MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 18 March 1997.
Online here https://web.archive.org/web/20120416011318/http://www.candw.ag/~jardinea/fanflame.htm.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
It has become fashionable among shameless propagandists, who will say anything based on the slenderest of slender premises, that Manley in the end had capitulated to the “Market” and surrendered himself and Jamaica to the “magic of the market”. It is well to remember that Michael Manley’s last published book The Poverty of Nations written in 1991, by its very title, shows that it is in direct opposition to that of the father of market economics, Adam Smith and his The Wealth of Nations. The Poverty of Nations was Manley’s riposte to the free marketeers.
Manley also knew that despite all the talk about less government intervention in the economy which was being urged or imposed on developing countries, the developed industrial countries were definitely not following what they preached. For instance, Government spending in the developed industrial countries as a share of economic output (Gross Domestic Product) is at record levels. In the U.S. it was 33 per cent of GDP in 1995. In Germany it was 50 per cent of GDP in 1995. In France it was 54 per cent of GDP. The sheer facts, give the lie to the official market line. But I am proceeding ahead of myself.
In power from 1972, Manley had to stimulate an economy which was not just stagnant. It was moribund. He did what had to be done. He initiated a special works programme, mainly of public works, to create employment. From the Gracchi in Rome till now there is no other remedy. Manley went further. He encouraged the development of local industries, while stimulating the tourism sector. It is hardly ever noted, that long before it became fashionable Manley had cut government spending on the bureaucracy.
Manley’s market critics, out to prove he made havoc of the economy, forgot the central fact of the world economy. The oil price hikes from 1973 onward. Automatically, prices of imported inputs quadrupled. Even the mighty U.S. economy, dependent on petroleum imports, reeled. World inflation was sky-high. The all-powerful United States was in a tail-spin, let alone vulnerable Jamaica. The world had seen nothing like it before, or for that matter since. The United States had to institute, a programme which President Carter, called MEOW–the Moral Equivalent of War. War is not moral; and can have no moral equivalent. The reality was that the oil shocks, required war measures even in the most robust economy, that of the United States. The oil shocks undermined Manley’s programme for social transformation.
The great novelist Leo Tolstoy, writing, in War and Peace wrote that “One only has to penetrate the essence of any historical event, that is, to the activity of the mass of men who take part in it, to be convinced that the will of the historic hero does not control the actions of the mass, but is itself controlled by it.” In this Manley was not circumscribed and controlled by the mass, he was controlled by objective economic conditions – the oil price shocks that sent the world reeling, round the bend. In that sense, Plekhanov is far more correct. It is not the character of the leader that is a key factor in development. It is only key “where, when and to the extent that objective conditions permit it to be such.” Manley’s programme to put the people in control, for the first time since the Santa Maria landed was, in part, checkmated by the world economic convulsion from 1973.
Nevertheless Manley moved to a free education system, initiated a novel agrarian programme of extending small farmers’ lands. Production in the agricultural sector, increased significantly, in spite of increased oil driven costs of inputs! Nonetheless the economy was riven inside out.
In 1979 the IMF laid down the hardest of hard conditions for continuing its support. The IMF demanded, among other things, that the Jamaican currency should be devalued by a minimum 40 percent. Public expenditure slashed by some 27 percent. And the part that Michael Manley could not swallow, unemployment be allowed to rise. Manley was in the depths of anguish. Unemployment rose to 30 percent. Inflation sky-rocketed to 47 percent. 75 percent of export earnings had to be set aside for importing foreign oil and servicing foreign debts.
There are those who try, time and time again, to place Manley in some kind of strait-jacket. Those on the left felt he was some kind of hide-bound, gradualist, firmly addicted to the West, however critical. The facts again give the lie to such baseless criticism.
Manley flew to Moscow though even then a Vice President of Socialist International, long in opposition to Moscow. He flew to Moscow in the hope that Moscow would see that any assistance would be to the vital social sectors–workers, farmers, women and youth. Nor did he rely on an ideological appeal to help the poorest. He had the most thorough preparation in hard economic terms, with varying options for concessionary loans. The Cubans had helped with the preparation and the bargaining approach. It was a bold move, by a bold man.
