Causes of Jamaican turmoil, part 5
'Slave driver, the table will turn'
By P. Chin
The following is the fifth and final part of this
series. Read the first four installments: Part 1, Part
2, Part 3. Part 4.
The labor uprising of 1938 was a highly significant focal
point in Jamaican history. It represented a leap from cultural
resistance against colonial domination to armed struggle by an
organized working class conscious of the need to take direct
action.
The rebellion erupted within the context of the capitalist
depression that started with the stock market crash of 1929.
While the sinking economy caused hardships in the United States
and the other industrialized countries, in Jamaica these
hardships were magnified a million-fold. As unemployment,
poverty, hunger and hopelessness surged, the British colonial
regime used the threat of force, coupled with oppressive laws
like the "Masters and Servants Act," to keep the workers in
line.
Unrest in the British colonies, which spread across the
Caribbean, exploded in Jamaica three years later. "The road to
revolution had been marked out," wrote Eric Williams, starting
with a sugar strike in St. Kitts in 1935 and ending in Jamaica.
("From Columbus to Castro: the History of the Caribbean")
Property relations remained basically the same after the
labor revolt with the virtually all-white big landowners
remaining at the pinnacle of power. But the rebellion forced
concessions from London that helped birth the nationalist
movement. "These limited gains of the masses provided the
stepping-stone for the aspiring petty bourgeoisie who desired
to participate more fully in the perverse capitalism which
colonialism had introduced," explains Horace Campbell in his
book "Rasta and Resistance from Marcus Garvey to Walter
Rodney."
"For a short period of the history of Jamaica, black people
were willing to allow the black nationalism and race
consciousness of Garveyism and Rasta to take second place to
the strident Jamaican nationalism of the People's National
Party," Campbell continues. "Out of the bonds of conflict and
cooperation the organization of the middle class emerged in the
form of two principal parties, both with mass working class
support."
Alexander Bustamante and Norman Manley had emerged from the
labor uprising as leaders. The former, who had sided with
striking workers against the police, formed the Bustamante
Industrial Trade Union. Jamaica's first major vehicle of mass
protest to fight for higher wages and other labor rights, the
BITU soon grew to encompass 60,000 dock and sugar plantation
workers, as well as unskilled urban laborers.
Bustamante would then launch the Jamaica Labor Party from
the BITU's base with business-sector support in 1944 after
universal adult suffrage was granted. A popular, charismatic
labor leader, though politically conservative, Bustamante
wielded tight authoritarian control over the BITU and the
JLP.
The People's National Party, Jamaica's first political
organization, was launched by Manley and a coalition that
included other intellectuals of mixed race, former supporters
of Marcus Garvey, activists from the New York-based Jamaica
Progressive League who had returned home, and Jamaican youths
with an affinity for Marxist ideas. Its focus was on winning
universal adult suffrage and self-government.
Like the BITU, "the 1938 riots spurred the PNP to unionize
labor, although it would be several years before the PNP formed
major labor unions," notes the Library of Congress Country
Study on Jamaica. "The party concentrated its earliest efforts
on establishing a network," it continues, "both in urban areas
and in banana-growing rural parishes, later working on building
support among small farmers and in areas of bauxite
mining."
Campbell explains that it was the PNP's Marxist core that
gave the organization credibility among the poor.
In 1952 Manley expelled the Marxists from the PNP and the
party moved more towards the center. This followed electoral
defeats, coupled with the anti-communist McCarthyite
inquisition after World War II. The left wing of the party had
worked to internationalize the union movement through the
Caribbean Labor Congress, and it also controlled the Trade
Union Congress. After the expulsions, Manley summoned his son
Michael from Britain to organize the more conservative National
Workers' Union.
During the 1944 to 1962 period of constitutional
decolonization, the two parties shared power. Unionized labor
rapidly became an integral part of the JLP and PNP. "During the
transition from colonialism to neo-colonialism," notes
Campbell, "nepotism, political violence and victimization
became entrenched as a part of the Jamaican political
culture."
It was also during this period that the movement for the
West Indies Federation was dealt a fatal blow when Jamaicans
heeded Bustamante's call to vote against it in a
referendum.
Jamaica was granted political independence in 1962 against a
backdrop of high unemployment and discrimination against
dark-skinned Jamaicans, who made up the vast majority of the
poor. Post-independence economic policies followed the old
colonial formula, and the unionized work force was forced to
defend its right to strike and to collective bargaining.
Poles of wealth & poverty
In the decade before independence there had been an
unprecedented displacement of the population generated by the
discovery of bauxite and the penetration of foreign capital.
U.S. and Canadian multinationals replaced weaker British
enterprises. The imperialists reaped huge profits from mining
bauxite, opening hotels and establishing import substitution
industries.
