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Guerrilla Governmentality
Nalini Persram
No citations without author's permission.
Department of Political Science University of Dublin
Trinity College Dublin 2 Ireland
Tel. +353 1 6083596 persramnOtcd.ie
Gzrerrilla Governr~terztality Nnlini Persr~ztrl'
Britain has handled us and the question of our independence not in our interest, but in hers.
Cheddi Jagan, The West on Trial2
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 indigenous, non-
white, anti-elitist politicians 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 frigid 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 government3 as to be forced to declare a colonial emergency,
suspend the constitution and remove Jagan and his party from power. It was
a move that, for the British, was considered to be deeply damaging to the
liberal ideology of empire with its benevolent images of enlightening
paternalism, and it was to have major ramifications throughout the British
colonial world.
The consequences for the people of British Guiana would be that what had
been a uniquely successful indigenous anti-colonial force operative in
defiance of that history's self-declared trajectory, would eventually become a
mere casualty of the imperial and liberal-capitalist containment of
1 I would like to thank the participants of the Graduate Seminar, Department of Political Science, University of Dublin, Trinity College and, in particular, David Scott for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.
Jagan, Tlrc Wcst oil TrLl: My Figlit for Grrynrin's Frcer/ortr (London: Michael Joseph Ltd., [1966]), p. 341, hereafter referred to as W.
democracy's radical potential. By 1962 another colonial emergency was
declared, but this time it was upon the initiative of Cheddi Jagan, not the
British.
Yet the eventual demise of Jagan and the People's Progressive Party 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 PPP - and, many would say, for Guyana's
postcolonial future. By 1963, the political events following the second colonial
emergency would provoke many sympathisers of the radical faction of the
nationalist movement to denounce Jagan's final political act as a sacrificial
offering to colonial authority - as nothing less than the unrolling of the
political red carpet to neo-colonialism's indigenous lackeys.
Different theoretical and analytical perspectives highlight different aspects
of this period in colonial history. From a Gramscian perspective, the
radicalisation of anti-colonial politics offers the possibility for the
neutralisation of anti-capitalist forces thereby paving the way for Capital;
Guyanese independence thus represented the beginning of a new era of
domination in the form of neo-colonialism. A critique of Orientalism reveals
the attitudes and mentalities of the colonisers towards the colonised and
illustrates the way in which, regardless of the indigenous agency that is
discernible through nationalist discourse, the conferral of political
independence represents only a nominal shift in relations of power between
the West and its Other; the system of thought that enables the practices of
Orientalism remains intact.
Foucault's concept of governmentality involves a more specific object of
inquiry. It is an approach that scrutinises that characteristic rationality of
3 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 891/1.
governing upon which British colonial authority relied for the realisation of
its political objectives: liberalism. Through an analysis of the two colonial
emergencies and their consequences what would appear to be colonial
backfire to liberals, textbook class conflict to Marxists, power politics to
realists, and race relations to pluralists is shown to be the powerful effects of
the colonial "conduct of conduct".
Political Imperatives in Caribbean Thought
Raymond Smith has recently written with resignation over the prevalence
of race conceived as a fundamental feature of Guyanese society in even the
most sophisticated sociological, cultural and political analyses.4 History, he
says, is invariably invoked to facilitate understanding, and he accepts that
when speaking about Guyana this necessarily involves the issue of race.
Taking Smith's criticism further, the problem occurs when analysis
endeavours to explain the most persistent problematic in studies of Guyanese
history and politics - the racial origins of the political crisis of the nationalist
movement - rather than seeking to invert the problematic itself.
The need for such inversion arises from the general acknowledgement that
race had become a significant dynamic during the anti-colonial struggle
immediately after 1953 through the process of politicisation. Curiously, the
recognition that race was not a "natural" or autonomous presence that
operated as a dormant essentialism 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
4 Smith idcntifies the work of Clive Y. 'I'honias and Brakette Williams as a prime example. 'Fhonias locates the roots of racial violence in the functional aspect of the division of labour between Africans and Indians. In Williams' anthropological study of contemporary Guyanese society, her ultimate conclusions veer toward the idea that "race" has now become sociologically and politically sedimented. More mainstream work that exhibits similar tendencies is that of Ralph Premdas. Raymond T. Smith, "Living in the Gun Mouth : Race, Class, and Political Violence in Guyana", New West Ittdian Gtiide 69 (3&4), 1995: 223-252, pp. 225,245. Despite the politically incorrect use of the term "race", this paper will deploy it for the purposes of adhering to the discursive formations of the time. Occasionally other terms will substitute it, but these are not so much inconsistencies as variations that represent an overl,.~p of discourses from different historical periods.
fundamental aspect in the history of Guyanese social conflict is underminecl
by deference to an ontology of racial antagonism. The discourse of race seems
to liquefy critical thought. As Smith insists, "the question is not whether
cultural constructions of race continue to exist in the modern 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."5 The imperative is thus to recognise the powerful
discursive (and thus sociological) effects of race and at the same time critically
interrogate the ways in which this discourse has been received as the aura of
primordial identity in the imagination of the Guyanese. It is one that arises
out of the acknowledgement that the problems of postcolonial present can be
neither appreciated nor critically understood as long as the colonial past
remains shrouded in the mists of sociological essentialisms.
The work of influential Caribbean scholar, Gordon Lewis, is a case in
point. And it illustrates one of the ways in which race has become
sedimented as a category of political analysis in much of Caribbean thought.
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, Tlze
West on Trial: My Figlzt for Guyana's Freedom. Jagan had published the work
Though merely a book review, the commentary is highly political and deeply
rhetorical, not least because of the timing of Jagan's book, which was the year
his arch rival, Forbes Burnham, had been sworn in as the first leader of the
newly independent Guyana. Taking a position starkly opposite to Smith's,
Lewis criticises Jagan for not taking seriously enough the race "rea1ities"of
Guyanese society. Counterintuitive to Smith, Lewis in fact attributes Jagan's
historic downfall to his oz~erpoliticisation 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
5 Smith, ibiil., y . 237.
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 ...
