Co-Operative Citizens? Development, Work and Protest in Guyana, c. 1970–1985

Abstract

Histories of Third Worldism have received renewed attention from historians in the past decade. Much of the resulting scholarship has focused on the international to the exclusion of the national. This article addresses this relative neglect by focusing on a particular iteration of Third World nation-state-building: co-operative socialism in Forbes Burnham's Guyana. Refuting the argument that co-operative socialism was imitative and implemented for reasons of political expediency only, the article contends that Burnham's doctrine should be regarded as a meaningful attempt at remaking Guyana's society and economy through its core principles of self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and self-discipline. These principles gave rise to a specific conception of citizenship in 1970s Guyana, where the People's National Congress (PNC) sought to link political belonging and participation with a moral ethic premised on the notion of hard work in service of the nation. The article examines how this collectivist understanding of citizenship gave rise to a particular set of struggles at the turn of the 1980s, as the co-operative republic began to collapse. What emerged from these struggles was an alternate but parallel imagining of citizenship espoused by the Working People's Alliance (WPA), which rejected the PNC's vanguardism in favour of empowering the Guyanese people through the creation of non-hierarchical systems of collective authority. The article concludes by arguing that the failure of the WPA's attempt to overthrow the PNC through popular revolt signified the ends of decolonization and Third Worldism in the Caribbean, and the beginnings of new struggles against new forms of coloniality in the guise of the emerging neoliberal and good governance agendas.

Introduction

The study of decolonization has become one of the most dynamic fields of historical inquiry. This vibrancy can be attributed to the increased adoption of postcolonial and transnational methodologies. These approaches have encouraged historians to abandon national and imperial frameworks in favour of perspectives that consider the plural and contested ends of empire beyond the formal attainment of “flag independence”.¹ One outcome of these historiographical developments has been a better understanding of the interconnected and mutable character of anti-imperial, nationalist, pan-ethnic, and Third Worldist movements.² These were projects that emerged across imperial spaces over the course of the twentieth century, as nationalist elites, intellectuals, revolutionaries, civil society activists, and colonial subjects questioned what to do with empire and its inequities. At no time were such uncertainties more apparent than following the conclusion of World War II. The development of mass-based nationalist parties after 1945 fuelled expectations regarding independence and created the dilemma of what would arise from the imperial ruins. Elites and subalterns responded to this predicament by constructing cosmopolitan futures and parochial pasts in order to define the configuration of the nation state, particularly in terms of its external borders, its internal demographics, and domestic power sharing arrangements.³ The “politics of belonging” was closely linked to another key issue: the difficulty of reconciling the need to advance individual rights and protections with the collective imperatives of state-building and economic modernization.⁴ This challenge shaped discussions concerning the importance of state sovereignty and national interest relative to the pursuit of peaceful coexistence, multilateralism through reformed international institutions, and Third World solidarity.⁵

For those involved in the subsequent debates, the seemingly contradictory positions on these issues were not irreconcilable. This was particularly true of nationalist elites, who argued invented pasts and “indigenous” customs would become national traditions that offered a pathway to cohesive multi-ethnic futures; the creation of strong centralized states and the realization of plans for economic development would protect individual liberties and livelihoods; and support for Third World revolution would strengthen national sovereignty.⁶ That said, regardless of elites’ faith in these outcomes, the questions, doubts, and conflicts their visions generated, both domestically and internationally, underscore a crucial point: decolonization and its aftermath was a contingent moment in time when multiple possibilities appeared to be within reach.⁷ Historians have been encouraged to treat these postcolonial imaginaries as meaningful attempts at “world-making”.⁸ Many of the resulting histories have been concerned with diplomacy, statecraft, and international law.⁹ Inevitably, this has led to a greater focus on the role of itinerant elites and their efforts to organize various forms of South–South cooperation, which aimed to create a more equitable global order.¹⁰ By comparison, few historians have considered the implications of these world-making projects for domestic state-building efforts, or what the “socialist globalization” agenda meant for ordinary citizens of Third World nations, even though it is widely acknowledged that Third Worldism was as much about the national as it was the international.¹¹ This relative neglect has contributed to a perception that left-wing Third World states’ domestic socialist agendas were either poor imitations of their European equivalents or they were façades which were fabricated for reasons of realpolitik, rather than because they reflected their architects’ moral and ideological convictions.¹²

This has certainly been the case for Guyana's Forbes Burnham, who ruled from independence in 1966 until his death in 1985. Critics of Burnham rightly point out that during this period Guyana became a de facto one-party state, where political violence and economic predation flourished.¹³ The devastating consequences of Burnham's regime for Guyana and its people should not be forgotten.¹⁴ However, to focus only on these aspects of Burnham's premiership is to overlook the ways in which the People's National Congress (PNC) sought to transform Guyana's social structures and political economy through its programme of co-operative socialism. Far from being a set of derivative ideas or being subservient to the imperatives of retaining political power, the PNC's co-operativism was a mutable and “heterodox” form of socialism, which drew inspiration from local circumstances in Guyana and ideas associated with the wider Third World project.¹⁵ The aim was to remedy the socio-cultural legacies of colonialism, reverse historic patterns of underdevelopment, and thereby empower the Guyanese postcolonial state and people.¹⁶

A key aspect of the PNC's efforts to build the co-operative republic was its conception of citizenship. The PNC's understanding of citizenship reflected certain intersecting assumptions relating to race, gender, class, and generation, which were held by the party's predominantly middle-class Afro-Guyanese leadership and had to be accommodated with its revolutionary aims for remaking Guyanese society.¹⁷ This tension contributed to the emergence of a citizenship regime that constructed carefully delineated roles for specific categories of Guyanese citizen in accordance with the overall aims of the PNC's development strategy. The outcome was an often-contradictory approach to citizenship, which promised equality and liberation through multiracialism and enhanced legal and constitutional protections, but also effectively placed limits on particular citizens’ freedoms because of their assigned roles in the PNC's development plans. Invariably, this involved privileging Afro-Guyanese men's status as waged workers and peasant farmers in productive service of the nation, whilst reducing their female counterparts to their reproductive roles of wives and mothers, even as the PNC promised to free women through the co-operative socialist revolution.¹⁸ What was consistent, however, was the PNC's repeated emphasis on the importance of hard work to the co-operative republic and its revolution.¹⁹ As part of the PNC's efforts to create a socialist economy, which included the nationalization of Guyana's principal export sectors, import substitution, and the fulfilment of “basic needs”, the party promised emancipation, material advancement, and meaningful political participation, if all Guyanese citizens adopted a work ethic premised on the principles self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and self-discipline.²⁰

The various connections the PNC made between work and citizenship were by no means unique to Guyana, but the ways in which the party framed this relationship contributed to a particular set of struggles as the co-operative republic began to collapse in the late 1970s.²¹ During this period, a multiracial and inter-class movement arose in opposition to the PNC. Central to this campaign, which was coordinated but not determined by the Working People's Alliance (WPA), was the demand that the right to dignified forms of work be realized, promises of political and economic liberation be fulfilled, and state power be devolved to the Guyanese people through institutions organized according to the principle of collective authority.²² These were not cynical or instrumental claims designed to speak only to the PNC's co-operative socialism and its accompanying legal, discursive, and material practices of citizenship. Rather, such demands constituted a parallel but alternate imagining of the postcolonial state, its political economy, institutions, and citizenship regime. Both the PNC and the WPA believed rights and freedoms could be protected through collective means, but whereas the PNC emphasized the paramountcy of the party, state, and nation above all other individual and shared interests, the WPA advocated non-hierarchical forms of organization and the realization of change through the people themselves. In this way, the WPA sought to enable ordinary Guyanese people to remake their world and answer the questions that had been posed by decolonization but had been left unresolved. What did freedom from imperialism and colonialism signify? What did political and economic sovereignty entail? And, how could dignity, respect, and self-worth be acquired?

