Walter Rodney Mixtape

Walter Rodney: This evening, I'd like to welcome you to hear Walter Rodney, who will be speaking on Crisis in the Periphery of the World System: Africa and the Caribbean. Dr. Rodney is a historian, a political economist, who's taught at the University of Dar es Salaam, as well as the University of the West Indies and Cornell. He's lectured widely throughout the Caribbean, the United States, Africa and Europe. He's also the author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and co-author of The Silent Class Struggle. In Guyana, he's a member of the Working People's Alliance. And without further ado, I'd like to introduce Dr. Walter Rodney. Good evening. It's not a no-show. A few small problems, like someone borrowing my briefcase and papers and things of that sort, have disrupted the proceedings somewhat. Nevertheless, I think that on this particular occasion, I feel that I'm continuing a discussion because I'm no stranger to this context. And while it is true that the audience varies from time to time, and while it is true that my appearances here have been separated by intervals of 2 years or 3 years, as the case might be, it is still true that within an institution certain traditions are established and And presumably, in an institution of learning, a tradition of learning and discussion is of the utmost importance. So I would like to feel that there would be a few people who have participated in earlier stages of the discussion, and that there will be many more who have, in some way, by proxy at any rate, also had a feel of some of the earlier issues which might have been raised in forums such as this as the years have elapsed, issues concerning the general condition of Africans on the African continent, of African descendants, the black people of this country and the Caribbean. And when on previous occasions I have had the opportunity to join with you around these issues. I have sought at all times to try and establish a methodology more than anything else, not to seek to be a pundit, not to seek to be a soothsayer, to gaze into any crystal ball to foretell the future. But to try first and of all to grasp problems in their correct dimensions and in their complexities, to describe accurately and therefore to lay a basis for a scientific analysis. And out of that, presumably, all of us collectively could begin to see the light, could begin to see the possibilities. Yes. Of the solutions, because what matters most of all is that the questions be placed very clearly. When those questions are identified, it seems to me that we are on the way to getting an answer. But there are no answers to questions which are muddy, questions which are unclear. And I would like to remind some of the brothers and sisters who have been with us for some time that on previous occasions we had cause to discuss specific issues of the African and Pan-African world, like the significance of the regime in Uganda, like the trend of events in Angola, like the pattern of social development in the Caribbean. And I would like to feel that on most of these crucial issues, the position which I myself sought to adopt in previous times has been vindicated. And I say this not with any intention of a personal vindication, but to illustrate the possibilities of the method which— to which some of us subscribe. A method which, for one thing, seeks to unite our comprehension as so-called scholars with our reality, with our being, with our day-to-day activities as we intervene in the historical process to produce change. There is a saying, particularly in Marxist and left-wing circles that one ought to engage in praxis, to unite theory and practice. And very often that phrase is used somewhat cheaply. It is bandied about perhaps without a full significance, without a full appreciation of its significance, because ultimately what it means is not merely that one theorizes and subsequently goes into— derives from the effectiveness of the practice. There really cannot be any separation except the initial conceptual separation of these two, of these two ideas. Now, at the present time, I want to move forward to look at essentially Yes. The African and Caribbean sectors of the international world scene. Those 2 areas will interest directly a large proportion of people who are here this evening, and indirectly, presumably, it interests everyone who is here. And what we need to try and find is an overview which is an accurate, or at least An approximate overview of our time, 1978. We are living in a process, and we are going to struggle, however difficult it may be, to temporarily abstract ourselves from that process, as it were, and to see it in its objective clarity. We live, and inevitably, when we live in a social situation, it is often difficult To do that abstraction. I know that it's always easier to do it as a historian, to see the period, to see the epoch when it is concluded. But when all of the tendencies are still incomplete, that, of course, is when the analysis is most difficult and where we will make mistakes. So I'm not, as I said at the beginning, intending to act as a pundit or as a guru. Maybe mistakes will be made. But we want to grasp the essence. Grasp the essentials and the inner movement of the period of time in which we are living as African and/or Caribbean peoples. And first and foremost, I would like to locate our existence within the international system, that for the longest while, from at least the 15th century, we have been part of a particular system of production. Our labor, our land, and our resources have been integrated into that particular system. That system has determined whether or not land has been a commodity in our society, whether or not labor has been a commodity. It has even determined that we ourselves have been commodities and have been sold as slaves. It is a system which at some time says, you are a colony, you are to be ruled by a white administration. And then when the contradictions reverse that process and we move towards independence, the system has had a number of new answers. And we want to deal with the new answers after a very brief evaluation of where this African and Caribbean world has reached. Because we have reached a point, more or less, of national independence. It is true, and it must be acknowledged, that the national independence movement of the Third World and of Africa and the Caribbean in particular has come almost to its conclusion. We see only the very last phases of that movement. In Southern Africa today. And we ought to recognize the historical weight of that movement. It is not to be treated lightly. There was a time not so long ago, in our lifetime, when the continent of Africa and the area of the Caribbean was colonized, a specific political conjuncture. And one which many people expected to last at least until the end of this century, if not until the end of the next. There was a period not so long ago, at the end of the Second World War, when it was not considered even sane to conceptualize a free Africa or a free Caribbean. When Winston Churchill said that there would be no dissolution of the British Empire except over his dead body, he was making a statement on behalf of a ruling class. He was expressing a perception that they did not see freedom, even in the limited sense of political independence, for African peoples at home in Africa and in the Caribbean. And there had to be a counter-vision to the vision of the ruling class, a counter-vision which was perhaps best and most ably represented in the activity and the thought of Kwame Nkrumah. And out of that vision, and out of the activity of African peoples, they swept away the whole superstructure of colonial rule. Let us not for a moment underestimate the revolutionary significance, the way in which the map of the world was transformed by the initiative having been seized by African people, by the people of the Caribbean. In our own instance in the Caribbean, come the Second World War, we were seemingly in the doldrums. There was a period when The British metropolitan government had more or less abandoned the Caribbean, had said the British West Indies had become a backwater, were prepared to trade the Caribbean off to the Americans for whatever they could get during the Second World War. And yet our people forcibly reminded them of our existence and said, never mind whatever tatters you have left after centuries of exploitation, we still demand that basic right of autonomy and self-expression. So we won in spite of the odds. That is one aspect of the dialectic. We put it aside and we see that there is another aspect, that one does not sit back and assume that this national independence per se, in and of itself means that either the day-to-day social life of the African and Caribbean peoples has improved or that they have assumed any greater control over their production, over their culture, over their future. This assumption would be false. We have to be, in a way, Having accepted the validity and vitality of the revolutionary nationalist movement, we now have to become self-critical of that movement and to see its basic shortcomings. The movement produced African rulers. Someone was telling me not long ago about a rather crude racist joke which is popular in Zambia, but in spite of its crudity. It makes a certain point, and what it does is it simulates a conversation between a white who is an engineer in Zambia because Zambians have a lot of white engineers, South Africans. So this South African Afrikaner white engineer in Zambia supposedly goes home to the Republic of South Africa and meets Vorster, the former prime minister, who was his boyhood friend. They hadn't seen each other for a long time, and he didn't know what Vorster was doing, so they were exchanging information. And he says, well, I'm an engineer. And Vorster says, well, since you went away, I became prime minister of South Africa. And he says, oh, where I come from, that's a black man's job. Now, kind of crude racist joke, but if you know South Africa, you get the point. If you know South Africa, so it's a black man's job nowadays. Prime ministerships have a lot of black prime ministers. The Washington Post was describing the vice, the vice second. What's what's his official position? The deputy prime minister of. Guyana as a large black man. So we have, we have black men of all shapes and sizes who are prime ministers, and in a certain sense, that doesn't carry us very far. We want to see what substantial changes, if any, what movement is taking place within the African and Caribbean world today. With respect to its location to the same international system into which we know that we have been located. And one has to be quite sobering in this, because looking at it realistically, there is not a lot to shout about. There is not a lot to celebrate. The role of Africa and the Caribbean in the international system has been becoming more and more marginalized, more and more peripheral, in fact frankly regressive, there is nothing to shout about, nothing to celebrate. We, we were integrated into the world system in a peripheral and dependent position. But over