Walter Rodney Lives!

Peoples Power No Dictator!

Wazir Mohamed

[A reflection on Walter Rodney’s continuing relevance 27 years after his assassination in Guyana on June 13, 1980, by the Wazir Mohamad, former Co-Leader of the Working Peoples’ Alliance of Guyana, now
PhD Candidate in Sociology-Binghamton University, New York.]

Part 1

The Stalled Rodney Inquiry and the Racial Dimension of Guyana

I think it necessary that this pertinent question is asked: What happened to Walter Rodney, why was he assassinated, and who was responsible? After years of stops, starts, and inaction on this issue, in 2005 it seemed as though an international inquiry into Rodney’s assassination was finally on the cards.

The Guyanese Parliament on June 29 2005 passed a unanimous resolution authorizing the creation of a commission of inquiry, whose terms of reference were to be ironed out among representatives of the Government, the Rodney family, and others. This year as we mark 27 years since his passing we ask, what has happened to this decision for the inquiry?

It is now 27 years since Walter Rodney “the prophet of self-emancipation” was murdered in a dark corner, at a dark moment of Guyana’s history. That day in June 1980 is arguably the saddest of modern Guyana. I was 22 years old at that time, but my life was already enmeshed in the struggle which Walter Rodney defined in terms of a battle for “peoples’ power – no dictator”. Dictatorial rule was the hallmark of the Burnham presidency which ruled Guyana for more than two decades. Yet, for many years until his death in 1985 Burnham was revered in the corridors of power in the region, in Cuba, the Soviet Union, and all the Eastern Bloc Countries.

"The Society of the Unspectacular"

Eric Kluitenberg, Nettime

[The short text below was given as a fast talk in the closing program
of the INFOWARROOM series on media criticism and visual cultures at
De Balie Centre for Culture and Politics in Amsterdam, June 8 & 9
2007. After three seasons the INFOWARROOM series came to a close this
weekend with an extensive two-day lecture program devoted to the
theme "At the end of the era of mass media."]

It is time to leave the theories of Debord about the Society of the
Spectacle behind us. If today we witness the hyper-spectacular in the
mass-media, this should not fool us. It is not the apotheosis of the
spectacle, but much rather the eclipse of the spectacle — the final
moment of tragic sublimity, of hyper-violence, before it fades out....

In many ways the fate of the spectacle society mirrors (and is
mirrored in) the culture of the spectacle par excellence, that of the
mass-mediated United States of America. If today the USA projects its
power as super-state throughout the world with an unprecedented hyper-
violence, then this tragic spectacle should not fool us. The USA has
long shed it status as the sole superpower in the world. Silently
financed by China, economically eclipsed by the EU, again China, and
soon even India, unable to procure for its own wasteful energy needs
(hence its dependence on countries like Russia, Venezuela, Saudi
Arabia), culturally and intellectually unsettled — it has become a
crash waiting to happen...

[Continued from the first part, of this essay, here.]

CHAPTER FIVE: Considerations on the Causes of the Advances and Retreats of the Workers' Assembly Movement

"In what concerns our war, it is a great truth that, when men are fighting, they imagine that they are in the greatest of wars and, once peace has returned, they prefer to admire the wars of yesteryear. Without a doubt, a simple examination of the facts will make us see that we have here the most important conflict ever." Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War.

The workers' assemblies, defended by pickets and co-ordinated through revocable delegates, were not only the weapon of the social revolution but also its signal. They implied that the working class, dispersed into a multitude of organisations that divide them into a thousand parts, had joined together and that no one part existed independently. They meant that the entire class was preparing for its communal existence with equal interests, formulating its own ideas from its own practice. The assemblies were not born as organs of power but as a stronger and more representative form of organising strikes, in which workers dealt with their own concrete and immediate problems, and negotiated with management. Before exercising power, they acted as defensive organs for their everyday existence. At this stage of struggle, the proletariat did not concern itself with an assured and permanent organisation of industrial sectors and branches, areas, and provinces or at the level of the State. This indicates that it had not planned a systematic large-scale offensive against the dominant power. But by beginning simultaneously at various points, the historical logic of struggle changed the assemblies into organs of power whose enormous strength the proletariat was not fully conscious of. When assemblies existed as a real power alongside the fictitious power of the unions, opting for one or the other became the order of the day. It was a knife-edged balance. Either assemblies or unions! The unions were too weak to oppose the assemblies but the proletariat was not sufficiently conscious to feel the need to destroy the unions. All throughout the first half of the year, an immediate alternative was posed: either the autonomous affirmation of the proletariat or the defeat of the movement. For the unions an inverse alternative was posed — either lose their dominant position conferred on them by the bourgeoisie and the State as spokesmen for the workers or finish with the assembly movement by enframing the workers within the unions. The unions had to accept the workers' conquests and recognise the power of the assemblies, thereby hoping to smash them in a moment of reflux that the workers, in order to hold on to their gains, were obliged to follow through; they had to extend the movement to every sector and every town, and defend it. The end of one fight could only be regarded as the beginning of a more tenacious and decisive one. If this was not to be, if the working class did not use the victories obtained to radicalise and consolidate its struggle elsewhere — and after a more or less favourable outcome to strikes, just let the assemblies dissolve and all communication channels along with them — then one had to regard this as one of those unusual situations in which a victorious army abandons the field to a conquered one, as happened in May 1937. The unions would recover lost positions and the workers would begin the next strike in worse conditions than before. A victory never can have repercussions if it is not exploited. The pursuit of a conquered adversary must begin at the moment when, abandoning the struggle, it leaves the field of combat. The assemblies had to go on until the unions were smashed. The proletariat must know how to end a strike, keeping open its path of retreat — which is the same as that which it had advanced along — so that it can begin the next one in the best possible circumstances.

The Sick Planet

Guy Debord (1971)

Today "pollution" is in fashion, exactly in the same manner that revolution is:
it takes hold of the entire life of society, and it is illusorily represented in
the spectacle. It is boring chatter in a plethora of erroneous and mystifying
writings and discourses, and in reality [dans les faits] it gets everyone in the
throat. It reveals itself everywhere as ideology and it gains on the ground as
real process. These two [mutually] antagonistic movements — the supreme stage
of commodity production and the project of its total negation, equally rich in
internal contradictions — grow together. They are the two sides through which a
single historical moment (long-awaited and often foreseen in inadequate partial
figures) manifests itself: the impossibility of the continuation of the
functioning of capitalism.