THIS is the third installment in an ongoing analysis of social classes in Guyana. In case you missed the other two columns, they are in the November 22 and 23 editions of the Guyana Chronicle.

In part two, I made the following observation: “There have been four periods that saw profound changes in Guyana’s class structure: 1- Burnhamite state hegemony; 2- Hoytean capitalist restoration; 3- Jaganite elevation of the peasantry; and 4- petro-dollar economy.”

Let’s look at the first period which is the immediate post-colonial period that morphed into state paramountcy under Forbes Burnham. After independence, there were more political upheavals rather than class changes. Post 1966, Guyana was more about political fierceness and not class struggle.

The coalition of a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist, pro-Western party– the United Force (UF) — in coalition with the PNC whose constituencies were essentially the urban proletariat and the pro-Western, Mulatto/Creole middle class, produced an extreme rarity in class struggle referred to by Karl Marx as dialectical stagnation.

The employment of dialectical stagnation by Marx is one of his innovative contributions to Georg Hegel’s adumbration of the dialectic.

Marx argued in the “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” a book about the 1848 revolution in France that led to the seizure of power by Napoleon, that there was a period of dialectical stagnation.

To acknowledge that there could be a moment in class struggle when there is a dialectical standstill appears to be a contradiction of the very nature of the dialectic, but Marx acknowledged that there could be a moment when class struggle can experience a dialectical moment of no movement backward or forward.

Dialectical stoppage in the evolution of the antagonistic relations among social classes is very rare in the history of the world, but I would argue that for a brief moment between 1964 and 1967 in Guyana, there was a dialectic halt in class antagonism.

I will argue it in this way. Given the class support the UF had from the petit bourgeoisie and the embrace the PNC received from the middle class and urban proletariat, the missing link were the rural proletariat, the peasantry and the Kulak class.

These classes supported the PPP, but though these sections of Guyana’s sociological layout would have resented what happened to Dr. Jagan, the post 1964 coalition government did not target the classes supporting Dr. Jagan because of pragmatism and a dose of class sympathy.

The UF would not have allowed the PNC to move against the large rural land owners and the Kulak class because the UF had some class sympathy for them. Sections of the Kulak class, prosperous from rice production, supported the UF. It must not be forgotten that the UF had some wealthy Indians among its ranks. My wife’s uncle, Amjad Ali who was chairman of the Rice Producers’ Association supported the UF in those days.

Dialectical stagnation occurred for two reasons: after the fall of Dr. Jagan, he did not incite the rural proletariat to confront the PNC/UF coalition regime because Dr. Jagan was an astute Leninist who internalised the famous strategy of Lenin – “one step backward to take two steps forward.”

The PPP had just been ousted from power by a Western conspiracy and there had to be a period of strategising. Also, Jagan had devoted some space for himself after 1964 to complete his autobiography.

Secondly, the rural proletariat was pivotal to the survival of the sugar industry and by extension, the country’s economy, and it would have been an economic disaster for the new government to target sugar workers so soon after coming into power.

But I doubt this was a choice of the UF whose class mentality would have prevented any sympathy for the rural proletariat for religious, political and cultural reasons. The sugar workers after 1964 would have seen more sympathy for them from the PNC than the UF.

After independence, around early 1967, the period of dialectical stagnation ended and class confrontation resumed in Guyana. Two factors could be cited for this.

One was the PPP’s open rejection of the development strategies of the coalition government, which Dr. Jagan described as neocolonial. For more on this see the fine article by Dr. Jagan, titled, “Alternative Models of Caribbean Economic Development and Industrialization” in DEVELOPMENT AND PEACE, Volume Three, Number One, Spring 1982.

The second factor was the creeping confrontation over policy direction between the UF and the PNC. The relations between the parties were riddled with ideological and class differences, with the UF’s open embrace of unharnessed capitalism versus the PNC’s more quasi-socialist direction. For more on this, see chapter three of Tyrone Ferguson’s informative book, “To Survive Sensibly or to Court Heroic Death.” Part four is forthcoming.