and above that, the changes of recent times, changes of technology changes of the forms of capital accumulation, and changes in the manner in which capital subjugates both the domestic economy in Europe and America, as well as the broader international economy— these changes have conduced to making Africa and the Caribbean more marginal. Take, for example, our share in international trade. It continues to decline. We command year by year a smaller proportion of the gross trade as conducted between nations, while the developed— so-called developed countries of Europe and North America and Japan share amongst themselves an ever-increasing proportion of that world trade. And that is just one of the indices. Many of the other indices can be used to illustrate a decline in our productive capacity, or certainly in our production, can be used to show that there has been in many instances a minus growth rather than any positive growth in the economies of several, of many, many African and Caribbean countries, that we struggle even to produce a few percentage points of growth in the conventional bourgeois sense, and at the same time the population increases, and at the same time the rate of inflation increases, so that we can in fact say we are registering a negative growth. And if that seems rather abstract, test it at the level of the goods and services available to our peoples, to recognize that in many instances the level of available goods and services has fallen, the ability of our people to command resources in these so-called independent African countries as a whole has declined. And there may be one long-term explanation. Or one explanation that goes towards underscoring the long-term significance of that change is that the products which we originally were assigned are no longer products that are central or vital to the development of capitalism. And note I said the products which we were assigned. In the Caribbean, we were assigned sugar. There was no choice. The Ghanaians had an assignment of cocoa. The international division of labor allocated to the Senegal and to Gambia— and to the Gambia the role of providing groundnuts, or peanuts, as we call it. And those functions, which were at one time perhaps crucial either to the production of food to maintain the working classes, to reproduce the working classes in Europe and America, or were important as raw material inputs, as in the case of cotton, are no longer vital to the capitalist system. At best, we find their replacement in a few instances by one or two products that are now considered essential to the world system, as defined from the center, as in the case, obviously, of petroleum, as in the case, obviously, of chrome, still of gold and diamonds, and still, obviously, the case with any fissionable materials which are crucial to modern nuclear technology. But there is a lesson to be learned in looking at the relationship between one of the older traditional crops or product lines, such as, say, sugar or cocoa, and what is presumed to be the case with the newer, more dynamic lines, such as, say, petroleum. There is a serious lesson that we need to learn, and that would suggest Yes. That even with petroleum, we are not— in Nigeria or in Trinidad and Tobago, we are not moving through a stage of development, that we are still locked into the pattern of dependent development, or rather dependent underdevelopment. Because with oil, as with sugar, in spite of the seeming differences, the choice of products is still the choice made from the center. The rationale for production is still derived from the central economies, from the metropolitan core economies. The market is still external to the area of production. It is still the old pattern of the export of a primary good, of the export of that which the economy does not really consume. And it is clear that what has happened in the past is that dependent underdevelopment has tended to create the illusion of growth at various stages. That if, for the sake of illustration, between the 2 world wars, cocoa brought money to Ghana or to the Gold Coast, as it was then, at a time when the economy was becoming monetized and when commodity production was becoming generalized, then it created an illusion that the future was with cocoa, that wealth lay if one could get hold of a farm which would produce cocoa. And long after The reality had changed. Take today, long after cocoa means anything in terms of a money earner to the Ghanaian or to the Ivory Coast or to the Nigerian people, we find large masses of Africans who are still locked into the cycle of cocoa production. Of course, they're not simply following an illusion; they are locked in because structures have been created that. Maintain them that way. And they're locked in because classes arose historically within our own society, and segments of those classes at any rate still feel that their objective interest is bound up with the type of economy and the type of dependent relationship which might have been the case, or which was the case, when cocoa was the principal crop. And we could, by analogy, Yes. An independent investigation make the same case for sugar. But then the time comes when one crop goes, and the capitalist system is capable of selectively substituting another product which will reintegrate different parts of the metro— of the peripheral world into capitalism. But the choice is a metropolitan choice. And whatever they do at a particular point in time, they are free to undo at a later stage. We do not have the control over the process. This is a warning against the illusions that might be created by things like Nigerian oil and Trinidad and Tobago oil, because it is clearly a situation in which they are at the level of the subjective It's the same phenomenon that, say, the people of Trinidad and Tobago imagine that oil means wealth, that the extraction of that product is in and of itself the basis of development. That is no different from the illusion that might have been created in the late 19th century when Jamaicans started to export bananas and thought that they were onto a good thing, no different from the illusions created by cocoa and coffee and cotton and sisal and every other product that was determined in its essence, as far as production in the world scale was concerned, determined by capitalism at the center, not chosen by our people as an integral part of an autonomous development, not chosen by our people as part of the development of all of our economic resources. So it is a short coming that we have to watch out for. Over and above this marginalization in the broad sense because of the changes in technology and the changes in the value of the products which we produce and which we sell to the capitalist world, we also find ourselves the victims of the international economic depression, the international economic crisis, I should say, because it exhibits features which are partially features of a depression and features of a recession. But again, this is something in which we live. And if we think about it enough and we look around ourselves, we need not feel that it is an abstraction. It is something which we are living. The capitalist world has been in perhaps the most serious, the most pervasive, and the most peculiar of its economic crises. Even the bourgeois economists themselves are looking back, and they're saying this thing is far more deep-seated, far more wide-ranging than the so-called Great Depression of the 1930s. And If we were to go even further, we would find that 100 years ago, in the 1870s, the period 1878-1879, Europeans used to speak about a Great Depression. The term was used in the 1870s. It was reused in the 1930s to represent points at which the international economy was in severe crisis. And whenever that international economy was in severe crisis, as always, I imagine, with any social system, the system had to take stock of itself, and the system had to take new initiatives in order to survive. I'm going to suggest that right now the international economic system, having been in crisis for these last few years, has been taking stock of itself. Now, the capitalists who man this system, whose consciousness of the process in which they live is now sharper than ever, are aware of the overall ramifications of the crisis, even where they don't have an immediate answer. And very often, we who live in the peripheral world, we amble along without recognizing what it is doing to us and what is its real significance. Above all, for us, the significance is that the burden of the depression will be passed over to us whenever and wherever possible. That is happening throughout the Third World. If you were to make an examination of inflation and identify the specific products that now— with a certain proportion of inflation, and then trace the export of those products, you will see the export of that inflation to Third World countries, including some of the vaunted oil-rich states of the Middle East. Those are also ones that import the inflated products and, in that sense, accept the inflation from the central capitalist countries, which, of course, is not new, because in previous depressions, central capitalism has also sought to export the depression, to export the penury, to export the pressure created by contradictions internal to the system in Europe itself, a system which believes in the private appropriation of the products of labor, although whether it likes it or not, it has become more and more socialized as the days go by. So the international capitalist system is— has never been more socialized than it is today. Social forces all over the world enter into the making of the products which are sent out by capitalism. And yet it has never been more private in its appropriation. Never has so much wealth been concentrated in so few hands, in a system that has been globalized in its social content. And these contradictions emerge first of all in the center where capital resides, where capital concentrates, and they are then exported to the rest of the Third World, to the rest of the world. We only need to look at the principal indices of the crisis One, the rate of inflation. Two, the degree of unemployment. And three, the instability of major international currencies. And you see how in each of these instances, the crisis, however great it may be in Britain or in Germany or in the United States, is far less than the extent of the crisis in Africa and the Caribbean. That's, that's for sure. And the central capitalist countries have some mechanisms for dealing with the problem. They establish priorities. They pass legislation. They take steps to try and cope with the 3 problems I've mentioned, whereas in our economies there is nothing but laissez-faire, because there is no power. Locally resident in the African and Caribbean economies to cope with these major problems. Inflation, which obviously runs at a high rate here, which is really not being curbed in any of the major capitalist countries, not even in Japan or in West Germany, is something which when exported to the Third World means far more than it does here, partly because The margin for survival