Co-Operative Socialism and Development

By the late 1960s, the hopes and expectations of independence were fading across the Anglophone Caribbean. Regional governments’ adoption of the so-called Puerto Rico model of development produced impressive macro-economic growth rates, but also widening inequalities; inter-party competition contributed to low-intensity political violence, particularly in Jamaica; and postcolonial elites were reliant upon the coercive apparatus of the state to consolidate their authority and suppress dissent.²³ This situation contributed to a series of protests and campaigns for change, such as the 1968 “Rodney Riots” in Jamaica and the February 1970 Revolution in Trinidad, both of which drew inspiration from the Caribbean variants of Black Power and Third World radicalism, and these movements’ respective critiques of imperialism and neocolonialism.²⁴

In Guyana, Forbes Burnham, the prime minister and leader of the People's National Congress (PNC), observed events elsewhere in the Caribbean with unease.²⁵ Guyana's transition to independence had been more troubled than most. Guyana had been pushed to the brink of civil war in the early 1960s. Constitutional meddling by the imperial authorities and a CIA-sponsored campaign of industrial unrest had destabilized successive governments led by the Marxist, Cheddi Jagan, and his People's Progressive Party (PPP).²⁶ This political instability contributed to interracial violence involving the PPP, the PNC, and their respective supporters amongst the Indo- and Afro-Guyanese populations.²⁷ The worst of this violence occurred in the interior bauxite mining town of Wismar-Mackenzie, and rural villages situated along Guyana's coastal sugar belt. The violence was significant not just for its tragic human cost, but because it contributed to the emergence of racially segregated communities. The growing racial polarization was exacerbated by the PNC and the PPP, both of which deployed racially coded language to warn their supporters about the possible implications of an opposition victory. It was out of this chaos and disorder that the PNC emerged to form a coalition government at the 1964 elections before leading Guyana to independence in 1966.²⁸

Guyana's fractured political landscape, in combination with the region-wide unrest of the late 1960s, convinced Burnham of the need to ensure that the PNC's programme spoke directly to the grievances and aspirations associated with Caribbean Black Power movements.²⁹ Burnham told one interviewer that Black Power in Guyana meant “the fight for dignity and equality for all non-white peoples”.³⁰ However, although some moves were made to recognize aspects of Indo-Guyanese and Amerindian cultural life, the PNC's principal focus was on promoting Afro-Guyanese culture.³¹ To this end, Burnham established a working relationship with Eusi Kwayana's African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa (ASCRIA), an organization with Black Power sympathies and ties, even if it did not necessarily define itself in such terms.³² Burnham also sought to position himself as a leader of a “model progressive black government” by hosting a number of African-American civil rights activists in Guyana to promote the PNC's Third Worldist credentials.³³

British diplomats attributed the PNC's manoeuvring to Burnham's ideological flexibility and his determination to hold onto power by whatever means necessary.³⁴ True, the 1968 elections were rigged and political patronage was routinely distributed to supporters, but Burnham went further than most of his regional counterparts to demonstrate the PNC represented a decisive break with the colonial past.³⁵ Nothing symbolized this resolve more than the PNC's decision to cut ties with the British crown and declare Guyana a co-operative republic in February 1970.³⁶ The shift to republican status was accompanied by the adoption of socialist-inspired rhetoric and policies. In speeches and publications, PNC representatives increasingly referenced ideas associated with non-alignment, economic sovereignty, and Third Worldism.³⁷ Other revolutionary socialist states, such as Julius Nyerere's Tanzania, Josep Tito's Yugoslavia, and Kim Il Sun's North Korea, were cited by the PNC as potential models for Guyana's co-operative republic. The result was that many PNC policies drew on ideas developed elsewhere in the Third World, including the Guyanese versions of Yugoslavia's “Peoples’ Militia” and North Korea's “Mass Games”.³⁸ These domestic efforts were matched by equivalent foreign policy initiatives. The PNC provided material support to liberation movements struggling against white minority rule in southern Africa, and, in 1972, Guyana established diplomatic relations with Cuba and the People's Republic of China.³⁹

The PNC was not the only Guyanese political party to take a decisive leftward turn at this time. Hitherto, the PPP had tempered its Marxist principles in accordance with strategic considerations relating to the Cold War context of Guyana's decolonization struggle and domestic political factors, including its reliance on the support of the more conservative elements of the Indo-Guyanese community.⁴⁰ However, the PPP opted to abandon its previous caution following its 1968 election defeat.⁴¹ In 1969, Jagan declared the PPP to be Marxist–Leninist, he aligned the party with Moscow, and called for the nationalization of the economy and greater forms of worker control.⁴² In response, the PNC sought to distinguish itself from what it regarded as the imported Marxism of the pro-Moscow PPP by emphasizing that its turn to co-operativism was principally concerned with addressing local issues rooted in Guyana's histories of slavery and colonialism. Specifically, the PNC claimed co-operative socialism would transform the “small man” into a “real man” through various educational, economic, and political initiatives premised on the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, and direct democratic control.⁴³ This objective was simultaneously radical and conservative.⁴⁴ On the one hand, the PNC's emphasis on empowerment spoke to the Black Power critique of the postcolonial condition and the continued disenfranchisement of Caribbean peoples.⁴⁵ On the other, the PNC's aim of fostering discipline through self-help reflected the moralizing worldview of the party's creole elites, who, much like their counterparts elsewhere in the region, believed it was incumbent upon them to inculcate a sense of civic duty in the citizenry because colonialism had eroded working-class Caribbean peoples’ sense of purpose.⁴⁶ This moral vision for the new republic was accompanied by the subsequent development of three core beliefs, which would shape the trajectory and content of the PNC's co-operative socialism: co-operative societies as the basic unit of production and consumption; public ownership of Guyana's principal economic sectors and public utilities; and the “paramountcy” of the party.⁴⁷

Senior PNC figures frequently claimed that the embrace of co-operative socialism in this form was the outcome of the party's intellectual heritage dating back to the early 1960s.⁴⁸ In practice, the different ideological strands that informed the PNC's nebulous concept of co-operative socialism did not emerge fully formed. At the turn of the 1970s, PNC representatives were concerned with sketching out the broad contours of the party's co-operativism at the expense of a specific understanding of its socialism.⁴⁹ The PNC made it clear that Guyana's co-operative movement would expand beyond its traditional focus on credit and savings to include agricultural, marketing, trading, and construction societies, and thereby become the third sector of the economy.⁵⁰ It was also envisaged that co-operatives would be created within public corporations to represent the interests of employees, consumers, and the state.⁵¹ These ambitious plans enabled the architects of the PNC's co-operativism to reject claims that it was modelled on Western or Eastern European equivalents.⁵² Instead, the PNC argued co-operativism was “rooted in the social and economic history” of Guyana, with the idealized collectivism of the post-emancipation free village movement cited as one precedent.⁵³ The PNC's belief in the uniqueness of its co-operative model led the government to argue that it represented a novel solution to Guyana's dependency and the problem of alienation under capitalism.⁵⁴ The PNC envisaged that co-operative societies concerned with production and consumption would reduce Guyana's vulnerability to the vicissitudes of external trade, and they would empower peasant smallholders, waged workers, and consumers by giving them a democratic stake in the means of production. In this way, the co-operative would become an “instrument of national of development” because co-operatives’ egalitarian principles would incentivize production, rationalize the use and distribution of resources, and reconcile individual needs and aspirations with the collective requirement for economic advancement.⁵⁵

The initial focus on the co-operative component of the PNC's ideology meant that the government's conception of socialism only became more clearly defined in the years that followed the founding of the republic.⁵⁶ At the 1974 party congress, Burnham declared his belief in the “paramountcy of the party”, which had the effect of rendering the distinctions between the PNC and the state obsolete. This was followed in 1976 by the announcement that the government intended to create a socialist society along Marxist–Leninist lines.⁵⁷ These bold assertions were accompanied by more specific explanations regarding the objectives of the PNC's socialism. Party speeches emphasized the importance of generating surpluses for public good rather than private gain, the restriction of private property, and state ownership of national resources.⁵⁸ These policy objectives often emerged through engagement with particular issues and events, rather than from a set of beliefs rooted in a fixed understanding of socialism. The question of land ownership, for example, became a policy concern following the 1973 “land rebellion”. This protest movement, which was co-ordinated by ASCRIA, involved Afro- and Indo-Guyanese villagers occupying vacant lands owned by expatriate plantation companies.⁵⁹ Once these lands had been seized, the villagers established multiracial “People's Committees” with the intention of administering the land according to collectivist principles.⁶⁰ This produced a tension in PNC policy when the government responded to the “rebellion” by committing itself to imposing limits on private property ownership, but not private enterprise, in spite of its contention that Guyana's national resources should be publicly owned.⁶¹ In short, the PNC's co-operative socialism was created and reworked in real time, as Burnham's government devised and implemented policies in response to the responsibilities and challenges of postcolonial statehood.

