We Called Him Mikhell Menlie: Jamaica’s Michael Manley Did Not Lead a Social Revolution
Those who have access to Caribbean elders, and those who are keepers of archives, and those who today can speak and act for themselves understand. As one elder put it: “We called him Mikhell Menlie.” And that is what those who uncompromisingly struggle in the Caribbean must learn to call him. Those who are attending PNP banquets, who are capitalists and call each other comrade, will continue to play around. We are tired of a Caribbean littered by capitalists who call each other comrade. May they be swept up and thrown in the dustbin of history. And we in no way wish the JLP well. We would like to pave a road over them.
Michael Manley’s The Politics of Change was a statement by a prime minister at a historical moment, 1973–1975, where the U.S. wished to destabilize Jamaica following the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s Chile. Cold War anti-communism led many to conclude Manley was articulating a profound socialism and leading a revolt against neocolonialism. Revisiting how he articulated self-reliance, social justice, equality, and participation should clarify how Manley was overwhelmingly conservative and opposed class struggle. For those who wish to claim Manley was perhaps the greatest prime minister Jamaica ever had, we have no quarrel. We don’t think presidents and prime ministers are legitimate personalities anyway. But when people claim he led a social revolution, that goes beyond the boundary of the truth of freedom movement history, those who lived it and those who know it intimately.
The project of cultivating the popular will, not simply ignoring or wishing to transparently suppress it, can serve the ends of hierarchy and domination. We cannot see this clearly unless we begin to expect that certain frameworks of “movement politics” can take on both radical and aristocratic tones, and further the nation-state or republic, a minority rule formation, cannot lead the democratization of society. Democracy, or majority rule, must be the activity of toilers and the unemployed not just being self-managing in production but directly governing society. It is from the perspective that finds this absurd that lends Manley, a former trade union leader, a certain prestige as a radical.
All of this becomes clear if we re-examine closely Manley’s propositions that stridently claim a pragmatism and a moral purpose, while he maintained impossible contradictory stances.
Manley openly declared he didn’t believe in equality but he promoted noisily equality. He makes a big show of rejecting elitism and privilege from a princely philosophical disposition. Social and economic justice is revealed as something ordinary people cannot achieve for themselves, and participatory democracy a tool of the state for subordinating commoners.
It is important to underscore that whether as a result of color caste or the family he was born into, as the son of Norman Manley, Jamaica’s first prime minister, Michael Manley should not be condemned for the material facts of existence that he was born. His tone or color doesn’t disturb us.
One can be born into royalty and be a committed insurgent. Such a burdensome commitment should not be laughed at for a familial identity one cannot control. The key is we must underscore that is not who Manley actually was.
Manley reveals permanent contradictions in his personality, often expressed in a duplicitous rhetoric, that reveals not a commitment to a new society but a desire for opportunity for individuals and nations to improve their socio-economic status in a competitive world that will always degrade and leave others behind. Let us begin with how Manley speaks of “equality.”
Equality
Manley’s politics of equality begins with the proposition, he finds self-evident, that human beings exist in a hierarchy of talents or merits that must produce a hierarchy of outcomes. Yet this links a truth to a falsehood. Where humans dance or do math better than others, it does not mandate that they should be compensated greater or be conferred a special status above society. Yet Manley says people should be accepted naturally, not as symbols of economic accomplishment or traditional status which he does not in fact reject. If this seems strange and inconsistent, Manley explains all over the world there is great resistance to the social acceptance of people for their upward mobility as a result of their economic skills.
He is arguing for non-discrimination (in terms or race or gender or born status) against those who ascend a hierarchy. Manley says “equality” is where a street cleaner’s son has an equal chance to be chairman of a large corporation. But this accepts that the street cleaner and the executive are not equal; equality is the next generation’s chance (which are never guaranteed).
Manley argued for an outlook that suggests all of a society’s economic functions are important and thus to his mind equal. The manager of the workplace and the toiler is then equal; the prime minister and the peasant are somehow equal; and the national bourgeoisie of each nation (if not for imperialism) should be equal — when in a self-emancipating socialist society marked by direct democracy in any sector of the world system they should be discarded. Anyone talking social revolution, who is not an organizer for a PNP banquet or wine and cheese party, can’t argue with this.
