RECENT writings about Dr. Cheddi Jagan branding him as an unrepentant communist are misguided. Worst yet, to lay blame on Jagan for Guyana’s problems on account of his supposed ideology is a form of regressive revisionism as recently pointed out by Minister Robert Persaud. The record should be set straight.
Jagan’s world view had three mutually reinforcing components.
Firstly, Dr. Jagan was firmly influenced by the actual conditions of the working classes in Guyana. He had a deep understanding of the general structure and modes of operation of the colonial and immediate post-colonial economies as in the case of Guyana. The extractive and agriculture-based character of these economies placed these social formations at the bottom end of the hierarchy of global capitalism. Since there was very little value added production in places such as Guyana, the wages of workers were almost permanently depressed.
Jagan understood the plight of workers in structural terms. In the pre-independence period he was certain that poor wages and working conditions were not simply the result of ‘market economics’ but also of the arbitrary exercise of political power in the form of colonial governance. National liberation, therefore, was about two things, namely, national sovereignty and, simultaneously, a platform for socio-economic transformation. There was nothing particularly ‘communist’ about these objectives.
Secondly, the politics of decolonization was deeply embedded in the global politics of the Cold War. The strident agitation of Jagan and the PPP was not well received in London and Washington for the same reasons that these centers of power privileged conservative forces in other locations. The sources of hegemonic power wanted what might be called gradual decompression of the global colonial order. They wanted to administer self-determination with guarantees. Two such guarantees were important. The first was basically to assure support for the Cold War effort, and had nothing to do with democracy. Events in Iran and Guatemala in the early 1950s prove this. The second guarantee was about ensuring that Guyana and other emerging sovereign states developed in the context of vertically integrated market economies.
Jagan and the PPP rightfully objected to this grand design of post-colonial hegemonisation.
Third, and finally, in the post-independence period, Jagan and the PPP were well aware of the severe limitations embedded in the Bretton Woods system. The international financial institutions, combined with other multilateral institutions of global governance were deeply penetrated by the values and preferences of western interests. These included the interests of both multinational capital and western great powers.
All together, the architecture of western governmentality amounted to forms of imperial continuity. Jagan rightfully objected to this. To his credit, he was not prepared to sell Guyana’s sovereignty for what Michael Manley once derisively called a few feeder roads.
The concept of governmentality allows the analyst to examine not only the tangible forms of structural marginalisation, but also the discourses of legitimation deployed by the power holders. Jagan developed an ideology which contested both the material and philosophical bases of great power dominance, something that did not sit well with those who controlled global power.
All told, Dr. Jagan was basically an anti-imperialist, something he shared with all the great anti-hegemonic leaders from Arica, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Interested readers may want to read Dr. Jagan’s letter to Peter D’Aguiar dated October 14, 1960.

Apparently, it does not sit well with some in Guyana, even a few who willingly served in Dr. Jagan’s government. One gentleman in particular seems to going through his own gradual decompression.