Eusi Kwayana’s Vision of Popular Committees of Labor and the Landless in Guyana
If Eusi Kwayana has reflected that Guyana’s working class has not been given enough historical credit for that nation’s movement for colonial independence, he has been central to facilitating visions of the mobilization of labor for the impending confrontation with Guyana’s post-colonial condition. This can only come from Black and Indian labor’s self-directed liberating activity.
If Guyana officially became independent in 1966, after a long struggle beginning in the late 1940s and early 1950s, this is especially so if we revisit the movement of popular committees of labor and the landless in Guyana in the early 1970s.
Kwayana Cautions As He Looks Toward the Future
Kwayana in response to favorable historical assessments of this period has suggested that while he is pleased that younger generations are inspired by and identify with these events, they may in fact have become more significant as they have become recognized by scholars.
A product of Kwayana’s sense of political strategy at that historical moment, it may not represent his political thought consistently across time. Nevertheless, if this movement of popular committees was embryonic as the bankruptcy of the old electoral party politics became clear to him, one thing cannot be doubted. They are way more outrageous and decrepit than 50 years ago — for they have discarded all pretense to movement building and no longer maintain principles that can veil their personal aggrandizement.
When we consider Eusi Kwayana’s The Bauxite Strike and the Old Politics (1972) (especially the updated 2012 edition with the appendix of a selection of rare ASCRIA documents), we see that in Guyana, what began as a Black Power-oriented criticism of a Black-led regime, had to shift toward recognizing that Black labor’s and Indian labor’s autonomy had to become the meaning of post-colonial freedom.
Eusi Kwayana’s ASCRIA: Teaching A Cultural Revolution
Eusi Kwayana’s African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa (ASCRIA) in the late 1960s and early 1970s was teaching a cultural revolution. Highlighting the search for identity and the redemption of African heritage, they were always careful to affirm the cultural contributions of Indians and Amerindians to Guyana’s heritage as well.
Initially, a cultural front around Forbes Burham’s People’s National Congress, ASCRIA increasingly articulated a critique of the aspiring Black bourgeoisie and the Forbes Burnham’s regime’s corrupting sponsorship of such ambitious behavior. ASCRIA taught the content of socialism and anti-imperialism to Afro-Guyanese. Increasingly, they defended Black labor from what Kwayana called the Burnham government’s “pseudo-socialism.”
ASCRIA was also for a time the sponsor of a Pan-African Secretariat where Guyanese activists worked closely with African American and South African political prisoners in exile. Kwayana was central to globalizing the Black Power movement. As such this stirred political controversy and debate abroad for as Kwayana’s and Burnham’s principles diverged, those expressing solidarity abroad, and in exile in Guyana, had to choose.
Certainly, as dynamic as the social motions were in the African world and Caribbean world of the early 1970s, nothing quite stands out like Kwayana’s vision and support of popular committees of labor and the landless.
All of these questions of political economy and direct democracy and how they conflict under state capitalism or increasing nationalized property came alive in the history of Guyana in the 1970s. There is enough documentation of these events. But there must be a search for a proper philosophy of history, an interpretive framework, to support Black labor taking independent action against hierarchical leaders, whether in government or trade unions.
A Philosophy of History that Identifies With Labor’s Self-Emancipation
A philosophy of history takes the facts one discovers through research and interprets them throw a political lens. How one feels about government, how society should be designed and arranged, and who should hold the reins of power, is always reflected in how historians lead discussions.
The professional historian, in contrast to someone who is a revolutionary and scholar, after all, is an expert on the past but claims not to know where the present and future are unfolding. One need not be clairvoyant to see most historians see themselves as serving the cultural apparatus of the state. Further, in the average historian’s mind, nation-states and republics, and their evolutionary reforms, are reasonable and permanent facts of history.
The working people in any country can never get proper credit for any self-organized politics if everyone assumes all they do is arrive at their workplaces, or with dread look for one, burdened with feeding children, paying rent, and otherwise being powerless. The state (the prisons, police, military, and surveillance forces) functionally exists because those who hold power above society know better.