in the Third World is often so slim, and partly because of the lack of control over our indigenous economies, so that one finds a situation where goods and services spiral in value day after day, where housewives go to the shops and literally see prices changing like magic in front of Their eyes. You have to do a little act of imagination, if you are not accustomed to walking the streets of Accra or walking the streets of Georgetown, to understand how dramatic can be the changes in price levels in those parts of the world. Don't imagine anything that you complain about in this part of the world, however valid those complaints may be, do not imagine they compare in intensity —and in extent with the rate of inflation in the Third World countries, a rate of inflation that has not only destroyed, for the most part, any possibilities of savings on the part of the working class, it has even reduced sectors of the so-called middle class back to the level which they themselves thought that they had put behind them, the level of— I'm sorry. That has not been employed and will not be employed under the present arrangements that exist, where governments in fact have abandoned the possibilities of offering anything approaching full employment in their society. And even those who are employed are underemployed. Either they are employed for part of the year, or they are really being given jobs Jobs which are, in effect, ways of social assistance, jobs that are not themselves productive, jobs in an expanded bureaucracy. And then, when the economy gets into serious crisis, a force such as the IMF comes in and says, well, we want to make sure that you maintain your balance of payments, and we want to make sure that none of the credits that we give you are going into nonproductive— Jobs. —services, like the bureaucracy. So there's more unemployment when they advance. And if there's inflation before they came in, there is more inflation as they enter, because they insist upon the removal of such things as subsidies, which may be vital, subsidies on basic foodstuffs and items which are necessary for life in these parts of the world. So inflation and unemployment assume tremendous dimensions. They have some grisly human aspects, some very frightening human aspects. Friends and I were discussing the phenomenon of crime in Guyana, a part of the world which under normal circumstances I would say is relatively crime-free. Certain types of colonial societies were not necessarily societies in which there was the production of a lot of crime. Certainly even until now we have a limited amount of crime and we have no organized crime, but there develops within the context of the unemployment and allied social pressures a species of very violent and depraved personal crime, the type that you would call mugging, which we more appropriately and evocatively would call choke and rob. And you better believe that it is choke and rob, you see, because you get choked first. And that, that, of course, is really crime of the poor and the poor. It is part of a vicious cycle in which the poor prey on each other, because the structure of society, which I will continue to elaborate later, of course, ensures that a segment of the population is accumulating and protects its accumulation, and they cannot be touched. So the poor prey upon the poor. And then, of course, when it comes to financial instability, our countries are totally at the beck and call of the large— of the major currencies because of our patterns of export. All of the independent Third World countries, of course, Yes. Most of them, of course, have relations with one or other currency group. Those who were former British territories used to have their currency pegged to the pound sterling. And 2 or 3 years ago, when the pound sterling was slipping, most of them shunted over to the American dollar. They said, let's leave these shifting sands and, and set up on the American rock, because nothing could ever happen to the American dollar. And one is not sure what those individuals are thinking of today. But then, of course, our prime ministers, these black men, large and small— —have such a capacity that one would not be surprised if they announce that they are shifting to the Japanese yen, looking for something. However far east you have to go, maybe there would be something there for a year or two, a purely adaptive strategy accommodating to whatever takes place in the central capitalist world, with no capacity of our own to regulate affairs. Now, this decline in social and economic circumstances of the Third World is not merely an export of the crisis in the metropoles. In material terms, but more profoundly looking at it, I think it is the export or the re-export of particular class relations of production. I'm going to try and deal with that concept. If it doesn't come over very clearly, it's because I myself am struggling to achieve some clarity with the idea. But I believe it to be that, that there is some There is a fundamental truth in that direction, that at the present moment the international capitalist world is using the opportunity of the crisis to ensure that it replicates a certain type of social relationships on a world scale, that it is trying to ensure that the classes which will arise within Africa and the Caribbean will both mirror the classes that exist in Europe and, more importantly, ensure the patterns of flow of surplus from there, from all parts of the world, to the central capitalist parts of the world. Because in the midst of all of this decline about which I have spoken, nothing is clearer than the fact that in Africa and the Caribbean, a certain minority has continued to accumulate. If it is a fact that the nations of a whole, as a whole, have grown poorer, then it is equally a fact that Yes. —that a certain minority has grown much richer. And we don't need to spend a lot of time at the moment in trying to be very precise in defining this new class that is emerging. It seems to me that it is hard to dispute the empirical evidence that it is emerging, that wherever its focus may be— and I think that changes from one African country or one Caribbean country to another— there is this class emerging. Origin, and that it is very closely tied to the state apparatus and uses that for the purposes of its own reproduction. Now, everywhere that is true, that this class has been defending its accumulation at the expense of the increasing immiseration and pauperization of large majorities of the peoples in this country. But these classes find it difficult to carry out this feat on aided. Within the context of the international crisis, even those sectors of the— of the peripheral African and Caribbean ruling class which had sought a measure of freedom from capitalist domination are now returning to underscore and to subscribe once more to the domination of capital in a frank alliance which recognizes the sovereignty, as it were, of metropolitan capital in its multinational form, and recognizes at the same time that they will play a subordinate role, a role which for them involves the, the perk that they will at least be able to continue with the exploitation of the labor of their own peoples. We see this particularly in the aforementioned situation of the International Monetary Fund, because it is striking the number of interventions that have been made in recent times by the Fund, not only shoring up capitalism in Britain and in Portugal, but in Egypt and in Sudan, in Peru, in Guyana, in Jamaica, and the list will lengthen Because a lot of other— Zambia's already got, Sierra Leone is going to be in line. A whole range of African and Caribbean countries are almost lining up to go to the IMF for help. Now, whatever that means, they're going to the IMF for help. Yes. And what the IMF says, in brief, is that we are going to help on some certain terms. Our terms of reference have not changed since we were instituted in 1944. Our terms of reference are fundamentally to ensure the flow of goods and the flow of profits for capitalism on a world scale. So we will help to buttress a particular ruling group within any given African state or any given Caribbean state, provided that group at the same time at least accepts as, as basic the need for their own economy to continue to produce surplus and to export that surplus to the metropolitan world. And if that is so, inevitably the need to continue the exploitation of its own population along certain lines. 2 of the most dramatic examples were in Egypt and in Peru. Dramatic because the level of resistance of the ordinary people of Egypt was very high, and it had to be crushed by the Egyptian army. That was the alliance between Sadat and his clique and his class and international capital. In Peru, the struggle is still going on, a very protracted struggle, where the working class and sections of the middle class are saying to the Peruvian ruling class, we do not accept to be sold to the IMF, to be part of a deal by which your position over us is guaranteed at the expense of this destruction of the living standards of the Peruvian people. And in Guyana, on a smaller scale, it is the same struggle. Workers and peasants who are aware of the fact that the policies that have been pursued in recent years, and policies which have been intensified since Guyana decided that it was going to go to the IMF to get certain standby credits and compensation payments, that these policies undoubtedly wipe out whatever minor gains the workers might have won through their own struggle in the colonial period and in the early years of independence, and leaves them naked and exposed to a new form of exploitation, which in our instance may not be through the private ownership of the means of production, but the net result is exactly the same. We will continue to export in the form of compensation payments and in the form of other kinds of remittances, precisely precisely the same value and more which we had exported when there was foreign ownership of the means of production. And the whole economic pressure has created the most amazing political scenario in Africa and the Caribbean, because you cannot have an economic situation which is deteriorating that rapidly You cannot have the rise of an indigenous African and Caribbean petty bourgeoisie, which is so ravenous and which is so willing to waltz with international capital. That cannot take place without, at the same time, there being political distortions within the system reflective of those facts. And in many ways, it is easier even to start by identifying —identifying those political distortions and asking for the explanations why these distortions take place. Because, frankly, nowhere in the world do you find a scenario of politics to compare with some African and Caribbean states. One could write a scenario that is a shared tragedy, and one could write a scenario that is a comedy. And they would both be applicable, because the politics is nowhere so comic as far as the ruling classes are concerned, but the consequences are nowhere more tragic as far as the working people are concerned. So you move from one Caribbean state to another.

