Antigua Caribbean Liberation Movement — Independence: Yes! The Old Mess: No! (1977)
On Monday, Antigua and Barbuda will play host to the 4th UN International Conference on Small Island Developing States (SIDS4). The summit will convene high-level meetings of statesmen, ministers, consultants, and hand-picked representatives. Many will applaud this summit as an example of “south-south cooperation” and solidarity across vulnerable island geographies on the front lines of anthropogenic climate change.
It would be an error to accept this applause at face value. Indeed, as we at Clash! have emphasized time and time again, Gaston Browne’s Antigua plays host to SIDS4 at the very same moment that his government dismantles the communal land tenure system in Barbuda and collaborates with multinational developers to dispossess Barbudans in service of billionaire residences and luxury tourist ventures. The larger deceit of this summit is on display in its exclusion of Barbudans themselves from the conference proceedings. Ordinary people from all participating small-island developing states and territories will not be invited to debate the terms of climate governance or offer up their own proposals for the new society.
This fact appears all the more stark against the backdrop of the independent social motion of ordinary people and toilers in Kanaky (aka New Caledonia). In the South Pacific, Kanak people have launched an insurgency against the French colonial government and a proposal by the French parliament to extend voting rights to a population of settlers from the French mainland. This strike against colonialism, which has resulted in at least seven deaths as colonial police clashed with Kanak demonstrators, is a pernicious reminder that the moment of colonialism is not yet behind us. Yet, SIDS4 will not make any proclamations against colonialism in the Caribbean or the Pacific. Far from it, they will tell us that colonialism is over and the new rulers and strongmen — Gaston Browne chief among them — may govern with violent impunity in the name of “independence.” From the Caribbean, the struggle for Kanaky resonates with the people of Bonaire, Saba, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands — who remain under the colonial authority of the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States. But it equally resonates with the people of Barbuda, Union Island, Bequia, and Nevis, who are nominally “independent” but subject to the whims of repressive state authorities who seize lands and court foreign capital in the name of “sustainable development.”
This is the condition not only of the smallest islands in our region, but of ordinary people across the entire Caribbean. In the period between associated statehood (1967) and political independence (1981) in Antigua and Barbuda, the Antigua Caribbean Liberation Movement turned its attention to the perils of “independence” that awaited them. In the document transcribed below, “Independence: Yes! The Old Mess: No!,” the ACLM posited that independence cannot coexist with an economic landscape dominated by foreign capital and multinational firms.
The document exhibits an uncompromising spirit. It calls for a Caribbean federation from below that is not brokered by ruling elites and technocrats (as is the case with CARICOM today) but by the ordinary people of the region themselves.
In 1977, the ACLM described this political ideal as a “new Caribbean state.” This, they conceived of as a federation that would include all “nation-states and territories in the Caribbean archipelago be they Dutch, English, French or Spanish.”
Today, we can identify with this spirit of federation from below and the desire to locate it within a model of the nation-state that wished to improve on the previous experiments in independence modeled by Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, and Guyana.
We also must be clear that the spirit of federation from below in the 1970s was clearly an enemy of the post-colonial Black political class. What existing hierarchical governments did ACLM propose to federate with in 1977? There were no worthy partners that we can see above society for popular democratic politics below society. This dynamic tension we must remain alert.
We must also remember that the movement for the Sixth Pan African Congress in Tanzania of 1974 exposed the treachery of so-called ‘progressive’ governments (Tanzania, Jamaica, and Guyana) and their repression of the delegates from the Caribbean region that advocated direct democracy and workers self-management.
In advancing a federation of toilers today, we are armed with the benefit of hindsight. But we also must sustain the highest principles of our political thought — a principle that transcends time for ethical and fighting people.
In Grenada (1979–1983), for instance, the period of the revolution put this question to the test. Can ordinary people directly control political and economic affairs in a nation-state governed by a centralized bureaucratic authority? The lessons of Grenada demonstrate that in a revolutionary society, power either dwells in popular assemblies or is monopolized by bureaucratic cliques. Otherwise, direct democracy functions as a mere decoration for ruling elites to pay lip service to the popular will in town halls and public rallies. There is no room for this masquerade of minority rule by armchair cliques if ordinary people are truly to take the lead.
Indeed, the ACLM’s warnings about the need for popular and direct self-government ring true as we welcome the bureaucratic masquerade of SIDS4 to Antigua this week. When the ACLM calls for a federated Caribbean state, they made clear that this cannot take the form of a centralized bureaucratic authority that claims a monopoly on government and economic planning. This is where we unite with this dormant legacy, and ready ourselves for it to explode once again.
The statement contends that working people themselves must “by and through democratic discussion and decision, themselves plan production goals for the whole society.” This tradition of popular assemblies — in villages and workplaces — embraced by the ACLM, Trinidad’s New Beginning Movement, and Grenada’s Movement for Assemblies of the People (which later formed the New Jewel Movement) is suppressed in radical histories of the postcolonial Caribbean. This suppression is deliberate.
But this tradition, as an archive of political thought, must be studied closely. We must investigate, discuss, and discard any reference to state formation. If we mean popular and direct self-government formation the time has come to make it plain.
It is well known that the ACLM had been in decline for at least ten years before Tim Hector died in 2002. ACLM lost its way into a senseless electoral politics of not diminishing returns (but no returns for everyday people), discarding cultivating the popular will of workers for advising the nation which came to mean the existing decadent government regardless of party or personality no matter how degrading post-colonial politics became. The spirit of popular and direct democracy declined, was on the road to being lost, and finally was discarded.