What is not said is that this subordination formed the basis of both Jagan's
political strategy and nationalist rhetoric. By drawing attention to the
colonially constructed and politicked nature of (in keeping with the historical
discourse) racial conflict, and by mobilising first the Indian peasantry and
then, with the cooperation of Burnham, the Afro-Guianese urban middle
classes, Jagan was able to fulfil the objective of politically unifying along class
and thua ethnic lines the Guitlneae population,
Nevertheless, Lewis focuses on the tensions between Jagan's political
discourse and his strategy of anti-colonial resistance. It would seem that
Jagan's sociological account of the formation of Guyanese society is very
much at odds with his political rhetoric about the divide-and-rule policy of
Brj tish colonialism. 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 11ad 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 1963.7
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 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
Lewis "Review", Caribbean Studies 7(4), 1967: 59-61, p. 60. Ibid., p. 61.
rules". I t 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
disqualify them".s
The assumptions about the "roots" of racism and his
underacknowledgement of Jagan's pre-1953 strategy aside, Lewis is highly
astute in his analysis of what happened in the decade following 1953. What is
interesting for the purposes of this paper, though, is how Lewis' conclusions
focus more on Jagan's political plan of anti-colonial action and less on colonial
strategy. What is left is an abstract rationalist critique of political strategy,
one that does not takes much notice of the political conditions under which
Jagan had to act, nor of the ambivalence of the logical implications associated
with resisting their reigning codes of conduct.
This is where governmentality as an approach to understanding the
specificities of colonial rule is quite illuminating. The implications of
governmentality, furthermore, are that an understanding of the technologies
of domination assists in the critical reading of resistances to them. Foucault
put it the other way around, stating 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". 9 The precise task of the
argument presented here is to investigate how, during the political quest for
independence in British Guiana, the history of colonial conduct became
interwoven with the history of dissenting, anti-colonial "counter-conductsY.
Unlike some," I view such an endeavour as one that engages in the
familiar issue about indigenous agency, and, involves a variation of the
lbid., p. 60. Foucault, "Afterword: The Subject and Power" In Hubert Dreyfus and Paul
Rabinow, Micllel Folrcault: Beyorld Strtrctlrralisril and Herirlerlet~tics (Hempstead: Harverster Wheatsheaf, 1982), p. 211.
'0 Colin Gordon, "Governmental rationality: an introduction", in Burchell et a1 (eds), Tile Forrcarrlt Efect, p. 5 .
l 1 For example, David Scott, Refasltiorling Futures: Criticisnt After Postcolorliality (Princeton University Press, 1999).
notion of episte~nic violence.12 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 trace of the original's - the
emphasis being on what we cannot know about the subaltern - the
investigation of political rationality serves to illuminate something different
but nevertheless related. In revealing the technologies that produce self-
governing individuals, individuals who in following their own interests
unwittingly do what they should14 (according to the objectives of colonial
conduct), the elusiveness of subjectivity within structures of domination is, in
affirmation of Scott, of less concern than the governability of the subject.
However, that subject in being unknowable to itself, is one that may be
articulated in the terms of epistemological aporia. As such, epistemic violence
in this capacity represents not just an incidental link, but a necessary
condition for the successful effects of governmental rationality. Before it is
possible to go any further in this direction a brief discussion of what
go-r~ernnlentality entails would be useful.
Governmentality
There has been a great deal of interest recently accorded to the notion of
gooernmentality as developed by Michel Foucault. Foucault states that "we
live in an era of a 'governmentality"' where "the problems of governmentality
and the techniques of government have become the only political issue, the
only real space for political struggle and contestation". What is crucial for our
modernity, he says, is not really the "e'tntisntion" of society, but the
"governmentalization" of the state.15
In contrast to classical political philosophy which is concerned with the
legitimate foundations of political sovereignty and political obedience - that
l2 See Gayatri Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak", in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Mnrsisrrl nnri tlrc ltrterl7r~~tntiorr elf Crrltrrre (London: Macniillan, 1988).
'The "original" being, of course, a theoretical impossibility. l 4 Jeremy Benthani as interpreted by Scott, Refnslzior~ing Frrtrrrcs, p. 51. '5 Foucault, "Governmentality", in Barry et al (eds), Foucnult and Political Rensoil, p.
103.
is, the best government - governmentality, according to Foucault, is about
how to govern.lVrom the middle of the 1 6 t h c. the political issues began to
encompass much more than that of the nature of the state or how the prince
could best protect his power. Indeed, virtually every form of human activity
demanded attention to how best it could be accomplished, that is, how it
could be made more "economical". Society - the population - was turning
into a political target. Foucault links this new interest to the emergence and
expansion of centralised state administrative apparatuses in France at this
time. In the 17th c. detailed knowledge about the elements and dimensions of
the state's power developed and was called "statistics", or "the science of the
state". 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 new political rationality. A rationality, Foucault
assures us, from which we have not yet emerged." 17
The objectives of government from that point onwards have existed in the
welfare and prosperity of the population. During the 18th and 19th 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 family18 - "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.19 With respect to
other approaches to family, population and economy during the classical age,
Foucault's work represents an extension of as well as a departure from the
Annnles school. The long-term changes stressed by this school are linked, by
Foucault, to political processes, the distinction he makes being the placement
of any emphasis at all on these processes, and the conscious rather than
unconscious nature of forces behind them. The practice of government is
16 Ibid., p. 92. 1' Paul Rabinow (ed.), "Introduction",The Foucazilt Reader (Harmonsworth: Penguin,
1984), pp. 15,16. 18 Gordon in Burchell et a1 (eds), Tlle Foucatllt Efiect, p. 7. ' 9 Foucault, "Space Knowledge and Power", in Rabinow (ed.), Tlze Fotlcazrlt Reader, p.
242..
considered a teclttze - a "practical rationality governed by a conscious goal".
Government comes into view as a "function of technology", and one can now
speak of "the government of individuals, the government of souls, the
government of the self by the self, the government of families, [and] the
government of children".20
The issues are about the limitations of governmental activity to enable the
best possible outcome but that are also in keeping with the rationality of
government, and the avoidance of intervention. As Foucault explains,
[I]t 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. What was discovered at that time - and this was one of the great discoveries of political thought at the end of the eighteenth century - was the idea of society. That is to say, that government not only has to deal with a territory, with a domain, and with its subjects, but that is also has to deal with a complex and independent reality that has its own laws and mechanisms of reaction, its regulations as well as its possibilities of disturbance.21
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.22 Based on the recognition that
political government could undermine itself through over-governing,
liberalism, from this perspective, represented less a diminution of
government than a mode of careful, economic and moderate rule. As
Burchell has explained, it is this nctiz~ity - the etllos or techne23 - rather than the
illstitlitiorz of governmentality that interested Foucault. Considered "a
rationally reflected way of doing things that functions as the principle and
20 lbifi., pp. 255, 256. 21 Ihiil., p. 242. 22 Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nicolas Rose, "Introduction", in Barry et a1
(eds), For~cnl~lt and Political Reasolt , p.10. 23 Ibid., p.10.