This dynamic was apparent in the case of the government's 1972 development plan, which represented one of the PNC's earliest expositions on co-operative socialism. During the 1950s and 1960s, colonial-era development strategies had focused on export-led growth through investment in agriculture, bauxite, and related transport and communication infrastructure.⁶² The result was that successive development plans had entrenched Guyana's dependence on foreign trade and investment.⁶³ Even the PNC's first post-independence plan, which aimed to promote industrialization and agricultural diversification as part of a mixed economy, relied on foreign loans and generous tax concessions to private capital.⁶⁴ The 1972 plan was markedly different.⁶⁵ The plan set annual GDP targets, but its Guyanese planners criticized previous development initiatives for being too growth-centric and too concerned with established sectors at the expense of implementing strategies that would develop the wider economy and raise Guyanese living standards and incomes in the longer term.⁶⁶ Rather than reinforce the existing structure of the economy, the PNC's new plan aimed to end Guyana's dependency by reducing unemployment to five per cent, diversifying exports, promoting import-substitution, and extending the developmental reach of the state into the interior, which was identified as a potential site for agricultural, livestock, and forestry initiatives.⁶⁷ In doing so, the plan, which was premised on a much greater role for the state at the expense of private enterprise, aimed to make “the basic necessities of life” available to Guyanese citizens in accordance with the government's objective of “feeding, clothing, and housing the nation” by 1976.⁶⁸

Nationalization and the Making of Co-Operative Citizens

Guyana was not alone in its abandonment of orthodox development strategies.⁶⁹ By the turn of the 1970s, many Third World policymakers and intellectuals, including the Caribbean's New World Group, had become critical of established development models.⁷⁰ This search for alternate development strategies was closely related to international efforts to re-think the operation and regulation of the global economy, particularly with regard to questions of economic sovereignty and the redistribution of wealth.⁷¹ The PNC was an active participant in these discussions.⁷² In 1972, the PNC hosted a conference for Non-Aligned Movement foreign ministers in Georgetown, which paved the way for the various United Nations declarations that comprised the emerging agenda for the New International Economic Order (NIEO).⁷³ The PNC became a strong advocate of the NIEO. At the 1975 heads of commonwealth conference in Jamaica, Burnham called for a restructuring of the global economy's institutions and regulatory framework, with the objective of ensuring that primary commodity producing nations received a more equitable share of the wealth they produced.⁷⁴ These were not new demands. Since the founding of the co-operative republic, Burnham had referenced the insignificance of independence without a corresponding attempt to transform Guyana's economy. In 1970, Burnham's speech to the PNC's annual congress had criticized foreign capital, which extracted Guyana's wealth to the detriment of its people and this was followed by the passing of a resolution in favour of the state acquiring a fifty-one per cent stake in enterprises engaged in resource extraction.⁷⁵

Congress's resolution represented a direct warning to Alcan, the parent company for the Demerara Bauxite Company (DEMBA), which was headquartered at Wismar-Mackenzie, where Guyana's most significant bauxite concessions were located. Guyana's bauxite industry was an archetypal example of neocolonial exploitation. Generous taxation and concessionary rights were compounded by Alcan's model of exporting unprocessed bauxite from Guyana to its North American smelters, which transformed this raw material into more valuable aluminium products. In return, Guyana was left with the negative effects of bauxite mining, in the form of environment spoliation, but it received little by way of economic return.⁷⁶ The “operational logic” of bauxite firms such as Alcan led Norman Girvan, the notable Jamaican political-economist, New World Group member, and adviser to the PNC government, to conclude that the only way the Caribbean's reserves could be used to service the material needs of the region's peoples was to nationalize the sector.⁷⁷ Girvan reached this conclusion as part of a negotiating team assembled by the PNC to investigate possible routes to “meaningful participation” in Guyana's bauxite industry. Initially, the PNC did not intend to nationalize DEMBA, but Alcan's refusal to compromise during the negotiations, which ran from December 1970 to February 1971, prompted Burnham to remark that, “it is better to die on your feet, than to live on your knees”.⁷⁸ A few months later, on 15 July 1971, DEMBA was nationalized and ownership was transferred to the state-owned Guyana Bauxite Company (GUYBAU).⁷⁹

The PNC celebrated the acquisition of DEMBA as the first meaningful act of economic independence.⁸⁰ This triumphalism masked emerging tensions, however.⁸¹ Opponents of the PNC, including the Ratoon Group, which was comprised of University of Guyana scholars and students, criticized the terms of the nationalization agreement.⁸² Ratoon supported the nationalization of DEMBA, but argued that the PNC's agreement amounted to a commercial transaction that did not address the historic exploitation of Guyana's resources.⁸³ Supporters of the PNC were equally circumspect. The industry's Afro-Guyanese mineworkers were concerned about the implications of DEMBA's nationalization for the outcome of ongoing pay negotiations and the long-term security of their pensions.⁸⁴ These uncertainties contributed to a two-week strike in April 1971.⁸⁵ The conduct of the strike reflected the workforce's growing support for ASCRIA and its advocacy of autonomous collective action and Black racial pride. The strike was coordinated by a leaderless group of rank-and-file workers, who referred to themselves as the “Committee of Ten”. The Committee, which made it clear it was not opposed to nationalization, condemned the pro-PNC Guyana Mine Workers' Union (GMWU), and through its publication, “The Voice of the Workers”, it called for a range of entitlements, including pay awards linked to production targets and more meaningful forms of worker participation.⁸⁶

At a time when ASCRIA's alliance with the government was becoming increasingly conditional, the mineworkers’ appropriation of government discourse on co-operativism and nationalization created a problem for the PNC.⁸⁷ Consequently, notwithstanding one or two clashes involving the police and striking workers, the PNC did all it could to reassure the workforce. The government promised to improve working and living conditions at Wismar-Mackenzie – which was renamed Linden (after Burnham) following nationalization.⁸⁸ These promises were given practical effect by the Tyndall Commission, which recommended a total pay award amounting to G$1.7 million (G$=Guyanese dollar), and the PNC pledged to safeguard workers’ pensions by transferring them to a government scheme.⁸⁹ The PNC also stated that nationalization would result in significant changes to workers’ lives. The party newspaper, New Nation, reported that Linden's residents would no longer be second-class citizens and workers would have a “meaningful say” in how the industry operated through systems of worker participation.⁹⁰ The PNC announced that worker and trade union representatives would be elected to GUYBAU's board, and workers would also have the opportunity to invest in the company through co-operatives.⁹¹ In exchange for altering mineworkers’ relationship to the means of production, the PNC made it clear that GUYBAU's workforce should become the “vanguard” of the revolution and act as paragons of self-reliance, self-discipline, and productivity.⁹²

These potentially radical ideas relating to worker empowerment and participation co-existed with the more conservative elements of the PNC's vision for the Guyanese citizenry. Reflecting the “pedagogical” ethos of PNC elites, a series of government campaigns explained key terms associated with co-operative socialism.⁹³ PNC publications clarified the rationale underpinning the government's economic strategy and defined Guyanese citizenship in terms of participation in government-sponsored schemes linked to self-help and co-operative projects.⁹⁴ This attempt to inculcate a sense of civic duty through participation in parastatals was accompanied by the implementation of policies in state-run enterprises, which reinforced hierarchical roles for citizens along the axes of class, gender, race, and generation. Initial government interventions targeted sectors of the economy where Afro-Guyanese workers predominated – a strategy that reflected the racialized nature of Guyana's political economy, the PNC's resulting dependence on client trade unions, and its leadership's moralizing view of the Afro-Guyanese working classes.⁹⁵ What was particularly striking about these interventions was that, for all the PNC's promises to advance women's economic opportunities and protect their rights through co-operative socialism, the government's oft-stated intention to make the “small man, a real man” was indicative of certain masculine assumptions regarding who the worker was.⁹⁶ These normative expectations were reflected in pay awards and employment benefits, such as those afforded to Afro-Guyanese waterfront workers in the early 1970s, which affirmed men's status as households’ principal wage-earners, and ministerial statements that often contradicted official PNC policy on gender equality by defining women's roles in relation to unremunerated reproductive labour.⁹⁷

Persistently high rates of unemployment and inadequate wages for those with formal employment meant that the PNC's emerging vision for the ideal Guyanese citizen was just that: a vision.⁹⁸ It was partly for this reason that the government introduced a national service programme in 1974.⁹⁹ Internal government correspondence reveals how officials understood the programme's relationship to the 1972 development plan and the party's intention of creating citizens through work.¹⁰⁰ The PNC anticipated that national service would enable the government to achieve its aim of “feeding, clothing and housing the nation” by transforming “individuals geared for dependency into self-reliant and productive nationals”.¹⁰¹ In accordance with the PNC's pedagogical approach, preparation for national service included five days of political training, which would then be followed by ten days of military training.¹⁰² The training, which was framed in a speech by Burnham as “orientation”, was designed to facilitate discussion among recruits, so they realized that their problems – low wages, unemployment, and crime – were caused by “imperialists” and their “local stooges” in the form of “black marketers, landlords, and landowners”.¹⁰³ Following the completion of their training, national service recruits would be dispatched to agricultural settlements in the interior, or set to work on other tasks linked to the 1972 development programme.

