Before she died, Janet Jagan admitted that she was the one who had introduced Cheddi Jagan to communism by giving him a copy of the Communist Manifesto. She was active in the Young Communist League in the United States, which, together with the Communist Party and similar type organisations, was banned and their membership criminalised by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954. This was four years after the Peoples Progressive Party (PPP) was established, with Cheddi Jagan as leader, Forbes Burnham as chairperson and herself as secretary, which party has since publicly portrayed itself as essentially a social democratic arrangement committed to bourgeois liberal democracy.
The PPP gained a lot of public sympathy when the West, led by the USA, claimed that it was communist-inspired, engineered its political demise during the 1950/60s and kept it from government for nearly three decades. Of course, not everyone believed the party was innocent and in even some sympathizers thought that, given Guyana’s geographical location, it was being completely reckless in the era of the ‘containment of communism.’
From my assessment, Guyana was a colony and the PPP could not have openly supported communism or become a member of Communist International, but it was clearly sympathetic to the cause and had and still have, a simplistic understand of the nature of democracy, i.e., majority rule. Feeling secure in the ethnic majority it then had, as directed by Vladimir Lenin’s Communist International’s twenty one admission conditions, it organised its internal business on the communist principle of ‘democratic centralism:’ that is more centralism than democracy. The twenty one conditions tied national communist parties tightly to the dictates of the Soviet Union and were interesting in other ways.
For example, no. 14 stated that ‘Every party that wishes to belong to the Communist International has the obligation to give unconditional support to every soviet republic in its struggle against the forces of counter-revolution. The communist parties must carry out …. legal or illegal propaganda, etc., with every means at their disposal …’ And no. 4 insisted that: ‘The duty of propagating communist ideas includes the special obligation of forceful and systematic propaganda in the army. Where this agitation is interrupted by emergency laws it must be continued illegally. Refusal to carry out such work would be tantamount to a betrayal of revolutionary duty and would be incompatible with membership of the Communist International.’
Worldwide, various levels of loyalty to the Soviet Union continued even after it became relatively well known that Stalin had executed more than a million of his own people and was committing all manner of atrocities on millions of others in the name of communism and the fatherland. Therefore, as we have seen in the US, globally communist parties, in liberal democratic countries, were routinely being banned, their ministers expelled from coalition governments, etc.
It now appears that the West most likely had evidence that the PPP not only planned to deliver Guyana but the entire British Caribbean to the Soviet camp. Stalin died in 1953 but in September 1951, Cheddi Jagan sent a letter to the International Department of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, which stated: 1. The purpose of this letter is to outline the political situation in British Guiana and the role of the Peoples Progressive Party and to solicit aid on behalf of the Party. 2. The Imperialists are now actively engaged in exploring the potential mineral resources. The British plan to federate most of the British West-Indian islands and British Guiana into a glorified Crown Colony. … British Guiana will therefore most likely play the leading role in any future development of the Caribbean Area and in the future federation. As such a strong militant party in British Guiana is vitally necessary. 3. The balance of power in the Executive Committee of the party is with the communists. 4. To fight for and to preserve peace is also to fight the imperialist at their weak points – the colonies. … The second reason for urgency is the fact that our party will face a general election in 1952/55. To strengthen the party … however some financial assistance is required. (SN: 11/04/2023)
Someone said that democracy (majority rule) is only bad where it is intended to end democracy, and whatever was the intention of Soviet-type proletarian democracy, to which the PPP was committed, it did not only end a better historical expression of democracy but was a particularly inhuman form of Marxist development. This might have resulted from the fact that the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in which Marx provided a more detailed explanation of the objectives of the proletarian revolution was not published until 1932, after Vladimir Lenin, a foremost thinker and first leader of the Soviet Union, had died. Indeed, Lenin took his notion of creating ‘a new people’ and the title of his important work ‘What is to be done’ from a novel of a similar name (What Is To Be Done? Tales about New People), that the Russian utopian socialist Nikolai Chernyshevsky had written while in prison for sedition.
In passing, in an article ‘The Most Politically Dangerous Book You’ve Never Heard Of: How one obscure Russian novel launched two of the 20th century’s most destructive ideas’ (Politico, 11 December 2016), Adam Weiner, associate professor of Russian at Wellesley College, USA, suggested that Chernyshesky inspired both the 1917 Russian Revolution and the financial crisis that rocked the world in 2008. His novel became a user manual for revolutionaries and ‘was one of the great destructive influences of the past century: first in his home country, where his writing helped spawn the Soviet Union, and now, of all places, in the United States, where his rational egotism continues to reverberate in American political and economic thought.’
I reject the notion that liberal democracy represents the end of history, i.e. the final stage of human political/democratic development. I am more amenable to Karl Marx’s, somewhat utopian extrapolation. ‘Only when the actual individual man absorbs the abstract citizen of the state into himself and has become in his empirical life: in his individual labour, in his individual relationships, a species-being, only when he has recognised and organised his “own forces” as social forces and therefore no longer separates the social force from himself in the form of a political force; only then is human emancipation complete’ (Economic and Philosophical Manuscript of 1844).
