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Guerrillas, Games and Governmentality
Nalini Persram
Paper presented to the Caribbean Studies Association Conference St Maarten, May 2001
Please do not cite without author's permission.
Department of Political Science University of Dublin
Trinity College Dublin 2 Ireland
Tel. +353 1 6083596 persramn@,tcd.ie
Guerrillas, Games and Governmentality Nalini Persram
Britain has handled us and the question of our independence not in our interest, but in hers.
Cheddi Jagan, The West on j rial'
Introduction
The period 1953 to 1963 in the history of colonialism in British Guiana is remarkable. For
the British Empire, the year 1953 was a disaster. During that year a radical, class-based
nationalist movement led by a group of indigenous professionals and a Jewish-American
Marxist woman was swept to power in the colony. It was like poetry in motion for
proponents of international socialism, yet it caught the British government almost totally by
surprise; within the frigd anti-communist climate of Western world politics the victory left
behind an imprint of British absent-mindedness and colonial impotence. Indeed, less than six
months later, colonial authority felt itself sufficiently threatened by the party it had once
denied was unacceptable to the British as to be forced to declare a colonial
emergency, suspend the constitution and remove Cheddi Jagan and his socialist party from
power. The suspension was a move that, for the British Colonial Office, was considered to be
deeply damaging to the liberal ideology that buttressed empire with its benevolent images of
enlightening paternalism. As an unprecedented act of colonial force, and it was to have major
ramifications throughout the British colonial world.
Yet the eventual demise of Jagan and the PPP in the era of anti-colonial politics was to
take another decade to complete. During that time, a new era in the struggle against
colonialism was initiated which was to see the re-election of Jagan and, for one very crucial
period, to contain the strong possibility that it would be he who would lead British Guiana to
socialist independence. What followed was nothing less than political disaster for Jagan and
the People's Progressive Party. Its culmination came in 1962 when another colonial
emergency occurred, but, crucially, this time upon the initiative of Jagan hlmself. By the
following year, the political events following the emergency would provoke Jagan's allies to
denounce h s final move - the transferral to the British Colonial Office of the authority to
decide whether or not a new electoral system would be established before the next, crucially
pre-independence, election - as nothing less than a gift to his Westkrn-backed opponent, and a
spectacular fall into the jaws of neo-colonialism. For the people of British Guiana what had
1 Jagan, The West on Trial: My Fight for Guyana's Freedom (London: Michael Joseph Ltd., [1966]), p. 341, hereafter referred to as WT. ,
Robertson (Constitutional) Commission: Discussion between The Chairman, the Archbishop of the West Indies and Sir Donald Jackson", 3:20-4:00 pm, 18 February 1954, CO 89111.
been a uniquely successful indigenous anti-colonial force operative in defiance of colonial
history's self-declared trajectory ended up as another casualty of the imperial and liberal-
capitalist containment of democracy's radical potential.
This paper investigates the ten-year period spanning Jagan's rise to power and retreat
from it in order to critically interrogate some of the now mythologised events that have
produced the profoundly debilitating politics, coalesced around the discourse of "race
relations7', that characterises contemporary Guyanese life.3 In seelung to understand the role
of colonialism in this process, the avenue of inquiry known as "governmentality" will be
taken. Pursued alongside those of Guyanese history and politics, it is an avenue that can
illuminate both the rationalities of colonial rule as well as the conditions under which
resistance to it is organised - and, by extension, the ways in which resistance can be made
either successful or unsuccessful.
Political Imperatives in Caribbean Thought
Raymond Smith has recently written with resignation about the prevalence of race
conceived as a fundamental feature of Guyanese society in even the most sophisticated
sociological, cultural and political analyses.4 Curiously, the recognition that race was not a
"natural" or autonomous presence that operated as a dormant feature waiting to erupt
nevertheless is often contradicted in the same breath by a resort to the assumptions of the
pluralist thesis: the result is that the crucial identification of politicisation as a fundamental
aspect in the history of Guyanese social conflict is undermined by deference to an ontology of
racial antagonism. The concept of "race relations" seems to liquefy critical thought. As
Smith insists, "the question is not whether cultural constructions of race continue to exist in
the modem world - they do - but under what conditions does 'race' or 'ethnicity' come to be
a major fault line in the society, making for violence of the kind that was seen in British
Guiana in the 1960s."~ The work of influential Caribbean scholar, Gordon Lewis, contains,
perhaps unexpectedly, an illustration of one of the ways in which race has become sedimented
as a category of political analysis in much of Caribbean thought.
3 See Gordon Rohlehr, "Articulating a Caribbean Aesthetic: the Revolution of Self- perception" in My Strangled City and Other Essays (Port-of-Spain: Longman Trinidad Ltd. 1992), p. 13.
4 Smith identifies the work of Clive Y. Thomas and Brackette Williams as prime examples. Thomas locates the roots of racial violence in the functional aspect of the division of labour between &cans and Indians. In Williams7 anthropological study of contemporary Guyanese society, her ultimate conclusions veer toward the idea that "race" has now become sociolo~cally and politically sedimented. More mainstream work that exlxbits similar tendencies is that of Ralph Premdas. Raymond T. Smith, "Living in the Gun Mouth": Race, Class, and Political Violence in Guyana7', N m West Indian Guide 69 (3&4), 1995: 223-252, pp. 225,245.
Smith, ibid., p. 237.
