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American Perspectives
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Alex Dupuy
allowed him to leave racialist discourse behind and propose a much more
democratic and inclusive political agenda. Rodney himself may not have
been aware of the inconsistencies between his earlier and later positions on
the race question; his later writings do not explicitly disclaim the views
advanced in The Groundings, although they constitute a break with that
view, Rodney was not just another Caribbean intellectual who made signifi-
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1989) and is completing a book on Haiti in the New World Order:
107
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oppressed and exploited classes and racial groups to create a better, just an
political struggles in Jamaica led the government to label him as a "communist" who engaged in "subversive activities" and advocated violent revolution (Payne, 1988: 28). The government banned his return to Jamaica in
October 1968 while he was attending the Congress of Black Writers in
Montreal. Rodney's reflections on this experience and on the struggles being
waged elsewhere in the Caribbean, the United States, and Africa led him to
write his first major essay on the race question in the Caribbean, The
Groundings with My Brothers.
during that time that he wrote his most influential work, How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa (1972). In this work Rodney showed how the conquest, colonization, and partitioning of Africa in the 19th century led to the
economic, political, and cultural underdevelopment of the continent while
simultaneously contributing to the enrichment and industrialization of
Western Europe.
also became known in the Caribbean and elsewhere as a marxist militant and
one of the most effective leaders and spokesmen of the Working People's
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during the 1950s. It was during these years that his thought on the existence
and significance of racial and class distinctions and politics began to be
formed (Huntley and Huntley, 1990 [1983]: i; Alpers, 1982: 61-62). As Alpers
argues, by the time Rodney entered the university "the basis of his mature
political belief was well established and the challenge for him was more one
of determining what role these would come to play in his life than one of
1963 to 1966 to pursue his graduate studies, his political ideas developed
further as he became involved in a study group with other Caribbean students
formed around the renowned Trinidadian marxist C.L.R. James. It was also
during his years in London and later in Lisbon, where he did research for his
doctoral dissertation A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800
During his first two years at the University of Dar es Salaam (1966-1968),
Rodney became directly involved in the struggles to create a socialist Tanzania
after the Arusha Declaration of 1967 established the principles of Ujamaa or
Tanzanian socialism. Particularly important for Rodney was the role he
believed that the petit bourgeois intellectual must play in postcolonial society
and in the construction of socialism. Basically, Rodney argued-following
Amilcar Cabral-that as a class-in-formation the petite bourgeoisie could
commit "class suicide" and align itself with the working class and the
struggle against colonialism (in Africa and the Caribbean), Rodney was well
aware that with the coming of independence and the creation of the postcolonial state the petite bourgeoisie in most cases sought to transform itself into
a dominant class opposed to the interests of the workers and peasants
(Fontaine, 1982b: 150; Alpers, 1982: 65-66; Hill, 1982: 86-89). It was this
realization, I will argue, that led Rodney to break definitively with the cultural
nationalist views espoused in The Groundings.
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expressed itself in the movement for racial equality, racial pride, and Black
Power. In the search for a socialist alternative to the emerging neocolonial
Caribbean state in the 1960s, given the demise of the West Indian Federation,
the defeat of the socialist PPP in Guyana, and the squashing of the mass
movement in Trinidad, Rodney articulated a version of Black Power adapted
to Caribbean conditions (see Hill, 1982: 77-78). His views were developed
in The Groundings.
The immediate context for the arguments he advanced was the Jamaican
society of the 1960s, where foreign capital controlled most of the key sectors
of the economy-the leading sugar estates, the bauxite industry, some of the
capitalist class consisted mainly of the local or Creole Europeans, Jews, and
Lebanese and, to a lesser extent, of Chinese and those of mixed Afro-European
parentage referred to as the "browns" (Stone, 1988: 12). The lower, working,
and peasant classes were made up almost entirely of those of African descent
and a smaller number of East Indians. The browns and Afro-Jamaicans, along
with some Chinese and East Indians, were heavily represented in the middle
to top professional, managerial, civil service, retail, and supervisory occupa-
tions (Payne, 1988: 17; Stephens and Stephens, 1986: 33-36; Lewis, 1968:
191-192; Stone, 1988: 12-14). The postindependence period, particularly the
decade of the 1970s, saw a significant increase in the proportion of black
middle-class individuals in top corporate positions as well as in the ownership
of relatively small and a few large business enterprises (Stone, 1988: 14).