In theory, recruits would include young men and women drawn from different racial and class groups. In practice, the PNC appears to have prioritized the recruitment of young Afro-Guyanese men because they represented “prospective heads of families” and they were most at risk of becoming “limers” – a pejorative term for young Afro-Guyanese men who relied on petty crime and street “hustling” to survive, and frequently attracted comment in the local press during the 1970s.¹⁰⁴ There was no corresponding recruitment drive to enlist the women into the programme. PNC communications described women as “the basis of the Guyanese family”, who were central to the reproduction of the nation. Consequently, although it was accepted that women should not be discouraged from becoming members of the national service programme, it was emphasized that care should be taken to avoid any disruptions that would prevent women from becoming wives and mothers.¹⁰⁵ In other words, the national service programme reflected the moralizing belief of PNC officials that unemployed young Afro-Guyanese men constituted a threat to the government's plans for realizing economic development through productive forms of work. Enlisting would-be limers into the national programme would remedy this situation, because the training would teach recruits the value of self-reliance, self-sufficiency, and self-discipline through collective forms of labour. Such an undertaking, as one PNC publication put it, constituted “labour in the service of the nation”, which officials presumably believed would provide male recruits with a pathway to formal sector employment in a nationalized industry and thereby facilitate the formation of stable working-class family units in accordance with the government's promise to make the “small man, a real man”.¹⁰⁶

The “Shock of the Global” and Its Local Consequences¹⁰⁷

The inauguration of the PNC's national service programme, with its class-based analysis of the postcolonial condition in Guyana, signalled the party's turn towards a more doctrinaire form of socialism. Following Burnham's 1974 Declaration of Sophia speech, PNC elites increasingly defined the party in terms of its socialist and vanguardist credentials.¹⁰⁸ At the same time, however, very few of the PNC's policy initiatives functioned according to their intended aims or socialist principles. Critics of the government claimed that the PNC's national service programme functioned as a paramilitary organization that was comprised of party loyalists and ideologues.¹⁰⁹ This may have been true for its salaried members, namely, the officer corps recruited from the Guyana Defence Force, but PNC correspondence suggests many others were ambivalent about the ideological aims of the national service programme. An internal government survey indicated that few members of the public believed in the official rationale for the programme, whilst others objected to it altogether, except where “limers” were the principal target for recruitment.¹¹⁰ This ambivalence was echoed in a 1978 newspaper report, which implicitly conceded that the architects of national service had failed to convince the public of the programme's value.¹¹¹ Many recruits appear to have shared this view. Urban residents were unaccustomed to the demands of hinterland living, very few had the agricultural skills required to make the programme's schemes successful, and the emphasis on military-style organization was antithetical to limers’ conception of freedom, which stood in direct opposition to the disciplinary principles so valued by Burnham and other senior PNC figures.¹¹² The result was that recruits simply abandoned their posts and returned to Georgetown.¹¹³ The development of the co-operative sector was also subject to various struggles. The 1973 “land rebellion” suggests the PNC's co-operative model had a potentially receptive audience among rural communities. However, although the number of co-operatives had expanded rapidly by the mid-1970s, most had been established in the private sector to benefit from tax concessions and privileged access to land. The outcome was that many co-operatives operated by employing waged labour or sub-dividing land, thus becoming a vehicle for individual private accumulation rather than collective production and redistribution.¹¹⁴

The incomplete nature of the PNC's co-operative socialist revolution was acknowledged by party figures. By 1976, the PNC had nationalized eighty per cent of the Guyanese economy, including not just the bauxite sector but the sugar industry too.¹¹⁵ Burnham argued that this extensive programme of nationalization was part of a wider shift to a wholly socialist state, which would involve the establishment of a federation of state-run enterprises and community-led producer and consumer societies, all of which would operate according to co-operative principles.¹¹⁶ Burnham admitted that the creation of a co-operative socialist state in this form was a long-term objective and that Guyana was in a transitional stage, but the performance of the Guyanese economy following the first wave of nationalizations had given the PNC leadership cause for optimism.¹¹⁷ Following the 1973 oil crisis, government revenues had benefited temporarily from increased export prices, which generated surplus foreign reserves and thus compensated for rising import costs.¹¹⁸ From 1975 onwards, however, falling production levels in the bauxite and sugar sectors exposed Guyana to the consequences of the successive economic shocks that sent the global economy into recession in the latter part of the decade.¹¹⁹ Data compiled by the IMF reveals the steep decline of the Guyanese economy. GDP dropped by an average of ten per cent per annum in the period 1977 to 1979 and foreign reserves were eroded to such an extent that there was just enough to cover two weeks’ worth of imports by the end of 1980.¹²⁰

Guyana's deepening economic crisis was compounded by a failure to correctly identify its causes. Starting in 1977–1978, the PNC entered into a series of short-term agreements with the IMF and the World Bank.¹²¹ These agreements were premised on the assumption that the economic crisis was a temporary balance-of-payments deficit caused by a combination of adverse domestic conditions and unfavourable external trends linked to the global economy.¹²² PNC and IMF–World Bank officials agreed to remedy the situation by limiting demand in the short-term, through restrictions on imports, and increasing domestic export production in the medium term.¹²³ However, the second oil price hike, which further raised import costs, revealed that the crisis was really “a crisis of production”.¹²⁴ Key economic sectors could not raise export volumes because underinvestment in infrastructure, shortages of skilled staff, and scarcities of fuel and spare parts had contributed to the degradation of equipment and chronic underproduction. This meant that Guyana's exports had begun to lose market share at a time when the PNC lacked the resources to reverse the decline.¹²⁵ The outcome was that the PNC was forced to enter into more extensive structural adjustment programmes.¹²⁶ The design of these programmes reflected the principles associated with the “conservative counter-revolution”, which challenged the collectivist ethos of the NIEO by attaching stricter conditions to World Bank and IMF support.¹²⁷ In the case of Guyana, the government's agreements with the IMF and the World Bank required the PNC to limit the role of the state in favour of private enterprise, liberalize trade, devalue the currency, and realize public savings through increased taxation, wage restraint, and reduced public debt ratios, which meant further cuts to social services and subsidies on essential goods.¹²⁸

By the early 1980s, the effects of IMF–World Bank conditionality on the Guyanese economy were so severe that PNC ministers were arguing that Guyana should go it alone without the support of the two Washington-based institutions.¹²⁹ Initially, however, the PNC had sought to accommodate IMF–World Bank demands without compromising on the principles of its co-operative socialism. In correspondence with the World Bank, Guyana's minister of finance, Kenneth E. Hope, had affirmed the PNC's commitment to both the “establishment of co-operative socialism” through its basic needs strategy and the structural economic reforms required by external donors.¹³⁰ The PNC's attempt to reconcile the demands of IMF–World Bank conditionality with the government's economic revolution contributed to the replacement of the 1972 plan with a new development programme (1978–1981).¹³¹ The aims of the new strategy were to promote a rapid increase in exports, facilitate infrastructure development, and encourage public savings.¹³² The return to short-term objectives linked to export-orientated growth did not signal the PNC's wholesale abandonment of the ethos that had informed the 1972 plan.¹³³ Hope explained the new development programme with reference to the continued importance of empowerment, egalitarianism, and ending citizens’ alienation from the means of production. Hope argued that these objectives had been partially realized thanks to the PNC's nationalization programme, but short-term exigencies meant the new plan's ability to continue delivering the promises of co-operative socialism would be contingent upon higher productivity levels and efficiency savings.¹³⁴ In doing so, Hope and other PNC ministers, including his successor, Desmond Hoyte, shifted the responsibility onto Guyanese citizens, by arguing that low productivity and declining output were as much a result of poor attitudes to work as they were caused by issues linked to infrastructure problems or shortages of essential supplies.¹³⁵ The PNC instructed workers to rationalize the use of resources and eschew strike action. PNC ministers also renewed the link between citizenship and work by arguing that the delivery of socio-economic rights and material advancement depended upon increased productivity.¹³⁶