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.24
With regard to the population, the objectives of government exist in the
creation of "interest at the level of the consciousness of each individual" as
well as that of the population as a whole (the compatibility of these interests
notwithstanding). Of fundamental significance are that both remain
"ignorant" of what is being done to them, and that coverture is accomplished
by the disposition of things in the service of convenient ends instead of the
impositions of law.25 Political power is thus conceived as a network of
technoIogies for creating and sustaining self-goz~ernnretrt.26 Hence the
materialist rather than theoretical nature of this approach to identifying the
contours of power.27
Colonial Governrnerrtality
Following Foucault's formulation, Scott's recent work on what he calls
colonirzl goz~ernnzentrzlity involves the political rationalities of government as
they occur in the colonial domain. Although not to be uniformly
universalised for the colonial experience, when its trajectory is traced into the
postcolonial arena it is an approach that powerfully addresses contemporary
forms of domination. Hence, the constitutive role of colonial governmentality
in what Scott calls newly emerging imperatives for contemporary postcolonial
criticism.28
z4 Graham Burchell, "Liberal government and techniques of the self" in Barry et a1 (eds), Forrcalllt arrd Political Rensoiz , p. 21.
L5 Fo~~cault, "Governrnentality", Barry et a1 (eds), Fo~icnrrlt nrul Political Rensorr , pp. 94, 95,100.
2b Peter Miller and Nicholas Rose, "Governing Economic Life", in Mike Gane and Terry Johnson (eds), Foilcatllt's Nezo Doiiznirts (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 102.
27 Rabinow, "Introduction", Tlze Foricniilt Reader, p. 10 and Mitchell Dean, Gover~lirreiztality: Pmi~er nrld Rrrle in Motlerrt Society (London: Sage, 1999), p. 3.
' 8 Scott, "Introduction", Rcfnslzioiziizg Frltlircs,.
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
Orientalism29- Scott shifts the critical eye towards the problematic of how the
colonised have been inserted into modernity through that characteristic mode
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 elaborating his argument, Scott refers to Partha Chatte rjee, whose
stated interest is in critiquing "the persistence into the present of an
ideological erasure in liberal historiography by means of which the
assumptions of universal history work to displace . . . indeed repress - the
specificities of colonial powerU.30 Taking exception to Chatterjee's
assumption about the spatial, temporal and even discursive homogeneity of
colonialism being embodied in a singular political rationality, Scott plays
down the significance of the rule of colonial difference (articulated by
Chatterjee through the generalised category of 'race'). He instead attempts to
"impose an historicity on our understanding of the rationalities that
organized the forms of the colonial state". For Scott, it is 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 modern in
which "race1' was to operate.31
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
29 Edward Said, Orietitnlisttt: Westertz Cotzceptiolzs oftlze Orielzt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1978); Scott, ibiri., pp. 25,40.
Cited in Scott, ibiri., py. 28-9. " Ibiii., pp. 25,28-9,30,31.
understanding how those modes produced specific and related effects in the
colonies. 32 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 macle.33 The important problematics, he maintains, have to
do with the kind of platform made available to the colonised on which to
produce their responses. For with the development of the political rationality
of the modern colonial state, "not only the rules of the political game but the
political game itself changedrf. Not only did the relations of power between
coloniser and colonised change to shift the targets of colonial power from the
subjugated as the producers of social wealth to social conditions as the effect
of colonial conduct; the grounds of political struggle did as well. 34
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 G ~ i a n a . ~ ~ Furedi notes that these colonies were held up as symbols of
imperial failure; this was due to the belief that the need by the British
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, it was thought that the imperative to get involved in such conflicts
guaranteed that, inevitably, Britain would have to abandon its imperial
preten~ions.3~ To the contrary, despite the thesis of imperial historians where
colonial reforms were not a survival strategy but the unavoidable - and
32 lbid., p. 25. A perusal through 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 assumed" - but refers to any rational regime 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.
3"ott, Refnsl~iorliirg Futtires, pp. 31-2. lbid., pp. 31-2,51.
" Furedi, Colorlial Wnrs n11d the Politics of Third World Nntiorlnlisrlr (London: 1.B.Tauris Publishers, 1994).
" U~biii., pp. 3, 86, 188.
unregrettable - fulfilment of Britain's imperial mission,37 the will to imperial
power continued after WWII, as the policies of the 1945-51 Labour
government indicated.38 Thus, regardless of their threatening appearance in
the initial stages, the emergencies eventually became a kind 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."39
It is perhaps becoming clearer how it might be possible to put together a
problematic from Lewisf critique of Jagan's anti-colonial strategy that draws
upon the inquests40 of governmentality. Creech Jones, deeply fearful of the
consequences of the demise of imperial authority, had viewed decolonisation
as a policy for maintaining order, a method of controlling political change;
decolonisation, states Furedi, was designed to retain empire in rationalised
form.41 But the conclusion of a Conservative Party memorandum on the
colonial failures of Malaya, Kenya and British Guiana was that whilst other
colonies "obtained universal suffrage [and] managed to keep the ship on an
even keel . . . British Guiana capsizedn.42 Thus, the problem is how this
retention of which colonial officials spoke was made possible, particularly in
the face of anti-colonial opposition led by a party that had already put to
shame the British empire. As such, it involves the question of what took place
in terms of political rationalities and their counter-rationalities that inspired
Lewis to describe the events of 1963 as the pathetic denouement to the anti-
colonial movement.
V7l'he Whig Interpretation of African history takes the triumph of nationalism as the culmination of Africa's socio-political development. Ibid., p. 10.
38 lbid., p. 64. 39 Ibid., p. 189. 40 The deliberate (mis)use of this term metaphoricaly refers to the disturbance felt by
Foucault over the simultaneously totalising and individualising effects of governmentality - as Gordon says, over the sort of power that takes freedom itself and the life and life-conduct of the ethiucally free subject as, to some degree, "the correlative object of its own suasive capacity". Gordon in Burchell et a1 (eds), The Foucnlilt Efect, p. 5.
41 Furedi, Colo~rinl Wnrs, pp. 64, 189, 87. Cited in Furedi, ihicf., p. 3.
The Political Ratiorzalities of Rule
1953
In 1951, not long before Jagan would be elected to power, the Waddington
Commission had been set up to investigate the political organisation and
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 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.43
The Commission, moreover, did not believe that the development of
disciplined political parties in British Guiana was imminent. This was
probably due to the performance of earlier politicians who, though engaging
in unprecedented radical critique of the institution of colonialism and who
purported to speak for the working classes (as was the PPP now), had not
drawn upon the masses in any significant way in their politics and protests.44
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 as the first step towards local
self-government. Ministers were to be responsible for their offices with the
governor retaining, crucially, the authority to veto legislation as well as
-.
43 Thomas Spinner Jr., A Politicnl and Social History of Guyma, 1945-1983 (London/ Boulder: Westview Press, 1984), pp. 33-4.
