MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 1 November 1996, online here.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Dr. Paget Henry, in his unmatched history of Antigua and Barbuda, entitled with a rather complex name, Peripheral Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Antigua, divides the modern history of Antigua into three phases.
But in assessing this period from 1940’s to the present, Dr. Paget Henry makes a startling and profound remark. Wrote Dr. Paget Henry, an historian and social scientist, who began his studies in Physics:
“In the early forties both the planters and the nationalist leaders [V.C. Bird and Co] appeared to be rather unaware of the impact that the changing international order would have on Antigua. Neither saw clearly that these changes were to bring an end to the long period of agro-export oriented to the international market.”
It is a stunning conclusion. It goes to the heart of our present and future. Neither the ruling Planter class, nor the challenging nationalist leaders at the head of the working people, peasant and worker, had a clue as to the changing world in which they lived and fought each other. Neither Planter nor the new Nationalist leaders had a grasp of the changing forces which were affecting them. That failure has had no small effect on the present and a compelling effect on the future.
It is an axiom of history that an outmoded ruling class, 200 or more years old, attaches itself and holds steadfastly to the old ways, the old order, the old forms of labour which produced it. Rarely does a ruling class change itself. It remains what it was. It is changed by a contending and oppressed class. That is an iron law of history.
However, when the ruled, the oppressed, the challenging class has no clue about the forces at work, and the changing world in which it operates, all that can result is the mutual ruin of both contending classes. We, today have inherited that as Present. That is the ruin of Planter and Peasantry. No other Caribbean territory has that awful legacy.
An elaboration is in order. For, we are dealing with the essence, the quintessence, of our present and future.
The nationalist leaders, V.C. Bird and Co., formed an alliance with the Peasants and the labourers. Their struggle with the Planters manifested itself in a struggle over land. In other words, as Dr. Paget Henry wrote nationalist leaders, peasant and labourer, were in alliance by the 40’s “and together they were committed to a program of land redistribution and peasant [or small-farmer] development”. It failed. And it is that tragic failure we now inherit.
As Dr. Paget Henry cogently remarked “If it had been successful, this strategy would have produced changes in internal class relations.” That is putting it very mildly as dispassionate doctoral dissertations must.
The new leadership failed in that it had no consciousness of new production relations in a new organisation of production. It could only change from foreign owned mono-crop, to foreign owned mono-industry.
And that tragic failure was not partial. It was complete.
The failure resulted in the ruin of Planter and Peasant alike. The Planters, once the ruling class of Antigua, disappeared without trace. That by itself is one of the most startling events anywhere in this whole wide world. The English aristocracy, the rough equivalent of the plantocracy here, was displaced from power and internal hegemony by the English industrial revolution. But it still survives. In India, the old moguls who ruled before and during the British Raj have been displaced by the nationalist revolution. But they still survive. In Antigua the plantocracy ruined, disappeared without trace. Not a single descendant survives here. Whatever values and traditions they espoused there is none to uphold. An alien class, even after 300 years of sojourn in this space, they returned to their “home”, severing all connection with their 300 year past. It is unprecedented. It has no known parallel in human history, or at any rate any I know of. Values, be it noted, are maintained, if not advanced, not so much by individuals, but by a dominant social class, which seeks to epitomise the values they claim to represent. The old ruling class disappeared, and the new tourism owning class was either absent or invisible. Crudeness, crassness and corruption filled the social void.
Perhaps we should stay a bit with the decline and not fall, but disappearance of the Planter class, which constitutes what Professor Paget Henry termed the Second phase of the modern era.
Wrote Professor Henry, this period was dominated by the collapse of sugar production.
“For, in spite of the containment, of peasant production [deliberate containment, I remind, as the result of a written and secret deal between peasant leader V.C. Bird and Planter, Alexander Moody-Stuart] plantation production was not doing very well.”
Peasantry contained by its leader’s secret betrayal, Plantation circumscribed by itself.
And, continues Professor Henry, in his indispensable work for the understanding our heritage and our future:
“By this time, the nationalist leaders had abandoned the democratic socialist tendencies and were now committed to a policy of development that was based on the new quasi – staple – tourism.”
The long dissatisfaction, Professor Henry continued, “with plantation work increased during this period. Consequently the Planters persistent complaint about ‘the dilatory manner in which the crop was reaped’ also increased. The problem became so severe that labourers had to be imported to work on the [sugar] estates in spite of high unemployment.”
Contemplate those words, for Professor Henry in the style of most social scientists prefers the dispassionate. Contemplation by you as reader, would lead to the ineluctable conclusion that a mode of production – the plantation – had collapsed as a viable form and no other mode of agricultural production had replaced it. Despite high unemployment people refused to work on the plantation. A mode of production had therefore collapsed beyond redemption. Yet it was persisted with, by planter and nationalist leaders when they took state power. It was awfully tragic.
It was not, and I am most emphatic on this point, yes, it was not a rejection of agriculture. It was a rejection, an utter rejection, of a specific mode of agricultural production age-old plantation labour.