Moscow would hear, but remain obdurate. It had long ago abandoned any idea of uniting workers of the world, except with warmed over Stalinist rhetoric. Manley returned empty-handed. The facts of the matter were clear for all to see. No developing country, however well endowed, and Jamaica was not well endowed, can make any serious leap forward without the combined assistance of progressive developed countries. It can put its house in order, but it will need the assistance of others anxious to re-align the world so that the poor will inherit the earth. Socialism is nothing if it is not international.
Manley needed crash loans and alternate markets for Jamaica’s bauxite and sugar industries to stem the tide. Or else the tide would overflow and overwhelm. Moscow was unyielding and unhelping. The IMF by 1980 tightened the screws, even tighter. Food shortages were now allied to negative growth, and unthinkable levels of unemployment. By 1980, Jamaica had only 30 days credit left for food and medicine!
In the while the destabilisation continued apace. 800 Jamaicans perished in clashes. The seeds of this party–tribalism predated Michael Manley. But now it was overwhelming politics. Seaga, a man of power as an end in itself and for itself, like so many who pass as politicians in the Caribbean, made himself and party the willing tool of external powers. Manley survived two assassination attempts. Jamaica was a hot-bed of destabilisation in extremis. Seaga’s party would fall more and more into thuggery. And Manley’s party the PNP, rooted in no ideology, would unfortunately be transformed into its opposite from Manley’s idealism into thuggery.
Seaga, a supposed free marketeer, whatever that means, in a country with primary production, and high cost manufactures, was of course the darling of President Reagan. He won the 1980 elections. By 1983, he controlled all 60 seats in Parliament, since Manley had refused to participate, boycotting what he deemed to be a corrupt electoral process. U.S. aid poured in but made no difference. Jamaica in the interim, had amassed the highest per capita foreign debt of any country. Agriculture declined. Social services and infrastructure deteriorated. Inequality ballooned opening a yawning gap between rich and poor. In that devastation, disaster was to follow. Hurricane Gilbert flattened bananas and sugar.
Seaga the vaunted free market manager of managers couldn’t manage clearly. The U.S. Congress lost faith in their darling Seaga, whom they felt had played false and loose, letting down the “free market.” Few have acknowledged that free market politics failed and failed utterly.
Seaga in turn felt betrayed. Congress had failed to approve crucial aspects of Reagan’s 1982 Caribbean Basin Initiative. Nor did the aid promised by Reagan arrive. Seaga was doomed. Even far right Republicans longed to be rid of Seaga. Love had turned to hate. The Free Marketeer was a disaster, if not a rocketeer.
In the election that followed in 1989 Manley swept the polls, winning 45 of 60 seats. But that is by no means the important statistic. Whereas in 1980 some 800 Jamaicans had died, only 12 died in the 1989 elections. It was proof, if proof was needed, that the 1980 descent into the valley of death was more externally orchestrated, than internally initiated. However, the seeds of the violence, senseless killing, would return to plague Jamaica.
Against Manley, in the mid-seventies and after, the communist bogey had been whipped up to red-hot heat. The Jamaican middle class had left in droves. Their patriotism was more expression than reality. They had moved abroad, mainly to Miami, like the ‘Gusanos’ of Cuba, with all the wealth they had accumulated in Jamaica. They had moved so easily, because unlike the international middle class, whose life-style they imitated in ceaseless conspicuous consumption of foreign production, they had no economic stake in their own country. They were foot loose and fancy free. It is a peculiar class, peculiar to the Caribbean. Urbane and articulate, often far removed from production, and with little or no interest in the subject, except in administrative posts and pay. How to transform them. Manley would try the second time around. But three years 1989 to 1992 was no time at all for so great an enterprise. It is the prime challenge of politics in the English-speaking Caribbean. Others will have to succeed where Manley attempted.
The key question is how to make the middle class national, by having it invest its savings, not so much in real estate, but in public and co-operative enterprises. How to persuade the middle class to forego the ways of conspicuous consumption, and live within the national means. How above all, to get it to accept that the old relations of labour, of Order-giver and Order-taker are finished in terms of raising the productivity of labour. Instead, there must be new relations in which workers, in Manley’s famous phrase have “a voice at the work place,” and in being competitive with international labour, share in the profits from their own labour. That in itself, is social transformation on the grand scale.