Speaker 3: Yes.

Walter Rodney: You find these aberrations that sometimes when you think of certain films or certain novels, certain pieces of fiction which have been denounced as fiction, as having no bearing on reality, you wonder whether in fact you are dealing with fiction or with reality. Prime ministers who shuffle around, who resign.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Walter Rodney: Prime ministers who dress themselves up in different costumes, one day a general, the next day a chief of police. Prime ministers in Africa who go to the prisons and haul out prisoners and beat them themselves. A prime minister who makes his wife The chief of the opposition. Those are not things taken from novels. Those are descriptions of what actually transpires in African and Caribbean states. And really, what one has to ask is, why is that possible? If we were to take a well-known and classic example to which attention has been focus for a number of years: why is an Amin possible? Not who he is and what he does, but how was it possible in a place like Uganda? And it seems to me that the possibility of a buffoon and a murderer becoming a head of state is very much connected with the location of Africa in the international capitalist system, its marginalization, particularly in cases such as Uganda. Where the primary crop was no longer as important, and the fact that the distortions produced as a particular cumulative class led at the time by, by, by Obote tried to absorb as much as it could, tried to squeeze as much as it could out of the Ugandan people. It created this distortion, and out of this the monster Amin arose. But he's not just an individual phenomenon. He can be Yes. And because Uganda is not central to the production of surplus in the world system, then imperialism sits back and laughs. They don't have to enter and intervene in that situation. They simply have to hold him up as an example of what an African ruler is like— another large black man ruling this society and being a buffoon, you see? So they gain both ways. They are responsible for the fundamental distortions, but then they sit back and gain some propaganda value from the fact that Africans behave in that way when they are located in a specific historical and class conjuncture. And this can be illustrated in other ways. Not only the areas that are marginal, but the areas that have been reintegrated into capitalism are also made to carry out the same absurd political functions. The old Congo, now Zaire, has never really been relinquished by imperialism because of its importance as a zone of mining production and as an area for the concentration of monopoly capital, second to no other part of the world, with the exception of South Africa. And in that area, it is imperialism that has consistently maintained the most reactionary and authoritarian and, in a certain sense, almost comic regime in Africa, that of Mobutu of Zaire, a man who descends from heaven every day on the television. That is his role in Zaire. But on every occasion, as you know, that the Zairean people have made serious efforts to deal with this imperialism, Yes. And the United Kingdom has been quick to intervene. This is not a Uganda growing coffee. We're talking now about uranium and copper and gold and diamonds and bauxite, so that we don't play around there and describe Mobutu as a buffoon. You move in and you help him to liquidate large numbers of other Africans who are trying to create a rational society. And the same applies to Egypt, which at one time under Nasser Had flirted with the more radical forms of nationalism, had sought to create some national bases, at any rate, even if national capitalist bases in some instances, or state capitalist. But since the swing with the Egyptian petty bourgeoisie, we find, of course, that it's possible for them to move into a very close alliance with Sadaqat. I was surprised. I was surprised to read an article only about 3 weeks ago. And things that African leaders do and Caribbean leaders do don't normally surprise me. I thought I had exhausted the capacity to be surprised by African and Caribbean leaders. But Sadat taught me something new. I read this article, and I found out that Sadat was in France and he was in Austria, and he was negotiating negotiating with the French and the Austrians about the possibility that France and Austria would export their nuclear waste to be buried in Egypt. We know— those of us who are familiar with the pattern of life in this society, we know that capitalism, in its drive for profit maximization, has been totally oblivious of the effects on the environment. We know that they have been killing the environment in the process of expanding capital. But the alienations which this has produced in the capitalist countries themselves has at least sparked off the ecological movement. And now there is some resistance to the wanton development of this type of technology. And therefore, in this country, in Germany, in Austria, in France, etc., people are saying, we refuse to have you planting nuclear waste in the soil when you yourself know that you have no control over it for the next 2,000 years, when you yourself know that this is the most vicious form of pollution. So capitalism has been restrained in the center from going full blast ahead with certain types Yes. —types of nuclear development which involve the expansion of nuclear waste. And here is a foremost African head of state seriously sitting down with Europeans and advancing spurious arguments to the effect that there is more space in Egypt and the substrate is more stable, and he is contemplating the possibility of doing some deal with these Europeans so that he becomes the nuclear garbage heap of Europe. As I said, I don't think I'm easily surprised, but if you chew on that, you will realize that you really have to do a lot of chewing. Now, in that framework, of course, one is thinking about the possibilities of social change. The analysis of what is happening is only intended to be a— the first step in an analysis or a program, or at least some sense of direction of what— where changes are possible. And what I'm going to emphasize briefly in that respect is the question of who makes the changes rather than what changes are made, because I think we have in part been trapped by the question of what changes should be made. And if I were to make a self-criticism, I would say that I too might have been trapped by that vision, in the sense that in the past, if you made this critique, somebody— someone will come to you and say, well, tell us what you would do. Tell us what the economy should look like. What is the proper development plan for Guyana or Barbados or Ivory Coast, as the case might be? And there you go knocking your brains trying to devise a program of development. But of course, this program of development has to be implemented by somebody, by someone, by some social group. It surely cannot and will not, for the very reasons implicit in this analysis, it cannot be developed by the present state systems, by the classes that presently control that state. And therefore, it seems to me that we have to shift from that, although we need to look at it in a technical sense ultimately, and to be far more rational and scientific in planning, we need to concentrate more on who will do the changes, who has the right to reassess the situation. And in this context, I will fall back on a social class analysis, because it seems to me that that is the only valid way that we can understand how the societies are functioning and which groups can make a contribution. Ultimately, although I have to oversimplify, African and Caribbean society breaks down into 2 large components, or to 2 components with power. There is the power of working people that derives from the fact that they produce, and the producer always has that power, sometimes only a potential power which has yet to be actualized. But it is always there. And there's the power of the social groups who control the state, who control the allocation of resources and the allocation of surplus in the society. Now, for Africa, let us exclude for a moment the direct intervention of multinational capital and concentrate on the political scene, where undoubtedly the indigenous state has an authority. Autonomous capacity, and it has a capacity to wage struggle on behalf of its own class vis-à-vis the workers and peasants of Africa and the Caribbean. And in that context, we therefore need to identify the social group, the leading social group, which will both command the struggle, provide the organizational basis for the struggle, provide the ideological underpinnings of the struggle. And we can proceed inferentially. We can exclude one group as a group that is not operative and is not functioning and cannot historically function anymore to lead the African people and to lead the Caribbean people, and that is the so-called middle class, the petty bourgeoisie. Let us at least put that The petit bourgeoisie as a class is unable constitutionally to lead any Third World country anywhere except to destruction. That class was born originally, located, spawned by imperialism and capitalism. Its members, of course, do have a certain choice to a limited extent. They are fluid. But as a class, their intervention in the historical process has been to lead movements, mass movements, has been to lead populist movements, and they have imposed their own stamp on these populist movements. And they have stood as a barrier between the working people and the state, between the working people and the elaboration of a true working-class ideology, between the working people and the development of a working-class organization. All of these groups, without exception— and this includes some who would be considered as more progressive than others, it will include Nkrumah's and the Sékou Touré and the Nyerères, as well as the plethora of other reactionaries, of the real reactionaries in Africa and the Caribbean. They have organizationally established the hegemony of the petty bourgeoisie over the working class and the peasantry. All of these political parties, all of these state systems represent petty bourgeois hegemony over the working class. And if the petty bourgeois has a role, as one should hope— at least I would hope so for my own sake, being located in that class. If we have a role, it has to do with the shift of the initiative into the hands of workers and peasants. And then, for a change, we begin to serve those classes, because mostly we have been serving other classes anyhow. Mostly we have been serving the capitalist class. So for for a change, we may begin to service the working people, service the working class. But to do so, we have to understand that organization as well as ideology must reside in the hands of the working people, their own autonomous organizations born out of spontaneous struggle but disciplined in that process and addressing themselves to the real needs of the working people. Because when we import our concerns, it's amazing what the petty bourgeoisie can be concerned about. We have all kinds of preoccupations which have very little— which have little or nothing to do with what working people say and do out of their own immediate activity in production. And we have to begin to formulate— if we at the petty bourgeoisie are involved, it has to be organization that is rooted in the working class, within the working class, for the working class, which means of course it has to be a working-class ideology. Again, we cannot import various strands of bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology, which has been the case throughout Africa wherever you go. And again, this can be illustrated by taking the most progressive, never mind the Houphouët-Boigny in the Ivory and the Ahidjos in Cameroon and the really backward types. But even for the Nyereres and Tanzanian socialism, Sékou Touré and his talk about African communalism, in the Caribbean now we have Manley and democratic socialism, Burnham has long spoken about cooperative socialism and what have you. All those are petty bourgeois ideologies whose objective function Quite apart from their intentions, has been to confuse the working masses. Thank you. So we move towards recognizing that social change and social ideas can only be rooted in social classes, social forces. This is not too difficult to establish and to accept, because in Europe itself, or in this