It is evident that Latin American politics has made a decisive shift to the left. The startling presidential triumph of Evo Morales in Bolivia is only the latest in a series of electoral victories that has seen the rise and consolidation of left-leaning governments in several South American countries and, soon, possibly Mexico. This tendency is certainly not monolithic. The administration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, for instance, with its significant compromises with global capital, occupies an entirely different space from that of Hugo Chávez with his aggressive use of Venezuelan oil revenues to loosen Latin American and Caribbean reliance on traditional avenues of finance. Equally, Néstor Kirchner’s attempts to chart a relatively autonomous path out of debt for Argentina is substantially different from the policies inherited by Michelle Bachelet in Chile, where social democracy continues to embrace “globalization” with some—albeit, ambiguous—success.
Similar tendencies have not so far been manifest in the Caribbean. Aside from the singular example of socialist Cuba and the stymied attempt at populist mobilization in Haiti under Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Caribbean governments since the collapse of the Grenadian Revolution in 1983 have largely avoided radical, transformational politics. From the Bahamas in the north, through Jamaica to Trinidad and Guyana in the south, there has been widespread adherence to the Washington Consensus and to neoliberal policies of structural adjustment.
In the Jamaican context the apparent stasis of the Caribbean’s broader economic, social and political moment can be described as “hegemonic dissolution.”1 The term describes a situation where the old hegemonic alliance is unable to rule in the accustomed way, with alternative and competitive modes of hegemony from below equally unable to decisively place their stamp on the new and fluid situation. It also entails a disconnection between significant sections of the population and the formal order towards which they no longer feel any loyalty, that they perceive to have disrespected them repeatedly and to be unable to provide many with the modicum of a decent livelihood. Jamaica provides a compelling case for examining this trend, because the problems and possible ways forward—however tentative—have materialized most clearly.
As the Caribbean has become more firmly entrenched in the reformulated networks of global capital that have come to be termed “globalization,” emphasis on primary exports has shifted toward economies based on services, tourism and the remittance of income from emigrants working in the North. Beyond the legal economy, an entire sub-economy of gray and illegal activities, including drug transshipment, money laundering, extortion and even kidnapping has mushroomed. The exact size of this sector is difficult to measure; however, based on the Jamaican experience, the popular demonstrations that have followed the arrest of purported gang leaders suggest that entire communities are dependent on the illegal economy for survival.
To assume, however, that the effects of globalization on the small states of the Caribbean have been uniformly negative would be a grave error. Some of the smallest states in the region—and particularly those still tied to their respective colonial powers—have certainly prospered, at least in terms of macroeconomic indicators. Thus, for instance, the tourism and offshore banking economies of Cayman and the British Virgin Islands have grown exponentially in the last three decades, while many of their larger neighbors have languished with little growth. Trinidad and Tobago has also experienced remarkable growth amid rising prices for its oil and the development of its extensive natural gas reserves. Barbados, after a brief recession in the early 1990s, implemented a “social partners” arrangement—basically, a tripartite pact between government, the private sector and labor—that is partially accountable for the resumption of robust growth, placing Barbados in 2004 ahead of all its neighbors and 30th in the world on the UN Development Program’s human development index.2
The existence of a number of relative success stories within the region—as problematic as the notion of success may be—is certainly one reason why radical trends have vegetated in the past two decades, but there are also many other factors at work.
The paralyzing legacy of the abrupt end to the Grenadian Revolution, with the killing of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, remains a formidable obstacle. When soldiers of his own People’s Revolutionary Army executed Bishop in 1983, the Caribbean left suffered a mortal blow. The sudden collapse of Grenada’s Revolution and subsequent U.S. invasion was not an instance of electoral defeat as eventually happened in Nicaragua, or a purely military defeat in which the rump of the insurgency regroups and engages again under different circumstances. In Grenada, the instance of fellow revolutionaries killing the popular leader of the movement vilified the notion of radical change altogether, and placed it outside the realm of viable options.