Immediately after the anti-colonial struggle in British Guiana had officially ended, at a
time when disillusionment was deep and political wounds were still raw, Lewis published a
review of Jagan's political autobiography, The West on Trial: My Fight for Guyana's
Freedom. Though merely a book review, the commentary is politically charged and highly
rhetorical, not least because of the timing of the appearance of the book, which was the year
Jagan7s arch rival, Forbes Burnham, had been sworn in as the first leader of a newly
independent Guyana. Taking a position starkly opposite to Smith's, Lewis criticises Jagan for
not talung seriously enough the race "rea1ities"of Guianese society and in fact attributes
Jagan's historic downfall to his overpoliticisation of the race issue.
Jagan recognises, of course, the early historical roots of racialism; he can see that occupational differences within the colonial prison generated racialist feelings and that such feelings have indigenous roots. He also recognises the deep power of the creolisation process, creating an aggressive Indian commercial bourgeoisie demanding entry into the social power structure. But he prefers to subordinate these elements of the total process to the thesis of imperialist assault upon racial harmony ... 6
Although Lewis speaks of race relations as being historical in character and thereby subject to
contingency, his organic treatment of race relations seems to ground race in Guyanese society
so as to make it autonomous of politics and history - to reify into a fundamental feature of
identity.
But there is another aspect of Lewis' comments that has far-reaching implications for the
analysis presented in this paper, one that relates to the issue highlighted by smith but extends
to the role of race in the political strategy of anti-colonial resistance. Lewis focuses on the
tensions between Jagan's political discourse and his policy implementation, maintaining that
Jagan's rhetoric about the divide-and-rule policy of British colonialism was deeply
inconsistent with his own politics. Jagan was ultimately left out of the historic transition to
Guyanese independence because he did not sufficiently understand that the imperialist assault
upon racial harmony
concerns itself with the vital question of colonial political strategy. Once his own premises about colonial ruling classes were accepted, he had no right, logically, to trust the British . . . Yet his policy after 1953 was, in fact, based on such a trust, culminating in the astonishing act of unconditional surrender to the Colonial Secretary in the last sad act of the drama in November 1963.'
As far as Lewis is concerned, it was Jagan's "over-simplified" marxism that blinded him to
the race issue - that led him to underestimate the potency of race as a major component in the
social-economic process and instead elide it under arguments about the legacy of colonial
6 Lewis "Review", Caribbean Studies 7(4), 1967: 59-61, p. 60. 7 aid., p. 6 1.
rule. As for the actual mistake he made, it was, says Lewis, to persist - even after the
dissolution of the official nationalist movement - in "playing the game according to British
rules". It was "a game, of course, [the PPP] were bound to lose, for ... the difference between
American sports and British sports (as also colonial policies) is that whereas the Americans
defeat their enemies, the British disqualie them".8
Aside fkom the politically dangerous assumptions Lewis makes about race it is the notion
of "trust" that provokes a critical reading of his analysis of Jagan's political manoeuvres. The
perspective known as "governmentality" seems particularly useful in this regard. As a mode
of inquiry emerging from the work of Michel Foucault, the object of scrutiny in
governmentality is that characteristic rationality of governing and its accompanying
technologies of domination upon which official authority relied for the realisation of its
political objectives: liberalism. But Foucault also stated that "in order to understand what
power relations are about, perhaps we should investigate the forms of resistance and attempts
made to dissociate these relations". Thus, most crucial for the analysis here is not just an
examination of the dynamics the colonial "conduct of conduct" in British Guiana but one of
the anti-colonial strategy that tried to resist it - and for a moment succeeded. At its most
basic, this paper investigates how the history of colonial conduct became interwoven with the
history of dissenting, anti-colonial "counter-conducts".'O
Governm entality
There has been a great deal of interest recently accorded to the notion of governmentality.
In contrast to classical political philosophy which is concerned with the legtimate
foundations of political sovereignty and political obedience - that is, the best government -
governmentality, according to Foucault, is about how to govern.'1 "We live," he says, "in an
era of a 'governmentality' . . . [where] the problems of govemmentality and the techniques of
government have become the only political issue, the only real space for political struggle and
c~ntestation".'~ As Rabinow notes, "the art of government and empirical knowledge of the
state's resources and condition - its statistics - together formed the major components of a
Ibid., p. 60. 9 Foucault, "Afterword: The Subject and Power" In Hubert Dreyfus and Paul
Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Hempstead: Harverster Wheatsheaf, 1982), p. 21 1.
10 Colin Gordon, "Governmental rationality: an introduction", in Burchell et a1 (eds), The Foucault Eflect, p. 5.
11 Ibid., p. 92. 12 Foucault, "Governmentality", in Bany et a1 (eds), Foucault and Political Reason,
p. 103.
new political rationality. A rationality, Foucault assures us, from which we have not yet
emerged."I3 This is known as the "conduct of conduct".
During the 1 8fi and 19@' centuries, the political focus had been on how policing - that is,
the transmission of the principles of good government of the state to individual behaviour and
the management of the farnily14 - "would manage to penetrate, to stimulate, to regulate, and to
render almost automatic all the mechanisms of society". Now the focus is on the possibility
itself of government. The practice of government is considered a techne - a "practical
rationality governed by a conscious goal".15
The issues are about, first, the limitations of governmental activity for the purposes of
enabling the best possible outcome whilst remaining aligned with the rationality of
government, and, second, the avoidance of intervention. As Foucault explains, "it is here that
the question of liberalism comes up. It seems to me that at that very moment it became
apparent that if one governed too much, one did not govern at all - that one provoked results
contrary to those one desired".16 Liberalism, from this perspective, represented less a
diminution of government than a mode of careful, economic and moderate rule. If the basis
upon which liberal government is possible depends upon maintaining the autonomy of society
from state intervention, then the political spaces that allowed for critical reflections on state
actions have to be cultivated through the activity of rule.I7 As Burchell has explained, it is
this activity - the ethos or techne- rather than the institution of governmentality that interested
Foucault. Considered "a rationally reflected way of doing things that functions as the
principle and method for the rationalization of governmental practices" rather than "a theory,
an ideology, a juridical philosophy of individual freedom, or any particular set of policies
adopted by a government", the aspect of liberalism of interest to Foucault was its tactics
rather than its strategy for legitimising political authority.18
Political power in this approach is conceived as a network of technologies for creating
and sustaining self-government.19 That is, the objectives of government depend upon the
ignorance of both the individual and the population as a whole as to what is being done to
them. Coverture is accomplished by the disposition of things in the service of convenient