" These figures included Critchlow (the "father" of trade unionism), Edun and Jacob. Jagan, Tllc Wcst or1 Trill1 WT, p. 60.
specific reserve powers for emergencies, which were not thought to be
potential obstacles on the straight and narrow road to limited self-rule. The
PPP argued that the lack of a Guianese constituent assembly by universal
suffrage prevented the writing of a constitution providing the country with
full, internal self-gc~vernment effective immediately, but in spite of the
protests, Jagan himself admitted that the existing constitution was "one of the
most advanced colonial constitutions for that periodU.45
By winning the election in 1953 the PPP had surprised the entire colony,
particularly the small Guianese middle class. It was a victory that had been
achieved democratically on the basis of class and racial unification. Over the
next few months, attempts at pushing through radical social, political and
economic changes in a very short period of time were made. The first step
towards the realisation of the political and socio-economic objectives of the
nationalist movement were taken. These were, according to Jagan, avoidance
of the "chronic underdevelopment, backwardness and poverty" of Latin
Ameri~a4~ through nationalisation, democracy, "revolutionary scientific
socialist Marxist-Leninist ideology", industrialisation, class struggle,
development, and nation-building.47
It was over the sugar industry that disputes leading to the confrontation
between colonial authority and local government eventually occurred. This is
not surprising when considering that the high degree of centralisation of
political authority that has characterised colonial rule was evident in the
political power of the planter class.48 When capitalist investment began
leaking 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
45 Spinner, A Politicrzl nrzrJ Socinl His toy , p. 34. Jagan, Forbiddell Freed0111 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1954), p. 62.
47 Jagan, Tlre West 011 Trial, p. 419. 48 Clive Y. Thomas, Plantntions, Peasnnts, atld Stnte: A Study of the Mode of Slignr
Productio~l in Gziynnn (Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, LA and
machinery of democracy to destroy democracy and substitute rule by one
party on the Communist modeI"49 - and since they were "extremely good at
organisation and propaganda".50 The Governor, furthermore, was convinced
that the PPP was going to take over the unions. 51 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.52 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.s3 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, wauld have been aver the cricket match with Trinidad.54
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 Guyana.55
The transparency of Britain's dramatic decision to intervene did little to
suppress the support for Jagan's popularity. To the contrary, it drew attention
to the illegitimacy of the colonial regime in Guyana. Jagan later said of the
Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, 1984), p. 13.
49 Cited in Spinner, A Politicnln11d Social Histonj, pp. 42, 43. 50Robertson (Constitutional) Ccmmission: "Note of Private Session with the
Archbishop of the West Indies", p. 3,30 January 1954, CO 891/1. 51 Peter Simms, Troz~ble in Gzi!ptln: nrr Account of People, Persorznlities ntrd Politics as They
Were in British Gl~inlrn (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1966), p. 121. 52 Furedi, Cnlotltnl Wrrrs, p. 194. 53 Hintzen, The Costs of Regir~le Sliruivnl, 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 Pnssnge: Inlpressions of Five Societies - British, Frenclz nnd Dlrtclz - ill tlte West Ittdies and Solltll A~nericn (Harn~ondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1962), p. 101.
9 Spinner, A Politicnl n ~ l d SocinI Histonj, p. 45.
suspensiu~~ 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 [blut, 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 G~iana".5~ This echoed
what C.L.R. James had observed in 1933 - that what was in Britain the greatest
virtue became in the colonies the greatest crime.5'
Dean Mitchell has said that governmentality is usually concerned with
"the moments and situations in which government becomes a problem".
"Problematizations" are uncommon, and have specific dates and places,
occurring in particular locales and institutions. What he calls an "analytics of
government" commences with interrogation about the conduct of governing,
rather than from a coherently theoretical position.58
The problematization chosen in this discussion arises out of the
suspension of the constitution in 1953: the questions posed are thus quite
specific in their targeting of the extremist and unprecedented conduct of the
British government towards a democratically-elected indigenous political
party. The avenues of investigation, the search for understanding that is
organised along the lines of this questioning, however, moves way beyond
and behind the year of this colonial crisis. In 1947, Sir Gordon Letham, the
governor of British Guiana who had recently retired, had said that he did not
envisage the "emergence of parties and a recognised leader". Less than a year
later the Colonial Office had been poised to declare an emergency to suppress
political turmoil in the colony;5' five years later the Colonial Office went
55 Raymond T. Smith, "Race and class in the post-emancipation Caribbean", R. Ross (eds), Racisrrr altd Colo?lialisnl (The Hague/Boston/Sondon: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982), p. 208.
s6 Jagan, The West on Trial, p. 133. s7 C.L.R. James (from "The case for West Indian self-government") cited in Harold A.
Lutchman, Front Coloilialism to Co-operative Republic: Aspects of Political Development in Gtiyailn (University of Puerto Rico: Institute of Caribbean Studies, 1974, p. 44.
?Wean , G~mrv~e~r t :111tv . FF 28-19 This is one of the first. sustained. single-authored texts to appear that is devoted to the concept of governmentality as it has developed since Foucault introduced it.
59 Furedi, Colc~~ricrl Wars, p. 86.
ahcad and actually declared one. The first and most fundamental thing that
must be asked is how, from the perspective of colonial governmentality, the
unexpected came to be the unexpected.
Racialised Interest
In this regard, an extremely revealing point has been made about the . .
has been described as the stage in the development of the coloni2 state
whereby it begins its withdrawal from society.60 Jagan notes that the effects
of the distance between the mansions of the planters and the plantation
workers were that a "mystique" developed in which everything "white" was
good and everything "black" was bad. Soon, he says, everyone was aspiring
to "whiteness", adopting Western cultural characteristics and traits - personal
features, dress, music, song. With the help of Christian missionaries the
process of de-Africanisation began whereby the African was educated,
anglicised, and made to despise his own cultural background.61
If creolisation is a "stage" in the development of the colonial state, what I
would argue is that it is more than a passive one. It is actively constructed as
the platform for the colonised upon which they may produce their responses
to issues of liberty. The issue of creolisation is where Scott's comments about
the shifting grounds for political struggle become relevant in the British
Guianese context. If there is a shift by colonial power from 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; this is where a new form of colonial power takes effect and thus
enables the initiation of the process of colonial authority's withdrawal from
Guianese society.
60 George Danns, "The colonial state in a Caribbean society: the case of British Guiana," University of Guyana, c.1985: 1-43, p. 36.
Interview with Cheddi Jagan, 21 November 1994, Presidential Secretariat House, George town.
If a political rationality is to be identified to this transition, its early
manifestations may be located during the days of indenture. The work of
Thomas Holt is particularly instructive in this 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 freedom 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.62
The problem for Holt is that liberalism as a doctrine contained its own racist
contradiction.