The end of the Cold War had multiple effects in the region. The fall of the Soviet Union and “really existing socialism” in Eastern Europe put an end to the notion of “socialist orientation” as an alternative path of development for Third World states. More specifically, the dramatic shrinkage of the Cuban economy as it entered the “special period” in the 1990s sent the decisive signal that Cuba’s “basic needs” socialism was no longer on the agenda.3
In Jamaica, the decisive turn of Michael Manley and the People’s National Party (PNP)—from a policy of resistance to one of engagement with global capital in the mid-1980s—closed the door to alternatives, as the two dominant parties resumed the consensual pattern of rule that had existed before Manley’s initial rise to power.4
The massive migration of Caribbean citizens—mostly to the United States and Canada but also, depending on colonial connections, to Britain, France and Holland—had multiple consequences. The social and political tensions that would have arisen from the presence of large numbers of well-educated but unemployed young people were partially alleviated. And to the extent that these migrants were able to get jobs in the North and send remittances home, emigration helped relieve some of their families’ immediate material problems. However, as Prachi Mishra suggests in a recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) study, the scale of migration flows has deprived the region of a significant proportion of its skilled workers. Between 1965 and 2000, Caribbean countries lost an average of 70% of their college-trained workforce to developed countries. Individual cases are even more illustrative: Guyana lost 89% and Jamaica, 85%.5 Further, as Mishra concludes, remittances, seen by many analysts as an economic lifeline, have not compensated for the loss in productivity resulting from the mass exodus of well-trained citizens. More critically, none of the statistics measure the loss of “social capital” in the sense of absent parents, teachers, community leaders and role models. On balance, then, migration has eased some social tensions, while laying the basis for longer-term alienation and dissatisfaction. Indeed, a generation of youth now enters adulthood without the typical nurturing provided by a community, only connected to family by the narrow material nexus of “the moneygram.”
Beyond the existence of some models of relative success and the absence of a vibrant politics of radical resistance, there is, however, a wider, more textured picture. Trinidad and Tobago's economic buoyancy has been accompanied by social and ethnic tensions reflected in a seemingly out-of-control crime rate. Guyana on the South American continent, certainly the richest “Caribbean” country on the basis of its known natural resources, remains mired in a racial standoff between dominant Indian and African communities that has stalled any concerted policy of development. Crime and violence in Guyana, too, seem to have taken off on a steep trajectory with no clear end in sight. The emergence of ruthless drug-related gangs is pan-Caribbean in its nature and mushrooms wherever the possibility of new, loosely monitored routes for the transshipment of illicit substances might exist. The smallest territories are often the most vulnerable to this scourge since their security and wider institutional structures cannot withstand the power and resources wielded by wealthy drug lords. It is within this general context of region-wide social alienation coupled with increasing violence, growing unemployment, and a burgeoning drug trade, that the example of Jamaica is useful. In Jamaica, all of these problems are particularly well defined.
In february, government minister portia simpson Miller was narrowly elected president of Jamaica’s ruling—and nominally social democratic—People’s National Party (PNP), making her the nation’s new Prime Minister. Before a massive crowd of cheering supporters outside the PNP headquarters, and amid a sea of the yellow T-shirts of her campaign, Simpson Miller first read from the prophet Isaiah, called for party unity and then issued a message of hope: “I come to you with a promise of hope as we continue the transformation of the PNP and a promise of hope that all of us will unite and work for a better and brighter Jamaica.”6
She is the first woman and the seventh person to lead Jamaica since its independence in 1962, replacing P.J. Patterson, who is also from the PNP and Jamaica’s longest-serving Prime Minister. In the days following Simpson Miller’s victory, commentary in the newspapers and on the talk shows that dominate the Jamaican airwaves did not miss the significance of a woman coming to power, noting she was also someone who was genuinely from Jamaica’s grassroots and who—at least in the popular perception—had never severed her linkages with those roots. Most significant, though, were the powerful expectations that the victory seemed to have generated among her supporters and even deep within the rank-and-file of the opposition Jamaica Labor Party (JLP).
Elmore Briscoe, from the working class community of Vineyard Town, felt that a woman needed the chance to rule the country: “I feel good for a woman. Mek a woman get a chance. I feel crime is going to reduce because she’s a woman, she knows how to deal with things and she’s down to earth.”7 Even would-be critics like Winnifred Stoddart, a party delegate and supporter of opposition candidate Peter Phillips, recognized the significance of the victory. Stoddart said the new Prime Minister stood out from the other higher-ups of the PNP: “They’ve allowed things to go too low with the workers of the party; they are helping people who can do without it; she's from the grassroots, she understands when somebody says they are hungry.”8
Jamaica, while far from the “failed state” as described by some of its more pessimistic analysts, has oscillated between periods of marginal growth (as in recent years) to flat periods of no growth at all.9 It is evident that Jamaica fits into the pattern of many “middle income,” non–oil producing developing countries that respond to the impulses of the global economy, though with a broadly negative outlook for their prospects in the middle to long term. The Jamaican economy’s stagnation can be understood as part of the broader process of hegemonic dissolution, in which the old ruling bloc that defined Jamaica’s social and political path in the pre- and immediate post-independence periods is moribund.