The brown and black petite bourgeoisie were also in control of the two
principal political parties that came to dominate Jamaican politics after the
introduction of the universal franchise in 1944 and independence in 1962.
Rather than being political parties with a distinct class base, both the Jamaican
Labor party (JLP) and the People's National party (PNP) were essentially
electoral machines "led and dominated by educated professionals who acted
as brokers and bargainers in an attempt to assemble multi-class coalitions that
could contain the divergent interests of all social strata" (Payne, 1988: 18).
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Moreover, each party had its financial backers among the local capitalist
class, its trade union affiliates, and its defenders in the ghettos recruited from
the lumpenproletariat in the form of gangs. At the same time, each party
two parties worked against the "formation of either class or racial solidarity
among the large, massively underprivileged sector of the population" and
caused the two parties to have "a common stake in the stability of Jamaican
political life and [to work] together to suppress the dissemination of disruptive political messages" (Payne, 1988: 19). As Lewis put it, Jamaican society
of the 1960s was a "society of repressed violence in which the real threat to
the carefully nurtured image of inter-racial fraternalism comes, not from the
mass, but from the top groups placed on the defensive by the advent of
independence" (Lewis, 1968: 192-193).
It is easy to understand, then, why the JLP, as the government in power in
1968, considered Rodney a threat, deported him, suppressed the riots his
deportation occasioned, all with the relative acquiescence of the PNP opposition (Payne, 1988: 20-30). One of the principal targets of Rodney's critique
was the black and brown petite bourgeoisie that had assumed state power in
the postcolonial Caribbean states and had become in his view the "indigenous
lackeys" of British and North American imperialism (Hill, 1982: 78). In
with the class nature of nationalism, especially with its petty [sic] bourgeois
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dominance with the division of the world among the imperialist powers with
the onset of World War I in 1914. The international division of labor created
by the imperialist powers whereby the countries of Western Europe and later
the United States dominated and exploited the countries of Africa, Asia, and
Latin America also corresponded to the international racial division of the
world whereby white Europeans dominated black and other Third World
peoples in the subordinated countries. This racialist imperialist system led
not only to the domination of capital over labor but also to the domination of
whites over blacks politically, economically, militarily, and culturally. Thus,
whereas in the core or metropolitan capitalist countries whites were a numerical majority, in the dominated peripheral countries a small minority of whites
ruled over a vast majority of black, brown, or yellow peoples.
Even with the gaining of independence, Rodney maintained, the black
rulers remained subordinated to and dependent on the imperialist powers. He
concluded that it was not at all accidental that wealth came to be associated
with whiteness and poverty with blackness, for it was "the nature of the
imperialist relationship that [it enriched] the metropolis at the expense of the
colony, i.e., it [made] the whites richer and the blacks poorer" (Rodney, 1983
work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), namely, that the development of Western Europe was directly and dialectically linked to the underde-
cultural significance of the global European dominance was that the white
world had the power to define who was white and who was black. Furthermore, once someone was defined as black by the white world, this became
the most significant factor in that person's life, and it was also part of the
process of homogenization of blacks, who were thereby denied their distinc-
fundamental fact in the lives of Caribbean blacks and that it took precedence
over their other allegiances, such as their religion, their identity as citizens
of the same or different island nations, or their class (Rodney, 1983 [1969]:
16). The struggle for Black Power, therefore, was a struggle to alter the
cultural consciousness of Caribbean blacks to stress the positiveness of black
cultural values and esthetics. It was also to rid them of their identification
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with the white esthetic and ethical values that they were socialized to accept
and extol while denigrating black values and associating everything that was
ugly, negative, or evil with blackness. "The road to Black Power in the West
Indies," Rodney wrote, "must begin with a revaluation of ourselves as blacks
and with a redefinition of the world from our standpoint" (Rodney, 1983
[1969]: 33-34).
