It was in the early 1980’s after the assassination of Dr. Walter Rodney during the Burnhamite dictatorship that the PPP was debating whether to confront or have dialogue with the ruling PNC.This debate took the form of county conferences and at the Berbice conference, speaker after speaker that supported dialogue reduced the notion that confronting the PNC only meant armed struggle and repeatedly used the old worn and abused Marxist maxim of the subjective and objective condition not being conducive to that type of struggle.

Our alternate proposal was that confrontation is multi-dimensional and includes all form of extra parliamentary struggles, such as civil disobedience, picketing, marches etc., and metaphorically, I raised my arms to indicate that if it does come to that, we do have arms. This symbolic gesture raised the tempo somewhat in favor of confrontation.
Moses, a proponent of dialogue, was quick on the counter attack and said, “Yes we need arms, but first you have to have brains to make a revolution”. I did not follow the thinking of his brain then for dialogue, and certainly do not now by his junior coalition with the PNC.
Most of the prominent members of the present PNC were former ministers, presidential advisers, police and army officers during the Burnham regime. The nature of that monster has not changed; we just need to reflect on how the delegates of the Linden PNC were treated at their last congress to understand the dominating nature of the leadership of the PNC when you hold a different view-point.
I am still trying to figure out how Moses’s brains would tell him that the PNC will treat his party different when their views do not coincide. The dictatorial tendencies of the PNC is just at a sub-surface level; and once they are in the driving sea, there is no guarantee that they will act democratically. The lust for power sometimes makes us sell our noble principles to the altar of opportunism, and in the favorite word of Guyana’s only anarchist, maybe Moses’s brain might be having some amount of miasma.
REGGIE BHAGWANDIN