FOR “donkey years” now, I have been doing a daily column. It is impossible for any fan or admirer to read you each day without missing some editions. It happens to me too; because of intervening circumstances, I would miss the letter pages of the newspapers.

So, I get these emails from time to time asking me for elaboration of things I had already explained in my columns. Obviously, the person missed those editions. So, I got this email from someone who has been in touch with me for years now.  He wanted an interpretation as to why Cathy Hughes did not give her AFC fellow executive, Trevor Williams, the cellphone number of then Minister Volda Lawrence.

I explained the attitude of Mrs Hughes based on class analysis. I will do so again, but first, a word about class analysis. It was Karl Marx who popularised the importance of class conflict in understanding the nature of economic distribution in capitalist society. Marx was not the discoverer of the existence of social classes. Ancient Hindu scripts and philosophy in the ancient Greek City States made mention of social classes and the conflicts inherent in the relations between classes.

No political theorist, historian, sociologist or economist will produce plausible scholarship if he/she does not attach profound importance to classes and how they stand in relation to each other and how they are inserted into the relations of production. The written history of contemporary Guyana cannot be understood without class analysis.

The application of the methodology of class analysis will yield priceless explanations for the most seminal moments in Guyana’s social history. Here is a brief list of paramount events which cannot be understood without class analysis.

1-The fear of Cheddi Jagan and the PPP in the 1950s by the planter class and their Mulatto/Creole surrogates

2-The break-up of the PNC/UF coalition

3-The essential pillar on which rests the politics of the national poet, Martin Carter

4-The true nature of the existential politics of Rupert Roopnaraine

5-The quintessential difference in the temperament of PPP leaders as against PNC, WPA, and AFC leaders

6-The refusal of sections of the anti-Burnham platform to support Cheddi Jagan as the consensus candidate for the 1992 general elections

7-The reason for the birth of the WPA

8-The failure of the WPA to remove the Burnham government

9- Hoyte’s rejection of the 1984 dialogue between the PNC and PPP after he became President

10-The reason for the birth of the Stabroek News

11- The retirement of Robert Corbin as PNC leader

12- The reason for the birth of the AFC

13 -The transformation of some crucial civil society actors into insane antagonists against the PPP

14- The reason civil society, the AFC and the Stabroek News do not want a relationship with Kaieteur News

15- The reason for Nigel Hughes wanting to become the AFC leader

16 -The pressure on Aubrey Norton to concede the consensus candidature to Nigel Hughes

This is just a brief sample of seminal developments in contemporary Guyanese history that will not yield efficacious results if class analysis is not applied when studying them. In fact, no scholarly interpretation can be achieved if class analysis is not used in studying these political phenomena. I will briefly touch on four of them before I answer the gentleman’s question on Cathy Hughes.

First, Robert Corbin’s leadership of the PNC failed because the Mulatto/Creole class (MCC) considered it inappropriate to have Corbin as their leader. Secondly, the MCC refused even at the elementary level to have anything to do with Norton.

Thirdly, the MCC was deeply traumatised at the loss of state power by the APNU+AFC in 2020. It spent the period after 2020 sponsoring the Guyana Human Rights Association; Red Thread; Transparency International- Guyana Chapter; Help and Shelter; SASOD; the Stabroek News and prominent ideologues in the MCC of which a few names stand out: Alissa Trotz, Nigel Westmaas, Vanda Radzik; Danuta Radzik, Melinda Janki;  Percy Hintzen and Janet Bulkan.

Fourthly, even though the politics of the owner of Kaieteur News, Glenn Lall, shares a multiplicity of commonalities with the MCC and their surrogates, they consider Lall unfit to be part of their class world, thus they have absolutely nothing to do with him.

This column intended to explain why Cathy Hughes snubbed Trevor Williams. Unfortunately, space has run out. I wrote before that it was class snobbery. Hughes did not feel that she could share that information with someone outside her class circle. She would have willingly volunteered to give that information to her fellow MCC acolytes.

Leonard Craig told me that he met with the same attitude from Raphael Trotman when he asked Trotman for the cell number of a certain big one. Class analysis is part of life.

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.