It is to Manley’s eternal credit, that he is the only statesman in the region, who ever held power, who was deeply conscious that what is called for in the region, is a new organisation of production both in ownership structure and at the point of production. No other ruling politician has ever faced the problem square on, not even Jagan, only Michael Manley. He was exceptional as a person, exceptional in thought and deed as a politician.
Let a couple of examples suffice in terms of the last point. Manley at one time urged the Jamaica School of Music to take in more of the “sufferers”. His famous remark then justly deserves repetition. Told that the new reggae and dancehall rhythms inevitably lent itself to protest, Manley responded. “If anybody is going to protest against me, at least I want them to do it with style.”
If, as I said before, Manley’s criticism of the education system constitutes a charter for modern education, then his insistence of permitting a culture of protest, with style and in style, is a virtual declaration of a new cultural lease or leap, far removed from the current phase in the Caribbean, where the reactionary powers that be, want to control all voices in calypso or reggae, just as they wish to control all of society down to its innermost stirrings. Manley wanted full freedom of expression, and in the very best style.
The second example was Manley’s establishment of the National Housing Trust in Jamaica to deliver houses to the poor. When his own PNP supporters, who had sacrificed so much, insisted that the “other side” or tribe should be excluded from the benefits, Manley defied his very own supporters. It was leadership of a higher order, the stuff of which Caribbean politics is not normally made. It is a profound example. It was a tremendous blow against party tribalism.
These two taken together, are part and parcel of Michael Manley’s inestimable contribution to Caribbean politics. That is, the development of a democratic temper among the population. With it everything is possible. Without it, nothing but the politics, the demoralising politics of patronage, is possible. Manley headed in a new direction.
But I hasten to add, a democratic temper among the mass of the population, needs more than the shell of parliamentary democracy which we now have, to express and give meaning to that new attitude of mind. It needs new institutions of popular control and development.
What else is there to say of Manley in power?
When Michael Manley succeeded his terminally ill father as leader of the PNP his intentions were clear, and in my view, clearly beyond the capacity of the very PNP he led. That intention was this: to bring the destinies of the people hitherto wholly beyond their control, firmly within their control. There could be no grander objective and no larger anti-imperialist crusade. It fitted Michael Manley, but not the PNP. The PNP was at best an electoral machine, which marched under some kind of English Labour Party socialism, which had about as much to do with socialism as socialism has to do with socialite. Anti-imperialist programmes and policies need an anti-imperialist party, a mass party not only learning by theory, but learning by and from independent economic activity of the people, by the people, for the people. The party must be a school of action and of theory. Manley inherited a party of idea-less lawyers and middle class careerists interested only in their upward mobility, while paying lip-service to whatever was in vogue whenever. Such could garner votes, run ministries in the old approved way, but do little else.
The fact of the matter was. How to end conspicuous consumption through which the middle classes wasted valuable foreign exchange, no doubt considering it the forerunner of trade liberalisation? The pursuit of that end, with the state in tow, carrying a burdensome, unproductive, and ever expanding army of officials perpetuating themselves, was a dead-end leading to structural adjustment. The corrective to this was to bring the people into the main stream of the economy. It would have been great, for instance, if diplomatic relations with Cuba were tied to an old and new export sector, which would have found novel and unimpeachable ways of breaching the US embargo against Cuba. The anti-Cuban hysteria would have been stifled and stunted by these new economic relations.
Cuba, it will be remembered, built schools and dams, among other things in Manley’s Jamaica. The schools and dams stand as a monument to the poor helping the poor in socialist solidarity. Cuba, to be sure, did what Moscow would not.
But it is Manley himself, with scrupulous honesty, who best sums up his own economic role and dilemma.
“Basic to everything that happened was the question of the economy” as Michael Manley wrote “There had been negative growth. There were shortages. Unemployment had crept up from 24 per cent to 26.8 per cent.
“World economic crisis and its effects placed unprecedented strain on [the Manley government] Jamaican management. It took us a long time to respond adequately to this challenge. Unquestionably we overestimated the capacity of the bureaucracy and the management sector to run the wide range of new institutions. In a sense we overloaded the circuit.”
The colonial state and its officialdom will always be unequal to the task of any kind of transformation, even reformist transformation however gradual. They were built to serve the one-crop or one industry colonial economy, not an economy founded on people’s needs and developing abilities.