Pro-PNC trade union leaders embraced the government's calls for increased productivity. In 1977, Stanton Critchlow, the general secretary of the PNC-affiliated Guyana Labour Union, which included Georgetown's waterfront workers among its members, called for an end to “absenteeism”. Critchlow continued by arguing that workers should adopt a new “attitude to work” to realize the nation's collective goals of “greater production and productivity”.¹³⁷ These sentiments were echoed by individual workers, who were publicly supportive of the PNC. At a PNC rally in 1977, a bauxite worker, Serjent Samuels, affirmed his commitment to the “socialist ideal” and stated his belief that the PNC was “capable of […] liberating the people of Guyana from economic and social injustice”.¹³⁸ Not every worker shared these beliefs, of course. In 1978, in spite of Critchlow's call for improved workplace discipline the previous year, the police announced that new measures would be implemented in Georgetown's port to safeguard cargo, which was being stolen by waterfront workers for sale on the black market.¹³⁹ Similar concerns were expressed by Jacob Braithwaite, the president of the GMWU, who informed the Guyana Chronicle that the union intended to run an educational programme to teach its members what it meant “to work in a state-owned industry”, and thereby combat high rates of absenteeism and theft.¹⁴⁰ Other signs of indifference or perhaps even outright opposition to the PNC, given the government's insistence on active and engaged forms of citizenship, included workers’ attitude towards May Day. Under the PNC, May Day typically involved co-ordinated rallies and demonstrations by pro-government unions. Linden's 1978 May Day rally, however, was poorly attended, which led Braithwaite to condemn GMWU members and the wider community for their apparent apathy.¹⁴¹

The indifference of many GMWU members can be attributed to the deteriorating state of the bauxite industry. Grievances relating to arbitrary forms of discipline and dissatisfaction with the PNC over a wage settlement had contributed to strikes by rank-and-file bauxite workers in 1975 and 1976, respectively.¹⁴² The situation in the industry continued to deteriorate as Guyana's economic crisis worsened. Following the nationalization of DEMBA, the PNC had claimed that worker participation in nationalized industries was equivalent to worker control since state-ownership in the co-operative republic amounted to the social ownership of the means of production.¹⁴³ Contrary to these claims, however, a 1979 recording of a conversation between Burnham and members of GUYMINE's heavy earth department suggests that systems of worker participation in the bauxite sector were dysfunctional and party elites were indifferent to workers’ plight.¹⁴⁴ During the course of the conversation, it was revealed that meetings were held irregularly, if at all; workers were treated poorly; and Burnham, for all his talk of making “the small man, a real man”, responded to employees’ criticisms by retorting that “Linden ain't the whole of Guyana” when they told him he had outstayed his welcome.¹⁴⁵ This growing sense of alienation among bauxite workers was exacerbated by a range of other issues, including insecure employment, growing food shortages, and problems related to the delivery of social services and healthcare.¹⁴⁶

Senior PNC figures and their trade union allies attributed industry problems to bauxite workers’ ill-discipline and the influence of malcontents.¹⁴⁷ However, contrary to these claims, mineworkers were not opposed to hard work, nor were they intent on destabilizing the industry. The Organization of Working People (OWP), which had emerged as a successor to the Committee of Ten, made this clear. From the mid-1970s onwards, the OWP issued a series of statements that were highly critical of the PNC.¹⁴⁸ The OWP condemned corruption and mismanagement in the bauxite industry following nationalization, which it claimed had led to the emergence of a new “class of Canadians”. The OWP also stated that workers had become “wage-slaves” in a “neo-colonial context” where they were told to “eat less, sleep less, [and] work hard” whilst the managerial class grew “fat and rich”.¹⁴⁹

The OWP's criticisms were justified. The PNC contained competent and professional individuals, who were either committed to the ideals of co-operative socialism because they corresponded with their own worldview, or because they had a sense of patriotic duty to deliver an independence dividend to the Guyanese people.¹⁵⁰ There were those within the PNC, however, who exploited the party's control of the state for personal advancement and private gain. The exponential growth of the public sector following the establishment of the co-operative republic had enabled the PNC to dispense patronage to its principal supporters among the Afro-Guyanese middle- and working-classes. Prior to the onset of the economic crisis in the late 1970s, this took the form of jobs in the civil service and state-run corporations that gave PNC supporters privileged access to higher salaries, imported consumables, and other work-related benefits.¹⁵¹ In the bauxite sector, for example, the PNC concluded agreements that stipulated only GMWU members were eligible to receive dividends from the industry's profit-sharing arrangements and other fringe benefits that GUYMINE employees were entitled to.¹⁵² The political considerations that governed the distribution of resources were accompanied by more explicitly corrupt practices in a system where the principle of “party paramountcy” meant there was little or no oversight over public spending.¹⁵³ This led commentators to draw a connection between PNC predation, deepening socio-economic insecurity, and a wider breakdown in law and order.¹⁵⁴ This was particularly apparent in impoverished urban settings such as Linden, where unemployment, rising inflation, and shortages of basic goods gave rise to intra-class conflicts in the form of crime and struggles to access renumerated employment. The result was that the unemployed were transformed into “citizen-beggars”, who sought out meagre resources dispensed by PNC functionaries in exchange for pledging their loyalty to the regime.¹⁵⁵

The OWP's response to this state of affairs was to call on bauxite workers to operate collectively, reject corrupt practices, and put aside their individual concerns in favour of their shared class interests by working productively, if not for the PNC, then for the Guyanese working-classes and wider nation.¹⁵⁶ The OWP's collectivist agenda, which condemned exploitation and enduring forms of neocolonial subjugation, spoke to a specific conception of freedom that was rooted in the experiences of colonial and postcolonial unfreedom.¹⁵⁷ Historically, elements of the Afro-Guyanese working classes had rejected liberal understandings of freedom, which the colonial authorities had claimed could be realized through individuated waged work. Instead, since waged work was associated with drudgery and racialized hierarchy, many Afro-Guyanese peoples had sought to pursue a combination of economic activities that enabled them to retain at least partial access to the means of production, did not necessarily entail a distinction between personal and collective freedoms, and often prioritized communal goals over individual concerns.¹⁵⁸ By invoking this collectivist past, through references to the experience of colonial exploitation and the importance of empowering workers through meaningful systems of worker control, the OWP was drawing inspiration from historic struggles for freedom, albeit in ways that spoke to the postcolonial present.¹⁵⁹ In other words, the OWP's critique of the PNC was designed to resonate with workers’ anger at the government's failure to deliver the promises of independence, particularly in terms of its pledges to create a more equal society and transform labour's relationship to the means of production.

Enter the Working People's Alliance

Events in Guyana were being repeated across the Third World at the turn of the 1980s. In the decades following independence, Third World states had sought legitimacy through their anti-imperialist positions, ideas of popular participation and accountability, and, above all else, the promise that sovereignty had a “material” component which would deliver prosperity for the citizenry.¹⁶⁰ The imposition of structural adjustment programmes threatened this social contract in many contexts where widening inequalities and the indulgences of new bourgeoisies generated various forms of popular anger directed against postcolonial regimes.¹⁶¹ In Guyana, the PPP had announced a policy of “critical support” for the PNC following the government's formal adoption of socialism in 1974.¹⁶² The truce proved short-lived, however.¹⁶³ The late 1970s witnessed an upsurge in labour-related protests, including a 135-day strike by the pro-PPP Guyana Agricultural Workers’ Union (GAWU), which paralysed the sugar industry in 1977.¹⁶⁴ The 15,000-strong GAWU instigated the strike in retaliation for the PNC's failure to adhere to the union's interpretation of a profit-sharing agreement, which stipulated that a proportion of the industry's revenues should be redistributed amongst the workforce.¹⁶⁵ Significantly, and notwithstanding the PNC's attempts to stoke racial animosities by recruiting Afro-Guyanese strike breakers, the GAWU received moral and material support from sympathetic organizations.¹⁶⁶ This included independent trade unions with Afro-Guyanese memberships, such as the National Association of Agricultural, Commercial and Industrial Employees (NAACIE), which struck for two weeks in support of the GAWU, and the OWP whose members collected and distributed strike relief for Indo-Guyanese workers.¹⁶⁷ The growing industrial unrest culminated in the “civil rebellion” of mid-to-late 1979, when a multiracial cross-section of Guyanese society participated in a series of marches, rallies, and strikes.¹⁶⁸ Inspired by the overthrow of regimes in Iran and Grenada and angered by deteriorating economic conditions at home, the Guyanese people took to the streets where they shouted slogans such as “Shah Gone! Gairy Gone! Who Next?”.¹⁶⁹