Rodney was well aware, however, that, in addition to those of African and
Afro-European descent, several other racial groups lived in the Caribbean,
most notably those of East Indian and Chinese origin, and that the population
was also divided along class lines that cut through the various racial groups.
These distinctions notwithstanding, he insisted on homogenizing the stratified racial groups by identifying the Caribbean masses as blacks, whether
they were of African or East Indian origin. This reduction of the two racial
groups to the single concept of "black" was warranted for Rodney because
both African and East Indian workers were exploited by and experienced
similar racial degradation from the dominant whites (Rodney, 1983
[1969]: 28).
Similarly, the fact that sectors of the African population, primarily those
of Afro-European origin, and of the East Indian and Chinese population had
joined the ranks of the dominant and privileged classes-primarily as professionals and civil servants and in the service and retail businesses-even
before most of the colonies became independent did not alter the fundamental
racial characteristics of the class structure. These groups simply joined the
white power structure, adopted its values, and served its interests without
altering the fact that the vast majority of blacks-that is, Africans and East
Indians-continued to be poor and powerless. Moreover, from the standpoint
of the Black Power movement, these parvenu blacks, browns, East Indians,
and Chinese had to choose whether they would continue to ally themselves
with and serve the interests of the white imperialists or commit "class suicide"
and join forces with the black masses to overthrow white imperialism
(Rodney, 1983 [1969]: 28-29).
For Rodney, therefore, the Black Power movement in the Caribbean aimed
not so much to create a racially intolerant society as to eliminate the subordination and exploitation of the black masses by whites and their parvenu
lackeys, referred to as "white-hearted black men" by the "conscious elements." As Rodney put it, the objective of Black Power was to proclaim that
the West Indian societies were black: "We should fly Garvey's Black Star
banner and we will treat all other groups in the society on that understanding [and] they can have the basic right of all individuals but no
privilege to exploit Africans as has been the pattern during slavery and
ever since" (1983 [1969]: 30).
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A CRITIQUE
I agree with Rodney's characterization of imperialism as involving not
argument that the international division of labor of the world capitalist system
is made up of a class and ethnic hierarchy that expresses itself as nationalism.
Despite my agreement with Rodney on this point, I argue nonetheless that
the book remained trapped in the essentialist and racialist categories and
language created by that imperialism. The ultimate consequence of this
racialist discourse is that despite Rodney's claim that the Black Power
movement did not aim to create a racially intolerant society, it could not but
re-create exclusivist and hence fundamentally antidemocratic practices.
I offer three reasons for these claims. The first is that Rodney was aware
that racist prejudices and cleavages existed within and between the two main
racially defined working-class groups-those of African and East Indian
descent-and that there were also class differences and class prejudices
among the various culturally defined racial groups in the Caribbean (Rodney,
1983 [1969]: 29, 31-34). Yet he insisted on reducing class structure to two
principal racial categories by keeping the designation "white" for the domi-
nant and privileged classes and "black" for the dominated and exploited
classes. The racist reductionism of the European colonialists denied class and
cultural differences among the Europeans by redefining them as "whites" and
similarly deprived the various African ethnic groups brought to the New
ally defined and homogenized "white" racial group over other equally
"whites" and "blacks" (Depestre, 1980: 93). Moreover, he was well aware
that the two main racially defined working-class groups had very different
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cultural and self-identities. Yet, he did not question why in this homogenization process the concept "black" was chosen to refer to all other oppressed
racial/ethnic groups and whether the concept "Black Power" did not in fact
express the struggle of the black nationalist faction of the politically emergent
Afro-Caribbean petite bourgeoisie to impose an Afro-Caribbean "somatic
norm image" as the hegemonic cultural esthetics and ideology in the postin-
dependence Caribbean.
The second justification for my claims against Rodney directly follows
from the first. Rodney not only reproduced the fetishism of race by accepting
the metamorphosis of class relations into racial relations but also endowed
each racial category with its inherent valuational or ideational contents. To
was "black." To be "black," on the other hand, meant the negation and
opposite of "whiteness."