It takes new economic relations, that is new relations between worker and work, and new relations between workers and enterprise, on which to build a new state, and therefore a participatory democracy.
I personally rate Manley’s effort to form the International Bauxite Association, including, Jamaica, Guyana, Guinea and the Peoples Republic of China as the single most significant effort made by the English speaking Caribbean to challenge imperialist market arrangements, which most people today regard as having the force of Divine Ordinance, so now we have today the Divine Right of the Market replacing the Divine Right of Kings of the Middle Ages to do wrong.
How the International Bauxite Association was undone by the great powers is one of the great unwritten chapters of our modern history. Suffice here to say, that it was not so much Manley’s dalliance with Fidel Castro’s revolutionary Cuba that really infuriated. It was Manley’s effort to organise the producers of Bauxite which riled the United States in particular. In response the U.S. stockpiled Bauxite, with reserves to last it until the year 2005. Imperialism was never more sharply challenged. It had to mobilise not millions but billions. In the end it drove down the price of bauxite to punish Manley. This cruel process is known in economics as “the magic of the market.” But Manley’s effort to have Third World countries control Bauxite production in the world, is to date one of the grandest and greatest challenges to the imperial international order or disorder.
However, I also rate Manley’s JAMAL, a literacy programme in which some 200,000 adults, one tenth of the population were made literate, as one of his outstanding achievements. It is a model for Africa. It would be great if these literacy programmes could be organically tied to small and medium-sized enterprise development.
There was a famous argument between Michael Manley and I, with Maurice Bishop as referee, as to how Manley’s programmes of ‘Land Lease’ Jamal extended on the lines suggested above, as well as allied to a new national health programme constituted an alternative to the I.M.F. Manley was then in Grenada, literally climbing the wall, searching for a new alternative. It was not a polite exchange. Manley was riled. At first I was respectful but he urged me to drop my velvet gloves. I gave as good as I got, referee Maurice Bishop thought. Manley too, said, in conclusion, “at least, and for certain, you are not one of those ... (expression deleted) egg-heads and hot heads who cannot substantiate your political point and make economic sense.” I on my own part conceded, that I did not know where the infusion of external capital would come from. I hoped that a new foreign policy to Europe might be a source and a countervailing power, through joint ventures.
We both agreed that the political machinery was not in place for the endeavour.
Suffice it to say, Michael Manley was always open to any new strategy, short of revolution, which would transform society and make the “small man” equal and independent, for he knew, and firmly believed, that liberty and independence were inseparable from equality, if not fraternity.
He was in fact a man of the Enlightenment, an Encyclopaedist, in the manner of Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, even Robespierre, but who had imbibed the spirit of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Bolivar, Maceo, Marti and Castro, with Padmore, C.L.R. James, and not least Norman Washington Manley thrown in for good measure and not least Robert Nesta Marley, and the forces Marley and phenomenon he and Vivi Richards represented. It was an entirely new mix.
It was that combination, particularly adapted in the person of Michael Manley, together with his own specific interactions with the Jamaican working class, which made him a Titan, a Caribbean giant on the world stage, speaking always for the Wretched of the Earth, and in Bob Marley’s inimitable phrase “for the sufferers”.
Michael Manley does not mark the end of an era. He is a most necessary foundation, in success and failure, for the beginning of a truly Caribbean era, in a Regional State. When that time comes, the Ceremony of Souls, will declare Michael Norman Manley a true founding father of the Caribbean Regional State. One of the most profound critics of life and literature anywhere in the world today, Gordon Rohlehr, makes a most cogent point. He wrote:
“Post independence Caribbean politicians have had only small success in altering the fundamental structures of plantation society; great house and shanty, citadel and dungle, town house and wilderness. Political cynicism and exaggerated authoritarianism are, indeed little more than masks to cover a failure that is reflected in the rigid dualities of class.”
It maybe that Manley is one of the few that had small successes. But to see only that is to miss the magnitude of his assault on plantation society and the old and new imperial power that held it stubbornly in place. Manley did attempt like Hercules to clean the Aegean stables.