Manley accepts capitalist value theory, that if all do not have equal talents, they cannot be of equal value — even though labor produces all value whereby capitalists extract profits. But Manley doesn’t take this seriously. Instead, equality is a type of discourse of “dignity,” all labor up and down the hierarchy of society should know dignity.
He claims an African origin of this premise; it can also be Catholic. More than property relations, which he peripherally acknowledges, Manley has decided attitudes are the obstacles to equality. Is he given credit for leading a revolution in attitudes? Perhaps, among his caste and class. But that is no measure of social revolution — what the elite think, who still think they have a right to rule.
But Manley views the world from the point of view that each human being does not contribute to society with equal complexity. This makes sense on one level, there is the coconut peddler and the heart surgeon. However, for a politics of liberation too much cannot be made of this. Manley’s “equality” is essentially a politics of recognition among the nation he imagines as a family, whose children and wives are not loved equally (but all are loved).
Manley believes society, as it is arranged at present, must see all its economic functions as of equal worth. Yet the banker cannot be valued equally to the farmer, bauxite miner, or oilfield worker in an anti-capitalist vision. And the search for socialist or anti-colonial nationalist banking is the bane of a deep anti-imperialism where labor holds the reins.
Participation
Manley in his search to cultivate the popular will asks must government be remote? Can we make it intimate? This is a prelude to discussion of participation in a manner that mystifies the coercive power of the state and should be a warning against participatory democracy as a discourse.
Manley promotes that the population must be involved in government. It is considerate of him to wish for commoners to be engaged or included considering democracy means majority rule. For Manley, it means minority rule. Therefore, he seeks to cultivate the popular will to participate at the local level to make commoners feel connected. He makes manifest that he is not looking to promote dissent, or referendum for every decision that must be made. Manley desires a democracy that is intermittent and doesn’t disturb his authority above society. Participation, for Manley, is to encourage national sacrifice which means austerity.
We should learn from Manley that behind the discourse of national purpose for Caribbean people is the administration of austerity with bells and whistles. Participation is passive, an opportunity for the state to explain things to the people. Further, Manley insists local people can come up with ideas for their own development. But these, he says, must be made feasible by centrally located technicians. His contempt should be self-evident.
In a popular assembly, a facilitator may help ordinary people shape and articulate programs and perspectives of their own, but in a direct democracy this is to make the state and professionals obsolete as the embodiment of government. Where Manley says all governmental institutions represent a pragmatic response to reality this is totally false. This is a vulgar materialist reading of capitalist hierarchies and stratifications as reality, and a denial that embedded in the law is property relations that cannot empower the poor. He is not sweeping away common sense that permanently delays the transition from quantity to quality. Manley has no vision of moving beyond bourgeois budgeting to toilers invading, occupying and controlling the wealth and means of production they created with their own hands.
Social Justice
We must understand that Manley terms a state with a moral agenda pursuing a just society as having a project of social justice. Somehow, Manley believes some governments make arbitrary decisions — they do not. Individual rulers or administrators make arbitrary decisions. But the intent of all governments when looking down on the part that has no part is the same.
Individual politicians may evade and make zig zag statements to cover up the capitalist class they serve under the premise of the market. However, nations that claim to be centered around state planning, and delinking from foreign influence, also follow the dictates of markets. They even invite foreign investment (if not management) in their nationalized property. And what this means is the nation, the public, the workers, it is structurally intended, have no control over their lives.
Manley proposes that social justice must be based on egalitarianism and the individual. While social revolutions organized around mutual aid propose to expand the creativity and autonomy of the individual, Manley defines the surrender of some freedoms of individuals to the social contract in a peculiar exchange. He says people must in exchange be guaranteed work (wage labor). But this is to guarantee toiling producers rights as consumers. Manley believes that commoners are only able to defend themselves in the long run of history. This is one way of expressing he is not for social revolution and doesn’t want the world to be turned upside down under his watch.
Social justice therefore is the identity of a state that doesn’t imagine that every cook can govern. Manley adds insult to injury by belaboring the point that no elitist model of society can pursue social justice, and that all transitional regimes will be defeated by leaders who in fact maintain a superior status. This of course mystifies his own station as a politician.
Self-Reliance
Manley accepts that the role of government is the distribution of favors. He has the disposition of a socialist tax collector, who always is inquiring who will redistribute the wealth, and if there is any social wealth to redistribute ordinary people. The audacity of such ideas comes from the on again, off again, admission that labor produces all wealth, and denial of their direct self-government includes their capacity to redistribute what they produce consistent with an agenda that wishes to oppose a hierarchy of social classes.
