I DO not know if Nigel Hughes has read Karl Marx. If he hasn’t, then he should right away. One learns a mountain of things about political economy when one enters politics by reading Marx. If you are in politics and you haven’t read Marx, then, get out of politics.

My thinking is that Nigel has refused to correctly classify the people who tried to destroy Guyana last Monday as hooligans. As an analyst, I think his attitudinal direction is because he is in competition with Aubrey Norton and thus he considers it strategic not to condemn.

If he is going to compete with Norton for Norton’s constituencies then he cannot be seen to be delivering harsh condemnations of the action of hundreds who tried to burn down Guyana last Monday.

The AFC is going into the 2025 elections on its own (it may team up with some one-man lunatics) and since it cannot attract cross-racial voting, then to save his credibility, Nigel has to have some seats; at least two or three.

So Nigel is behaving like typical PNC leaders since the 1950s – try to court the lumpen proletariat. This is a social class that Marx describes as a stratum that is not engaged in productive work because of their unfortunate social evolution. They are, politically, an unreliable, selfish and opportunistic class that the proletariat should not depend on.

The lumpen proletariat operates in circumstances that are similar all over the world. Because of their disadvantaged existence they see life as being unfair to them and they will destroy life if in that destruction their existence is assured. The lumpen behaves the same way in every country during moments of political upheavals.

They want to maximise every opportunity to expand their personally deprived economy. This is how they view life. They are not interested in political values and higher political causes because that is a world they don’t comprehend and don’t want to comprehend.

This is a social class that does not want to understand what political loyalty is because it is a jargon to them. They understand one thing only – “I must make that moment work for me by any means necessary.”

The lumpen proletariat has a long history in Guyana. Their importance to political confrontation crystallised during the first half of the 1960s when the PNC under Forbes Burnham and Hamilton Green cultivated them and expanded their value to the PNC. The United Force in the 1960s could not have been effective without the PNC lending substantial numbers of lumpen elements to the United Force who then financed them.

The PNC has always had an enduring relation with the lumpen and it was the lumpen elements that carried out violence against Walter Rodney and the WPA in the first half of the 1970s. In 2002, the PNC organised a band of lumpen elements based in Buxton to undermine the government of President Jagdeo. They wreaked havoc in Buxton from 2002 when they escaped from the Camp Street jail but the politicisation of the Buxton lumpen were an impossible job.

Neither the PNC, ACDA, Ronald Waddell, elements in the WPA could have politicised the lumpen in Buxton. They used the power of criminality to terrorise Buxton, rob and kill Indian businessmen and raped women in Buxton. In fact Waddell had a falling out with them and it ended violently.

Waddell wanted them to act as a political force. They had no interest in politics. If I publish names of certain personalities who were involved in Buxton 2002, I will be sued a million times. Buxton failed because a political movement cannot politicise the lumpen.

The analysis of Georgetown voting patterns will reveal that the lumpen does not vote. Aubrey Norton must be laughing at Nigel because Norton has been around long enough to know the unsavory purpose the lumpen serves the PNC but voting has never been one of the contributions of the lumpen to the PNC.

The PNC as a huge political party (it has a mammoth 31 seats in parliament) will always have usage for the lumpen to perform violent acts for the party but one is unsure what purpose the lumpen will serve a very, tiny party like the Alliance For Change.

Nigel sees the lumpen as being useful to the AFC’s election campaign but in what ways? The lumpen is a violent stratum. It does not engage in essential political activism. Its role is to create violence for the purpose of enriching itself. When I functioned with the WPA in the 1970s in Tiger Bay, lumpen elements would steal from the office all the time. For now, Nigel and Norton will be competing with each other to get the lumpen on their respective side. Nigel will lose.

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.