13 Paul Rabinow (ed.), "Introduction",The Foucault Reader (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 15, 16.
14 Gordon in Burchell et a1 (eds), The Foucault Eflect, p. 7:' 15 Foucault, "Space Knowledge and Power", in Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader,
pp. 242,255,256. 16 Ibid., p. 242. 17 Andrew Barry, Thomas Osbome and Nicolas Rose, "Introduction", in Barry et a1
(eds), Foucault and Political Reason , p.10. 18 Graham Burchell, "Liberal government and techniques of the self' in Barry et a1
(eds), Foucault and Political Reason , p. 21. 19 Peter Miller and Nicholas Rose, "Governing Economic Life", in Mike Gane and
Terry Johnson (eds), Foucault's New Domains (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 102.
ends instead of the impositions of law.20 In its quest to identify the contours of power,
governmentality is thus more materialist than theoretical in na t~ re .~ '
Colonial Governmentality
David Scott's recent work on what he calls "colonial governmentality" involves the
political rationalities of government as they occur, in their specificity, in the colonial
domain.22 In moving beyond the task of revealing the agency of the colonised or
colonialism's practices of inclusion/exclusion, or the attitudes or mentalities of the colonisers
toward the colonised - that is, the tasks of critiques of 0r ien ta l i~m~~- Scott shifts the critical
eye towards the problematic of how the colonised have been inserted into modernity through
that characteristic mode of British colonial governance, liberalism. His assumption is that the
older problem-spaces of postcolonial criticism surrounding nationalism and socialist
revolution have been superseded by a new one that, as Foucault seeks to demonstrate, has
situated itself firmly and ubiquitously in the present. In contrast to Partha Chatte jee, Scott
emphasises not the distance -arising out of the effects of race -between the colonial state and
forms of the modern state in Europe that now needs emphasis, but the change in the targets of
governmental practice that produced the distinctly modem in whch "race" was to operate.24
Drawing upon liberalism as the locus of critical inquiry and focusing on it as a means by
which the activity of rule derives its inspiration rather than as an ideology or principle
requires, says Scott, a turn towards the metropole and its modes of domination, hegemony and
power in the search for ways of understanding how those modes produced specific and related
effects in the colonies.25 The political rationalities of Europe are important because they
produced novel ways of interacting with and maintaining rule over the non-Western world,
and thus new grounds upon which responses to those changes could be made. For with the
20 Foucault, "Governrnentality", Barry et a1 (eds), Foucault and Political Reason, pp. 94, 95, 100.
21 Rabinow, "Introduction", The Foucault Reader, p. 10 and Mitchell Dean, Govemrnentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999), p. 3.
22 Scott, "Introduction", Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality (Princeton University Press, 1999).
23 Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1978).
24 Scott, Refashioning Futures, pp. 25,28-9, 30,31,40. 25 Ibid., p. 25. A perusal of the rapidly burgeoning literature on governmentality
shows that the term "government" is not limited to official state power - the state is merely a particular form that government has assumed25 - but refers to any rational regme of power, regulation and production. It is thus more useful to view Scott's assertion as more of a political imperative directed towards a body of scholarship that he considers to be increasingly in danger of anachronism.
development of the political rationality of the modem colonial state, "not only the rules of the
political game but the political game itself changed".26
One form of this shift is documented by Frank Furedi in his comparative study of the
colonial emergencies that took place in Malaya, Kenya and British Guiana. The term
"emergency" served public-relations by allowing the British government to use coercion
whilst sustaining the semblance of normal civil rule. Nevertheless, Furedi notes that these
colonies were held up as symbols of imperial failure; this was due to the belief that the need
by the Britlsh government to resort to systematic repression when conventional methods of
political management proved unsuccessful represented a break-down in colonial power.
Regardless of who emerged victorious from the anti-colonial revolts, and Furedi notes that
Britain did manage to "shape, influence and ultimately transform the nationalist challenge it
faced", it was thought that the imperative to get involved in such conflicts guaranteed that,
inevitably, Britain would have to abandon its imperial pretensions.27 To the contrary, and
despite the thesis of imperial historians which held that colanial reforms were not a survival
strategy but the unavoidable (and unregrettable) fulfilment of Britain's imperial mission, the
will to imperial power continued after WWII, as the policies of the 1945-5 1 Labour
government indicated. Thus, regardless of their threatening appearance in the initial stages,
the emergencies eventually became a hnd of controlled experiment in change that used
tactics of "rearguard action" in an "attempt to shape the manner in which change could be
achieved by constructing an environment which restrained mass participation and created a
political framework that was insulated from popular pressure.'728
The central question arising out of Lewis' critique of Jagan's anti-colonial strategy that
draws upon the inquiries of governmentality is about those tactics of government that are
aimed at the continuation of empire under certain political and geopolitical conditions:
namely, the anticolonial nationalist movement in British Guiana during the height of the
Cold War.