country, no significant political or economic change could possibly have taken place if that change was not seen to be part of the interest, the objective interests of some given class. The class may have identified its interest as the national interest. That is always possible. Historically. The dominant classes always assert that their class interest is the national interest. But if we go beyond that facade, we will at least accept that all social political changes, even within this capitalist society, that have been significant have been monitored— more than monitored, have in fact been engineered and carried out by The bourgeoisie is a class because that was their objective interest and they benefited. So we have to concentrate on the possible ways in which the working people, defined firstly as those directly engaged in wage production and secondarily as those who are engaged in peasant production on a small scale, that those will find ways of organizing themselves And identifying themselves with particular social change. And this brings me to what may appear to be a totally unrevolutionary concept, a very old-fashioned concept, but one that I assure you, when you think about it in the present actuality, is more desired than any other. And it's the simple notion of democracy. For a long time after independence in Africa and the Caribbean, we started to talk about a lot of things, but democracy was low on the list, partly because we had identified democracy as the parliamentary mode, so that we had taken a historical form of class democracy, bourgeois democracy in a specific form, and we said that is democracy. So we absolutized from something that was very relative. And after we absolutized, we said, well, we don't want that. Why do we want democracy? That is for the British and these people who were debating in Parliament and so on. So quite a few progressive Africans prefer to lay the emphasis on some species of authoritarianism, some species of old-fashioned duties and obligations, mostly duties from the working people. And they said that this is what is required at the present time. And it seems to me, as we look at one African country after another, one Caribbean country after another, what we are in fact facing is a phenomenon in which whether the governments claim to be progressive or not, whether the countries are large or small, whether they're former French-speaking or former English-speaking territories, there is the same tendency for the fossilization of the state almost. It hardens as an apparatus that is totally isolated from and alienated from the vast majority of the people in the society, who in no way are allowed to practice any democratic choice, which has little to do with just elections. It has to do with whether they make choices, whether they influence choices. Choices in their own society? And the answer, when you pose that question, is invariably no. The pattern of development in our society has been consistently to deprive the working people of the capacity to make choices. And sometimes we do this under the name of democracy, because we have had high-flown notions. When Sierra Leone decided to— the government, present government, To abolish democracy in Sierra Leone, they did it in the name of democracy. When the government of Guyana, like others in the Third World, decided to hold a referendum, they said, we want to abolish political freedoms, we want to abolish the right to vote, but we are inviting people to vote as to whether they want to vote in future. You see, we're being very democratic. And of course, as you know, the people supposedly voted that they would not like to vote in future. So under the facade of democracy and in the name of democracy, certain democratic rights have been abolished. And not just the democratic rights in the formal sphere of political choice, but also in the everyday sense of the working rights of the working man on the job. The trade unions of Africa and the Caribbean are almost defunct compared to what they were even in the colonial period, as they emerged through struggle. You move from one end of Africa to another, the trade unions have either been liquidated or they have been so tamed that they run around toothless and are located very— I'm sorry. Is it right whether it's a civilian regime and also whether it's a military regime? Because you see the same trend in Ethiopia. They declare their socialism, military socialism, coming out of the army. One may think a strange place, but still, we say let us be as elastic as possible. Let us not be— Ismail Haniyeh. Maybe tied to old cannons and shibboleths. Maybe the army can prove to be a socialist institution. So one approaches it with the broadest possible vision. But the reality is that that army took over and proceeded not only to batter the students on the head, to put an end to that democratic ferment that was taking place in Egypt in the last years under Haile Selassie, but, again, significantly, Singled out the trade unions, made sure that there would be no independent self-organization of the working people, so that that class could say, we are represented, this is our force, and we are taking this as a basis. As I said, without that, it's not surprising that we have no working-class parties in these territories. Maybe we have to fall back on the old ways. On the thrust that is coming from Southern Africa. We have to fall back on that thrust because in many ways the nationalist struggle in Southern Africa has already begun to transform itself into something more than a mere nationalist struggle, that inevitably, because of the type of forces concentrated in Southern Africa, Africa, the nationalist struggle is already partway into transforming itself into a class struggle. That is one formulation. In actual fact, we could say that at all times the nationalist struggle was a part of the class struggle, but now it is much more explicitly so, and that it is attacking the question of those classes within Africa which are allied with international capitalism. And this being so, the liberation of the whole of Southern Africa, which means the liberation of the whole of Africa, has implications not merely for the people residing in Southern Africa itself, but of course for the rest of Africa. It means that questions are being posed and questions are being raised inside of Southern Africa which are bound to touch and to penetrate into indeed, those territories that are outside of the immediate area of conflict, because it has been impossible in Angola and Mozambique, and it is impossible in Zimbabwe and in Namibia, and ultimately in South Africa, to think of national liberation without raising fundamental questions vis-à-vis the role of capital and foreign capital, first of all, and secondly, the role of indigenous emergent African class elements who might wish to associate themselves with that capital. You may say that for those of us in the Caribbean, we do not have that same growth point, that same point of dynamism. But what is also present in the Caribbean is the actual living experience of the present era of economic crisis Because in effect, many of the illusions that were fostered in the '50s, or certainly in the '60s, are going by the board. The classic example is Jamaica, a society in which the control over the reproduction of ideas was so total that it was impossible to discuss socialism 5 or 6 years ago. And the turn to socialist rhetoric and, and, and, and sloganeering and, and so on has been determined partly by the fact that the Jamaican middle class and petty bourgeoisie and aspiring national bourgeoisie was in crisis on a world scale, that they were finding it difficult to guarantee their share of continued accumulation, and partly by the struggles of the Jamaican working people who are not standing still, that there is that pressure to be understood, that many of us who are making these kinds of assessments about where our society happens to be going, when we make these assessments at a purely theoretical level, we seem to ignore the most important fact of all: what the working people are actually doing. We seem to imagine that they are asleep, not seeing that day by day, in many complex and sometimes minute ways, but ultimately significant ways, the working people are arising to an awareness out of their direct experience of the meaning of the new forms which the system has assumed in all parts of the world. And therefore, there are really 2 attitudes, perhaps, that I would like to leave you with. The one attitude is a very critical attitude, is a very sober attitude. It is one that realizes that the task of development, of transformation, and of independence in Africa and the Caribbean is, is far more difficult perhaps than we had anticipated. There was a sense when at the end of the '60s and in the early '70s, there was an aura of escapism, of romanticism, a feeling that the political victories of independence would necessarily be followed within the foreseeable future by certain economic changes. Now we're even back to recognizing that the economic changes will not come until there is a deepened political revolution that goes far beyond that struggle for independence. And that is sobering. In fact, what is even more sobering is that if we cannot seize the possibilities of the mobilization of working people inside of our societies, we also have to face up to the possibility that regression will take place, will continue to take place, not merely whether we will stagnate or we will advance, But whether we will advance or regress, those are real choices. Historical regression is not new. It certainly is not new in the Caribbean, where the tremendous efforts of the Haitian people produced the greatest revolution of the 18th century. But by the 19th and 20th century, Haiti had obviously regressed below a level even for the rest of the Caribbean. And now we see the same regressive tendencies manifesting themselves, and they are part of a more generalized phenomenon which we see in the southern cone of the Americas— the fascism and corporate state direction of the Brazils and the Chiles and the Argentinas and so on. So we need to recognize possibilities, even frightening possibilities, that we could move in another direction. Well, when I that it is only as a warning, because there are other tendencies which suggest that regression may occur, but it is not the dominant historical tendency and cannot be. If we understand the movement of matter, if we understand the movement of society, we will not imagine that regression is a dominant tendency. And maybe there are long and short ways of explaining this. I'd rather I'd rather choose a rather short way, a way that is perhaps simply an emotive illustration, but it is one that came to my mind and has fascinated me for quite a while. And it was a story which I read, a factual account of a massacre which took place in Mozambique. The Portuguese went to one village Yes. Which they call Wiriyamu, and they rounded up the population in that village, men and women and children, mostly women and children. They butchered that population. After placing them in a line, they shot them down. They then heaped the bodies together and set the bodies alight. And they went off. So supposedly nothing should have been known of this because everybody was accounted for. The story came out because one boy survived. He survived. He had been shot. He had been wounded. He fell. He was put into the pile. The pile was lit, and he managed to creep out From under this pile of burning, bloody bodies. It's a scene that defies even, you know, Dante's Inferno. It seems more bizarre than the supposed reality or the fictional reality. And yet, in a sense, it is symbolic. Because as we know, Mozambique won. And somehow there is a level at which we have to unite an understanding of the real world as we reflect on it, which is the response that is mental, and as we connect with it, a response that I suggest is visceral. It's a gut-level response. Now, at the gut-level response That boy climbing out of that pile of burning, decaying bodies was a symbol of the possibilities that are inherent in human society, and certainly possibilities that are more than inherent in our society, not because of any racial mystique, but because of the dialectic itself, which has heaped upon us certain forms of exploitation and oppression. So that the act of survival requires an even greater act of affirmation. Thank you very much.