Insurgent social forces from below are questioning the terms of the old hegemony across the gamut of symbolic and substantive spheres of the social terrain. For more than a decade, this contestation has manifested itself in the culture wars surrounding the appropriateness of the Jamaican “nation language,” a new assertive sense of blackness, and in the quintessential space for popular expression: the dancehall and its music.10 Jamaican popular music in the post–Bob Marley era has moved from a period mostly defined by the glorification of symbolic wealth and macho sexual conquest (slackness) to a more recent period of “consciousness” in which themes of unity, resistance and rebellion have once more come to the fore.11
Artists like Bounty Killer, Sizzla, Anthony B, Capleton and many more, chant a message of renewed interest in the Rastafarian religion, but with a decidedly militant twist. Perhaps fittingly, one of the newer and most popular voices is Marley’s son, Damian “Junior Gong” Marley. In his new album Welcome to Jamrock, he raises themes of uprising and revolution that are now part of the stock in trade of the contemporary deejays: “Now we foreparents sacrifice enough/ Dem blood sweat and tears run like syrup/ Any day a revolution might erupt/ And the skies over Kingston lighting up/ For the new generation rising up.”12
Marley’s lyrics, while located within the sphere of cultural contestation, are however only part of a wider social upheaval, which is increasingly taking more overtly confrontational forms. Three recent incidents, chosen for their locations across widely separated parts of the island, suggest the tensions in the social sphere and the depth of the emotions that have been unleashed.
Under the headline “Rage in Mandeville: Town loses its cool over beating of supermarket employee,” The Jamaica Observer describes an incident last January in which popular anger burst into spontaneous demonstrations after the alleged beating of two SuperPlus supermarket employees.13 The supermarket’s director, Jeremy Chen, two of his managers and two other accomplices reportedly apprehended the employees for stealing three cases of Guinness from the store. Newspaper reports said they whisked the two workers to a nearby house, tied them up and beat them; even attacking one of the employees with a dog. When Chen and his cohorts were detained and taken to the courthouse, an indignant crowd of protesters arrived to denounce the violent act. Angry crowds even appeared at SuperPlus locations, Jamaica’s largest supermarket chain, forcing many of the stores to temporarily close. Police were called to make sure the situation did not spin out of control. “We are convinced that if we had not acted as we did, they would have burnt down Mandeville,” one investigator told The Observer.
Similar to Mandeville, the rural district of Farm Town in the parish of St. Ann is not normally associated with popular upheaval, but when a businessman was suspected of involvement in the shooting death of a local resident on February 1 and appeared to be escaping the net of justice, Farm Town erupted.14 Newspapers called the third day of protests a “rampage,” reporting that residents burned down the man’s house, two of his cars, his bar and his liquor store. “The fuming residents,” as The Observer called them, were demanding that the investigation into the killing be reopened.
The volatile city of Spanish Town, some 15 miles west of Kingston, has gained notoriety as the battleground between two rival gangs: the “Clansman” reputedly sympathetic to the PNP and “One Order” to the JLP. When police killed Clansman leader Donovan “Bulbie” Bennett in late 2005, widespread protests and the burning of property led authorities to place the city under curfew. The same thing happened in February 2006, when unknown assailants gunned down One Order leader Andrew “Bun Man” Hope. After his death, in which some residents claimed police involvement, armed men presumed to be One Order members overran sections of the city. “The gangsters also set fire to the town’s old courthouse, which was used for sittings of the night court, as well as several cars parked in front of the building,” reported The Observer. “Irate at the death of their ‘leader,’ residents shouted support for the torching of the courthouse. They also prevented firemen from putting out the blaze.”15
These three brief examples—of which there are countless more—share some common features. First, there is the common popular perception, evidently fed by numerous concrete provocations, that there are two categories of law: one for those with power and influence and one for those without. The examples also illustrate a willingness to take popular action for what is conceived to be in the interest of justice. The notion of justice deployed in these instances dictates that if the agents of the law are unable or unwilling to execute it, then it is within the right of the populace to execute the law on their own behalf. Finally, the form of this popular execution of justice includes not only the apprehension of the alleged perpetrators, but also the elimination of their property and if necessary, the property of other symbolic representatives of the formal and unjust system of law.
The rapidity of the popular mobilizations, the similarity and the severity of the actions taken, particularly in the instances of Farm Town and Spanish Town, all suggest the paper-thin acceptance of legitimacy and the depth of the disconnection. Using the earlier terminology, this might best be described as an advanced phase of hegemonic dissolution. The Jamaican state, and the social bloc that operates within its circles, remains in power, but mounting evidence suggest that its hold is increasingly tenuous.