The PNC's increasing authoritarianism was another key driver of the protests associated with the civil rebellion. In 1978, a fraudulent public referendum resulted in the abrogation of constitutional protections and the drafting of a new constitution which enhanced Burnham's executive powers and consolidated the PNC's control over the legislature.¹⁷⁰ The late 1970s also witnessed the violent suppression of anti-government demonstrations and politically motivated assassinations.¹⁷¹ Much of this violence was enacted by PNC loyalists in the security forces and party auxiliaries connected to the House of Israel – a religious cult that recruited the “lumpen” elements of the Afro-Guyanese population in exchange for meagre public goods in the form of dilapidated accommodation and basic food staples.¹⁷² This shift to violent authoritarianism, which occurred against the backdrop of the Jonestown tragedy and further fraudulent elections in 1980, co-existed uneasily with PNC rhetoric regarding popular participation and respect for civil liberties.¹⁷³ The new constitution contained many articles that referenced the importance of protecting individual rights for specific categories of citizen through civic organizations such as trade unions.¹⁷⁴ The duties of Guyanese citizens were also set out in the constitution. Specifically, the constitution gave legal form to the PNC's discourse on the relationship between work, development, and citizenship. This included the constitutional right to work in exchange for the corresponding duty to work, as well as further articles stipulating it was the “duty of the people through sustained and disciplined endeavours to achieve the highest possible levels of production”.¹⁷⁵

The architects of the constitution may have presented rights and duties as complementary, but the PNC invariably prioritized collective needs and obligations at the expense of constitutional protections.¹⁷⁶ Since the regime defined itself in vanguardist terms, PNC elites regarded the interests of the party, state, and nation as coterminous with the will of the people.¹⁷⁷ As such, there were no contradictions to resolve when it came to the relationship between the protection of individual constitutional rights and the collective imperatives of the PNC's socialist state-building project. The constitution asserted, for example, that the socialist structure of the economy and socialist labour laws would enhance workers’ protections and material status. However, in spite of these constitutional responsibilities, the PNC refused to deliver statutory obligations relating to profit-sharing or minimum wages by citing the deepening economic crisis.¹⁷⁸ Moreover, when workers struck in protest, as sugar and bauxite workers had done in 1977 and 1979 respectively, the PNC accused strikers of engaging in politically motivated protests.¹⁷⁹ Hoyte issued similar warnings in 1982 when he used his budget speech to caution trade unions about the potential implications of resorting to “political” strike action, even as he emphasized the constitutional right of workers to withdraw their labour.¹⁸⁰

The PNC's willingness to curtail freedoms and protections in the name of the socialist revolution became a focal point for civil society activists, many of whom drew on the principles and language associated with the human rights “breakthrough” of the 1970s to critique the authoritarianism of Burnham's government.¹⁸¹ It was no coincidence that the Guyana Human Rights Association, which aimed to hold the government accountable for its statutory responsibilities, was established in 1979 in response to the PNC's abolition of constitutional protections.¹⁸² Other opposition groups wanted to effect more radical change, however. At the centre of the growing anti-PNC movement was the Working People's Alliance (WPA).¹⁸³ Established in 1974 as a multiracial collective, the WPA styled itself as a pressure group before becoming a political party in July 1979, when it was involved in coordinating the civil rebellion.¹⁸⁴ Key WPA figures included Eusi Kwayana, Clive Thomas, Rupert Roopnarine, Andaiye, and Walter Rodney, the academic-activist, who had returned to Guyana from Tanzania in 1974 and whose writings on race, class, imperialism, and neocolonialism were hugely influential among like-minded intellectuals and activists.¹⁸⁵

The WPA was among a number of independent Marxist and Marxist–Leninist groups to emerge across the Caribbean during the 1970s.¹⁸⁶ In many ways, however, the WPA was distinct from its regional counterparts.¹⁸⁷ Initially reflecting Rodney's concept of “groundings”, the WPA rejected top-down strategies for mobilization in favour of revolutionary struggles led by the working people.¹⁸⁸ The emphasis on popular mobilization explains why Rodney and other leading members of the WPA toured towns and villages associated with bauxite and sugar production.¹⁸⁹ In these communities, WPA representatives listened to peoples’ grievances, learnt from their experiences of collective survival and struggle, and co-ordinated deliberative sessions on history and political economy.¹⁹⁰ It was out of these meetings that rank-and-file workers – often those who had been retrenched by the PNC – emerged to co-ordinate the protests associated with the civil rebellion.¹⁹¹ This strategy for mobilizing Guyanese citizens constituted an explicit rejection of the methods associated with the independence-era political parties, which the WPA accused of being overly concerned with elections and constitutional advancement at the expense of effecting radical change through the people. The WPA extended this critique to the socialist regimes that came to power throughout the Caribbean during the 1970s. Drawing on the thinking of Third World revolutionaries, including Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, and Rodney's own work on the implications of “false decolonization”, the WPA was highly critical of second-generation postcolonial regimes that preached socialism but enabled the continued survival of peripheral capitalism.¹⁹² In the case of Guyana specifically, the WPA condemned Burnham's “pseudo-socialism”, which had empowered the PNC and enriched its elites to the disenfranchisement and impoverishment of the Guyanese people.¹⁹³

The WPA's criticism of the first-generation nationalist parties and later post-independence governments created a number of intellectual challenges once it transitioned from a pressure group to a political party. After all, the WPA had rejected the electoral politics associated with the PPP and PNC, it had assisted with the coordination of the civil rebellion to overthrow the PNC, and it had boycotted the 1980 elections citing PNC's manipulation of the vote.¹⁹⁴ However, although internal documents suggest the party's attitude towards elections was a source debate, the WPA would not countenance the curtailment of rights.¹⁹⁵ This was in contrast to other radical left-wing opposition groups in the Caribbean, for whom rights-based issues were subordinate to the revolutionary struggle.¹⁹⁶ The principal supporter of the WPA's rights-based advocacy was Clive Thomas, who argued that the “historical task of socialism in Guyana is to build on the workers’ gains, not to reverse them”.¹⁹⁷ For Thomas and other senior WPA figures, democratic rights and civil liberties were “peoples’ rights” rather than “bourgeois rights”.¹⁹⁸ Consequently, the WPA aimed to restore the rule of law, enhance working peoples’ rights, and reimagine state structures and democratic processes that would devolve power to citizens and away from PNC elites. It was also for these reasons that the WPA operated as a leaderless organization with the objective of creating non-hierarchical institutions and systems of governance.¹⁹⁹ The clearest articulation of this ambition can be found in the WPA's 1979 Toward A Revolutionary Socialist Guyana. This programme stated that the WPA's objective was to create Workers’ Assemblies led by a National Patriotic Front in a Peoples’ Democratic State, where the executive offices of government would be replaced by collective leadership and headed by a rotating chairperson.²⁰⁰

The WPA's class analysis was also central to its vision for a post-PNC Guyana. For the WPA, the objective was to highlight the shared experience of exploitation and forge a multiracial revolutionary movement that embraced the working people and the progressive elements of the middle classes. In one of its founding statements, the WPA made it clear that the movement would be a cross-class alliance comprised of “workers, employees, farmers, landless peasants, the unemployed, housewives, students, progressive professionals, small traders, craftsmen and self-employed toilers”.²⁰¹ The emphasis on the collective experience of class exploitation did not mean race was dismissed as a form of false consciousness, not least because one of Rodney's greatest contributions had been to bring race into dialogue with class as part of his analysis of racialized class subjugation in imperial and neo-colonial contexts.²⁰² Applied to the Guyanese context, the WPA argued that racial divisions and animosities involving the Afro- and Indo-Guyanese populations were a symptom of unequal capitalist development and racialized class exploitation by the colonial authorities and their postcolonial successors in the form of the PNC. To remedy such inequities, the WPA identified labour's control over the means of production, the right to dignified work in both its productive and reproductive forms, and freedom from exploitation as central to the creation of more egalitarian forms of citizenship.²⁰³

During a period when Guyanese citizens had been primed to understand the relationship between work, rights, and freedom in collective terms, the WPA's alternate imagining of state socialism drew thousands of people onto the streets as part of the civil rebellion. This popularity was also the WPA's potential weakness. The development of a broad-based opposition movement centred on the WPA made its leadership a target for the state security forces. The resulting campaign of state terror reached its nadir with the assassination of Walter Rodney, whose death in June 1980 signalled the end of the civil rebellion.²⁰⁴ In the wake of Rodney's death, the WPA continued its efforts to organize demonstrations and other forms of civil disobedience.²⁰⁵ However, although thousands attended Rodney's funeral, the frequency and intensity of anti-government demonstrations subsided, as the opposition became increasingly fearful about the consequences of challenging PNC rule.²⁰⁶ It took the near total collapse of the Guyanese economy in 1982 for the protests to resume.²⁰⁷ This period witnessed a dramatic rise in unemployment, the cessation of basic public services, and severe food shortages, as the PNC restricted essential imports as part of its attempts to accommodate IMF–World Bank demands for public savings with its own policies of self-sufficiency and import substitution.²⁰⁸

