MY 2021 Christmas Eve column was titled: “Norton Faces Colour and Class”. Here is what I wrote 40 months ago about class distinctions in Guyanese society with the focus on the new leader of the PNC, Aubrey Norton:
“If Corbin was despised in 2002, Aubrey Norton will be treated with the same disdain the MMC (Mulatto/Creole class) has forever shown the Indians.
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he MMC will not associate with Norton. They believe he is not MMC material, just as Corbin wasn’t. They will not give the PNC any funds. The businesses that bankrolled Hoyte and Granger will chase away Norton. In 2025, the MMC will do one of two things. They will either try to resurrect the AFC,

asking Nigel Hughes to return, and pleading with Dominic Gaskin to become the leader. Or, they will put their money behind probably ANUG, with Timothy Jonas as the leader. Even if Norton doesn’t accept the election results of a PPP victory in 2025, the MMC will still not embrace him.
Forty months ago, I wrote that. Look at what is happening now. In 2025, the MCC has engineered Nigel Hughes into the leadership position of the AFC, and the MCC wants Nigel Hughes to replace Aubrey Norton as the APNU+AFC presidential candidate. After Norton rejected Hughes, the MCC was in no mood to relent. They offered Terrance Campbell as the consensus candidate.

Campbell (who Ravi Dev thinks is a billionaire) is an integral part of Guyana’s MCC. He is in fact very close to the MCC personality that the AFC leaders called in May 2015 to offer her the position of Minister of the Environment. The MCC seriously believes that it has a chance to resurrect itself in government, a power that it held from 2015 to 2020.

The MCC believes that the PNC is vulnerable in 2025, and it thinks that the political configuration favours it, with the Stabroek News and certain civil society organisations becoming crucial actors as the election campaign gets underway. The MCC, which is one of the world’s most unapologetic class-driven strata, for reasons known to them only, believes that Nigel Hughes can resuscitate the political fortunes of the MCC as when it was born in 2005.

The deportment of the AFC from the time Norton won over the leadership was to frown upon him, as I analysed in my 2021 Christmas Eve article, because it is a class thing.  The MCC will never allow any merger with the PNC for the 2025 election if Norton is the presidential candidate. The story of Nigel Hughes versus Aubrey Norton is the story of class divisions and class contempt in Guyana that was birthed by the descendants of the house slaves hundreds of years ago.

Interesting to note is what the MCC is doing to Norton in 2025 is what it did to Burnham in the late 1950s, and Khemraj Ramjattan in 2006. In a bizarre, incredible, unbelievable way, the MCC, an elitist, reactionary, pro-imperialist social class, without knowing it, had applied a Marxist strategy to secure political power on the two occasions listed above.

That Marxist strategy was adumbrated by one of the most phenomenal minds, philosophy produced – the Italian thinker, Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci birthed the twin strategy of “War of Manoeuvre and “War of Position” in the fight for revolutionary power.
Space makes it impossible to elaborate on “War of Manoeuvre” and “War of Position”, but if you look at how the MCC got power through Burnham in the 1960s, and then how the MCC managed to strategise to bring Indian votes through Ramjattan in 2006, and now Nigel Hughes’ unity talks with Norton, this is straight out of the Gramscian notebook, although I believe back then until now, any MCC personality knew and knows who Antonio Gramsci is.

But how the MCC strategised on those two occasions and now in 2025, it resembles the Gramscian position, although Gramsci would turn in his grave to know his strategy was employed by a pro-imperialist stratum genetically driven by class and colour.
As it stands now, the dialectics are at a standstill. Both Marx and Sartre argued that there comes a time when the dialectics do not move. In this class warfare between Norton and Hughes, the dialectics favour neither of them. This is what Marx and Sartre meant by the dialectics having stalled. The

dialectics never stall for too long, so as the weeks move on, we will see if the third attempt by the MCC of “War of Manoeuvre” and War of Position” will work with Norton.
Trouble is: Norton did Gramsci when he was a student at UG. So, Guyana is in for interesting times.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.