Class Struggle and Cultural Nationalism
Importantly, for Kwayana, a labor-economic theoretic did not have to be in conflict with an African (or Indian) anti-colonial cultural nationalism. Rather, a deeper anti-capitalist, anti-state perspective had to be fused with the latter. Kwayana recognized that previously it was a mistake to advise Forbes Burnham on the crafting of a cooperative republic for an independent Guyana. This was not because Kwayana first supported and then opposed cooperatives — concluding at a certain point Burnham’s state was abusing the most vital cooperative experiments in Guyana’s hinterland. Rather, the fusion of anti-colonial nationalism and socialism had created a government bureaucracy and party politics which cultivated the disposition of “it’s our turn now” among the Black middle classes, to pursue coveted positions and advance their individual pursuit of property in the name of Black Power.
Investment in Black People Above Society Can Reach The Point of a Fault
This is not an issue especially developed in Antigua Tim Hector’s “What is Socialism?” which reflected on how he was inspired by Kwayana’s politics. Kwayana was clear about how this social problem emerged. The burdens of racial insecurity flowing from slavery and colonialism necessitated the teaching that Africans could govern themselves. Yet “investment in Black people can reach the point of a fault.”
What Does It Mean that Caribbean Middle-Class Professionals Are Equal or Better than White Racist Colonizers?
Seeking to chronicle the historical and cultural context for these scars often flowed and overlapped into an assertion: the Caribbean middle classes and professional intellectuals were as vibrant and skilled as any other and could take over from and negotiate with white racist colonial elites. Like Jamaica’s Norman and Michael Manley and Trinidad’s Eric Williams relationship to labor revolt, this is how Antigua’s V.C. Bird enters anti-colonial history and the history of Caribbean labor.
Perhaps, it is only through the eyes of Kwayana’s criticism in The Bauxite Strike and the Old Politics that we can see Burnham, Bird, and other Caribbean statesmen properly. But how we see personal success and the purpose of labor revolt is crucial in such an assessment.
Anti-Colonial Nationalism’s Outlook on Labor
Anti-colonial nationalism, while embracing Black slave labor as despised and degraded historically within the colonial plantation order, responded to how Black labor was racialized, not so much how that racialization denied Black labor’s self-governing capacities in political theory and practice. Instead, the crime appeared to be it degraded all colonized people equally. Yet this created unequal anti-colonial political strategies and outcomes.
Hidden within this historical problem was the neglect to imagine new self-governing institutions and political philosophies. Instead most often there was a clash for recognition and representation under the governments and laws that existed. In pursuit of democracy and anti-racism, this could be limited by the matter that a republic or nation-state, animated by capitalist economics or not, could never permit the Black working people to hold the reins of society. Toilers could only be the banner for a false revolution or social change that still could be convincing to many.
Tim Hector believed in the 1940s “labor” in fact was made the false banner of middle-class anti-colonialism in the Caribbean. This was so even if parts of the middle class rose from peasant or unemployed parents. It is difficult, even when relatively perceptive thinkers propagate the destruction of hierarchy for the working class, for these thinkers must not to be revered and transformed into a new elite, even as philosophers who see their brethren as their poorer.
The crucial stance in response may be for the purported advanced thinker to refuse to appropriate the disposition and identity of a professional class and mentor with all the privileges which can come with those vocations. After establishing such an alternative personality among working and unemployed people they can accompany, facilitate and give direction toward a direct democracy. From 1970–1974, despite having already established himself as an original popular leader from 1951–1953, and from 1961–1964 in different phases in Guyana’s political history, Eusi Kwayana made his mark in a new fashion.
Self-Criticism: Advising the State and Doubting Guyana Labor’s Capacities
We must be alert to Caribbean socialisms that can conceive of progressive capitalism and thus might discourage or be hostile to strike action. Eusi Kwayana, as recorded in The Bauxite Strike and the Old Politics, began by taking responsibility for his role in counseling labor against strike activity “on a few occasions” since independence, from 1966–1970, as an adviser to the Burnham regime. He was insufficiently confident in Black labor to emancipate itself before 1971–1972.