The Rationalities of Rule and Resistance
The Problematic
In 195 1, not long before Jagan would be elected to power, the Waddington Commission
had been set up to investigate the political organisation and economic possibilities of British
Guiana. The results were that the society showed some indications of racial tension but that it
was only a positive sign of growing pains for a colony in transition to self-government. East
26 Scott, Refashioning Futures, pp. 3 1-2, 5 1. 27 Fuedi, Colonial Wars and the Politics of Third World Nationalism (London:
1.B.Tauris Publishers, 1994), Preface, pp. 1, 3,86, 188.
Indians, the Commission observed, were indeed competing to enter and integrate into creole
society; but since it was their demand for equal participation in creole society that was the
basic source of the agitation between East Indians and mainly Afro-Guianese, this was
essentially a progressive development. Moreover, the same communities lived harmoniously
in the rural areas of the country, further evidence that British Guiana was not fundamentally a
racially fragmented society.29
The Commission, moreover, did not believe that the development of disciplined political
parties in British Guiana was Thus, although the members of the People's
Progressive Party had already been identified as communist subversives, they were not
considered to be serious candidates for politics in the near future of the colony. It was
because of, rather than despite this view, that universal adult suffrage based on English
literacy was agreed upon as the first step towards local self-government. By winning the
election in 1953 the PPP surprised the entire colony, not least the small Guianese middle
class. It was a victory that had been achieved democratically on the basis of class and racial
unification and over the next few months, rapid attempts at pushing through radical social,
political and economic changes were made. The first step towards the realisation of the
political and socio-economic objectives of the nationalist movement was taken. These were,
according to Jagan, avoidance of the "chronic underdevelopment, backwatdness and poverty"
of Latin ~ m e r i c a ~ ' through nationalisation, democracy, "revolutionary scientific socialist
Marxist-Leninist ideology", industrialisation, class struggle, development, and nation-
building.32
It was over the sugar industry that disputes leading to the confrontation between colonial
authority and local government eventually occurred. This is not surprising gven that a high
degree of centralisation of political authority - characteristic of colonial rule - was evident in
the political power of the planter class.33 When capitalist investment began leakmg out of the
colony after a prolonged strike by sugar workers, the Archbishop of the West Indies accused
the PPP of promoting the strike. He called on the colonial secretary "to take such action as he
may see fit to ensure confidence in the Government" since the Party was "trying to use the
28 The Whig Interpretation of African history takes the triumph of nationalism as the culmination of Afnca's socio-political development. Ibid., pp. 10, 64, 189.
29 Thomas Spinner Jr., A Political and Social History of Guyana, 1945-1983 (London/ Boulder: Westview Press, 1984), pp. 33-4.
30 These figures included Critchlow (the "father" of trade unionism), Edun and Jacob. Jagan, The West on Trial WT, p. 60.
3 1 Jagan, Forbidden Freedom (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1954), p. 62. 32 Jagan, The West on Trial, p. 419. 33 Clive Y. Thomas, Plantations, Peasants, and State: A Study of the Mode of Sugar
Production in Guyana (Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, LA and Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, 1984), p. 13.
machinery of democracy to destroy democracy and substitute rule by one party on the
Communist - and since they were "extremely good at organisation and
propaganda".35 The Governor, furthermore, was convinced that the PPP was going to take
over the unions. 36 When Harold Ingram's report on his fact-finding mission to British
Guiana called for covert operations to be organised by MI6, there was no alternative, as far as
colonial authority was concerned, but to wage a secret war against the PPP.~' Fearing the
nationalisation of industry and PPP dominance over the unions, the British resorted to the
form of political control that was retained in the new constitutional arrangement, and made
the unprecedented move of suspending the Constitution and dismissing the Party from office
after only 133 days of being in power.38 Armed forces entered the colony "to support the
police and prevent any public disorders, which might be fomented by Communist supporters"
- even though at the time the only imminent crisis, as one observer noted, would have been
over the cricket match with ~rinidad.~' The official statement by the colonial authorities was
that the suspension of the constitution was carried out on the basis of political problems at the
domestic level but, more crucially, to prevent its subversion and the establishment of an alien
ideology in British ~ u i a n a . ~ ' Jagan later said of the suspension of the constitution in 1953,
that "in the field of local government, [the PPP] were simply putting into practice what
prevailed in the United Kingdom @]ut, apparently, what was acceptable in the West was not
to be tolerated in Guiana; what was deemed democratic in the United States and its
possessions was considered dictatorial in British ~uiana" .~ ' This echo-ed what C.L.R. James
had observed in 1933 - that what was in Britain the greatest virtue became in the colonies the
greatest crime.42
34 Cited in Spinner, A Political and Social History, pp. 42,43. 35~obertson (Constitutional) Commission: "Note of Private Session with the
Archbishop of the West Indies", p. 3, 30 January 1954, CO 89111. 36 Peter Simms, Trouble in Guyana: an Account of People, Personalities and Politics
as They Were in British Guiana (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1966), p. 12 1. 37 Furedi, Colonial Wars, p. 194. 38 Hintzen, The Costs of Regime Survival, p. 36. V.S . Naipaul states that the Jagans
were the "pariahs" of the West Indies when British entered Guyana-in 1953. Naipaul, The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies - British, French and Dutch - in the West Indies and South America (Harrnondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1962), p. 10 1.
39 Spinner, A Political and Social History, p. 45. 40 Smith, "Race and class in the post-emancipation Caribbean", R. Ross (eds), Racism
and Colonialism (The Hague/Boston/London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982), p. 208. 41 Jagan, The West on Trial, p. 133. 42 C.L.R. James (from "The case for West Indian self-government") cited in Harold
A. Lutchman, From Colonialism to Co-operative Republic: Aspects of Political Development in Guyana (University of Puerto Rico: Institute of Caribbean Studies, 1974, p. 44.