Speaker 3: In San Francisco, on African Liberation Day, Brother Walter Rodney, an African historian, noted both the importance of African Liberation Day in terms of our African identity and some of the root causes for our problem of identification.

Walter Rodney: I have met brothers and sisters Yes. —who say that their mother tongue, quote-unquote, is French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, as well as English, which we speak. And because of this, we have a problem of identification. We do not know whom we are. And that is why this gathering is of great symbolic importance, because it is an act Right. We are saying that we identify with the African people of the African continent. We are saying that we are an African people. And when we make this identification, have no illusions about the fact that this is a very revolutionary initiative. It is A rejection of every other form of identification which the white society has asked us to accept. Let me draw your attention to something which white universities and white libraries practice, and this is a university community. Numerous universities lie around this land. Go into their libraries and check the library of Yes. In the World Congress card, under Europe or Europeans, you will find all entries listed concerning the continent of Europe. You will also find entries listed about Europeans in East Africa, Europeans in North Africa, Europeans in Asia and Australia. Look under the Chinese. You will find entries listed not only for mainland China, but for Malaysia and for the Chinese In, in North America. But look under Africa and the Africans. The only entries under Africans relate to the continent itself. There are no entries under Africans overseas. There is no such category. Africans who have been raped from the continent mysteriously disappear and become Negroes. Aha! Welcome to this public meeting of the Working People's Alliance. As Brother Thomas has said, it is the first public meeting we have had for the year, and it is long overdue. Yes, it is. I want to devote my discussion tonight to a brief examination of the particular period Which we are living through in Guyana at the moment. I want to distinguish this period as one that began on July 11th, 1979, the early morning— the early morning of July 11th, when that building in Camp Street burned to the ground. This is a period that has been marked by 2 developments. It has been marked by an increase in state violence, and it has been marked by an increasing deterioration in the living standards of the broad masses of our Guyanese brothers and sisters. It is important to realize that these 2 things go together. Brother Thomas, a long time ago, wrote a fundamental document of our party It was a document out of which we derived the slogan, Bread and Justice, and Bread and Justice has remained the slogan of the Working People's Alliance, and we will adhere to that slogan and fight for that slogan for as long as it is necessary.

Speaker 3: Yeah!

Walter Rodney: In that paper, Brother Thomas demonstrated The way in which the social services are collapsing around us. And we need to understand the link, the fundamental link, between the violence of the state and this kind of deterioration in our ordinary lives. In subjecting this period to analysis, we need to try to understand where this violence comes from. We need to identify the various forms of this violence. How it is operating and why it must continue to operate until the Guyanese people take their destiny into their hands and free up themselves and their children. Free us, free us! Let us first of all distinguish the very open forms of state violence, the kind of violence that has been unleashed against the sugar workers of this country. When they went on legitimate strike action to claim their legitimate share of the profits, what did the regime do? We have said these things before, but we cannot say them too often, because we need, we need to pay attention to the responses of the regime to the agitation of the masses. It is only with that kind of perspective that we can come to understand the nature of the state today. But these overt forms of violence, you realize, for example, that whenever the question of power is put on the agenda, whenever it's a question of elections or the referendum, whenever it's a question of worker action in defense of their interests, the nakedness of the violence comes out for all to see. And this violence Has taken some terrible forms in the recent months. We have seen and lived through political murder. We have lived through the murder of Father Dhak, murdered by the thugs of the regime outside the main police station of this city. We have lived through the murder of Brother Kwame, shot down in cold blood by the police. We have witnessed the murder of Brother Dublin. Yeah. Ilwisma McKenzie, shot down late at night as he was coming out of a nightclub, and they tried to claim that Dublin was a criminal. Now, when a regime degenerates to the point of political murder, it is a very serious matter, and we need to be careful in Guyana that we do not become numb to these things. Because that is what the regime needs. It needs us to become numb, the way they have tried to make the masses of Haiti numb to violence. And when we become inured to this kind of violence, they can carry it out more and more nakedly against the people. So we need to be vigilant. It is only vigilance and agitation and protest against these forms of violence that will preserve us. Thank you. There has been, since July 11th, a systematic campaign on the part of the regime to liquidate our party, the Working People's Alliance. But we stand here tonight and tell you that in spite of the pressures, in spite of the courts, in spite of the police, in spite of the thugs, the Working People's Alliance is not liquidated. We are not liquidated. We believe in the party, that what we represent is the most decent aspirations of the Guyanese working people. And you cannot liquidate the most decent aspirations of a people. They will continue to live there. They will— they may go dormant, but they cannot be liquidated. And we want to serve that notice on the regime. We believe in the party. They can bring down their pressures, but the Working People's Alliance came out on July the 27th at Louise Row and declared to the people that we had come onto the political scene as a political party and that we were here to stay. And let the regime hear that loud and clear. We are going nowhere. Here's the thing. We have seen another very sinister development, which is the way in which the courts of the country are being systematically abused. And in this regard, I want to draw your attention to the activity, the action taken by a particularly brave Guyanese sister, Sister Sohail Jadubey. You're right. So let us hail up that sister, because in a situation in the judiciary where all kinds of rights are being eroded, where magistrates are being called by the Chief Justice, who's being called by the chancellor, who's being called by the executive president-to-be, and being told what to do, she said, I will not do it. So let us hail up that sister. And recognize that in that attitude of resistance and courage lies the future of Guyana. Except more and more of God prepared to come out and to stand up and to resist the regime. You see, they can do nothing against the people's resistance. This is what we need to understand. This was the lesson of Iran. This was the lesson of Grenada. This is the lesson being taught to the Americans today in Salvador. That when a people unite and begin to resist the tyranny, no force can stop them. No armies can stop them. They have been passing some extremely repressive laws. They passed the Administration of Justice Act, and the Bar Association of this country, whom, if necessary, shall picket the courts. They found it necessary to take industrial action to demonstrate their protest against that legislation. They said then that this was a very sinister development because this act could be used for political victimization and for use against political enemies of the regime. And we have seen this come to pass. We have seen Guyanese people being denied the right to jury trial, an extremely important right, the foundation and cornerstone of justice. And today in Guyana, that right has gone by the board. But that was not enough. They formed the Administration of Justice Act. When they tried to apply it to Brother Abata, the thing wasn't working too perfectly. Because in spite of the genius Shahabuddin, these acts are concocted in political backrooms, and they have no serious substance in law. Boo! So what did they have to do? They had to return to the Parliament in the middle of a case and change the law. And they approved a new thing, a new monstrosity called the Criminal Law Bill. We have named, since it has been approved by criminals, Yes! Now, these overt forms of violence, the political murder, the unleashing of the military against workers, the abuse of the judiciary, the use of the courts, the thuggery— these are the things that we have seen come to pass in Guyana. These are things Which our fathers and mothers, who gave their blood in the struggle against colonialism in this country, who fought for very serious rights and won those rights— these rights their children and their grandchildren are living to see being taken away day after day by this regime. And we have to put a stop to that, brothers and sisters. Yes! Now I've been drawing your attention so far to the most visible aspects of violence in the society. You notice, for example, the degeneration when the Catholic Standard has decided to change from putting in that little box those who have resigned and gone abroad. They're now putting down those who have been murdered by the police. In a particular week. Day after day, in the rag, the Chronicle, we can see some nonsense about people attacking the police. 10 police with berettas surround a man, and he decides to attack them with a cutlass. Yes! Yes! Yes! And the young people of this country are deprived of work. And when you deprive people of work, you deprive them of the right to life. You begin by depriving them of the right to life. They are driven into extreme situations, and then you mow them down on the streets. That is the degeneration to which I'm drawing your attention, and it has drawn the attention of the Consumers Association. And Sister Cox, who has come out recently and spoken about this degeneration, must be commended for that. Thank you.