The above point may be illustrated by showing how Rodney dealt with
the membership of some Caribbean blacks, East Indians, and Chinese in the
dominant class and the racial cleavages between African and East Indian
workers. It was not only that these individuals became members of the
dominant class as a class but rather that they joined the "white power structure
in terms of economic activity and culture." Thus, in addition to exploiting
people produced black people who [administered] the system and [perpetuated] white values" (Rodney, 1983 [1969]: 29, 33). Similarly, when African
and East Indian workers confronted one another violently it was because
"both groups [were] held captive by the European way of seeing things,"
which meant that each group had accepted what "the white man said about
[East Indians and Africans]," as if "no black man [could] see another black
man except by looking through a white person" (Rodney, 1983 [1969]:
33-34).
other blacks or East Indians or who harbored racist beliefs about lower-class
blacks or East Indians or vice versa could not do so because of their individual
or class interests. This could happen only because they had been duped by
whites into acting against their own self-interest or "their own kind." Thus,
they were not really "black" but rather were the prototype of the Antillean
black, alienated from his own culture, depicted by Fanon in his Black Skin,
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ciaries (if it were to succeed in capturing state power and reorganizing society
in its image) of the Black Power movement, namely, the redefined blacks and
the brown petite bourgeoisie, but only after they commit class suicide by
because they are white and therefore cannot commit "class suicide"; they
simply cannot choose to be "black." Though they would not be denied "equal
rights" in the new society, the implication is clear that they would remain
It was with the racialism and essentialism of The Groundings that Rod
broke when he returned to Guyana in 1974 to become active in its political
life and to write his definitive History of the Guyanese Working People before
his tragic assassination in 1980. Rodney's second interlude in Tanzania
(1968-1974) may have been important in contributing to the break with the
nationalist perspective of The Groundings, for it was during that time that
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not just in our society but in the international capitalist society. But of course
what we're trying to do is to extend that analysis and indeed to go beyond it.
The situation has gone beyond the analysis in the sense that we're talking about
capitalism as a living mode of production, which has gone through many
changes, and that someone who calls himself/herself a Marxist... [starts] from
a Marxist perspective.
Given the rise to political power of the African petite bourgeoisie in the
postcolonial period and the vast differences among the various African states,
Hill argues that Rodney never saw Pan-Africanism as a "simple process of
mutuality, whereby its force was derived from some mystical racial union"
(Hill, 1982: 80). Rather, for Rodney Pan-Africanism derived its substance
from the particularities and internal dynamics of each struggle for the
emancipation of the workers and peasants and from the ways in which a
struggle in a specific domain shed light on and encouraged struggles in other
domains (Hill, 1982: 80). Pan-Africanism was useful for Rodney, therefore,
because it allowed for a "rigorous delineation of the facets of class structure
and class struggle that underlay the earlier anticolonial struggles and the
distorted social formations that succeeded to formal independence" (Hill,
1982: 86). This perspective led Rodney to believe that in analyzing any
African or Caribbean society "we are dealing with state power and we must
examine the class nature of that power" and "must see [that] the goal of our
international activity is to develop a perspective that is anti-capitalist, antiimperialist, and that speaks to the exploitation and oppression of all peoples"
(Rodney, cited in Hill, 1982: 86).
It was in the context of this specifically marxist perspective on PanAfricanism and his arguments against its petit bourgeois and antisocialist
variants that Rodney developed his most forceful criticism of the postindependence African and Caribbean petites bourgeoisies in control of the state.
Despite the progressive role played by the African and Caribbean petites
Unlike the entrepreneurial bourgeoisies of the developed capitalist countries that created their respective nation-states to achieve the integration of
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direct political control, and the latter were allowed to share in the exploitation
of the workers and peasants through their control of the state bureaucracies
and those economic sectors not in competition with foreign capital. Thus,
rather than redressing class exploitation and social inequalities, the gaining
sie was no longer a progressive force that could be counted on to advance the
cause of equality and social justice in a future socialist (and united) Africa
and Caribbean (Rodney, 1975a: 23-29, 1975b: 15-21).
only perspective that could accomplish this task for Rodney was marxism
(Prescod, 1976: 111-112).
