TODAY’S piece is the conclusion of 11 columns as a response to a half-page letter Nigel Westmaas of the WPA and the anti-oil lobby did on me in the Stabroek News of March 14, 2020. Together with a 7-part series on Rupert Roopnaraine and a 5-part series on the Stabroek News, they constitute 23 offerings on the politics and sociological perspectives on the Mulatto/Creole class (MCC).
I don’t care who thinks I am boasting, but these 23 submissions have filled large gaps in the current history of Guyana. Long from now, these 23 items would be a source of material for those who want to write on the political history of Guyana. To put it chauvinistically, I have contributed to the writing of Guyanese history. In Guyana, you have to beat your own drum because no one has the mental courage or the moral obligation to beat it for you.
There will not even be one reply from Westmaas, his MCC acolytes and his WPA colleagues, the aficionados of the Stabroek News and the fan club of Roopnaraine. They will not reply because they know if and when they do, they will open large cans of worms. My 23 submissions are backed by research and quotations from politically rich sources. I have offered an ocean of facts about Roopnaraine, the Stabroek News, Westmaas, and the people around him.
The last time, an MCC personality replied to my work, it was Professor Percy Hintzen. He accused me of fictions and questionable research, but Hintzen was barefacedly brazen. He could not devastate not one fact that I cited in condemnation of the politics of the MCC. Hintzen cited Red Thread as the likely saviour of Guyana at this stage. I responded to that miasmic thought of Hintzen accusing him of “eyepass” when you think of the rich struggle of the sugar unions.
I conclude this series of rebuttals to Westmaas by the following lopsided remark: “Will Kissoon examine the claim made by Gerald Pereira of the Organization for the Victory of the People that “sixteen families” effectively own everything in Guyana?”
I have spent my entire life in Guyana and I don’t know there are 16 families that own Guyana. It is pathetic nonsense to ask an academic to comment on a statement without facts, statistics, and specifics. Who are these 16 families? Where are their investments? Where did they get their capital from?
The entire Guyanese nationality, in and out of the land, knows about six extremely rich families in Guyana. These are the traditional petty bourgeoisie that have become embourgeoisified over the past 25 years with the rise of perestroika at the beginning of the 90s. They can be properly classified as a national bourgeoisie in Guyana.
The money of these families is from legitimate sources, and they are innovative investors. They will get richer as the oil economy becomes the foundation for what W.W. Rustow calls the “take off.” The take off is already occurring. The birth of a national bourgeoisie was inevitable once capitalism was allowed to resurface in Guyana.
As a socialist academic and a left-wing public intellectual, my task is not to engage in activism that would stop the investments of these families. I do not see that the goal of my activism, although I accept large doses of socialist economics, is to be critical of this national bourgeoisie.
One can only be critical of the capitalist class if it uses the state and its administrators to shape a capitalist system that is cruel, oppressive and prevents the state from using policies to benefit the working people and the middle classes. That is oligarchy. We do not have oligarchy here. I do not see Irfaan Ali as a facilitator of oligarchy.
Last Sunday, I wrote that I see Anil Nandlall as the president of Guyana in 2030. I know Nandlall up close and personal. He will not let the state be manipulated by an oligarchy. I honestly believe that Nandlall is the closest thing to a Jaganite ideology in the PPP. Under an Ali presidency and a Nandlall administration, I do not believe the proletariat and strata within the middle classes will have no economic room that will prevent their well-being and their future.
I will use my voice and my pen to confront untouchables in Guyana that abuse the law and abuse people without status and the wealthy. I have done that my whole life. But at this stage of Guyana’s development, it is not my business if wealthy people get wealthier. My business is to safeguard the future of Guyana’s proletarian and hard-working peasantry.
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.