The Food Rebellion

Growing public anger at this state of affairs contributed to a series of strikes and anti-PNC demonstrations.²⁰⁹ In 1982, there were 653 recorded work stoppages caused by a combination of factors, including demands for higher wages and grievances relating to retrenchment and victimization.²¹⁰ These work-related protests included several strikes in the bauxite industry where the pro-PNC leadership of the GMWU and its sister union, the Guyana Bauxite Supervisors’ Association, had been replaced by anti-government figures.²¹¹ The renewed wave of industrial unrest intersected with the “food rebellion” of 1982 to 1983, which involved a multiracial alliance drawn from across Afro- and Indo-Guyanese communities (Figure 1).²¹² Notable among the protestors were Afro- and Indo-Guyanese women, who participated in the rebellion because the burdens of the government's “feed, clothe and house the nation” strategy had fallen heaviest upon them in their roles – as defined in the PNC's discourse on citizenship – as wives and mothers.²¹³ These demands highlighted the extent to which material conditions remained at variance with the PNC's pronouncements on gender equality.²¹⁴ PNC statements and legislation, including the 1980 constitution, had reaffirmed women's status as equal citizens with particular rights and protections.²¹⁵ The PNC also continued to make statements voicing support for active female participation in political affairs and the necessity of providing education and childcare to facilitate women's entry into the workforce “to join with men in building the economy and the nation”.²¹⁶

Figure 1. Map of Guyana.

In practice, the material realities of citizenship for Guyanese women were very different to its legal and related discursive dimensions. The struggles of working-class Guyanese women to reconcile the demands of paid work with domestic responsibilities were documented in the local press, including the PNC's New Nation.²¹⁷ These hardships were exacerbated by inequities in the labour market. The PNC did attempt to provide remunerated work for Guyanese women, but these opportunities were often restricted to sectors that depended upon low-paid feminized labour, such as the garment industry.²¹⁸ In contrast, in the comparatively better-paid male-dominated sugar and bauxite sectors, the PNC continued to argue that agreements for higher minimum wages were in keeping with its aim of making “the small man, a real man”.²¹⁹ The PNC's Women's Revolutionary Socialist Movement (WRSM) perpetuated the perception that Guyanese women were responsible for reproducing male labour power in service of the nation. One of the WRSM's initiatives included the operation of mobile food canteens, which were stationed outside workplaces, such as the port of Georgetown. The acting GLU president, Sam Walker, stated that the canteens were beneficial because they enabled “workers to obtain a meal without having to rush home”, thereby contributing to workers’ welfare and productivity.²²⁰

These inequities became even more acute as the effects of the PNC's austerity programme worsened during the early 1980s. PNC statements and publications continued to make it clear that Guyanese women were responsible for feeding their families in accordance with the government's “produce or perish” doctrine.²²¹ The WRSM co-ordinated cooking demonstrations, which aimed to teach Guyanese women how locally grown cassava and rice could be substituted for banned imports such as wheat flour.²²² However, at a time when infrastructure was collapsing and shortages of essential goods were contributing to malnutrition and increased rates of related diseases, many Guyanese women opted to defy the PNC by playing an active role in Guyana's expanding parallel economy.²²³ Typically, this involved women smuggling contraband into Guyana directly, or selling and purchasing goods on the black market, thus securing much-needed income and supplies for their families.²²⁴

Participation in the parallel economy was dangerous work that entailed various risks, including sexual exploitation, with some women reportedly turning to sex work to raise capital for smuggling trips into neighbouring Suriname, and harassment from the security forces who were tasked with prosecuting traders selling prohibited goods on the streets of Georgetown. Many female traders also had to combine this work with their routine caring obligations to their families, and, if it was available to them, renumerated work in the formal sector.²²⁵ However, although these gendered forms of class exploitation contributed to Afro- and Indo-Guyanese women's decision to support the food rebellion, it did not free them from the reproductive labours that sustained the movement. During the rebellion, women participated in street protests and demonstrations, but they also assumed responsibilities for providing food, distributing WPA publications, and facilitating the organization of public meetings and so-called bottom house gatherings. These were forms of labour that reflected gendered assumptions about women's familial and societal roles and contributed to the perception that they were adjuncts to their male counterparts.²²⁶

That said, for all the food rebellion's internal hierarchies, the movement was highly symbolic. The rebellion peaked in mid-1983. In May, bauxite workers protested against food shortages in Linden, in a series of demonstrations that drew support from other residents of the town with similar complaints.²²⁷ During these protests, bauxite workers turned the PNC's productivist rhetoric against the regime. Workers and their supporters carried placards with the slogan “hungry workers can't produce”.²²⁸ The demonstrations escalated the following month when bauxite workers began one-day-a-week rolling strikes, which provoked parallel stoppages in the sugar industry by Indo-Guyanese cane cutters and Afro-Guyanese factory workers.²²⁹ Since these sugar industry employees were striking out of harvest season, their protest was principally a sympathy action. The sympathetic nature of the action made it all the more significant. Not only were Afro- and Indo-Guyanese sugar workers collaborating in support of Afro-Guyanese mineworkers, but they were engaging in strike action at a point in the agricultural cycle when they had limited industrial power.²³⁰ The PNC's response to the rolling strikes was to impose a three-day week on the bauxite industry, which, in turn, precipitated a six-week general strike that began mid-June.²³¹

The general strike in the bauxite industry was coordinated by the GMWU, but many of the protests that occurred during this period relied on the efforts of rank-and-file representatives of Afro-Guyanese mineworkers and Indo-Guyanese cane cutters. These workers established the Sugar and Bauxite Workers' Unity Committee (SBWUC), which emphasized the multiracial character of the Guyanese working-class population as a source of potential strength, rather than division.²³² This was reflected in SBWUC publications that stressed the shared history of class exploitation under slavery and indenture, as well as the importance of independent organization free from the racialized politics of the PPP, the PNC, and their respective trade unions.²³³ SBWUC demonstrations and rallies, in combination with spontaneous meetings in participants’ villages and homes, also provided Afro- and Indo-Guyanese communities with a shared sense of their collective struggles and aspirations.²³⁴ Such unity would have been unthinkable two decades earlier, when PNC and PPP elites had stoked racial animosities by warning their respective communities about the potential implications of an opposition victory prior to the attainment of independence. The resulting violence had created racially segregated villages and deep-seated animosities, which activists, particularly those associated with ASCRIA and, later, the WPA, had worked to repair over the course of the 1970s.²³⁵ These efforts culminated in the 1983 protests. During this period of unrest, members of Afro- and Indo-Guyanese communities in coastal villages and in the interior mining town of Linden attempted to remap the racial geographies that had emerged in the wake of Guyana's violent transition to independence.²³⁶ These efforts involved marching between different “African” and “Indian” settlements in a demonstration of collective class solidarity.²³⁷ In other cases, meetings were held in spaces that had served as an unofficial boundary between Afro- and Indo-Guyanese communities, thus neutralizing a potential site of tension or conflict.²³⁸

This is not to suggest that racialized political divisions disappeared. The SBWUC's advocacy of independent worker organisation brought it into conflict with the GAWU. The result was that GAWU activists, who feared a loss of influence, had to be pressured into supporting the strikes by rank-and-file workers.²³⁹ Even then, GAWU leaders reportedly told their members not to support Afro-Guyanese bauxite workers, because such support had rarely been extended to Indo-Guyanese sugar workers prior to the events of the late 1970s and early 1980s.²⁴⁰ This led the WPA's Open Word to claim that the GAWU was incapable of representing the Guyanese working class as a whole.²⁴¹ Support for the WPA also divided villages and even individual families, especially along generational lines, with older Afro- and Indo-Guyanese residents maintaining their respective support for the PNC and the PPP in opposition to younger community members who were more willing to embrace the possibility of change through multiracial collective protest.²⁴²

The PNC exploited this potential for division. The early 1980s witnessed an upsurge in violent crime, not only in Georgetown, but also in rural villages where Indo-Guyanese communities resided. So-called kick-down-the-door-gangs, which were heavily armed Afro-Guyanese groups with links to the security forces, terrorized neighbourhoods. Armed robberies and physical violence were a constant threat.²⁴³ Among the principal targets of this violence were women, and particularly Indo-Guyanese women. Contemporary reports and later accounts recorded that women were either too afraid to leave their homes or they gathered in public spaces to protect each other.²⁴⁴ The tragic irony was that the WPA had recognized Guyanese women were a constituent component of the working people, and women had responded to this call by co-ordinating protests and risking violent reprisals from the security forces.²⁴⁵ However, neither the WPA nor the SBWUC extended any meaningful reciprocal support to these women – even though an SBWUC statement had promised to protect victims of PNC repression.²⁴⁶ The failure to support Guyanese women involved in the food rebellion meant the material and affective costs of sustaining the demonstrations became too much, particularly once the SBWUC announced its intention to pause the protests on 6 August, following a partial resolution to the general strike in the bauxite industry the previous month.²⁴⁷