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Whereas in The Groundings Rodney had argued that black racial con-
sciousness was essential for the unity and emancipation of the oppressed
African and East Indian working classes, he now maintained that to identify
oneself primarily in racial terms worked against forming alliances between
the two broad sectors of the working class and between them and sectors of
the progressive and racially diverse middle class to create a movement of
was not simply a mimicry of European racism. On the contrary, the racism
of the ethnically differentiated workers had an existential basis in the relative
positions that they occupied in the system of production, on the one hand,
and, on the other hand, vis-a-vis both the colonial ruling and planter classes
To understand the class and racial cleavages among the Guyanese people,
Rodney had to reconstruct the historical evolution of the Guyanese working
class during the colonial period and the creation of ethnically based political
parties prior to and after independence. Given that the indigenous Amerindi-
plantations, had come to see themselves as the true indigenous and creole
inhabitants and considered the East Indian Guyanese as immigrants who
came later as indentured servants to replace the Africans on the plantations.
The significant fact for Rodney was not only that these two groups of
involuntary immigrants developed competing interests but that they perceived their interests to be conflicting (Rodney, 1981 a: 174).
According to Rodney, there were essentially three bases for the conflicts between Guyanese of African and East Indian descent during the
latter part of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th: issues of
employment and wages in the sugar estates when both African and East
Indian laborers were employed in them, issues of residential patterns
when Africans began to leave the sugar estates to seek employment in the
coastal economy, and issues of land redistribution by the colonial authorities. At every turn those of African descent claimed that they were the true
creoles and hence that they ought to have priority in treatment over the
more recently arrived East Indians. The creole Africans felt threatened by
and resented the East Indians, whom they perceived to be undermining
their precarious positions and achievements. The East Indians, especially
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creole Africans their rivals in the struggle for survival and social advancement (Rodney, 198 1a: 175-183).
To appreciate Rodney's argument it may be useful to discuss his understanding of the process of creolization. The term "creole" refers to all those
of immigrant ancestry who are born in the colonies. This is so for all racial
or ethnic groups. Because they had arrived in Guyana long before the East
Indians, the Afro-Guyanese claimed that they were the "true" creoles and that
the East Indians were simply "immigrants." But subsequent generations of
East Indians inevitably underwent the creolization process under strong
Euro-Guyanese and Afro-Guyanese influence while simultaneously influ-
class and its plantation overseers. Thus, though each ethnic group brought
fragments of its particular continental culture with it to Guyana, the creoli-
zation process and the patterns of interaction between them and with the
dominant classes acted as a counterforce. It was inevitable, then, that a new
Guyanese culture emerged that reflected the influences of its various parts.
Subsequent generations of Afro-Guyanese and East Indian Guyanese,
therefore-as well as those of European descent-would become more
Yet, despite these tendencies toward cultural convergence, Rodney maintained that they were not sufficiently advanced to eliminate ethnic or racial
animosity between the two working-class groups and lead them to form
bonds of class solidarity vis-a-vis the dominant classes. Put differently,
Rodney argued that, the creolization process notwithstanding, the two main
ethnic components of the working class failed to develop a class consciousness strong enough to overcome the barriers created by perceived racial and
cultural differences and their separate trajectories. The consequence of these
differences was to maintain the existence of "two semiautonomous sets of
working class struggles against the domination of capital," the one waged by
the descendants of African slaves and the other by the descendants of East
Indian indentured servants (Rodney, 198 la: 179).
As can be seen, Rodney's argument here is qualitatively different from the
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significance of inter-working-class ethnic or racial contradictions and conflicts by appealing to a unitary and essentialist notion of "blackness" opposed
confront each other and blocked the creation of bonds of class solidarity
between them.
