'Buzz' Butler and the genesis of ideology

June 04, 2001

Ideas don't drop from the sky. People, in their quest to devise better ways of existing in their particular environment, examine and interpret their experiences and the sum total of their collective history, and as a result of that ongoing exercise, they, by necessity, formulate them.

People everywhere engage in formulating ideas to one degree or another depending on their circumstances, depending on the kind of antagonistic contradictions that may arise within their specific environment, and the capacity to free themselves from the demands of eking out daily existence. Usually, leadership comes to be provided by the people who, by these circumstances, are best placed to engage in the process of formulating ideas and visions.

But these ideas do not magically manifest themselves as though by some divine intervention, rather they are culled from all the past and present efforts and endeavours of ordinary people; efforts that may reflect sheer brilliance in some cases, while in other cases, downright stupidity, but which, nevertheless, when placed in context over time, indicate a coherent direction.

When, for instance, the framers of the American Constitution stated in preamble: "we hold these truths to be self-evident..." and then proceeded to outline those "truths", they could only have formulated those truths and their underlying "ideology" as a result of their collective pioneering history and all the brave and brilliant and stupid things that occurred in the course of their attempts to subdue new environments in the interest of their own humanity and to create a new world of relationships. Of course that task is not yet over. However their ideology could only be relative to their time and their place. It is the same all over. There could be nothing like "timeless" and "place-less" ideology.

Of course there are great claims made about religious formulations. And probably a lot of what people deem to be "absolutes" may really be dreams and desires and values that are yet to become reality and part of general consciousness through the struggle of common men and women and children and the leaders they throw up.

What then could one mean by "dead ideology" when the very concept and nature of the word "ideology" suggests vibrant engagement with all that obtains in life.

Take Tubal Uriah "Buzz" Butler! He was the first to deem himself the "Chief Servant", a concept that our leaders of today would do well to seriously consider - leadership that serves membership. From 1936 to 1946 he, being best placed to emerge, as the impetus shifted from port to oilfields, wielded the British Empire Workers and Citizens Home Rule Party as both a "party" and "trade union" as one integrated, structural whole. Again, the very name indicates the stupidity and the brilliance. It functioned as party or as a trade union according to expediency.

The registered membership, which was the base that financially supported the organisation, was divided into branches according to geography and occupational job-activity, and this was coalesced in a leadership of representatives that were elected annually at the convention of the mass membership. It is significant to note that there was never a sitting General Council of representatives or delegate system and all were free to participate in a direct democratic process and all were allowed and encouraged to vote.

Butler at the helm embodied all this and would guide the launch of the objective force that would eventually break the back of British colonialism by 1962. Listen to what a Guardian journalist had to say about Butler in 1945: "It does not matter your frame of mind when you begin to listen to the man. I guarantee that you will be swept away after 10 or 15 minutes by the inexorable tide of his oratory.

He speaks with the full weight of his being. Having heard him I no longer speculate as to the likely reasons for his ability to produce an instantaneous response from his audience. That intense, consuming, passionate quality, I have never witnessed before.

Speaker and audience were organic and indivisible..."That is the kind of power that can only be obtained when the ideas and ideology being expressed by a leader are the "ideas whose time has come." At such junctures in history there is no separation between "words" and "action".

However as Stephen Maharaj, a close friend of Butler and one of his main collaborators, described it , there were crowds of people around all the branch headquarters clamouring constantly for involvement in activity; they virtually lived as campers around the branch sites, to the extent that the situation became unmanageable and party funds were exhausted on their general sustenance.

That was the source of Butler's great strength as Chief Servant just as it was also the source of his great weakness. No one then proved able to put organisational coherence to what was happening. No one formulated any ideological perspective to make sense of the madness.

What are the lessons for us today to learn from such an experience? Clamouring for direct democracy and one-man-one-vote and so on is one thing, but certainly managing it structurally is quite something else. We must engage in ideological formulation constantly in order to comprehend the teasings and the demonstrative actions of the masses of people in their struggles to gain for themselves more meaningful lives.

Even the best of our past leaders have been known to falter on this very question. Not to mention those pseudo-intellectuals and so-called "bright stars" among us who seem at all times to be able to comprehend only half the question.