It is unprecedented among Marxists and revolutionary nationalists on a world scale to make such a public self-criticism. However, this mistake was far from uncommon and central to the downfall of the socialist project in many former colonized nations. Kwayana then began to clarify nationally and internationally “the Negative Direction in Guyana” (1973) that Burnham’s purported Pan-Africanism and cooperative socialism had fostered.
The Negative Direction in Guyana
This was difficult for Kwayana, for since 1964, he propagated in some way, that Burnham was building “a cooperative republic” (Kwayana gave him the name for the nation-state), that would ease economic burdens domestically and be a refuge for political prisoners (which for a time it was).
Yet Kwayana saw the Burnham regime evolve toward a populism that “disguised class snobbery,” especially under the pretense it was leading a cultural and economic revolution. It actually abolished the most dynamic cooperatives. This led Kwayana, a long advocate of cooperatives, to temporarily cease his promotion of them. For, the cooperative drive was now tied to the monster state’s identity.
Leaderless Wildcat Strikes of the Guyana Bauxite Miners
Kwayana, along with other initially more alert members of ASCRIA (members of the group had multiple views on the labor revolt and there was much debate), began to support a wildcat strike led by a Committee of Ten which insisted they were leaderless. This group published The Voice of the Workers (which was the masthead of their leaflets). A selection of their organ and the false propaganda of Burnham’s PNC state was the contents of Kwayana’s last chapter of the original printing of The Bauxite Strike.
Popular uprisings in Linden (Wismar-Mckenzie) around the bauxite mines confronted the abuses of ALCAN (a Canadian division of ALCOA) from permitting sexual abuse of Guyanese nurses employed in a segregated company town, to betraying these industrial workers’ pension scheme (RILA). This happened in a process whereby Burnham’s PNC government was negotiating the nationalization of the bauxite industry. In the process of negotiations, the government appropriated the matching funds the multinational corporation had previously contributed to their retirement and life insurance.
Rebel Workers of Guyana Subject to Jail, Beatings, and Teargas
The rebel workers who fought this for over a year had been subjected to jail, beatings, and teargas by the Guyanese state. The union bureaucracy of the Guyana Mineworkers Union (GAWU), having not sanctioned the strike, suspended 20 members who they claimed were the leaders of the strike. This allowed for the blacklisting of these employees for years. The government wished to divide the striking workers by creating tiers among them — that is refunding their pension investment, without contributing to it, if they had been on the job less than 12 years. This was the process of how Guyana consolidated its state capitalism by negotiating with “labor” and settling through negotiations a wild cat strike.
Kwayana learned that such bauxite workers were ready for socialism and could defend it. Labor was the force to resolve national crises; nations, even the formerly colonized, should not resolve economic crises at the expense of self-organized labor. In contrast, Kwayana viewed the “old politics” should be discarded, where charismatic personalities worked crowds or assemblies only to disband the political work after elections.
What Are Mass Meetings For? Electing Politicians or Ordinary People Governing?
Once in state power politicians, replaced mass meetings with press releases. Kwayana viewed the bauxite strikes as a process where “we all learned to govern,” alluding to James’s principle of “every cook can govern.” Kwayana recognized the popular committees and assemblies of the bauxite strikers as having at times narrow views and that democratic processes can have severe if unexamined limitations. However, Kwayana was organizing solidarity with these strikers and had not yet entered the arena of facilitating a direct democratic process himself, among workers and farmers as self-governing producers.
Dual Power at the Community Level
His next project was profoundly different where he assumed from the beginning workers and farmers could directly form their own government. He advocated that they form a type of dual power at the community level. In 1973, Kwayana organized a rebellion of multi-racial landless sugar workers. It was the first multi-racial radical activity in more than a decade in Guyana. Burnham’s PNC government was in the process of negotiating the nationalization of old sugar lands, no longer farmed, but abandoned by the Bookers Corporation. Kwayana propagated and successfully encouraged over 2000 people in African and Indian communities, on the East Coast of Demerara, Guyana, to seize the land and start building homes and farming on them. He advised them to inform the government, which was advocating nationalization as part of a cultural revolution, that they wanted their deed but they would not pay for the land.