toward each other could be understood only when situated in the context of
the evolution of the class structure and the patterns of class conflicts in
Guyanese society. Each ethnic group entered the society at a different point in
its history and in different contexts. Each confronted the racism and exploitation of the Guyanese planter class, and each competed against the other for
these positionings and helps to secure the hegemony of the dominant class
or social group over the subordinate ones (Hall, 1980: 337-338). Thus,
although in the abstract one can conceive of social classes and the relations
between them as unitary and homogeneous, in the concrete one must always
keep in mind that social classes exist in fragmented forms and are divided
politically, culturally, ideologically, and economically in terms of their specific positioning in the system of production and distribution. Perceived racial
or ethnic distinctions, then, can serve and historically have served as a means
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identity may not serve the interests of social classes or class factions or that
once formed ethnic or racial identity and interests remain unchanged. Indeed,
objectives that gives ethnicity or race its special significance. The reverse is
also true, however. Just as individuals may use their ethnic or racial identity
different social groups and classes used ethnic and racial identities and
excluding them from positions of power and privilege. Similarly, the ethnically fragmented subordinate classes reproduced their ethnic particularities
to distance themselves from each other and to advance their interests vis-a-vis
the dominant classes by excluding the other from competition for scarce
resources and relatively advantageous positions in the labor system.
The privileged petites bourgeoisies of the two main ethnic groups in
Guyana used similar strategies to maximize their interests in the postinde-
fearing its program of social reforms and political independence, the British
colonial authorities suspended the PPP government after 133 days and
replaced it with an interim administration nominated by the governor (Latin
America Bureau, 1984: 32-34).
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the PPP's marxist politics, the party split along racial and political lines in
1955 and became a predominantly East Indian Guyanese organization led by
Cheddi Jagan. In 1958 the breakaway faction led by Forbes Burnham, which
had merged with the United Democratic Party (UDP) and the urban middleclass League of Coloured People, renamed itself the People's National
Congress (PNC). The PNC became the party of the Afro-Guyanese sector
(Latin America Bureau, 1984: 34-36; Fontaine, 1982a: 20). The larger East
Indian population, combined with the racial polarization of Guyanese politics
and the political system of simple plurality, contributed to successive PPP
electoral victories in 1958 and 1961. Given this situation and the higher
birthrate among East Indians, the Afro-Guyanese PNC was doomed to remain
forever a minority party. This led it to join forces with the predominantly
Euro-Guyanese and proimperialist United Force (UF) party to destabilize the
PPP and to foment social unrest and racial violence that polarized Guyana
until the 1964 elections (Latin America Bureau, 1984: 38-40).
Urged by the United States, the British changed the electoral system to
one of proportional representation, which made for a more equitable distribution of legislative seats and allowed the PNC to form a coalition government with the UF after the 1964 elections even though the PPP had won the
45; Rodney, 1975a: 18). Once in power, however, the PNC used various
strategies, including fraud, to retain control of the government and to rule
alone without the support of the UF, which disintegrated shortly thereafter
(Fontaine, 1982a: 21-23).
ethnic allegiance rather than class dictated political behavior in Guyana and
that this primarily served the interests of the petit bourgeois sectors of both
the key economic positions in the state administration, the civil service, the
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mixed Afro-Guyanese and East Indian Guyanese middle classes. The large
that by 1980 had given the Guyanese government control of about 80 perc
of the economy was more than any other single factor responsible for
emergence of a new Guyanese managerial and professional middle class
based in the vastly expanded public sector and the cooperatives. The control
it exercised over the state and the economy gave the PNC a great deal of
power and patronage not only over the public sector but over the other sectors
of the economy that heavily depended on the state sector. Though the
Afro-Guyanese sector of the middle class undoubtedly became the primary
beneficiary of the PNC dictatorship, the East Indian Guyanese faction also
benefited from PNC patronage and support (Baber and Jeffrey, 1986: 51-53).
of the Guyanese economy by the PNC had been nothing less than a "process
by which a local governing class was extending and consolidating its base of
power" (Mandle, 1982: 113).
enterprises, the East Indian Guyanese petite bourgeoisie, along with the
small Chinese, Portuguese, and European populations, strove to retain
their control over the private manufacturing and mercantile sectors.