True it is, that even after his assault on the ramparts of plantation society and imperial power there is still as the great poet Kamau Brathwaite wrote:
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chapel courthouses main guards & supermarket, prison, empty |
and too:
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“beyond that there is rab & wilderness and cultural gorillas |
And then too from the same great poet, Kamau Braithwaite there is the dark but realistic vision, which unfortunately lives among us as reality from the Bahamas to the Guyanas [Cuba excepted]:
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i see my brothers high and nodding |
That reality is social and very real now. It will not go away without the success of the social transformation, Michael “Joshua” Manley attempted.
Yes, Michael did not as “Joshua with the rod of correction” given to him by Haile Selassie “clean out Jamaica” of “corrupt colonialism” as he had promised. But he made a strenuous effort. An heroic one. A titanic one befitting, the Titan he was.
In circumstances of 20 per cent unemployment and $3 billion U.S. foreign debts consuming more than 40 per cent of export earnings only a mass participatory democracy could tackle and transform, not party tribalism for sure. Manley knew that. And he was no squeamish Hamlet fearing to do what had to be done. He recognised too late that the nation-state was not the vehicle.
This caused some estrangement between us at the end. In 1982 I told him that I thought the Grenada Revolution was becoming unstuck. He was alarmed. Not even a revolutionary island nation-state could tackle the problem. He acknowledged my “prescience” as he called it, after the Grenada Revolution convulsed. But he refused to use his enormous prestige to organise the progressive forces of the Caribbean into a Regional party, after the Grenada self-destruction. So both before and after the collapse of the Grenada Revolution he evaded me, even deflected me. I sulked, hurt. Relations cooled. Much later I was learn that his health did not allow. But in the interim, I fumed that the one man who could have initiated a Regional Party of progressive forces had proved unwilling.
But I will always remember our meeting in Grenada, when with Maurice Bishop and myself this exceptional raconteur, Michael Manley, recounted how during a campaign drive in the heart of rural Jamaica he came across a wizened peasant woman who had cultivated some most exotic roses “with obvious artistic pleasure.” Manley was most knowledgeable about roses, owning himself some 40 acres devoted to roses and coffee. In deference to us he did not go into the details. But from the description it seemed like Rosa Columbine which the peasant woman had lovingly cared for. Manley ended his tale by saying, “when all is said and done, nothing truly human is alien to them no matter how low and how lowly they have been struck down.” That was Manley’s vision. The poor rising on an economic base, which allowed them to realise their natural, acquired and artistic abilities. It was enough that he articulated it to the masses. From those strivings, those utterings of Michael Manley, will come a mass Joshua throughout the Region which will blow down the walls of Jericho, eventually. Hail Joshua! Hail Michael Manley!
And now a postscript. Jennifer was naturally intrigued to hear that Manley had five wives. She wanted to know what I thought. I evaded her with the blessed cliché “to each his own.” What is evident is that Manley was an Enchanter, a romantic rebel, who loved women. What perhaps is less obvious is that he was an Enchanter who did not vainly pursue women. He charmed and was charmed. Unlike John Kennedy the modern Camelot, Manley’s was not a case of priapic sexual adventurism. Michael Norman Manley was of a higher order.
Finally what else is there to say of Michael Manley. His crowning political statement is not his “Jamaica is not for sale” but a simpler one, and therefore a more profound one. Michael Manley said.
“I think that so long as politics is seen as the rather undignified contest between groups that are struggling for nothing more dignified than power, so long as that is true, then so long is shame the proper attitude to apply to the process.”
Manley knew only too well that shame is a revolutionary sentiment, and wanted the people of the Caribbean to rededicate that politics of shame, for the politics of making the region take control of the region, in every single island or mainland territory. It is for that Michael Manley lived. There is no finer example. It is for that too, that no one, can call three statesmen of his time, in developed or underdeveloped country who outclassed him. Michael Norman Manley, also known as Joshua, to the Jamaican masses, like Fidel Castro, made an indelible and ineradicable impress on the 20th century. He is among the best of the best. Peasants in Zimbabwe will remember Michael Manley’s efforts on their behalf and they associate Bob Marley’s song of the same name with Michael Manley’s efforts on their behalf. So too every anti-apartheid fighter in South Africa will remember Michael Manley’s heroic efforts on their behalf. Therefore, hail Joshua, hail Michael Manley. He was the best thing the Caribbean, the English speaking Caribbean produced in politics. He was therefore in his own right and by his own struggles a world historical figure. He is the founding father of the Caribbean Nation, as a Regional State.
Last updated on 14 February 2022