According to Mitchell Dean, governrnentality is usually concerned with "the moments
and situations in which government becomes a problem".43 The problematisation chosen in
this discussion arises out of the suspension of the constitution in 1953 and the tumultuous
decade that followed it. The question posed relates to the assertion of the liberal character of
British colonial rule in an attempt to respond to the charges Lewis lays against Jagan. It is
placed within the more immediate historical context that involved the British obligation to the
liberal doctrine of self-determination, the historical move towards decolonisation, and the
dualistic ideologies of empire and the Cold War that drove the extremist and unprecedented
conduct of the British government.
Racialised Interest
One can begin to respond with an extremely revealing point that has been made about the
function of creole society with respect to the civilising mission. Creole society has been
described as the stage in the development of the colonial state whereby it begns its
withdrawal from s o ~ i e t y . ~ With the issue of creolisation Scott's comments about .the shiftmg
grounds for political struggle become relevant in the British Guianese context. If there is a
shift by colonial power &om targeting the colonised as the wealth-producing Other, to
targeting the social conditions of the increasingly Westist subject as the effect of colonial
conduct, this is where it happens most visibly. This is where a new form of colonial power
takes effect prominently and enables the initiation of the process of colonial authority's
withdrawal from Guianese society.
The work of Thomas Holt is particularly instructive in t h ~ s regard. In his study of race,
labour and politics in Jamaica and Britain over the century leading up to 1938, Holt observes
that changes in the arenas of British politics, colonial policy and ideologies of race initiated
novel perspectives on the problem of freedom.
The political dimensions of that problem for British policymakers paralleled the economic: how to reconcile eeedom with coercion, or more specifically, how to structure a political system in the colonies nominally consistent with liberal democratic principles, while maintaining ultimate control over black political expression.45
43 Dean, Governrnentality, pp. 28-29. This is one of the first, sustained, single- authored texts to appear that is devoted to the concept and interpretation of Foucault's notion of governmentality.
44 George Danns, "The colonial state in a Caribbean society: the case of British Guiana," University of Guyajla, c. 1985: 1-43, p. 36.
45 Holt, The Problem of Freedom; Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832- 1938 (Baltimore: The Johns Hoplans University Press, 1992), p. 2 17. Also cited in David Scott, Refashioning Futures, p. 88.
Liberalism as a doctrine, says Holt, contained its own racist c~ntradiction.~~
In examining the history of British Guiana between the years of the early twentieth
century and those in which indigenous political activity first began to emerge, it is not
difficult to see a similar process at work. As previously indicated, the issues surrounding the
decision about universal suffrage for the Guianese people were, to a large extent, about the
cohesiveness of a society that was considered to be divided by racial animosity and
competition. British attitudes towards West Indians in particular during WWII had stressed
the condition of moral decay rendering the anti-colonial responses that came later as mere
greed, frustration and, irrationalism: racism redressed itself in the notion that colonised
subjects were not prepared for self-determination. The pluralist thesis held that West Indian
societies were not "whole fabrics woven by the passage of time" like the countries of Europe,
but "indigenous peoples" existing within different culturally-bound sections "created by a
sequence of political acts".47
These "political acts" are explored by Jagan in his discourse of nationalism. Historically,
says Jagan, there had been the feeling that the only way to break out of the structures of the
colonial value system was to assert either Afro-Guianese or Indian racial solidarity against
colonial d~minat ion .~~ Jagan traces this tendency to life on the sugar plantation. His account
illustrates how the socio-economic and politico-economic strategies for the survival and profit
of the plantations lay the conditions for the naturalisation of race relations into a sociology of
Guianese life. Similarly, the economist Clive Thomas has noted that during the 19" century
and into the 20th the planters used many "stratagems, particularly psychological and cultural
ones" to manipulate the increasingly separate and distinct ethnic groups of Ahcans and
Indians to their own advantage." These "stratagems" were also supported by the Colonial
Office whose interest was to contain the Afkican and Indian peasantry, despite the British
authority's "contempt for the 'saccharine oligarch^"'.^^ Smith has observed that even when
immigrants escaped from plantation labour, they continued to be identified primarily by race.
This is what has brought complications to the class system and worked to undermine the
creation of broad class movement^.^^ The British relied on the notion that competitive entry
into creole society by mutually antagonistic racial groups was a diminishing force for any
46 It is important to note, however, the particular aspect ofjiberalism that Holt addresses, which is "the pure ideals of liberal democracy". Looked at as a doctrine or set of principles in relation to its manifestation within the post-emancipation period of Jamaican history, Holt's account of the dynamic between liberalism and race arrives at the accurate conclusion that the fkeedom that was produced by this dynamic represented "ideologically, a freedom that internalized its own antithesis". Holt, The Problem of Freedom, pp. xxiv, xxv.
47 Furedi, Colonial Wars , pp. 126, 128, 132. 48 Smith, "Race and class in the post-emancipation Caribbean", p. 115. 49 Thomas, Plantations, Peasants, and State, pp. 83,25.
Smith, "Race and class in the post-emancipation Caribbean", p. 1 13.
indigenous political developments that might threaten the power of the colonial state, even in
the face of serious political agitation.
Thomas uses the term "interest7' to refer to the planters' unadorned economic objective of
profit-making using the smallest labour force possible, the fulfilment of which occurs through
the racialisation of the plantation labour force. With respect to Smith's concern, the notion of
what may be deemed "racialised interest" is what allows for the inversion of Smith's
problematic such that the racial origins of the political crisis in Guiana (from the mid-50's
onward) is rearticulated as the political origins of the racial crisis in Guyana at present. That
is, the basics of racialised interest are what allow for an argument about the colonial
production of a Guyanese sociology.