In examining the history of British Guiana between the J ears of the early
twentieth century and those in which indigenous political activity first began
to emerge, it is not difficult to see a similar problematic 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.63 The pluralist thesis - the influence
of which lay in its seemingly measured, non-partisan approach and its
politically convenient implications - freely acknowledged the role of British
domination in the constitution of racially divided colonial societies: West
62 Holt, The Probletn of Freedom; Race, Labor and Politics in latnnica 17nd Brifnin, 1832-1938 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 217. Also cited in David Scott, Refnsllioilirlg Flrtt~res, p. 88.
6"uredi, Colorzinl Wars , pp. 126, 128.
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 actsr'.@ indeed,
it was precisely because of the constructed nature of these societies that
(issues of colonial accountability aside) they were inherently fragmented and
thus doomed to be uncohesive.
It is precisely these "political acts" that are explored by Jagan in his
discourse of nationalism, an exploration which Lewis acknowledges.
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 domination.65 Jagan
traces this tendency to life on the sugar plantation. Similarly, the economist
Clive Thomas has noted that during the 1 9 t h 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
Africans and Indians to their own advantage."66
If anything, this would appear to be a sociology underlying the political
rationality currently seeking expression, rather than a political rationality as
such. But this is precisely a result of the power of the discourse of race.
Heeding Smith's critical imperative with regard to historical readings of
Guyanese society, nonetheless, would mean avoiding the trap of sociological
determinism in the form of "race relations" and keeping alive the question
over politicisation. Thus, rather than interrogating the sociological basis of
political rationalities - that is, the sociology that enabled a certain conduct of
government to be rationalised - what should be asked instead is how such a
sociology was prodziced by specific colonial rationalities.
With this in mind, the way in which race strategically undermined
liberalism and the attempt to contain black power is closely tied to the
political rationality of colonial governmentality in British Guiana in the
64 Ihirf., p. 132. 65 Snlith, "Race and class in the post-emancipation Caribbean", p. 115. 66 Thomas, P l i ~ ~ ~ t r ~ f i o ~ ~ s , Punsnrlfs, nrril Stnfe, pp. 83, 25.
period leading up to 195367 becomes apparent in one particular official
statement of the late '40s, the time of political activism in the colony. In 1947
(the year Jagan entered the Legislative Council) the governor Sir Charles
Woolley congratulated the electorate for producing a 70% turnout for the first
elections since 1935, but stated his regret that much racism had been evident.
Racism, he noted, could only "be a major hindrance to progress
constitutionally and otherwiser' in the colony; it was, in other words, an
anathema to liberal democracy. He then went on to say that this animosity,
however, was not "deep-seated or widespread" (something that was to be
echoed by the Waddington Commission several years later).
Yet 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 movements.68 Hence the assertion that creole
society arose from the condition of an immigrant colony lacking a "broad base
of consensual valuesU.69 Contrary to Woolley's implication that the dynamic
of race relations was a matter of rational choice - a choice that involved
prioritising either racial affiliation or liberal individualism - race was a very
powerful force in Guianese society, as a discourse of identity and social
stratification.
With respect to the notion that race undermined liberalism, all of this is a
testament to the sensibility of Woolley's viewpoint and the credibility of the
pluralist thesis: racial antagonism was, to some degree or other, a sociological
condition of Guianese society. To speak, however, of the strategic role that
race played in undermining liberalism requires looking at the colonial tactics
-- 67 It is important to note, however, the particular aspect of liberalism 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 freedom that was produced by this dynamic represented "ideologically, a freedom that internalized its own antithesis". Holt, Tlre Probleitr of Freetforrr, pp. xxiv, xxv.
" Sniith, "Race and class in the post-emancipation Caribbean", p. 113. 6" See Ralph IJremdas, "Ethnic conflict and development: the case of Guyana", United
Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1992, py. 1,3; and Danns, "'l'he colonial state in a Caribbean society".
involving race in the interests of inhibiting political agency. Once again,
Jagan's autobiographical observations are revealing.
Jagan speaks of the "opportunism" that accompanied the process of de-
Africanisation and creolisation whereby and "ezten "black" men by their
accommodation, behaviour and performance were accepted into the "white"
hierarchy of Guianese "creole" society, to the exclusion of East Indian~.~O
Though closer in colour71 to the whites than were the Africans, says Jagan,
they were not allowed into the social hierarchy, being "regarded as outcasts,
and despised by the creole society as 'coolies', as being culturally different
and economically subservient."72 As discussed, in the late 1940s and early
'50s, the British relied on the notion that competitive entry into creole society
by mutually antagonistic racial groups was an diminishing force for any
indigenous political developments that might threaten the power of the
colonial state, even in the face of serious political agitation. Clive Thomas has
noted that the "stratagems" used by the planters were also supported by the
Colonial Office whose interest was to contain the African and Indian
peasantry, despite the British authority's "contempt for the 'saccharine
0ligarchs"'.7~ The "interest" to which Thomas refers initially arises out of the
planters unadorned economic objective of profit-making using the smallest
labour force possible. The means by which it is fulfilled is through the
racialisation of the plantation labour force, such that relatively less cheap
70 Jagan, The W e s t or1 Trial, p. 292, my emphasis. The predicament of the African in Guyana was exemplified by one "Negro" lawyer's view of himself as not essentially African since he knew no other civilisation than the British, and the sentiment that England was truly his "mother country". Lutchman observes that the new middle class politicians who began to emerge in 1926 did not reject but welcomed British values to an even greater extent than did Europeans. Lutchman, "Patronage in Colonial Society", p. 5. Naipaul, on the other hand, observed in 1962 that in Guyana slavery was "hard to forget", and the word "Negro" was resented by m a w Guyanese because of its association with slavery. Naipaul, The Middle Passage, p. 1 07.
71 Sindey Mintz notes the significance of colour as an ideology, not just indication, of status in Caribbean societies. Mintz, Caribbeatl Tratlsfornlntiotls (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1974), Chapter 11.
72 Jagan, 'The Wes t on Trial, p. 292. There is a relatively small section of society occupied by Portuguese people originally brought from Madeira as labourers whose members are somewhat marginalised in this account, given their "whiteness", their treatment as lion-Europeans by the British notwithstanding. The position of this group in the stratification of Guyanese society was just under that of the ruling class.
free74 black labour is forced to compete with relatively more cheap Indian
indentured labour, thereby producing a discourse of racial animosity based
on competitive "market" relations. The implications of this discourse,
furthermore, extend to such issues as, first, the economic threat (from the
planter perspective) of self-sustaining African free villages, and, second, the
tendency for Indians, whose cultural practices under indentureship have been
assaulted to a lesser degree than had African culture under slavery, to hold
back from entry into creole society, and, third, the antagonism to which the
relation between the two gave rise.
This is an important point. It exposes a crucial aspect of the "sociology of
race" and governmentality. By establishing a clear connection between the
ethnically divisive conditions cultivated on the plantations, the discourse of
race (that Wolley's advocation belies, the pluralist thesis implies, and C.