Speaker 3: Amen.

Walter Rodney: But there are other forms of violence, sisters and brothers, the hidden forms of violence practiced by the state, to which we must also draw attention. For us to understand, for us to understand this violent state, we need only look at the history of the ruling party. How did it come into power? We know how it came into power. We need to tell our children how it came into power. It came into power by a well-orchestrated plot by the CIA and the British intelligence services that installed this regime on the backs of the Guyanese people. That is how it came into power. The CIA found fertile ground It found fertile ground. It came in and exploited and preyed on the racial insecurities of our people, fomented racial strife, communal strife. We remember the dark, nightmarish days of the '60s. That is how the PNC came into power. Let us not forget it. That was the first great crime. And I have said elsewhere that Jonestown seemed to me like the logical conclusion of PNC violence. It is the natural historical arc of violence that is described by the PNC, because in Jonestown— that's their uninvestigated monstrosity— in Jonestown, a lot of the essential features of the PNC came to be concentrated.

Speaker 3: Yes.

Walter Rodney: Concentrated in some disgusting way. The violence, the murders, the funny sexual goings-on at Jonestown, the corruption, the American dollars. You look, every aspect of Jonestown is a concentrated, concentrated distillation of PNC behavior and activity. Yes. Now, we need to understand that after coming to power in that manner, the regime has found it necessary to maintain itself in power by the constant exercise of violence. We know the history of the elections, the rigging of the lists. This is all history. We lived through this. But it is important that we not lose our sense of revulsion at these activities. Let us not shrug them off and say, well, you know, that is how they behave. That is not enough. We must recover in this country our sense of outrage at these kinds of activities. And it is when we recover in full that sense of outrage and revulsion that we will put an end to the Yes. Yes. So I want to look at these kinds of what I have called the hidden forms of violence in the society. You know, it is very easy, it is very easy, it is what the racists in South Africa do, it is what Ian Smith has been doing for years, to look at the liberation struggles To call them violent people. They were putting out the word that Robert Mugabe used to drink blood and all kinds of obscenities. Why? Why? Because the state exercised enormous violence against the African people until the day came when they decided that they had exhausted every possible means. They had exhausted every possible means. Yes. And nothing else was left but to commit their nation. And no revolutionary commits his nation calmly to bloodshed. But it was necessary in Southern Africa. It was necessary in Zimbabwe. So we have to be careful that when we hear all this talk of violence and all this talk of treason, we have to be very careful, analyze the situation very concretely. Yes! Yes! Now, the everyday violence I'm talking about has to do with the struggle for food. That is a form of violence. It is violent when a mother wakes up in the morning who cannot find food to feed her children. It is the most obscene form of violence. Well, that mother has to go and join those enormous lines in Georgetown and throughout the country, trying to find some ordinary, ordinary items of food to feed the children and the family. This is an enormous kind of violence. And then the regime— these people are without shame. This we have always known. But the obscenity Of the Minister of Labor, who calls the dinosaur, suggests that the reason for the long queues is not because they're hoarding and giving it to the PNC knowledge-sharing institutes and foolishness. No, that is not the reason. The reason is because the workers in there are not packing the food fast enough. It reminds me of when When the water system broke down not so long ago and all kinds of trash was coming out of the water pipes, and they turned around and said it was because of them men throwing cast nets in the Lamaha. But I've been throwing cast nets in the Lamaha since I was a child, and I never see worms coming out of the taps before. When we look at the situation as regards food, Imagine, Brother Thomas pointed this out the other night, a regime that would have the gall just before May Day, International Workers' Day, to put a big headline in the Chronicle saying milk has been banned in the interests of the people. Milk has been banned in the interests of the people, condemning our children. Yes. To calcium deficiency, condemning our children to further malnutrition. And you know, we have the most serious malnutrition. It is only Haiti in the Caribbean, only Haiti that has a worse nutrition situation than Guyana. When we look at the situation of the health services, we look at the situation of the public hospital, And realize that because of the collapse of that health service, because of the demoralization of the doctors and the demoralization of the nurses, the shortage of drugs and the general working conditions under which those people must operate, we realize that one of the nasty effects of this is that it has given rise to a lot of extremely expensive exploitative practices in the private hospitals in this city. There are private hospitals in this city that make a habit of hiring nurses who haven't completed their final exams so they can pay them $120 a month and make them do full nurse's chores. And the Working People's Alliance is drawing your attention to the way in which these revolutionary socialists Allow the most exploitative kind of capitalist practice to go forward in the society. These are practices that are increasing hustling, smuggling. These are the big industries in Guyana today. When we look at the situation of employment, it was mentioned to begin with. That it is over 30% of all working people who have no work. And as I said before, when you deprive people of work, you are depriving them and their families of the right to life. Over 30% of our people have no work, and those that have work are told that you are privileged, you are lucky. It is because the regime is so generous that you have work, and that is why they expect you to be so grateful that at the slightest sign of any kind of opposition or disaffection on your part, they come to you and say, well, look, maybe you have this work long enough, we'll give it to somebody else. And you know who they're giving it to. Bye. In the situation in the schools, and I want to touch on this school situation very briefly. Recently, some children of this city, some children of this city have pointed the way forward, and we in the Working People's Alliance will hail at the children who have marched forward. It is important to note It's important that the to realize that those children are protesting immediately the transfer of their headmistresses and headmasters. But that is not all that they are protesting. They are protesting against the shortage of textbooks. They're protesting against their being dragged out into mass games. They are protesting the brainwashing, the party for education in the schools. They are protesting the brainwashing, the party for education in the schools. This is the kind of thing they're also protesting. And we believe in the Working People's Alliance that the children of this city, once they have been attacked in that way, have responded in a way that we in this party are proud, are proud to call them children of Ghana. We noticed, for example, that that man Dargan, some new mouthpiece, that's with a new look in the Chronicle, they've decided to infiltrate into your homes. All kinds of trash coming out from Dargan every day. But don't laugh, it's very serious. Because yesterday I noticed that Dargan came out and talked about incitement and treason, and the next thing I know, some people get charged with treason.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Walter Rodney: So does Dargan. Looks as though he's very close to the big mouth. So we have to be very careful about Dargan. Now he's trying to say about these schoolchildren, you know what he's saying about them? He's saying about them that they have inherited too much of the colonial past. They are colonial little children, and they want to maintain privilege. And that is why they don't want to see these good headmasters ahead, Mr. Sid. Go to the poorer working-class schools. That is Dargan's profound analysis of the schoolchildren's movement in this city. We have to say to Mr. Dargan that we do not doubt that there are colonial traces in this society which do need eradication, but we will not be diverted from the tasks of the moment, which is the struggle against the neocolonial regime. That is locking our people into the most servile relations to the financial institutions of imperialism. We will not be diverted from our struggle against that because they come and invoke some set of white people who gone from here so long. Let the workers at Wismar tell you who are the more thorough exploiters. Go and ask a bauxite worker today. Go and ask him under whom he has suffered more oppression, and he will tell you, and he will not tell you the Canadians. Now these economic policies of the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, has imposed the most savage sanctions against the working people of this country. We warned when the regime was entering into their secret deals with the IMF. We in this party warned that this could only aggravate the misery of the masses. The IMF has a long history of aggravating the misery of the masses throughout the world. And we have seen this come to pass. We have seen consumption tax We have seen collapse of the already collapsing social services come about. These are the normal byproducts of the IMF. They will settle for nothing less. When the IMF gives you money, they give you money in exchange for your blood. That is the history of the IMF. And this regime has entered into this secret pact with the IMF. And one aspect of violence I will touch on briefly the aspect to which Brother Thomas alluded the other night, which I believe to be one of the most serious aspects of violence in the society, and that is the aspect of mental violence. What happens when a single party controls the only media, when they strangle all other media, when they are the only voice you can hear? It leads to a most terrible degeneration in the society, and we are beginning to see that today. We have just learned that the 2 radio stations have now become one. Nothing new. We have seen the way in which you can influence the radio station. Shambach. Shambach comes on and he says a few nasty things about the local hero. The local hero calls up his protectors, and the next thing you know, Shambach is off the radio. I am not a fan of Shambach. I am not a fan of Shambach, but I'm less of a fan of the local hero. We must protest against this bombardment Of our children, our homes, with the lies of the regime, the lies that are coming out of the radio day after day, the lies that are coming out in the Chronicle day after day. We must protest this, because except we do, except we do, they will reduce us. They will reduce us to a kind of robotic people who will hear one thing, orders to march, and march. We must not be afraid. This was the development in Nazi Germany. This is the development in all totalitarian societies. And we know that one of the healthy things about a free society is the capacity of contending viewpoints to be heard. Let the people decide. Let them debate. Let there be a ferment of debate and thought loose in the society. This we regard as a healthy situation. The situation today is as unhealthy as it can be.