Th~s is how Scott's notion of the way in which the move towards liberal modes of social
being comes "to depend upon a discourse of racew5' is decipherable in the Guyanese context.
It appears that political liberalisation in the colony proceeds on the basis that racialised
interest will act as the guarantee of the impossibility of a broadly based indigenous anti-
. colonial power. How this assurance operates cannot, it appears to me, be understood without
one other theoretical element.
That is, the role of both indigenous agency and epistemic violence. If the notion of
epistemological oppression conceives the subaltern as being acted upon and inhibited by
power such that representation involves little else than the mere trace of the original5' - the
emphasis being on what we cannot know about the subaltern - the investigation of political
rationality may illuminate something different. In revealing the technologies that produce
self-governing individuals, individuals who in following their own interests unwittingly do
what they should53, the elusiveness of subjectivity within structures of domination, may
become much less of an issue than the actual governability of the subject.
However, the subject, in being unknowable to itself, must be articulated in terms
associated with epistemological aporia. As such, epistemic violence in t h ~ s capacity
represents not just an incidental link, but a necessary condition for the successful effects of
governmental rationality: in order for agency as a political possibility to be assumed by the
post/colonial subject, it becomes a requirement of the tactics of power if they are to serve the
interests of governmentality.
The Crisis of Conduct
5 1 Scott, Refashioning Futures, p. 88. 52 The "orignal" being, of course, a theoretical impossibility. 53 Jeremy Bentharn as interpreted by Scott, ibid., p. 5 1 .
Foucault noted that power is power only when the agents upon which it works are fiee to
choose different paths of action, then power depends upon the ability of that agent to act. It
cannot arise out of the opposite, that is, the extinguishing of that ability.54 In the highly
illiberal move towards authoritarianism that was necessary in order to supplement colonial
authority's inability to split the PPP colonial rule is revealed to lack the fundamental power
for which it is named.55
Nevertheless, the failure of colonial conduct cannot be assumed to arise out of the internal
weaknesses of either governmentality or colonialism more generally. It was not simply the
case, as one British official put it, that "an underdeveloped and ill-educated population" was
given the vote "before they ha[d] learned how to use it". Such a position denies the power
and agency of the colonised and the will and capacity to resist colonial rule. Colonial
Secretary Oliver Lyttelton's said of the PPP that "the men and women round Dr Jagan are
cool, sophisticated politicians operating with full knowledge of all the weapons in the
Communist arrnoury. That is the menace in British Guiana." In more measured voices, the
PPP were said to be very different to other West Indian parties in the way it kept itself
together. But where British authority can clearly be heard acknowledging both the failure of
colonial governmentality as well as the power of indigenous anti-colonial agency is in
Whitehall: "the depressing fact is that it is only the Jagans who seem to understand how to
play the political game."56
One of the things that disturbed Foucault was the discovery of "the lund of power which
takes freedom itself and the 'soul of the citizen', the life and life-conduct of the ethically free
subject, as in some sense the correlative object of its own suasive capacity".57 But under
colonial governmentality, the "ethlcal subject" does not exist. That is because the legtimacy
of colonial governmentality rests on its claim to be able toproduce that subject. And during
the time and political space in which this production process occurs, the colonial subject -
contingently characterised through the logic of the civilising mission as one in the process of
transformation - is the target of the widely fluctuating negotations that seek to present, at
certain opportune moments, the ethical subject as artefact - that is, as something that is
shaped according to the legtimating requirements of colonial governmentality but which
cannot yet be named "free". There is a very specific "imbrication of resistance and rule" that
colonial governmentality embodies, constituted by the contradictions and tensions that this
54 Gordon in Burchell et a1 (eds), The Foucault Efect, p. 5. 55 Furedi, Colonial Wars, p. 262. 56 Ibid., pp. 2, 147-48, 165, 177. '' Gordon in Burchell et a1 (eds), The Foucault Efect, p. 5.
meddling with the colonial subject generates. It requires "subterranean practices of
government" in order to stabilise rule in the interests of retaining empire in rationalised
form.58 It would appear that the character of colonial governmentalit., at feast in the British
Guianese case, is reflected in its tactics. And by virtue of the way in which (contrary to
Foucault) legitimacy is the crucial issue and yet subversion is the crucial element those tactics
seem to me to operate along the lines of guerrilla warfare.
Guerrilla Governmentality change title?
Burchell has noted that the relationship between government and governed is one in
which "individuals are identified as, on the one hand, the object and target of governmental
action and, on the other hand, as in some sense the necessary (vo1untary)partner or
accomplice of government". This can lead to the paradox wherein the failure of
governmentality
may not of itself result in a public rejection or disqualification of this style or art of government. It would seem that the relationship between governmental activities and the self-conduct of the governed takes hold w i t h a space in which there can be considerable latitude vis-a-vis criteria for judgng whether government has met the criteria advanced by itself for its capacity to govern.59
This comment translates into a problem for thls perspective. It can be captured most basically
in the following questions about the period of British Guianese history under study. Did
colonial government meet the criteria advanced by itself for its capacity to govern? Did the
Guianese people, in the end, unwittingly do what they ought to have done?
Judging by Governor Patrick Renison's remark in 1958, the response to the first question
is "yes". "We have seen," he declared smugly, "the unusual picture of the communist Jagan,
both before and after the election, competing with all other parties and politicians to attract
and reassure capitalist investor^".^^ Lewis, as we have seen, would also a f h this position.