Manley’s discourse of self-reliance elides multiple ideological dispositions. The search for a nation for independence from empire. The search for Black autonomy from white supremacy. The search for language that can articulate a vibrant socialism while avoiding a true opposition to capitalism and property relations. He is aware also that self-reliance can be an outlook of a conservative individualist disposition. And so the discourse of self-reliance is really a triangulation.
A triangulation is a political strategy where one positions oneself in the middle of three or more diametrically opposed value systems and articulates something that sounds appealing to all of them. Of course, grassroots toilers who have the instinct to directly govern also may find self-reliance resonates with their ambitions. But to have a politician speak of equality, social justice, participation, and self-reliance in the way that Manley did was in fact a misrepresentation of workers’ self-emancipation. It was a type of totalitarian maneuver. This may seem strange that Manley who was always critical of Stalinist Russia could produce totalitarian maneuvers. But he clearly did so where he spoke on behalf of a state that claimed to act in alienated labor’s interests as it repressed and wished to contain its popular self-organization.
Manual Labor: The Image of Michael Manley Shoveling and Doing Dirty Work
Michael Manley, who was born into Jamaican color caste society with light brown skin, was always conscious of the psychic burdens of darker Black people and the memory of enslavement in a former plantation society. It is good to be conscious of things you cannot control. It is also good for Manley and his well-wishers not to take credit for one’s awareness. Many are professionally aware and continue to serve empire and the gathering of their own wealth.
Manley was alert that Jamaican and Caribbean society’s post-independence claim to be a plural society often masked the degradations of internalized white racism. The merits of this awareness in Manley are not self-evident. Like many alert to slavery as a total system of degradation and trauma with no official modicums of freedom, Manley could restrict recognition of what self-emancipation meant in the past and present, or the pursuit of self-government within the shell of the old regime, to justify his political ambitions. Slavery, like indentureship and colonialism, articulated that people of color as a race, and toilers of color as a social class, were unfit to govern themselves. Manley in no way unleashed that power but contained it.
In Jamaica and the wider Caribbean, since Michael Manley, darker brothers and sisters have found their equal opportunity to enter the rules of hierarchy and govern above society. Still, the Caribbean toilers have not been recognized for their right to try and directly govern where they have been termed unfit. For all the contemporary talk of racial insecurity and historical victimization narratives that Caribbean toilers can directly govern is still not acknowledged. Is this too a legacy of internalized racism and colonial mentalities? Nobody knows. We believe it is not. We believe the rejection of racism and empire clearly has not prepared anyone to rearrange society more democratically where toilers hold the reins.
The Caribbean was closer to recognizing the need for direct democracy just before most Caribbean radicals, who had advocated workers’ self-emancipation, began to retreat to support Manley’s mystifications which they previously denounced. What was termed an anti-fascist front against imperialism discarded the direct self-governing polity of tomorrow. Too many of us have not been taught critically the turning point of 1973–1975. We don’t take seriously what was accomplished before and what was betrayed. But history’s conflicting tendencies appear, disappear, and reappear. The Caribbean will soon have the chance to learn from that turning point again and make a new one.
Manley inherited a flawed worldview that impacted his notion of post-colonial economics and politics. Slavery and empire underdeveloped the Caribbean’s capacity to accumulate and retain their own capital but labor does not produce capital in liberation politics. Only in a fragmented freedom (in the aftermath of enslavement and indentureship) does it earn wages in a process, where officially at least, it doesn’t control the working day, and doesn’t directly govern society.
Michael Manley couldn’t relate to all this, as a trade union bureaucrat before becoming prime minister, who not surprisingly identified as much with workplace foremen and managers whom he was often in dialogue. The image of Manley doing manual labor reveals best how he saw race and class. Manley was aware that the color caste aristocracy of Jamaica associated darker brothers and sisters with manual labor where their hands and clothes would be soiled. They would never socialize their lighter skinned children to do such work.
Manley psychologically, instinctively, and partly as propaganda often was photographed doing manual labor. Fidel Castro also maneuvered in this way so the contradictions of lingering racism in Cuba would not soil his reputation as having come from the creole elite. We have criticisms of Manley and Castro that make them no touchstones for us. But their values were carried out consistently and we don’t propose to psychoanalyze them, just as we have no need to psychoanalyze Forbes Burnham, Cheddi Jagan, Maurice Bishop or Walter Rodney. Their political and philosophical projections and practice were what they were. Their skin, light or darker, did not help them get things right or wrong.
