: Conflicting Tendencies Within
When we are told to rally to reconstruct the nation we must remember the nation is not society as we know it in the barrack yards, dungles, bottom houses, and under the street lamp at night. The nation is not our shared community but a hierarchy of social classes where the propertied and those who brutally police have a demeaning project to defend and restore.
The Caribbean toilers of the Grenadines and the hills, valleys, and garrisons of Jamaica have no interest in restoring that. So after every hurricane, each Caribbean territory has 72 hours, perhaps a week to ten days, before power is restored. Not simply the electric grids. But the reconstruction of the rule by those who have kept us down.
While those who lament an existential crisis for the Caribbean, who can only look forward to our territories being flooded and sinking or drowning under global capital and their local stooges, a significant gathering of forces can begin to think and counter-plan differently. We can give a new meaning to disaster preparedness. Our mutual aid (when roads are blocked, and telecommunications are down and power is out, while the propertied rulers panic) can bring a new society closer. The instinctive cooperation and self-mobilization required to survive is embryonically a form of our own direct self-government.
We need not return to the old social relations. The smallest places we reside, the easier it will be to sustain the new ways of living. We need not reconstruct or restore the power of those who have exploited and brutalized us. While hurricanes can be deadly and disturbing, its aftermath (if we are prepared) can be a new beginning where time has run out for those who had forgotten the power of the barefoot, the unemployed, and toilers. After ecological disasters, the Caribbean democratic majority may encounter their real power once again.