After 1955, Jagan and his party were viewed as having lost their revolutionary fervour
and were considered to have been pushed by the racially derived affiliations of the population,
instead of having led the people "for~ard".~ ' It has been said that national solidarity in the
form of class and racial unity gave way to a new form of race relations, that had been
ideologsed along party lines by the split of the PPP into two factions with Jagan and
58 07Malley in Gane and Johnson (eds), Foucault's New Domains, p. 156. 59 Burchell, "Liberal government" in Barry et a1 (eds), Foucault and Political Reason,
p. 26. 60 Furedi, Colonial Wars, pp. 203. 61 Martin Carter, "The race crisis - British Guiana," Speech at the Inter-American
University of Puerto fico, c. 1964, p. 10, University of Guyana library.
Bumham as the respective leaders.62 This is the result of the "imperialist assault" to which
Jagan referred. Furthermore, class ideology "had become dominant and racialism submerged
in the period 1950-53", however, during the 1955-58 period "race and ideology jostled for
supremacy, both playing an almost equal role on the political scene".63 Racialised interest, it
seems, was delivering well to colonial power. Once at the service of economic interests and
the political containment of indigenous power, it now served the objectives of both Cold War
strategies and vindicatory hopes of an outdated imperialism.
If we are to understand the change in the targets of governmental practice that produced
the distinctly modem in which race was to operate, in British Guiana this period of history is
of paramount importance. Scott spoke of the shift in targets fiom the subjugated as producers
of social wealth - via the institution of slavery, for example - to soclal conditions as the effect
of colonial conduct. The account of racialised interest, in locating its emergence in the
plantation, straddles the shift Scott identifies. This is by virtue of the fact that indenture has
been called a new form of slavery and that the colonial practice of labour stratification
constitutes one of the social conditions to which he refers. But within the nationalist
movement of the 1950s in particular, there occurs another (non-theoretical) historically
specific shft. Racialised interest as a political rationality comes to occupy not only the
domain of colonial governmentality but also the realm of anti-colonial rationality and the
strategy of indigenous party politics (which are mutually dependent).
But this dislocation is more than just a change of place. It is the very moment in which I
would argue the most formative episode of epistemic violence in the colonial history of
Guyanese politics took place - the ramifications of which have reached critical proportions in
the postcolonial present. It was the instance whereby the racialised interest changed fiom -
being consciously recognised as structurally and ideologically constitutive of indigenous self-
interest to being consciously internalised as essentially and inevitably constitutive of
indigenous self-interest; and, moreover, in absence of the recognition that this shift was the
guarantee of the continuation of the rule of colonial difference. If the success of government
in this colony is to be identified, it is in this hrstoric move. Here is where the distinctly
modem in which race was to operate in Guyana - the platform made available to the
colonised on which to produce their responses - was constructed.
By this analysis, a very different reading obtains of what Lewis characterised as Jagan's
simple-minded tactics of colonial blame. It is now possible to admit that, in the face of the
now split collective colonial subject, Jagan's imperialist assault upon racial harmony
represented a strategic exaggeration of Guianese social cohesiveness, at the same time as it is
Hintzen, The Costs of Regime Survival, pp. 39,46. 63 Jagan, The West on Trial, p. 174. Jagan refers to the political ideologies of
socialism and capitalism when he uses the term "ideology" in this instance.
possible to bring to the fore that this emphasis was politically much more. Not unlike Walter
Rodney's A History of the Guyanese Working People 1881-190.5~ it was an attempt to undo
the epistemic violence that was to throw Guyanese society back onto the plantation with the
masters this time being the Guyanese themselves.
In the year after he had admitted to the Prime Minister that the "conditions of the people
in the Colony were largely responsible for the support given to the communist led PPP at the
election" of 1953, the colonial secretary Lennox-Boyd stated that colonial policy and tactics
were now enabling the emergence of a new National Labour Front which would, potentially,
neutralise the PPP through coalition. The ultimatum given to Jagan was based on the
correlation between constitutional advance and political stability: Jagan's aims could not be
"inconsistent with Western Parliamentary democracy". Caught under a constitution that was
explicitly intended to isolate the radical movement in British Guiana, Jagan was left with the
choice of political obsoleteness or playlng the game according to colonial rules. 65
Later, under the Kennedy administration, it was Arthur Schlesinger who devised a plan to
establish a system of proportional representation in Guiana designed to undermine Jagan's .
electoral advantage (he had won 57% of the Parliamentary seats based on 42.3% of the vote).
After the British government and the CIA had proposed the plan to Burnham and Peter
D'Aguiar, (leader. of the United Force - a conservative party supported by Christian churches,
foreign multinationals and Western governments), these local party leaders officially
presented it to the colonial office. A racially based campaign of anti-communism was waged
against Jagan' party. It was a plan intended to delegrtimise Jagan's claim to power and
authority over the people of the colony, and it worked.66 Indeed, it was, as hstory testifies,
successful beyond all expectations. In February 1962, three unions representing a large
portion of government employees declared a general strike against the Jagan govemment. A
march with over 60,000 people led by Burnham and DIAguiar took place in Georgetown.
Rtoting, arson and the looting of Indian homes ensued, but the police and parliamentary units
were sympathetic to popular discontent and ignored the situation. Lefi without the support or
loyalty of the armed and security branches of the state, Jagan made a formal request to the
colonial government to send in British troops to restore order. To the wider pro-American,
anti-communist world, it was a picture of indigenous incompetence that, in its drama and
pathos, was treated as a glorious victory.