Thomas's comments affirm) and the colonial interest of limiting indigenous
freedom, the political rationality of colonial power is shown to be derivative
of as well as essential to the determinist conception of "race relations". To
take the implications a step further, the dynamic of the political rationality of
rrrcirzlised interest aligns itself with Scott's assertion that, for colonial
governmentality, the issue is not so much the inherent racism of liberalism
but the way in which the move towards liberal modes of social being comes
"to depend upon a discourse of race".75 Holt's critique of the intersection of
racism and liberalism, and, indeed, the fraudulent and immoral character of
early 1 9 t h century liberalism in Jamaica is about a liberalism that promises
freedom with the hand of abolition, and fully intends to cut it down with the
hand of qualification. Scott's critique of the same intersection is slightly, but
significantly different. When turned towards the problematisation in British
Guiana it is not through the false pretense of dismantling the discourse of race
that liberalism begins its entry into the social existences of the colonised;
rather it is through the ideological and teclznologicrrl practices of sustaining that
73 Thomas, Plantations, Pensarlts, arid State, pp. 83, 25. 74 Meaning ex-slave. ' 5 Scott, Ri'ftlslljo/litlg F~I~II~L's, p. 88.
discourse and shaping it in a particular way - via Westist discourse and
policies designed to cultivate the grounds for socio-economic competitive
entry into creole society176 - that liberalism is rationalised by colonial power as
being advantageous to the continuation of colonialism's project of domination
and thus allowed entry into the domain of incrementalised "subaltern"
agency. It would be when the social conditions had been cultivated, whereby
"following only their [racialised] self-interest" the colonised "would
[unknowingly] do what they ought"77 that liberalism would be appear
seemingly to transcend what Chatterjee would call the rule of colonial
difference.
The Crisis of Conduct
Though the study of governmentality leading up to the colonial
emergency of 1953 in this essay largely adheres to the basis for
problematisation articulated by Dean, it justifies itself along lines that are
contrary to the observations on the character of governmentality made by
Miller and Rose. Miller and Rose have noted that "whilst 'governmentality' is
eternally optimistic, 'government' is a congenitally failing operation." As an
indication of the character of governmentality and of this essay, this statement
is particularly useful. Part of their point is that failure is a central element in
governmentality to the extent that it is what inspires the attempt to develop or
submit programmes that would be more efficient. Indeed, "the 'will to
govern' needs to be understood Iess in terms of its success than in terms of the
difficulties of operationalizing it." 78 The potential implication of this
imperative resonates with my reading of many the studies of governmentality
that I have come across. Generally, they involve the endeavour to understand
critically how government operates as a practice, rather than merely the
76 See Alan Adamson, Slrgnr Witlrolrt Slaves: The Politicnl Ecorrotr~y of British Glrintln, 1838-1904 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972)., and Thomas, Plarztntiotzs, Peasants, and State.
~7 Jeremy Bentham as interpreted by Scott, ibid., p. 51. 78 Miller and Rose, "Governing Economic Life", in Cane and Johnson (eds), Foircatllt's
Nezo Dorrrnins, pp. 84, 78, 85.
reflection of the art of ruIe.79 In this way, these essays may be described as
accounts of the "positive", that is, successful frzits rzccoztlplis, of which their
effectiveness for moulding the conduct of the population in the form of
identifiable tactics of government has been cause to name them
problematisations.
But it is precisely the ease with which the political rationality that guided
the colonial conduct of conduct in British Guiana from the late 1940's to the
electoral outcome of 1953 was operationalised, the presumption of its success,
and, furthermore, the final lack of its success that renders 1953 a curiosity for
the analytics of government. For not only was colonial power unable to
control the conditions under which the subjugated colonial would emerge as
a quasi-free subject unknowable to itself. The unsuccessful nature of the
guiding political rationality of colonial conduct lay in the necessity to
undermine indigenous freedom by force, rather than by recourse to the effects
of disciplinary power. It was precisely because Britain could not split the PPP
the suspension was inevitable.80 Foucault noted that if power is power only
when the agents upon which it works are free to choose different paths of
action, then power depends upon the ability of that agent to act - it does not
arise out of the opposite, that is, the extinguishing of that ability. To the
surprise and shock of colonial authority, freedom, in the historical moment
that is manifested in the internal self-rule of the colony led by the PPP, does
not yield revolutionary practices of civilised self-reform, but civilised
practices of revolutionary self-liberation. Two particularly important aspects
of governmentality in Guiana during this period now surface: first, the
ambivalence of the discourse of racialised interest, as illustrated by the
comments of Woolley which suggests, second, that self-reform in by the
partially liberated colonial subject moulded by the rationality under which
the conduct of conduct acts can explode the boundaries of governmentality.
This is the risk of government: that the taste of freedom will encourage an
79 Pat O'Malley, "Indigenous Governance", Gane an Johnson (eds), ibid., p. 156. 80 Furedi, Colo~lial Wl~rs, p. 262. 81 Gordon in Burchell et a1 (eds), The Fozical~lt Effect, p. 5.
appreciation of old politics in new contexts, rather than inspire the quest for a
different politics that suits its new conditions.
The failure of colonial conduct cannot be assumed to be an instance of
mere incompetence on the part of British colonialism. It is also indicative of
the power and agency of the indigenous political movement led by Jagan and
the PPP, of the capacity for resistance against colonial rule. The point
represents a divergence from the main themese of the current body of
literature on governmenality. As Pat O'Malley has pointed out, in privileging
official discourses, governmentality makes it difficult "to recognise the
imbrication of resistance and rule, the contradictions and tensions that this
melding generates and the subterranean practices of government
consequently required to stabilise rule". This is one of the assumptions of the
argument presented here; the constraints of space, however, have rendered
the focus the general object of inquiry in studies of governmentality - the
rationalities of power - which means that any elaboration in this regard must
be made elsewhere. The rest of this paper will thus focus on the shift in the
tactics of colonial governmentality as a result of suc.cessfu1 resistance to it.