Speaker 3: Yes, 28th of October, 1968, Walter Rodney riot. I never forgot that. I spent 7 weeks in the jailhouse for that. Hey, I tell you, um, because like everybody was rioting, everybody, you know, you didn't want to be labeled PNP because like it was very hard, uh, in those days. In that day, you, you might have a, a good phone, you know, on you right now that you can see social media, but in those days the social media was a star. From the greener in your back pocket. Everybody walk with a star. You have the greener first in the morning, and then in the evening you have a little star. And on the star, it mark front page, Chinaman kick Black woman in her belly and she lose her baby. That's one. Dr. Rodney is on the plane with Muhammad Ali, and they can't come off of the plane. The government say, Mr. Sheehy, who share with The prime minister at that time tell them they can't come off the plane because they don't want to see them in Jamaica, because Dr. Rodney deal with, um, the Black people struggle, and he's a historian and he's a doctor, to show us. And those days was like people were moving on to more social, you know, more than the, um, the colonial type of writing.

Walter Rodney: Yeah.

Speaker 3: system. So we, we— Dr., um, Mr. PJ Paterson, tell you, and, um, Arnold Burcham and a couple more stalwarts of the PNP, they decided to have a protest. And they start from Garden House, right, on Duke Street. And for me, I was working at the government printing office that time because you know I tell you I learned three trade at half five. I was printing, I was doing compositing in the printery and run the press. And I come out for lunch twelve o'clock and there was a friend. His name is Fullwood. His father have a band named the Soul Syndicates live on number ten Ninth Street. I used to play in the band and I was a member of the band and he called me made me found guilty. When I do the work on block people can't come out. I want to go to Jamaica. I want to do the work. So I stopped and said, Lucky, why are you saying that? And talking, talking, I end up in this big, big— everybody— big protest with thousands of people. They end up to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. That is one where we call Racecourse, used to call it George P. Memorial Park. It's called Heroes Circle now, you understand? So we went there. And when we went at that place, I tell you, it's like people start to fling stone on the ministry. The soldiers walk over to the ministry to part us out. You can see soldiers walking, and then the police. And then they fling— people start to fling on the police, and the police did tear gas us. And then from that tear gas— Oh, man. And they run up, everybody end up in Abdul and Mazuka place, and the people walking out with, with a lot of things. What people walking out with, lampshade, TV, and everything. You write down in those days, you know what I mean? Yeah, in those days, people drive bus, get free drive. They call the driver, leave his bus, and the police change his uniform. Yeah, yeah. And in the evening, I was walking. In that time, there was a song named Blood, Blood, Blood and Fire. There is no water throughout the fire. And I— we were singing that song, walking down King Street, our pocket full of money, you know what I mean? And, um, all I feel is a big hand in my face, in my back. My waist. When I look around, there's a big fat policeman, and they tie us like— 7 of us or 8 of us, 8 policemen or whatever. They grab us and, yeah, put us in this thing in the pickup. They call it Black Maria. In those days, we call it Black Maria. It's like a Ford, the back open, some board come, you sit on the bench there. And when I went to the station, I started talking a lot because I was supposed to work at the studio. After I leave, I supposed to go at the studio to play before Stranger Co sings a song.

Walter Rodney: Woman, I wanna bang around.

Speaker 3: But no, no, no, no, no. I supposed to sing that, play that song, Carlton Barrett, from the man. But I end up playing the song. And because I wasn't there, I was in some demonstration somewhere. And when I still, I tell the police, policeman, when I was in there, the policeman is an officer, policeman is a Nudishiner. Why you lock me? I'm a Nudishiner. Policeman say, I see you, you collect money from you, you was the conductor upon the bus and your friend was driving the bus. Your friend Dirty Eye was driving the bus.

Walter Rodney: Yeah.

Speaker 3: And I was have to shut up. I couldn't say nothing to the policeman. Yeah, because it was It was a terrible day. The policeman, they might tell you, I see people cutting up Chinaman. Take out his ratchet and make an X on the Chinaman face and his daughter and his children. Yeah, it was a terrible day for the Chinese. They burned down Tower Street and burned down certain place. They used to call it Chinatown, you know, in Tower Street and Harbour Street, you know. So they burned that down. So I'm telling you.

Walter Rodney: All right. So we're going to continue with that question. I'm back with a new question. And how did you end up participating in the riots? And were you there with Peter Tuch?

Speaker 3: Riot? Peter Tuch? Peter Tuch wasn't in that riot. Peter Tuch not in that riot. Those riots are like for St. Albans and Kingstonians who are suffering. For a long time. And for me, I was a musician. I was working. I just, years ago, I listened to this man who is part of a band and just follow him and end up as a revolutionary thinking, God, no Black people can't come in. And Muhammad Ali was my favorite boxer at them time. I end up, that's what he have in my head. I end up there, you know what I mean? You know, with all those people. Yeah. And university students that goes there with all those politicians, they don't get locked up. Um, but people like we, a demonstration, the police locked up, you know what I mean? So, um, I, I, I don't really regret that because it's like in those days we were trying to set a pattern of just imagine every day police beat you and this colonial system and if you pass somebody, you have to say good morning and all them things there. You know what I mean? And you know inside your heart you're a good person. So, you know what I mean? Why should they worry about that? And you live with them so good and you don't do them nothing. So it's like in those days, love, we was like rebels, revolution. Be honest, 'cause things weren't right for us growing up.

Walter Rodney: You know what I mean?

Speaker 3: I'm sorry. You see me in the movie Rockers? Yeah, I'm trying to send a message to the world about what happened in Jamaica. Is it true? I have nothing to hide about that.