While these businesses boomed, the distribution of wealth
became even more lopsided, with the minority white and
mixed-race part of the population benefiting at the expense of
dark-skinned Jamaicans.
An unprecedented number of small farmers had been relocated
to make way for the bauxite mines, and the country became more
dependent on imported food. Unemployment also soared since the
new industries did not absorb the huge numbers of displaced
people. Tens of thousands migrated to Jamaica's two urban
centers and overseas. At this time repatriation became central
to Rastafarian doctrine, the slogan being "Africa yes, England
no."
Cultivation of the ganja herb became more commonplace as
small farmers sought to subsidize their meager incomes. When
police raids criminalized ganja growing, a new stratum of
traders took over. Jamaica's link to the United States
facilitated the growth of organized crime connected to guns and
ganja. This led to the emergence of a layer of unemployed young
people in the cities called "Rude Bwoys" who, lacking work and
other avenues of constructive self-expression, turned to crime
as enforcers in the drug trade.
Drawn to consumerism through cultural penetration by the
United States, gangs battled each other for dominance over
party-affiliated neighborhoods. The JLP and the PNP used these
bands for intimidation and warfare and violence became a
growing part of trade-union activity and the political
culture.
In December 1978 Dr. Trevor Monroe founded the Workers Party
of Jamaica, a Marxist formation formerly known as The Workers
Liberation League. Monroe, who had previously been a senior
lecturer at the University of the West Indies, has since
renounced Marxism, and the WPJ is defunct. He now serves as a
PNP government-appointed member of pariliament.
Before then, the JLP and PNP had joined forces to crush the
Garveyite People's Political Party founded by Milliard Johnson.
In 1986, the Jamaican-American Party was established by James
Chrisholm. Enjoying little or no support among the masses the
group, which advocates statehood with the United States, is not
perceived as a threat to the two-party system.
In 1972, the PNP, led by Michael Manley, seized power from
the JLP in a landslide election victory supported by young
people and Rastas. One of Manley's allies was reggae superstar
Bob Marley who, along with Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff, Burning
Spear and others, helped popularize reggae music with its
pulsating message of social protest.
But Manley's tenure was riddled with contradictions as he
sought a "third way" between socialism as practiced in Cuba,
for example, and capitalism. He believed that the rich could be
"persuaded" to return without a struggle some of the wealth
stolen from the working class. In addition, while declaring
that Jamaica was not for sale, Manley allowed Washington into
the country under the guise of the "war on drugs."
This facilitated the CIA's establishment of the Ethiopian
Zion Coptic Church in Jamaica. This phony Rasta church is
really a big capitalist enterprise involving farms, cattle,
rice fields, deep-sea fishing boats, and reportedly ganja. As
small farmers tried to scratch a living from the hillsides, the
Coptics were allowed to buy huge tracts of fertile land.
The CIA's principal aim was to cause confusion among the
Rastas who symbolized cultural resistance to colonial
domination. By advocating the legalization of ganja, the
Coptics were able to attract young "brethren" into their ranks.
They were also used in a campaign to paint Marcus Garvey as an
anarchist and fanatical anti-communist.
When Manley moved too close to socialist Cuba, the African
liberation struggle and the Soviet Union, it was easy for the
CIA to destabilize his regime. He had, in effect, let the fox
into the chicken coop.
Over the years political violence resulting from competition
between the two major parties and acts of desperation
classified as criminal behavior have surged, rooted as they are
in the deep social stratification involving race, color and
class. Given the unjust disparities, the violent events of this
year come as no surprise.
Numerous strikes and protests have shaken the island since
independence, including demonstrations that erupted in Jamaica
and across the Caribbean after Guyanese scholar Walter Rodney
was banned from returning to Jamaica in 1968. The Black power
advocate and Marxist had worked with the Rastas and other
groups of poor laborers, as well as leftist students at the
university.
After Rodney's banning this small group of leftists
published "Abeng," a newspaper that sought to bring a
materialist perspective to Jamaican history, as did the Workers
Liberation League. However, like "Labour Weekly," a Marxist
periodical published in 1938 that questioned Jamaica's path of
development, "Abeng" and the WLL did not have the resources to
match those of the state and the middle-class intelligentsia.
As a result, the working class ended up putting its faith in
the idealistic underpinnings of the two major political parties
and their trade unions.
The Jamaican people have a deeply rooted legacy of
resistance to exploitation and oppression. Their struggle for
sovereignty, economic justice and dignity is far from over.
It's hard to imagine that it won't erupt again, especially as
the capitalist world economy contracts.
In the words of Bob Marley who exhorted us to free our minds
from mental slavery, "Slave driver, the table will turn. Catch
a fire and you will get burn. ..."
Reprinted from the Nov. 29, 2001, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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