IF you read the political analyses of certain Guyanese, most of whom are long, long gone from here and not coming back, what should be a contribution to academia and historiography becomes propagandistic aridity.

The people doing those analyses start out from an instinct of political bias, race hate or anti-PPPism so scholarship ends up as propaganda. I can cite just two examples. Dr. Nigel Westmaas wrote that all around in Guyana, there is social decay. Professor Percy Hintzen sees Red Thread as the possible avenue for liberation of the Guyanese people.
As a trained academic, I find both statements unadulterated propaganda. You surely have poor people in Guyana as in every other country in the world. But for anyone to say in a fast developing oil economy, Guyana is saturated with social decay is academic wildness. It is inexplicable why Hintzen would leave GAWU out of the equation and see Red Thread as Guyana’s potential saviour.

The Saturday, November 11, 2023 editorial of the Stabroek News (SN) is about the neglect of the proletariat (my word) by the PPP administration. Using so-called class analysis, the writer, with a crass display of anti-PPP instincts, ended up making a mockery of class analysis.
One quote can testify to this: “The incessant housing drive is another with the gullible poor brainwashed into thinking that home ownership equates to social mobility. So they take on millions of dollars of debt for houses that are not much better than shacks in the middle of nowhere and with zero resale value.”
I do not believe any sane person can write such appalling boloney. A family acquires a house lot to build a home and that is described by the SN as brainwashing people who think home-ownership is equivalent to social mobility. Home ownership is a commonsense reflection in humans. It is based on the basic, survivalist instinct of all humans that life will be less burdensome when you have a roof over your head.

It was Cheddi Jagan as President that introduced the sale of state-owned land at a cheap rate for those who do not possess their own homes. It has been a phenomenal success since 1992 in improving the lives of the lower working class, the working class itself and the lower middle class.
One of the great books the past 100 years is Thomas Piketty, “Capital in the 21st Century.” It is obvious that the person who wrote that editorial hasn’t read it. Piketty’s layout of statistics in measuring class changes in the developed world is highly impressive. His sequel to this 2013 publication is, “Capital and Ideology,” another masterpiece.
No academic can write on the dialectics of social classes without the use of statistics because statistics allow you to measure the rising disadvantage of the proletariat and peasantry in relation to the bourgeoisie, petit bourgeoisie and the middle class (the latter an important stratum in Guyana’s sociology the editorial left out).
Here are some statistics that allows one to measure the improvement of both the rural and urban proletariat and lower middle class in Guyana. From the year 2020 to 2023 there have been allocations of 26,600 house lots to applicants in eight of the 10 regions.

Go back 15 years and the amount will be colossal. I have been personally involved in facilitating house lots for working class families in the Jagdeo, Ramotar, Granger and Ali presidencies. They have gone a long way in improving the quality of life for the recipients.
The word “ignorant” is not inappropriate in describing that editorial on class changes in Guyana. The analysis lacks even a modicum of acquaintance with the dialectics of social classes and how classes stagnate and how other classes predominate.
We will have to do a second part of this critique here examining three dimensions of class analysis. One – why Marx’s prediction of class confrontation did not materialise in the developed world. Two – the huge dissimilarities in the economies of the industrial, capitalist West and the post-colonial economies. Three – the Scandinavian approach to state behaviour in capitalist societies.

The proletariat and petit bourgeoisie have had different fortunes in different capitalist systems. In many countries there has been a simultaneous economic gain of both the petit bourgeoisie and the proletariat through the instrumentality of what theorists refer to as the “relative autonomy of the state.”
To write an essay on class changes in Guyana and conclude that Guyana’s housing system leaves people with houses they built in no man’s land, is one of the most vulgar and degenerate expressions of anti-PPPism I have seen since the PPP’s return to power in 1992. Is the Stabroek News more anti-PPP than the PNC?