Manley believed working alongside toilers with a shovel in the heat, doing manual labor was good for human progress, and his own individual development. But he could only make this formulation conscious that he was not of the same racial caste or social class as those he was working. In fact, he articulated revealingly that approaching labor this way curried admiration among the rank and file just as workplace foremen and managers who are skilled and get their hands dirty helped fix problems of production and are appreciated more on a construction site more than bosses who hold the position but cannot or will not take part as equals. Manley was a “progressive” boss man.
Those who are compensated to administer labor, or have the status of governing above society, are not working people’s equals. They cannot be of equal merit when to put it kindly they are superfluous, and to make it plain they are oppressors. These social relations are not an accident of birth that cannot be overcome but a result of politics.
Conclusion
A self-reliant society marked by workers’ self-emancipation, and the wageless as valid persons, is one where toilers think and act for themselves. Whatever mediation or coordination is necessary should take power away from the state and capital, not hone toilers’ ideas and participation into policies for technocrats that legitimate rulers above society.
The struggle against the empire of capital cannot promote dignity to all, certainly not to bankers, state planners, and other bosses — or there is no fight actually happening.
Every economic function beyond pursuit of the necessities of life, and a happiness and innovation that will not exploit others, cannot be measured as of merit.
An insurgent politics against the empire of capital cannot be pursued where we vindicate mediocre personalities because Cold War anti-communism and white racism might attack any Caribbean or Global South statesman for even pretensions to independence. This is very crucial. And this is how to place Manley’s legacy and burdens in contemporary post-colonial and post-civil rights conversation. Women always face patriarchy. People of color always are confronted with racism. Workers are always exploited. Does this produce a name, image, and likeness that Caribbean elites can carry into executive and professional positions to legitimate their hierarchical realms?
The US empire did principally attack Michael Manley. It was a mistake then and now to think as a result he was leading a social revolution. Overwhelmingly women, people of color, toilers, LGBTQ who are degraded by systematic oppression are NOT leading a revolution. Certainly peripheral politicians are degraded by empire — — does this make them an oppressed class? The fact, that anyone would pause to think about it, is a disgrace.
Revolutionary politics is not an inheritance based on what is imposed on us. It is a choice. It is a strategy. It is a programmatic commitment. And one must overcome our own mistaken notions and institutional oppression. In no way did Michael Manley do this politically.
What he did was, as a symbolic personality, he re-engineered his own caste in the Caribbean. And he paved the way for darker sistren and brethren to also contribute to this sham and join the caste (the ruling class). Whoever says “but someone can be born poor, toil as a bus driver, and lead the nation…” will soon spread their expansive vision over us unto death. It’s happening today and not for the first time.
A pragmatist that expects there can be no alternatives to the world system can claim that their government is “not for sale” but politicians like Manley did not wish for Caribbean toilers to form their own government. This is why he reduced his support for Caribbean federation to a regional economic common market. Federation of Caribbean toilers in a politics of self-emancipation can discard all states and ruling elites above the region. That truth is why Michael Manley’s ambiguous Politics of Change lingers in the collective memory because “progressive” elites use it as a cornerstone in a false pantheon to limit the Caribbean imaginary that might discard them.
From knowing obscure Rastas, Rudies, and Dreads to the refrigeration mechanic Joseph Edwards, who knew Jamaican and Caribbean labor and socialist politics (and all its betrayals and abuses) intimately, to those who allowed their nationalism to overcome their deeper popular democratic sensibilities who nevertheless remember the times, he will always be Mikhell Menlie. Their slogan was “Down with One Menism” which meant rejection of trade union and party politics that in the final analysis served one man or maximum personality above society and was characterized as satanic. No administrative rationality can supersede that sound judgment.
So go ahead. Salute Michael Manley as your preferred Jamaican or Caribbean prime minister in history. Celebrate his birthday with party hats and kazoos. You can make your “progressive” choice among historical bourgeois politicians. But don’t ever talk about the social revolution he led. It disrespects the radical tradition, it insults our heritage that people who have not placed themselves up for sale know well. It can be wielded like a cudgel again.