The creative conflict of ACLM, NBM, and NJM was they did not in the final analysis take seriously the hierarchy and domination of the state power, wishing to rebrand it in the name of ‘workers democracy’, until finally they accepted any project of state formation in the name of national development. This is either the sad truth or objective truth but it is the truth. This is the context for stirring a revival campaign of our best principles. Such a campaign is merely the slow dedicated work of educating our people in politics.
The model of SIDS4, in which discussion and decision are brokered by the United Nations and the ruling elites of member states and territories, can only thrive in its insistence that ordinary people are too “lazy,” too “unproductive,” and too “destructive” to participate in the practice of politics. The history of the Caribbean is proof of the contrary. For the ACLM, true independence cannot be achieved by simply denouncing the imperialists in our midst. The task ahead must be to evangelize and cultivate the “creative energy, enthusiasm and productivity of Antiguan and Caribbean workers [toward] a new organisation of production and social relations.”
When you really have new social relations, there is no minority who rules above society. This, indeed, is what contemporary imperialists and Caribbean rulers fear as they gather behind closed doors in Antigua. The creative energy, enthusiasm, and productivity unleashed in Kanaky will soon reach the Caribbean as well.
ACLM ON INDEPENDENCE
Extract from Independence: Yes! The Old Mess: No! by A.C.L.M., Antigua. Transcribed by Ryan Cecil Jobson from Caribbean Dialogue Vol. 3 №3 (April/May 1977)
The first and essential purpose of Independence in a territory like Antigua and in world circumstances such as outlined above must be its immediate disengagement from foreign capital. Immediate is the word.
This involves principally two points. Where foreign capital dislocated and disorganised the Antiguan economy creating dependence on foreign food supplies, there must be a reorganisation of the economy by a completely new method of agricultural and industrial production and distribution. This involves the dissolution of the American Multi-National, Corn Production Systems, known locally as Antigua Agricultural Industries, which has taken control of 10,000 acres of the best land in Antigua at pepper-corn rent per acre. It is impossible for Antigua to be independent if it does not, at the very least, control its own land, and in the context of the world food shortage control its own agricultural production. That is the foundational premise of Independence in Antigua and for Antigua.
Secondly, there mast be a mobilisation of labour in agriculture and industry around the concept of social ownership of the means of production. That is to say, the workers in agriculture and industry must feel, in fact, know in truth, and realize in practice, that the age of exploitation is over and that with Independence they are no longer working for “Them” (the elite, local or foreign) but that they are working for Themselves. That is the beginning, the real beginning of Independent history in this island-parish of the Caribbean.
One other point, a crucial point, springs from the above. The political elite in the West Indies following in the footsteps of the colonial masters make a hobby of propounding how lazy, how unproductive, how destructive the Antiguan and Caribbean working class is and will be. Nothing is further from the truth.
The Antiguan and Caribbean working class have created more wealth for America and Britain, than could easily be imagined. After all, it is the Caribbean working class whose labour provided the capital for the Industrial Revolution.
Even now, American capital is more than anxious to exploit Caribbean labour to the hilt. More importantly, a world famous team of economists, The Economist Intelligence Unit had this to say about the working class in the East Caribbean:
“The labour force (in Antigua and the Eastern Caribbean) is readily amenable to training” — that remark is pregannt with meaning and is the essence of independence. More on that later. The team of distinguished economists continued thus, “The survey team has found that with good management there is no reason why productivity levels in the Eastern Caribbean should fall short of those in Europe or the U.S.A. The point is clear. No mistake about it at all. We are as good and as productive as the best.
Nothing impedes production and productivity in Antigua and the Caribbean other than foreign ownership of the means of production. That is an economic and political fact which we must all acknowledge.
However we reject the idea that what is needed is “good management” of Antiguan labour for by “good management” the distinguished economists mean “foreign management.”
What in fact is needed to release the creative energy, enthusiasm and productivity of Antiguan and Caribbean workers is a new organisation of production and social relations.
The key point in the new organisation of production is that Workers, by and through democratic discussion and decision, themselves plan production goals for the whole society, and organise themselves to accomplish those political and economic goals. That is the meaning of the unity of politics and economics, that, precisely and concisely, is the meaning of Independence in this the last quarter of the twentieth century.
It should be obvious that since we have shown that the nation-state is dying or dead, that independence for Antigua founded on economic control is only a beginning. A new beginning though.
It is a beginning of that thrust, pregnant in all the Caribbean peoples’ struggles, to create a United Caribbean State. A Caribbean Nation including all the nation-states and territories in the Caribbean archipelago be they Dutch, English, French or Spanish.
Such a Caribbean State is the only viable alternative in the world in which we live. Nothing else will do. All else is but petty nationalism and support of imperialism through petty island-states which must bow and bend before the colossus, the juggernaut which is American capital. With that bowing and bending we are finished. Completely finished. That is what Independence must mean.
Moreover a Caribbean State is a prime necessity when once the old colonial economy and its political apparatus have been dismantled. Cuba has made the break. We can do no less, and coming after Cuba, perhaps we can do much more.
Presently we have nothing to lose but our chains of dependence and insularity, and we have all to gain in Self-reliance in a New Caribbean State.