1963
Burchell has noted that the relationship between government and
governed is one in which "individuals are identified as, on the one hand, the
objcct and target of governmental action and, on the other hand, as in some
sense the necessary (voluntary) partner or accomplice of government". This
can lead to the paradox wherein the failure of governrnentality
may not of itself result in a public rejection or disqualification of this style or art of government. It would seern that the relationship between governmental activities and the self conduct of the governed takes hold within a space in which there can be considerable latitude vis-iz-zlis criteria for judging whether
government has met the criteria advanced by itself for its capacity to govern.82
In the case of the suspension of the constitution in 1953, the judgement by
colonialism's own admission is, despite all ideological claims to the contrary,
that British colonialism failed. There is, however, some disagreement over
what exactly was not made sufficiently operative, and this is related to the
issue of resistance (something again that is given minimal treatment in an
essay of this length). From the perspective of governmentality, it is
interesting to note the advice of Edward Gent, head of the Eastern
Department of the Colonial Office, who said that "the best use to make of
'leftist' views was to convert them to reformist views". This was a practice
with which colonial authority would not have been unfamiliar. During the
early 1940s, the influence of Soviet ideology in the colonial world had been
such that Britain had publicised widely its alliance with it in order to gain
credibility; leftist rhetoric was used for the purposes of justifying the imperial
mission.83 Here failure would have to be the lack of success in such
conversion. Others maintained that the problem was "an ui~derdeveloped
and ill-educated population getting a vote before they have learned how to
use it" which would "lead to eventual disasterU.84 Colonial authority from
this viewpoint had not sufficiently educated the population nor created the
social conditions in which the colonised would, of their own accord, support
moderate or reformist political policies.
Contraindications, on the other hand, refer not to the failure of colonial
authority to navigate power, but to the success of anti-colon ial resistance
itself, an emphasis that shifts the focus away from the deficiencies of
governmentality and towards the agency of the colonised. Colonial Secretary
Oliver Lyttelton warned that "the men and women round Dr Jagan are cool,
sophisticated politicians operating with full knowledge of all the weapons in
82 Burchell, "Liberal government" in Barry et a1 (eds), Fozicnlilt a~ld Political Renson, p. 26.
" Fi~redi, Colotlir~l Wors, pp. 59, 72. 8.' l l l i d . , p. l65.
the Communist armoury. That is the menace in British G~iana."~5 With less
militancy and greatcr circumscription, someone in Whitehall on the 1953
suspension stated that "the depressing fact is that it is only the Jagans who
seem to understand how to play the political game."86 Another statement
observed the PPP to be very different to other West Indian parties in the way
it kept itself together.s7
If complicity is the issue, then with respect to the electoral victory of the
Jagan in 1953 it was colonial authority which has been duped. With regard to
1963, it was, to contrary - and according to Lewis - Jagan who has been
fooled. It is the period between the collapse of colonial governmentality and
that described by Lewis, where Jagan and his party were seen to have
conceded away their political power, that I now turn. What is of interest is
the fundamental change in the power of colonial authority that led up to the
situation where, first, Jagan "gives away" the political upper hand and,
second, actually calls upon the colonial governor to authorise military
assistance in abating the potential violence that is occurring under his
leadership.
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
"forward".88 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 politicised
by the split of the PPP into two factions with Jagan and Burnham as the
respective leader~.~9 Furthermore, class ideology "had become dominant and
racialism submerged in the period 1950-53", however, during the 1955 58
I35 lhid., p. 2. lbiii., p. 177.
R7 lbiii., pp. 147-48. R8 Martin Carter, "The race crisis - British Guiana," Speech at the Inter-American
University of Puerto Rico, c.1964, p. 10. 89 Hintzen, Tlre Costs ofRegirrre Slrrvivnl, pp. 39,46.
period "race and ideology jostled for supremacy, both playing an almost
equal role on the political sceneU.90
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 at the
service of allowing for 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".91 Caught under a constitution that was explicitly
intended to isolate the radical movement in British Guiana,92 Jagan was left
with the choice of political obsoleteness or playing the game according to
colonial rules. 93 By 1958, Governor Patrick Renison was able to declare
smugly that "[wle have seen 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 investors".~
Later, under the Kennedy administration, it was Arthur Schlesinger who
devised a plan to establish a system of proportional representation in Guyana
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.95 It was a plan intended to
-.
Jagan, The West 011 Trinl, p. 174. Jagan refers to the political ideologies of socialism and capitalism when he uses the term "ideology1' in this instance.
91 Cited in Furedi, Coloizinl Wnrs, p. 207. 92 lbid., pp. 202. 93 Ibid., pp. 206,207. 94 Ibid., pp. 203. 95Ironically, Burnham had been perceived by the metropolitan powers as a black
racist, and had actually been considered less desirable than Jagan for a time.
delegitimise Jagan's claim to power and authority over the people of the
colony, and it worked.% Indeed, it was, as history testifies, successful beyond
all expectations. In February 1962, three unions representing a large portion
of government employees declared a general strike against the Jagan
government. A march with over 60,000 people led by Burnham and D'Aguiar
took place in Georgetown. Rioting, arson and the looting of Indian homes
ensued, but the police and parliamentary units were sympathetic to popular
discontent and ignored the situation. Left 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 which, in its drama and pathos, was a rather 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 before a decision on the colony's independence
would be made. Thus, although it was formerly supposed to be the winner of
the 1961 elections who would be given full executive and legislative powers
and lead the country to independence, it was not until 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
96Ot1e 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, Tlle Costs of Regirrre Slirviual, p. 52.
cla~ses.~7 "That there were hypocrisy, breach of faith and fraud", says Jagan in
great understatement, "was recognised widely".Yg
Guerrilla Governmentality
In examining the events leading up to 1963 it is interesting to note that the
British government had been left completely at sea in gauging the
consequences of the 1953 suspension of the constitution for the nationalist
movement and the image of British colonialism. This situation was quickly
abated with the split of the PPP and the racialisation of party politics. The
sociological determinism inherent in the rationality of racialised interest,
presumed by colonialism in the early '50s to be capable of forestalling any
form of effective radical indigenous politics, had been rejected by Jagan in the
pre-PPP days of peasant mobilisation, and it had been symbolically as well as
politically transcended when Burnham joined the PPP and, following Jagan's
strategy, led the party to victory with Jagan in 1953. But by the late '50s that
same racialised interest was now an essential component of Burnham's
political rationality. 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 a kind of
instrument in the service of colonial governmentality, if his political ambition
is viewed less as the target than the technology by which colonial rationality
aimed to circumscribe the exercise of Jagan's agency. Indeed, it is once
Burnham appears on the scene as Jagan's political and ideological Other and
colonialism's effective accomplice, exacerbating through his racial political
and social policies the conditions in which the anti-colonial movement would
be reduced to indigenous racial conflict, that colonial governmentality may be
said to have turned its failure in 1953 to a victory. Paradoxically, the
politically contingent character of racialised interest had become both
extremely evident by the way it had completed its rounds - from occupying a
position in the political rationality of colonialism, to that of Jagan's anti-
colonial nationalism, to that of Burnham's post-colonial aspirations - and at
the same time extremely entrenched as an essentialist sociology. The natives,
in other words, were doing what they should be doing with an efficiency that
was beyond the wildest expectations of the British.
