HERE is what Nigel Westmaas wrote about me: “Despite Kissoon’s declared commitment to ‘class analysis,’ it is doubtful that he will focus on the massive gap between haves and have-nots opening up, and the new elites emerging within Guyanese society through oil wealth and large-scale land acquisition.”
What follows is my reply. I start with a caveat. It is impossible to delineate class lines in Guyana in a mere newspaper column. Not even three columns will do it. What follows are extremely concise notes. In the remaining years of Forbes Burnham’s rule, all classes were demobilised or sharply reduced in functionalism. The middle class migrated. The petty bourgeoisie was severely reduced due to Portuguese migration and ubiquitous state control affecting the private sector.
Both the urban proletariat and rural proletariat were impoverished. The peasantry and the rural proletariat migrated in huge numbers. The landed Indian stratum was reduced to numbers you could have counted on your fingers. Perhaps the class that escaped near dissolution was the lumpen proletariat. That class always thrives when an economy becomes moribund.
Guyana’s class structure was resuscitated but in amorphous ways when President Hoyte invented the Economic Recovery Programme (ERP) based on structural adjustment. The traditional Portuguese petty bourgeoisie began to function again. The middle class became vocal. Both the landed Indian petty bourgeoisie and the rural Indian peasantry benefitted from the opening up of agriculture.
The lumpen proletariat was enlarged in substantial ways. This was because the narcotics trade provided huge sums to the lumpen elements which they could not get from banal, ordinary criminal activity. The urban proletariat, particularly state employees, were devastated by the ERP. If the urban proletariat was weakened by the collapse of the Burnhamite economy, then the Hoytean economy decapitated the urban proletariat.
For a brilliant dissertation on the near disappearance of the urban proletariat under Hoyte, see Tyron Ferguson, “Structural Adjustment and Good Governance: The case of Guyana” One peculiar stratum that the ERC birthed was the nuveau riche class. This is a neo-Marxist concept that does not exist in classical Marxist analysis and is confined to countries in the Global South.
The nuveau riche is not part of the lumpen proletariat. It is not part of the petty bourgeoisie. It is a class sandwiched between those two classes. It consists of people engaged in illegal activities and those trying to become embourgeoisified. The traditional petty bourgeoisie does not like the nouveausports, riche folks. The only time they overlap is in the motor-racing sports which the nouveau riche currently dominates.
At the funeral service for Ricardo Fugundes, the murdered right-hand man of Roger Khan, at the motor-racing club on Albert Street, the descendants of the traditional petite bourgeoisie and nouveau riche personalities could not be distinguished. I was at the National Park looking at who was who at the funeral.
We come now to the oil economy of Guyana. Four class changes the oil economy has birthed. Parts of the middle class have become embourgeoisified, making for the expansion of an African business world. Secondly, the petty bourgeoisie is becoming a fully fledged bourgeoisie. Thirdly, the land-owning wealthy class has expanded tremendously. Fourthly, the proletariat, both urban and rural, is heading in the direction of future comfort.
Westmaas says it is doubtful I will focus on the last two class transformations. There is nothing to focus on. This is a natural phenomenon of class differentiations and class changes when a society becomes wealthy. There are three potentials in such a dialectical formation. One is the route of unbridled American capitalism, where the rich becomes super-rich and the state encourages such cruel class disadvantages.
The second is communist/socialist economics, where the state intervenes in the relations of production to alter the evolution of natural things. This pathway means direct policies to alter the expansion of the wealthy classes. The third pathway is the Scandinavian direction. This is how I see Guyana at the present time, and this is how I see Guyana in the future despite which ever political party is in power.
In the Scandinavian model, there is no man-made tampering with the economy. What happens is that the state does have an interventionist role but is to see that the proletariat, the middle class and the smaller petty bourgeois dimensions benefit from societal wealth through state spending. It is ugly and immoral propaganda to assert as Westmaas did in his letter that in Guyana, the poor is getting poorer and the rich is getting richer.
I haven’t seen the statistics. I live in Guyana, Westmaas does not. I see where my country is going, Westmaas hasn’t. I don’t deny rich people are getting richer is Guyana. That is none of my business. My business is to see the working classes benefit from oil wealth, and I think they are at the moment, and I hope it gets better.
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.