If Its “the People’s Land” Hand Over the Deed for Free
If the public or nationalized property is “the people’s land” it should not be something that government restricts or manages access. After the first week of squatting, the government gave the squatters a 48-hour ultimatum. Burnham’s police then started subjecting these communities to brutality and burned the homes and farming plots that were in the process of becoming self-organized.
Ultimately in February 1974, there was a fast and vigil, which brought this episode to a close on the authority of the landless former sugar workers. The date was called “The Day of Redemption of Sugar Lands.”
Seizure or Discovery of Sugar Lands
As I have already mentioned above, workplace councils and popular assemblies are not merely forms of protest activity. This is part of the process of how revolutionary socialists form their own government. For the imaginary of economic planning to support designing a new society, those aspiring specialists who wish to facilitate must advise labor not hierarchical or bureaucratic regimes.
Eusi Kwayana’s effort at fomenting a rebellion of popular committees of the landless was accompanied by “guidelines.” These appeared to be informed by Julius Nyerere’s TANU guidelines (otherwise known as the Mwongozo) for socialist workers and farmers to fight “bureaucracy” but of course not Nyerere’s one-party state in Tanzania.
ASCRIA Guidelines for Class Struggle? Proletarian Invasion of Nationalized Property
Nevertheless, ASCRIA’s guidelines were different because they revealed how to proletarianize nationalized property at the expense of Burnham’s increasingly authoritarian state. Though Kwayana insists it was not a formula meant to attack the Guyanese state, it appeared to be guidelines for class struggle which encouraged the direct seizure of the means of social and economic reproduction from state power, while carefully warning against obstacles that may lead to racial insecurity and middle-class opportunism.
ASCRIA advised the landless sugar workers to first find out if the land soon to be nationalized was owned by the former sugar company. The land to be seized should not be privately owned. If it was private they were implored to leave it at once. If the state (the cooperative republic) seeks to lie or misrepresent itself as already having given the land to a cooperative, find the registered board of the specific co-op, sign up, and start building on the land. The squatters were warned to make sure that in the Official Gazette the deeds to their land were not being passed over their head.
Learning to Leave Behind Political Parties and Reject Feudal Capitalism
The movement was framed as not against the government or opposition but one which transcended political parties. Popular Committees were to be formed, and so long as individuals were not undermining the effort, they should be put on the committee regardless of race or party. This was to be a rejection of feudal capitalism — first Big Sugar as Landlord, then the Post-Colonial state.
The People’s Committees were encouraged to recognize and record the accomplishments and challenges of seizing the land and facilitate discussion. Strict rules must be maintained as to who could have the land. Speculators, those already with a plot of land, could only have land when the landless had attained theirs. The committee must also limit the number from each house or family. Each committee was told to first survey the land, leaving proper space for roads, irrigation, and sewage. Then the lot sizes could be decided and they should be doled out equally.
Protecting Minorities in People of Color Majority Communities
ASCRIA reminded there will be multi-racial communities dominated by Indians and by Africans. Whoever was in the majority must defend and protect the minority in their communities. Where there is a land dispute by an African and Indian community, judicial reason cannot be measured until there is an equal division made of the land within each community. There would be no inter-ethnic disputes fomented by community leaders who tolerate economic and other inequalities within their own community.
A federated Free Land Council would coordinate the different communities seizing the land. The landless were encouraged to fence in the land and only to fill out government forms if they were clearly expressing they would pay no fees for purchase of the land.
Burnham’s government initially responded to the squatters, before the police brutality, by recognizing their “need” for land. ASCRIA reminded: what was all the fuss if the land was publicly owned in a cooperative republic?
Making History Not A New Political Party; Occupying Land, Forming Their Own Government
The Guidelines told the landless they were making their own history, not a new political party. That feudal capitalism could only be destroyed if they arrived on their own authority occupied the land and formed their own government over it. ASCRIA reminded if the government jails or persecutes them they would be heroes to their people. Their people needed heroes it was proclaimed but not charismatic elites above society.