The collapse of the food rebellion was the last major episode of collective protest directed against Burnham's PNC, even though shortages persisted in many towns. Linden was described as “picture of depression and decay”, but many workers were too afraid to object to such hardships.²⁴⁸ Bauxite workers had good reason to be fearful. In September, the industry's management had retrenched more than 1,700 workers – a figure that included many workers and shop stewards who had been involved in the general strike.²⁴⁹ Additional anti-union measures adopted by the PNC included the 1984 Labour Amendment Act, which stipulated that the pro-regime TUC was the only organization with the legal mandate to negotiate wage increases.²⁵⁰ To counter this, a coalition of anti-government trade unions, including the traditionally pro-PNC Public Service Union (PSU), took control of the TUC's executive council and its new president, the PSU's George Daniels, demanded higher wages for Congress’ members and an end to the cycle of public sector job cuts.²⁵¹ For the average rank-and-file union member, however, the split within the TUC simply created yet another dilemma. The following year, a Canadian trade unionist reported that whilst many public sector employees were supportive of the anti-PNC unions, they were instructed to attend the government-sponsored May Day rally or risk losing their jobs.²⁵²

The PNC's growing indifference to workers’ waning enthusiasm for the regime was further exemplified by the government's insistence that employees of state corporations participate in the Guyanese-iteration of the North Korean “mass games”, which had become a feature of the government's attempts to showcase its ongoing commitment to Third World socialism and the continued importance it attached to collective forms of discipline.²⁵³ Choreographed public spectacles were accompanied by renewed pledges to fulfil the objectives of the PNC's co-operative socialist project.²⁵⁴ In statements and speeches, PNC officials invoked the “will to survive” and referenced the party's “resourcefulness” in defiance of the opposition forces arranged against the regime, with the IMF and the US targeted for comment and criticism in the local press.²⁵⁵ Internally, however, PNC elites were debating the future of the party's co-operative socialism.²⁵⁶ Reportedly, there were discussions regarding a possible power sharing arrangement with the PPP and the necessity of rapprochement with the IMF and the World Bank.²⁵⁷ The WPA was also engaged in internal discussions regarding its future.²⁵⁸ In the wake of the US invasion of Grenada, the party's leadership determined that it would seek a path to power through elections, rather than through revolution.²⁵⁹

The WPA's opportunity came in 1985, when Desmond Hoyte, Burnham's successor, scheduled national elections for 9 December. The WPA's hopes of effecting an immediate change through a democratic transition proved misplaced, however. Amidst accusations of electoral fraud, the PNC recorded a landslide victory at the expense of its principal rivals.²⁶⁰ The election outcome may have changed little in the short term, but the political parties’ campaign materials indicate that Guyana was in the middle of an epochal shift. In the case of the WPA, what is striking about the party's election promises was the greater emphasis on the language of democratic renewal, socio-economic rehabilitation, and multiracialism in lieu of the explicitly revolutionary, anti-imperialist, and socialist terminology that characterized its 1979 programme.²⁶¹ The WPA continued to emphasize its “Rodneyite position”, including the importance of devolved forms of collective authority, but this was partnered with concessions regarding the potentially positive contributions of private capital to the creation of a state-managed mixed economy in a democratic republic that guaranteed civil liberties and free elections.²⁶² In other words, although civil and democratic rights had always been an important component of the party's agenda, the WPA now regarded them as central to effecting change and reconstructing Guyana's society and economy.²⁶³ This decision to dispense with explicitly Marxist–Leninist language drew criticism from Jagan and did little to repair the troubled relationship between the PPP and the reformed WPA, even as the two parties attempted to work together in the late 1980s.²⁶⁴

The PNC was affected by similar tensions regarding the importance of socialism to its political programme. Following his ascension to the presidency, Hoyte moderated the party's socialist rhetoric and then abandoned it altogether in the aftermath of the 1985 elections, when he marginalized the PNC's remaining socialist ideologues, and set Guyana on a path to political and economic liberalization through reconciliation with the IMF and the World Bank – a project that was just as ideological as the one it displaced.²⁶⁵ This is not to imply there was a convergence of WPA–PNC thinking, however. For the remainder of the period, the WPA remained highly critical of the government's failure to improve the security situation; the problematic implementation of democratic reforms; and the presentation of simplistic solutions to Guyana's economic problems, which were often explained with exclusive reference to ownership structures, rather than the politicized way the PNC had run nationalized industries.²⁶⁶

Conclusion: The Ends of Decolonization and Third Worldism

The debates and disputes that followed Burnham's death underscore a critical point: the transition to post-socialist futures throughout the Third World was just as contested and uncertain as the outcome of earlier struggles to build socialist states in the decades that followed the end of empire.²⁶⁷ These post-independence state-building efforts had taken diverse forms. This was a dynamic that reflected the situated and contingent nature of Third World socialism, rather than its derivative character, as contemporary and later critics claimed. That said, for all the plurality of Third World socialism, the common factor that shaped the state-building projects pursued by political elites, activists, and ordinary citizens was the view that decolonization was incomplete. This was as true for Guyana as it was for those other Third World states that have attracted more attention and comment from historians. The relative neglect of Guyana is surprising. Events in Guyana during the 1970s were both symptomatic and constitutive of wider global dynamics. The PNC was a significant presence in the NIEO movement and a leading advocate of Third World solidarity during this period. The PNC's support for Third Worldism was complemented by a domestic agenda that not only took inspiration from policies pioneered by other Third World states, but also sought to implement novel solutions to Guyana's history of underdevelopment. These dynamics were equally apparent in the case of the anti-PNC forces, which emerged to oppose Burnham's regime. Activists and intellectuals, such as Rodney, drew on their knowledge of Third World revolutionary thinkers and their experience of other postcolonial settings to critique what they regarded as the “pseudo-socialism” of the PNC. At the same time, opponents of the PNC also took the specificities of the Guyana situation to devise theories that explained the workings of peripheral capitalism and the postcolonial state, and outlined strategies for advancing Third Worldism at the expense of the comprador classes, which had held power since independence.²⁶⁸

At the centre of these struggles in Guyana and its unfinished revolt against empire were two competing visions for the state and its citizenship regime. On the one hand, there was the PNC's vanguardism, which emphasized the primacy of the party, state, and nation as prerequisites for the empowerment of citizens and the safeguarding of their rights. On the other, there was the WPA, which rejected the paternalism and hierarchies associated with post-independence party politics in the Caribbean in favour of devolving power to the people through leaderless organizations and institutions that fostered debate and deliberation across racialized class lines. These divergent conceptions of political participation and citizenship brought Guyana to the brink of a popular revolution in the early 1980s. The socio-economic crisis that was produced by the failure of the PNC's co-operative socialist project was a critical factor in the protests, but Guyanese people also took to the streets because of a particular understanding of freedom and autonomy, which viewed individual and collective rights and responsibilities as indivisible. This was a worldview shaped by the history of unfreedom in a context where the very humanity of the Guyanese people had been disavowed with reference to their relationship to the means of production and related labour processes. The PNC had recognized this a decade earlier. In 1970, following the founding of the co-operative republic, the PNC had promised to emancipate Guyana's citizens if they worked in a productive and disciplined way for the nation state and its nationalized industries. Among the Guyanese people, there was no singular response to this demand, or the PNC's wider co-operative socialist project. For some, namely the PNC's ever-dwindling number of supporters amongst the Afro-Guyanese middle and lower classes, co-operative socialism became a mechanism for personal advancement, because it provided access to patronage in the form of jobs and other public goods. For others, including party elites and ordinary citizens, the PNC's co-operative socialism appealed because it promised to deliver on the expectations of independence and its potentially radical ideas for remaking Guyanese society resonated with their worldview. When these promises did not materialize, with the result that Guyana failed to move beyond a state-capitalist model, a broad cross-section of the citizenry attempted to remake their world through WPA coordinated protests and demonstrations. The failure of this endeavour – which coincided with defeat of Michael Manley's government in Jamaica and the US invasion of Grenada – marked the ends of decolonization and Third Worldism in the Caribbean, and the beginnings of new struggles against new forms of coloniality in the guise of the emerging neoliberal and “good governance” agendas.²⁶⁹