It is in this moment of advanced hegemonic dissolution that Simpson Miller’s ascendancy to a position of leadership has occurred. She has won a party election, buoyed by broad popular support, with a simple message bringing hope to the poor and calling for unity among the people of Jamaica. The problems she faces, however, are formidable. Within her own party, she has few cabinet or senior technocratic supporters with the experience and ability to run the complex machinery of government. She will therefore have to rely on many persons who have been lukewarm or openly hostile toward her ascendancy to power. And within the PNP, the majority of leaders have long been won to the notion that even if it is possible to disagree with the war in Iraq and to protest the expulsion of Aristide from Haiti, there is little room to maneuver around the macroeconomic “certitudes” of the Washington Consensus. She will therefore need the sort of technical talent coupled with political skill that can forge a policy sensitive to job creation and poverty alleviation, conscious of the constraints of global capital and yet willing to initiate hard negotiations with it.
Her support is undoubtedly strongest among the Jamaican poor, but whereas Jamaican working people have shown the ability to mount impressive, spontaneous community mobilizations around local concerns as in the three instances cited, there is little evidence of deep, layered community-based organization that builds from the local to address national and global issues. The political bases then, for a Bolivia-type movement—like Evo Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), building on a history of popular militancy and organization around indigenous, trade union and national issues—does not as yet exist. Nevertheless, given conditions in Jamaica and the Anglophone Caribbean, where politics more often than not flows through the conventional channels of the dominant nationalist parties, Simpson Miller’s election remains powerfully symbolic.
PNP delegates, riding on a national wave of hostility to “business as usual,” have elected a president whom the poor and the dispossessed perceive to be their own. If she chooses to deny her mandate and operate within the tight confines of business as usual, then her widespread popularity will ebb and Jamaica will continue along its rocky path of high interest rates, widening income gaps and low growth. If she chooses, however, to resist such a path, then she may help to initiate a different kind of politics.
Such a trajectory, while not the most likely outcome in the remarkably difficult constraints of the present moment, is nonetheless made possible by the presence of a powerful and palpable desire for a change of direction among the majority of the Jamaican people. If this course is taken, it would have profound consequences not only for Jamaica but also for the wider Caribbean; moving the region towards a deeper democracy, greater accountability and a new approach to how the local might negotiate with the global in the twenty-first century.
Notes
1. Brian Meeks, “The Political Moment in Jamaica: The Dimensions of Hegemonic Dissolution,” in Manning Marable (ed.), Dispatches from the Ebony Tower (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 32-52.
2. UNDP, Human Development Report (New York: United Nations, 2005), p. 219.
3. However, the pragmatic response to the sudden termination of Soviet aid saved Cuba from destruction, and laid the basis for economic recovery. See Susan Eckstein, “From Communist Solidarity to Communist Solitary,” in Aviva Chomsky, et. al. (eds.), The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 607-622.
4. For critical discussion of this turning moment in Jamaica and the Caribbean’s recent history, see Kari Levitt and Michael Manley, “The Michael Manley/Kari Levitt Exchange,” Small Axe, No.1, 1997, pp. 81-115.
5. Prachi Mishra, "Emigration and Brain Drain: Evidence from the Caribbean," IMF Working Paper WP/06/25 (January 2006), available at http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2006/wp0625.pdf.
6. The Sunday Observer, February 26, 2006, p.3.
7. Ross Sheil, “Church members react to victory,” The Gleaner, February 27, 2006.
8. Howard Campbell, “‘I dream it ...’ — Women respond to Portia Simpson Miller’s historic victory,” The Gleaner, February 27, 2006.
9. See, for instance, William Clarke, “The Disappointment of the Promise,” The Sunday Gleaner, May 22, 2005.
10. Deborah Thomas, “The Emergence of Modern Blackness in Jamaica,” NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol. 39, No. 3, adapted from Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2004).
11. See, for instance, Carolyn Cooper, Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Norman Stolzoff, Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2000).
12. Damian “Junior Gong” Marley, “Confrontation,” Welcome to Jamrock, Tuff Gong/Universal Records, 80005416-02, 2005.
13. Garfield Myers, “Rage in Mandeville: Town loses its cool over beating of supermarket employee,” The Jamaica Observer, January 20, 2006.
14. Carl Gilchrist, “Violent protest in Farm Town: Residents burn cars, house and businesses of man released by cops,” The Jamaica Observer, February 14, 2006.
15. Vaughn Davis, “Spanish Town erupts again: anger over gangster slaying,” The Jamaica Observer, February 9, 2006.
About the Authot
Brian Meeks is professor of social and political change and director of the Centre for Caribbean Thought at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His books include Caribbean Revolutions and Revolutionary Theory: An Assessment of Cuba, Nicaragua and Grenada and Narratives of Resistance: Jamaica, Trinidad, the Caribbean.