In “Getting Back The People’s Land” published in the Guyana Graphic in February 1973, Kwayana reminded a socialist government, a revolutionary government, would not be concerned by workers’ and farmers’ self-organization undermining their image or about secrets (like the cozy relationship between Bookers and Burnham’s government) leaking out.
Opportunist leaders in both ethnic communities tried to divide the landless sugar worker movement but failed. This movement was using the imperialist’s property (or the government’s now nationalized property) to resolve the contradictions and tensions among the toilers. Kwayana underscored what type of socialist government sees this process as its enemy and to be repressed.
Economic Revolution Is Not A Cheap Slogan or Policy Above Society
In ASCRIA’s “Sugar and Redemption” (1973), they reminded their readers economic revolution is not a cheap slogan or policy of a government above society. It means overturning, shaking up, changing the laws and government which affirms the rich’s ambitions so that the poor people can be liberated. The Burnham government was not going to be allowed to “treat people like dogs” and claim an economic revolution. They would not be permitted to impose financial burdens on people in isolation and proclaim they were socialist. People are prepared to work but for the authoritarian state or foreign capitalist exploiters. What they had built was people’s power and all the trials for land trespass were morally rejected.
You Cannot Put Capitalist Hustlers to Build Socialism
Finally, in “The Declaration of Bachelor’s Adventure” ASCRIA declined the collective punishment imposed on certain villages because they oppose the corruption of the so-called revolution. Fighting white supremacy and colonialism, ASCRIA no longer had a narrower race vindication on its mind. They had come to realize that Caribbean statesmen were not representative men of “black” achievement. As Eusi Kwayana explained:
“Looking back we should not have been surprised. You cannot put capitalist hustlers to build socialism. You cannot expect people who live by privilege to carry out a social revolution, or to uphold… equality. … Are we to stand aside and shut up when we see people preaching equality and practicing accumulation? The country is run in the supposed interests of the privileged few. The few are now more than before. They are African and Indian, Chinese and European, but they are few. They are the political elite, the managerial class in all sectors…”
This may have profound comparative meaning for the future of Guyana and the Caribbean which promotes state capitalism and nationalized property as “progressive.” It also penetrates into the contradictions of the United States, as an affirmative action empire, and ethnically plural police state.
When I was preparing the 2012 new introduction to the updated edition of The Bauxite Strike and the Old Politics (with the new appendix of these rare ASCRIA documents) Eusi Kwayana was a bit unclear why I had taken a contemporary interest in these long out-of-print small booklets, pamphlets, and flyers as someone who was born in the United States.
From Obama to CARICOM: Police Brutality At Home and Abroad
However, soon with the emerging contradictions of President Obama’s regime piling up, despite Obama claiming to be the embodiment of “change we can believe in” and moving the world “forward,” Kwayana, who was then 90 years old, relayed to me that he now understood.
Of course, from 2014–2020, the movement against police brutality in the United States found a high tide of insurgency. Curiously, in the Caribbean of the same period, there was little acknowledgment of the widespread abuse of the police state as administered by people of color, especially of the unemployed, certainly not by the CARICOM coalition advocating reparations and openly preparing the government boots (the RSS) to attack the Caribbean masses. So much for Caribbean charisma above society.
Will future discussions of Caribbean socialism begin to center that wisdom is plentiful among ordinary people to govern? Time will tell.
[This essay is a product of edited sections of a previous longer research article. Matthew Quest. “Wisdom is Plentiful Among Ordinary People to Govern: A View of Antigua’s Tim Hector and Guyana’s Eusi Kwayana.” Antigua & Barbuda Review of Books. 8.1 (Fall 2015) 132–162. See also Matthew Quest. “From Party Politics to Popular Committees of Labor and the Landless of Guyana.” Introduction to Eusi Kwayana. The Bauxite Strike and the Old Politics. Updated Edition. Atlanta: OOOA, 2012. 5–24.]
