Guyana has just finished celebrating the 50th Jubilee Anniversary of its independence and quite a number of citizens, while appreciating the symbols of national sovereignty, seriously questioned what was there to “celebrate” about the experience. At a minimum, they were perturbed by the aenemic material progress achieved in those 50 years in the face of the converse promised by the “independence leaders”.
While there can be no monocausal explanation for any social phenomena, much less one so complex as “economic development”, the economic model chosen by the leaders have to be given great weight. If for no other reason that such models are based on fundamental premises of human “nature”, behaviours and motivations while launching institutions based on those premises to deliver the good life on a foundation of economic security.
At the time of our independence, there were two competing macro models of development in front of our leaders – capitalism and socialism, in the parlance of the times. There were several variances of these models that purported to address critiques of the ideological and particular implementation contradictions. In Guyana, Cheddi Jagan was enamoured of the socialist model exemplified by the Soviet Union, and as a matter of fact, this was the proximate cause for his removal from office by the US. The latter promoted the capitalist model, as exemplified by WW Rostow’s “Stages of Economic Growth”.
While Forbes Burnham, tactically accepted the latter path, this was quickly seen and a tactical feint on his part so as to gain American help to oust the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) Government. In 1974, in his “Declaration of Sophia”, Burnham announced that he and the People’s National Congress (PNC) had always been, and remained, “socialist” and that henceforth the model of development would be “cooperative socialism”. Within a decade, the country had become an economic and social disaster plummeting by all UN indicators of development to just above Haiti in this hemisphere.
While the economy imploded, the PPP insisted that the particular model of socialism of the PNC, not socialism itself, was responsible for the disaster and offered “critical support” to the PNC in several of its socialist thrust including nationalisation of “the commanding heights (80 per cent) of the economy”. This defence of the failure of socialism (“it’s the application of the ideology, not the ideology itself that is at fault”) has been a constant feature of leftist hagiography even though it has been totally rejected by the empirical evidence from each of the five continents.
So it was somewhat disconcerting that as the socialist experiment in Venezuela, launched by Hugo Chávez and continued by his successor Nicolás Maduro, collapsing in a remarkable resemblance to the PNC’s version of three decades earlier here, the argument would be regurgitated in Guyana. Until recently, Hydar Ally was an Executive of the PPP and the Permanent Secretary to the public service. Responding to a criticism in the press of the failure of socialist model as exemplified by Venezuela, he had this to say:
“There is a fundamental difference between capitalism and socialism as models of economic development. Capitalism is essentially based on the exploitation of the majority for the benefit of the few. By contrast, socialism, as a theoretical construct, is a system of production and distribution in which the fruits of human labour are intended to be distributed in a fair and equitable manner and where there is no exploitation of man by man. It is clear from the above that socialism as a mode of production and distribution is inherently superior to that of capitalism, or for that matter any other socio-economic system which existed hitherto.”
Note the disingenuousness of Ally in describing capitalism categorically, but “socialism, as a theoretical construct.” While he is not a PPP Executive any longer, it might be useful in the lead up to their Congress scheduled for the fourth quarter of this year, for other PPP leaders to give their take on their model for Guyana’s economic growth.