The PPP's inability to instil order in the country was used against Jagan to force him to
accept the constitutional change to proportional representation, and to agree to new elections
64 Baltimore: John Hophns University Press, 198 1. 65 Citation from Furedi, Colonial Wars; see also, pp. 202,206,207.
before a decision on the colony's independence would be made. Thus, although it was
formerly supposed to be the winner of the 196 1 elections who would be given full executive
and legxslative powers and lead the country to independence, it was not untll after the 1964
elections that a date for independence was granted. With the electoral system in place, it was
a coalition government consisting of the (officially) moderately socialist People's National
Congress and the capitalist United Force that attained office, and in the end Burnham who
became the first leader of an independent Guyana. The politics of race that had ensued after
the nationalist coalition between Jagan and Burnham had collapsed not only had guaranteed
the political isolation of the Marxists, it had produced a more ideologically acceptable group
of leaders who had a degree of influence over the lower c~asses.~' "That there were
hypocrisy, breach of faith and fraud", says Jagan in great understatement, "was recognised
widely" .68
Insofar as Burnham's plan for gaining political advantage now rested on the same
rationality as colonial authority's tactics of government, it may be said that Burnham himself
became an instrument of colonial govemmentality, the complicity between Burnham and the
British being a land of technology of power. Bumham appears on the scene as Jagan's
political and ideological Other and colonialism's effective accomplice, exacerbating through
his pseudo-socialist ideology and opportunism the conditions by which the anti-colonial
movement would be reduced to a discourse of race. If political rationality under colonialism
in the form of racialised interest had attempted to generate its effects through the production
of a sociology of Guianese society coalescing around the notion of sedimented race relations
arising out of the structures of plantation labour, in the hands of indigenous politicians -
Burnham especially - the effects of this rationality were more dangerous. They were to
essentialise, in the minds and psyches of the Guyanese, the idea that the society was, in the
discursive terms of pluralism, inherently fragmented and that this fi-agmentation was caused
fundamentally by the existence of organically antagonistic racial groups.
In response to the second of the two question posed, the natives did indeed do what they
ought to have done - and it was with an efficiency that was beyond the wildest expectations
of the British.
One final issue remains to be addressed. It is what Lewis referred to as the "the last sad
act" of the anti-colonial movement.
By the early 1960s Jagan continued to command popular support despite the success of
governmental tactics as manifested in the fraudulent power of Burnham. Hence the urgency
66 One of the reasons Jagan's Marxism was seen as a particular threat to the West was that the PPP victory had come two years after the Castro revolution and soon after the Bay of Pigs. Hintzen, The Costs of Regime Survival, p. 52.
67 Bid., p. 49.
felt by Burnham and the British to ensure that electoral reform would take place before the
next election immediately prior to the agreed conferral of independence. As previously
inaccessible documents in the Public Records Office are made available nearly forty years
after the incidents leading up to Black Friday in 1962 when Jagan called for British troops to
enter Georgetown, it becomes increasingly apparent that this is where the guerrilla tactics of
governance were most intense. And it gets more and more evident exactly how the conditions
fkom which the self-reforming colonial subject would emerge were established by a
conspiracy between colonialism and indigenous agents. Foucault's dictum about power
comes into play once again. Power depends upon the ability of the agent to act; it cannot be
demonstrated by the capacity to remove that ability. Lewis, therefore, is entirely correct to
attest to the utterly tragic and pathetic way in which the anti-colonial "nationalist" movement
ended. Where we in fact disagree is over the agent of this tragedy. It was, in effect, by the
removal of Jagan's capacity to act that colonial and neo-colonial interests were finally met.
By Foucault's account, t h s does not represent the might of colonial power, merely its self-
endowed right. And it certainly had very little to do with what Lewis depicts as Jagan's
political ineptitude, regardless of the factual degree of the latter. Indeed, it is the conflation
between what is quite probably political naivete with the conditions established through
guerrilla governmentality that, ironically, makes Lewis himself an unwitting subject. But we
do seem to agree unequivocally about one thing: the right disposition of things arranged to
produce convenient ends in the colonial context has very little to do with justice.
Conclusion
Survival continually haunts the dream of sovereignty with the possibility that failure is not the other side of success or
If we agree with Lewis that Jagan made his own history, even though it was not under
conditions of his own choosing, we must also concede that if the native did what he ought, it
was under threat of (political) death. As Scott insists, the issue has little to do with whether or
not the colonised re~isted.~' And, as Bhabha's remarks indicate, it has little to do with
success.
Rather, it has to do with power and the shaping of resistance. As a less theory-laden
example, the invocation of the colonial "emergency", allowed colonial power to transform
68 Jagan, The West on Trial, p. 286. 69 Homi Bhabha in Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, "Survivng Theory: A conversation
with Homi K. Bhabha" in Fawzia Afial-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (eds), The Pre- occupation of Postcolonial Studies (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000)
70 Scott, Refashioning Futures, p. 16.
anti-colonial nationalists into law-breakers, criminals, terrorists and guemllas.7'
Nevertheless, Foucault maintained that "every intensification, every extension of power
relations to make the insubordinate submit can only result in the limits of power".72 Thus,
colonial governmentality in the British Guiana of '53-'63 may ultimately have become what
he calls the "winning strategy" within the context of Cold War politics. But with the "tactics"
turned inside out and the "conditions" being manifested as coercion, all under the guise of the
colonial "conduct of conduct", not only did it hold contradictory and subversive - that is,
terrorist - implications for itself, but, the realisation of its self-stated power-seelung objectives
was, at most, a pyrrhic victory.
Governmentality is one thing, colonial governmentality another. But guerrilla
governmentality is something entirely different.
I would like to extend my gratitude to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the British Academy for research grants in support of this project. I would also like to thank David Scott, Ronit Lentin, Brian Torode, two anonymous readkrs,
and the participants of the Graduate Seminar, Department of Political Science, University of Dublin, Trinity College for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.
71 Furedi, Colonial Wars, Preface, p. 1. 72 Foucault, "Afterword: The Subject and Power" in Dreyfus and Rabinow (eds),
Michel Foucault, pp. 225-6.