The enduring message of CLR James

January 29, 2000

One recalls a rap session back in the conscious 1960s, eventually mimeographed under the title "Proposals and Perspectives", in which CLR James sought to discuss the nature and structure of the kind of political organisations and political parties essential to advance the development of people, given the objective conditions of the modern world in the later half of the 20th century and given what he described as the "universality of knowledge".

He advanced precise theoretical formulation for what was required in the developed countries, making clear distinction between what obtained prior to 1914-World War I and what became essential thereafter.

However, mindful of his specific audience (students from the Caribbean), CLR explored what was possible in context of the "underdeveloped countries". And interestingly this is what he had to say in describing what presently obtains as our political reality:

"...I state that in an underdeveloped country, if a political party organises itself properly and has a real programme devoted to the mass of the people and the improvement of their situation, it will win nearly all the votes, so that in fact it will become a one-party state...

"The oppositions can take place, but there is no real room in most underdeveloped countries for any opposition to a party which is a genuinely mass party... (the) cut-throat business that is taking place in underdeveloped countries between two parties (takes place) because no party puts forward a genuine mass democratic programme...

"There is no need for the opposition party and the government party. This sort of business is an absolutely hopeless consideration to be carried out today... and will ruin all those underdeveloped countries until they finish up with it... But they are not therefore to run into the one-party totalitarian state."

Having read this, one immediately began to truly comprehend what the framers of the PNM's People's Charter had in mind when they stated that the PNM is a "rally for all", "a convention of all and for all", the "mobilisation of all the forces in the country... with the emphasis on united action by all the people in the common cause...".

CLR was the only person ever associated with the PNM who consistently held such views and consistently advanced a mass democratic programme as key to the people's development from stage to stage. He was the one who provided for the PNM a progressive tradition and a progressive heritage in its early existence.

However, once such political content was minimised and eventually extracted from the PNM. Once its progressive nature, its mass democratic programme, was compromised, the PNM quickly became a block to further political development of the people.

In CLR's view a genuine mass party is by its very nature "subversive" to the status quo, while on the other hand any party in the 20th century that is a "minority representative body" whether of the "left" or the "right", in government or opposition, is sooner rather than later called to question by the masses in action, thereby forcing its totalitarian nature, its propensity for dictatorship, to be exposed.

Quite rightly so, and according to CLR what took "40 to 50 years to develop in the advanced countries, or 25 to 30 years, now develops with extreme speed in the underdeveloped before the independence and after the independence... Most organisations worked splendidly and finely before independence and as soon as they get in... are unable to govern and have to develop the most reactionary tendencies..."

Williams, Burnham, Panday were all to varied extents collaborators with and or students of CLR who failed horribly to understand and apply the concepts. Confined to the framework of the Westminster system as practised here, the PNM as "rally and movement for all" quickly became nothing but the party of the doctor struggling at most times to balance some semblance of its populist heritage with its rampant conservative, right-wing management of the same old order.

Burnham's so-called "Co-operative Republic" was never anything but a "gambage" and a disguise for the one-party totalitarianism and hegemony of the PNC. And though it is still early days for Panday's UNC Government of national unity and party of inclusion with its blurring of the lines of demarcation between party and government and party and State, all the signs are there that the end result, given the disregard for mass democratisation, will be once again the dictatorship of the maximum leader with Parliament as rubber stamp.

And what about Lloyd Best's "effective and enduring party of parties in the cross-ethnic sense"? It likewise seems to amount to a bit of tinkering here and tinkering there if it stands in mortal fear and awe of common human clamour.

Hopefully, Best's quest for genuine "politics" shall push him further along the theoretical path to embrace a specific content of direct mass democratisation which presumes a fundamental relationship to the co-ordination and network of "independent councils" and assemblies of the people everywhere which usually emerge at precise moments in history when the masses intervene to both demonstrate and articulate their desires and decisions. And which, whenever they may next appear, need to be properly constituted in order to empower people within their active communities.

This is the only arrangement that will demarcate a fundamental departure from all that has obtained in the past. That is the only solution to the present stand-off between warring factions of the status quo.

Such a solution will surely take us to a higher level of civilisation. CLR contended, in that rap session some 35 years ago, that wherever or if ever a genuine mass party, or a party with a mass democratisation programme, were to become a reality in any part of the underdeveloped world, there would be no room for any other political organisation.

He was not advocating totalitarianism, though he recognised the inherent tendencies. And prophetically he maintained that intense or internecine competition between empty parties, or mere minority representative electoral machines in this part of the world, can and will bring out these negative tendencies that would prove to be socially destructive.

That is exactly where we are at this juncture. That is exactly why at this moment the social crisis is ever-present and ongoing. The point is, though, that all this could only have happened because no genuine mass party occupies the landscape.