A slander has been propagated against the people of Antigua and Barbuda, by both social scientist and politician, that the people of Antigua and Barbuda rejected agriculture. In other words, the people of Antigua & Barbuda did not wish to feed themselves, and to export the surplus. It is as false as false can be. It is an attack on our heritage. For few people have worked harder in agriculture, dry-farming agriculture, as have the people of Antigua and Barbuda, as both slave and wage-slave. They were tired of it. Its subordination. Its constant violations of the personality. The plantation did not allow them to become other than they were. They rejected the plantation, root and branch, despite high unemployment.
What the people of Antigua and Barbuda rejected, “in spite of high unemployment” was plantation labour, which lasted through slavery into the middle of the 20th century. The people wanted to own the land in agriculture. They had created a political movement led by V.C. Bird to do so. They did not only want small plots. They wanted large tracts of land which they would have worked collectively and co-operatively. That aim, objective and goal was abandoned mid-stream. The peasantry collapsed.
But we have to follow Professor Paget Henry closely. The supply of labour being short despite high unemployment, the supply of sugar-canes to the sole sugar-factory became less and less. The productivity of labour in field if not in factory declined. The sole sugar factory, in turn, took over the Sugar Estates. It was the largest concentration of capital – and labour. And says Professor Henry:
“This take-over was a fateful one. From it the entire system was not to recover. Over the ten years prior to the take-over, the Sugar factory averaged 26,000 tons of sugar a year with profits. However, following the take-over, it was quickly pulled down into the morass of the [sugar] estates, as losses in the field more than off-set factory profits. As a result of this worsening economic situation, the company went into receivership in 1966 and was bought by the Antigua government.”
The state then owned the sole sugar factory and the major share of the land. In spite of the take-over by the state, no new production relations was established. No re-distribution of land for which the very nationalist leaders had fought was even attempted. The old plantation mode of production and labour was maintained by the State, now headed by the so-called nationalist leaders. A nation was betrayed from its conception or in its pregnancy. And to rely on the dispassionate objectivity of Dr. Paget Henry as social scientist and historian. “In spite of the take-over by the State, the situation continued to worsen.” Production continued to drop, as did the productivity of labour. Sugar production averaged about 3,000 tons a year between 1967–70! How dismal the situation was is reflected in the fact that in 1959–60, peasants on uneconomic plots, mind you, had produced 43,304 tons of sugar. The state never came even near to that! A mode of production had collapsed. And neither Planter nor State led by so-called nationalist leaders was capable of producing a new mode of agricultural production. It is a millstone which weighs heavily on the national neck and the national personality.
Professor Paget Henry again, than whom this country has produced no better witness of its past and present, and who ranks in the top-drawer of Caribbean historians. He noted with an icy dispassionate calm that:
“Taking the place of sugar was neither of the more indigenous and directly government-run programs of peasant development or industrialisation, but the more foreign and privately controlled tourist industry. This industry, began mushrooming in 1960, growing faster than any other so that by 1966, it had surpassed sugar as a net contributor to foreign exchange earnings. In 1953 the contribution of the hotel services sector amounted to 9.4 percent of GDP; in 1970 this had risen to 25.5 percent.”
What Professor Henry did not say, is that the profits accumulated from this boom in tourism were not re-invested in any sector of the economy. Foreign tourism owners, mainly absentee, as in sugar, changed hands, unlike sugar, with monotonous regularity. With each change of ownership the generous fiscal incentives and concessions were extended and over-extended by the national government.
Consequently, accumulation of capital for development and expansion of any sector, became virtually non-existent. The so-called local economy had no self-expanding dynamic, based on re-investment. A national economy never developed, despite the proclamation of nationhood. The economic content did not match the constitutional form.
Development, therefore had to depend on loans acquired by the State, for infrastructure as well as in tourism. The projects were all unprofitable. Be it port, airport, desalination plant, electricity generation, Heritage Quay shopping mall, Royal Antiguan Hotel or Antigua Isle. A nation was mired in international debt, as it were, from its inception. Its future mortgaged to international creditors. That is the abiding and inescapable reality. Corruption, state corruption, is the scientific consequence. It ruled and rules the roost. The economic arrangements of society, government granting concessions to quick-fix foreign profiteers, lends itself to the cesspool. Corruption perpetuated itself, but not in perpetuity.
The point of the future is to change it. To re-construct on the ruins, new productive sectors, in new production and social relations. That is no easy task. It will take a new leadership rejecting authoritarian ways and methods, leading a nation conscious and mobilised, equipped with skills so to do. It will require a re-orientation of production and education, at the start.
Perhaps it is enough to conclude, that the repeated annual statements of the Hotel owners, about low productivity in the hotels, the collapse of infrastructure, the recurring complaints about government tax measures, lack of promotion and the complaints about the inhospitality of immigration officers and public, is but the old complaint of the Planters about “the dilatory manner in which the sugar crop was reaped,” only writ larger. It portends the same decline and fall. History, after all, repeats itself, as the immortal saying goes, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. The father was the tragedy. The son is the farce. “Antigua then will rise”, as a famous protesting placard so emphatically affirmed “When the Son goes down.” Nuff said.
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