From the perspective of an analytics of government, it would be possible
to end at this point the account of colonial governing in British Guiana during
the decade of the nationalist movement put together thus far. The
implications the colonial emergency of 1953 for representing the failure of
colonial governmentality has been shown to have experienced a radical turn-
around by 1958. The carefully cultivated freedom of the colonial subject that
had unexpectedly grown wild had been severely pruned to produce magical
results. Although the endeavour to recover agency and celebrate resistance
misses the point about how they are produced and how they are "inserted in
a system of purposes", the question of agency and resistance asked in this
account is highly compatible with an assertion made by Burchell. Namely,
that the techniques of the self are not reducible to technologies of domination,
and that the study of their interaction would appear to be extremely relevant
to "the ethical problems of ho~u freedom can be practisedU.99 The issue arising
out of the relation between agency, resistance and ethics is also what brings
Lewis back into the picture.
Despite and, I will argue, because of the success of the political rationality
of colonial authority by the late 1950s, Jagan continues to be a significant
target of colonial technologies of reform. The reason for this, I suggest, is that
colonial governmentality is so-named because of a qualitative difference from
Foucault's conception of the conduct of conduct - one that forces an emphasis
on aspects of governmentality that are counter-intuitive to his arguments.
One of the things that had disturbed Foucault in his work was the
discovery of "the kind of power which takes freedom itself and the 'soul of
99 Burchell, "Liberal government" in Barry et al (eds), Follcatrlt a d Political Reason, p. 21.
the citizen', the life and life-conduct of the ethically free subject, as in some
sense the correlative object of its own suasive capacity".l"0 Within the arena
of colonial governmentality generally, and in light of the colonial emergencies
in British Guiana particularly, it is the term "ethically free subject" that I find
difficult. In acknowledging the stress in the literature on governmentality on
rule in liberal democracies, Dean raises the issue of the kinds of resources
available to begin understanding the dynamic of "liberal rule through non-
liberal means"lo1 and the lack of any extensive discussion of what he calls
(following Philpott) authoritarian and non-liberal governmentality.'02 One
again, the gaming metaphor comes into play.
Foucault once said that "Our societies have proved to be really demonic
since they happen to combine those two games - the city-citizen game and the
shepherd-flock game - in what we call modern states".l03 Dean interprets this
statement as being a reference to the attempt by liberalism to balance the
forces of pastoral power and the deployments of sovereignty (through the
limiting power of law) "to limit, to offer guarantees, to make safe and, nboz~e
nll, to legitimate and justify the operations" of pastoral power and
disciplinary practices. However, he continues, liberalism can never fully
contain the "'demonic' possibilities" of this combination.lO4
It is the theme of legitimacy and justification that is of particular interest to
me. Scott, Dean and L. Mead all refer to the work of Mill in their discussions
of governmentality in the colonial situation.105 And their comments relate to
the critiques of Holt and Chatterjee on the subject of race. Liberal government
holds the possibility of despotic forms of rule because liberalism itself is a
doctrine that is inherently discriminatory. according to Mill, not all
populations embody the kind of subjectivity through which liberalism may
- - -
100 Gordon in Burchelf et a1 (eds), Tlte Forlarlilf Eflect, p. 5. '0' Dean, Gouenl~rlenfalify, p. 131. '02 Ibid., p. 145. '03 Cited in Dean, ibid., p. 132. 104 Ibid., p. 132 105 1 have yet to examine Mead, Tlre New Pnterrlnlism: Sirpervisonj Approaclres to Poverty
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997) upon which Dean relies for his argu nlent.
operate, hence authoritarian forms of rule are necessary in order to cultivate
such a subjectivity. If Holt talks about the internal racist contradictions of
liberalism, Chatterjee speaks of race as the colonial rule of difference and Scott
conceives of race as the enabling discourse of liberalism, what is apparent to
me js that the emergence of the ethically free subject as artefact is what is
necessary for the legitimisation and justification of race as the rule of colonial
difference.
The implications with respect to what happened between the late 1950s
and 1963, the year of the "the last sad act" of the anti-colonial movement, are
significant. Jagan continues to command popular support by the early 1960s
and, despite the success of governmental tactics as manifested in the
fraudulent power of Burnham. Authoritarian governmentality, however, is
not the answer; not only has it been a visible mode of conduct within the
context of Cold War conflict, it threatens to produce a pyrrhic victory in
which ideological gain for the West spells loss for governmentality as the
source of modern postcolonial subjectivity and the limitation of its freedom.
Jagan, in other words, must be seen to willingly step out of the competition
for leadership of an imminently independent Guyana. As previously
inaccessible documents in the Public Records Office (Kew Garden) 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 is becoming
increasingly clear just how the conditions from which the self-reforming
subjugated subject would emerge were established by colonial power.
The demonisation of Jagan by colonial authority goes beyond the
association with "authoritarian governmentality": with the declaration of a
secret war against the PPP, the covert and conspiratorial strategies of control
and removal, and the insidious placement of political snipers, the conduct of
conduct in British Guiana is more aptly named "gutjrrilla governmentality".
From this perspective, Lewis is entirely correct to attest to the utterly tragic
and pathetic way in which the anti-colonial movement effectively ceased to
operate. But I would maintain that what appeared to be surrender to the
British on the electoral reform issue may was in fact surrender, but it did not,
contrary to what Lewis implies, represent either the act of quitting or an act of
stupidity on Jaganfs part. What Lewis fails to sustain in his otherwise cogent
account is that the right disposition of things arranged to produce convenient
ends meant that Jagan was doomed to be disqualified from the game of
colonial politics. Refusing to budge on the electoral reform issue may have
left him standing with ideological dignity, but it would have totally destroyed
what little chance a severely circumscribed political reason would have had to
allow for a spontaneous act of self-reform by colonial authority. Justice,
however, is not part of the obejctive of colonial governmentality. Legitimacy
is.
Coszclusion
Every intensification, every extension of power relations to make the insubordinate submit can only result in the limits of power . . . [Elvery strategy of confrontation dreams of becoming a relationship of power and every relationship of power leans toward the idea that, if it follows its own line of development and cornes up against direct confrontation, it may become the winning strategy."106
The argument presented in this essay has been that between 1953 and 1962,
the limits of colonial power, the success of a strategy of anti-colonialism, and
the reassertion of power were, one by one, evident in the political struggles in
Guiana. But the operations involved in the reassertion call into question the
legitimacy of the practices of the liberal rule by non-liberal means. In the case
examined here, they did so to the extent that even naming s~zch a regime an
authoritarian version of governmentality is insufficient. For even that term
exists as an established "ism" in the lexicon of political theoiy. Guerrillas, on
the other hand, are something entirely different.
106 Foucault, "Afterword: The Subject and Power" in Dreyfus and Rabinow (eds), Micllel Fo~icniilt, py. 225-6.