These changes in the character of the Guyanese economy and class
relations led Rodney to reconsider the relationship of the new Guyanese
middle class to the formerly dominant European groups. Given the postcolonial experience in Africa and the Caribbean and the fact that in Guyana the
old colonial planter class was no longer dominant and the major foreignowned and foreign-controlled sectors of the economy had been nationalized,
Rodney could no longer argue that the Guyanese petites bourgeoisies were
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merely mediating foreign interests and hence were nothing more than "whitehearted black men." It was unambiguously clear that the new dominant
classes in Guyana had their own interests to defend and that these interests
stemmed not from the color of their skin but rather from the privileged
positions they came to occupy. Thus, just as with the racism of the planter
class, the racism of the petit bourgeois sectors of the two major ethnic groups
was instrumental in consolidating their dominant positions after independence and in exploiting the working classes.
Norman Girvan, analyzing the political economy of race in the Caribbean
in general, provides a further clarification of this point. The rise of a new
black and brown bourgeoisie in the postindependence Caribbean, he argues,
did not fundamentally alter the living conditions of the large majority of the
population. Insofar as the overall political economy of the region remained
unchanged, the masses of workers and peasants continued to be restricted to
the role of suppliers of cheap and unskilled labor. Therefore, Girvan argues,
it may be the case that this economic structure is perpetuated not because of
the continuing institutionalized racism of the past but rather because of its
continued insertion into the international capitalist order that reproduces the
"development of underdevelopment" in the Caribbean. Therefore, a fundamental change in the living conditions of the working and peasant classes
'people-centered' rather than a 'profit-centered' pattern of economic development" (Girvan, 1975: 27).
of the lives of the working classes stemmed from the extant socioeconomic
structures and their insertion into the international capitalist system without
It was the recognition of this fact in Guyana that led Rodney to conclude
that people could "look around and see who among them have advanced and
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recognize that the system is one that gives opportunity only to the few
[and] that surely the time must come when the African and Indian people
organize around their interests as producers in the Guyanese society as
distinct from pursuing this myth of racial superiority or racial subjugation"
(Strickland, 1976: 8-10).
the racist-oriented politics of the two major political parties and to engage
more seriously than any other organization in the political and ideological
education of the Guyanese masses (Strickland, 1976: 120). The ultimate
objective was to defeat the PNC dictatorship and build a new and genuinely
democratic socialist Guyana. For Rodney, however, it was apparent that
before that task could be achieved, a broad, cross-class movement of national
unity had to be created. He felt that the Guyanese middle class and businessmen could be called upon to participate in this movement because of the need
sectors of the dominant classes, which now consisted not only of the
European creoles but also of the African and East Indian creole petites
bourgeoisies and businessmen (Rodney, 198 lb: 76-78). In effect, then, Rodney
Rodney also shifted his position on the role of the progressive petite bourgeoisie in the struggle for a democratic socialist Guyana (and, by extension,
a democratic socialist Caribbean). In contrast to his earlier call for the petite
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was essential. The construction of the new Guyana that Rodney called for,
therefore, would not be in the image of blacks only but in the image of all
those who had positive contributions to make, regardless of their class, race,
color, or ethnicity (see also Fontaine, 1982a: 30). The essential criterion for
their inclusion was that they opposed dictatorship (of any class or racial/ethnic
group) and shared the objective of creating a democratic socialist and pluralist
Guyana.
CONCLUSION
Rodney, then, had made a 180-degree turn. Having advanced a black
cultural nationalist perspective in 1969 that called for the solidarity of the
oppressed classes around the racial concept of "blackness," by 1974 he had
jettisoned race or ethnic consciousness as a mystification and hence as a major
obstacle to an inclusive cross-class and cross-racial alliance of the progressive
sectors of Guyanese society. Three related factors served as the raw materials
for the development of Rodney's marxist views: (1) the rise of new indigenous petit bourgeois classes to positions of dominance in the postindependence Caribbean and African states, (2) the new associated relations of
exploitation and the class and ethnic conflicts that these indigenous classes
generated, which could no longer be explained by the reductionist
white/oppressor-black/oppressed dichotomy, and (3) the specific class character of the PNC dictatorship.
The evolution of Rodney's thought on these race and class questions
connotation that keeps Caribbeans or Americans imprisoned in a methodology that has compartmentalized and "racialized" the knowledge of the
historical laws of the Americas (Depestre, 1980: 88). Unfortunately, the
cowardly assassination of Rodney, who had become the Burnham dictator-
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