Robert Buddan Few Jamaicans would know of Lloyd Best who died last week. Best was a Trinidadian economist and Caribbean thinker who became prominent among the first generation of radical post-colonial intellectuals who had graduated from the University of the West Indies (UWI) in the 1950s and 1960s. Their ideas influenced politics throughout the region in the 1960s and 1970s. We better know some of those names, like Trevor Munroe, George Beckford and Walter Rodney.
Best was different from most in three main respects. He felt that the Caribbean was a unique region and needed a unique solution. Political ideologies and economic theories from other parts of the world were to be taken suspiciously. He therefore also felt that the Caribbean intellectual, especially the new generation coming out of UWI, had a special role to play in understanding what was different about the Caribbean to craft creative solutions. Best and colleagues therefore offered an analysis of the Caribbean in what they called the Plantation School of Caribbean political economy. Furthermore, Best thought that the Caribbean intellectual should be an activist to organise and communicate new research on Caribbean societies to the people at large.
Old intelligentsia
Best and his colleagues accused the old intelligentsia, including thepolitical intelligentsia of the 1950s and 1960s, of failing to understand the plantation origins of Caribbean societies. Plantation history would explain the true nature of Caribbean economic problems and the absence of creative solutions. They felt that economic dependency and its consequences were at the heart of Caribbean problems.
The truth is that the old intelligentsia, including the political intellectuals, had insights into dependency long before Best and his generation did. Therefore, and this has never been recognised, dependency analysis can be traced back to the period of 1945 to 1955 in Jamaica when Florizel Glasspole, Noel Nethersole and Wills Isaacs began to discern and explain certain emerging features of Jamaica's post-war economy.
As early as 1948, Glasspole identified five features of the emerging dependent economy as (i) import dependency, (ii) dependency on western markets, (iii) fiscal reliance on customs duties in the absence of an industrial revenue base, (iv) absence of a sufficiently self-reliant industrial, export economy, and (v) political dependency that denied national control over policy. Best and others came to these same conclusions 20 years after through more formal studies. Ironically, his generation came to blame the early political intelligentsia for reinforcing this dependency.
In 1952, Nethersole too offered an analysis that uncannily anticipated the later dependency theorists. If Glasspole focused on the condition of dependency, Nethersole identified the international causes of it. He pointed to, (i) declining terms of trade for commodity exports relative to import prices, (ii) control of trade by an imperial system of preferences, marketing, shipping, and manufacturing, (iii) imperial control of the currency and its international value, and (iv) reliance on private capital.
When Wills Isaacs became Minister of Trade and Industry in 1955, his analysis centred on the local basis of import dependency. He accused the previous JLP Government of having been a merchant's government. Powerful import oriented merchants, aided and abetted by overseas agents, local distributors, wholesalers and retailers, took large profit mark-ups for doing nothing productive. Imports provided needed customs revenue for government since the weak industrial and employment base could not. Isaacs claimed that merchants had given 60,000 pounds to the JLP for its 1955 election campaign to maintain this state of affairs.
The PNP intelligentsia thought that development was nevertheless possible if the basis for a national and regional economy was established. It advocated a central bank to protect the local currency of the local currency to the U.S. dollar, a single Caribbean currency under Federation, state-private sector partnerships, national and regional planning agencies, capital goods imports to support industrialisation, laws for better employer-labour relations, and incomes policy for stability in the labour market. Best and his generation did not recognise these possibilities for 'dependent development' and were themselves to be criticised for failing to offer realistic policy prescriptions.
THE NEW INTELLIGENTSIA
The relevant message that Best leaves the new intelligentsia is that the Caribbean remains unique and should not uncritically imitate other models wholesale (Singapore, Irish, American, Cuban, etc); and that the intelligentsia (UWI and post-UWI) still has a vital role in defining the region's future in a changing world. The Plantation Model no longer guides thinking and its advocates have abandoned it.
The new intelligentsia believes that effective governance (in the age of globalisation) offers possibilities for development despite past dependency (in the age of colonialism). It accepts that underdevelopment and poverty have a past in slavery, colonialism, and structural adjustment. But it is more concerned with discovering what causes countries to develop than to explain what caused them to have been underdeveloped.
The new thinking is that a society needs effective, democratic policy-making institutions (governance) guided by the values of good citizenship (culture) and the leaders across sectors with the vision and will to make them work (leadership). Strong institutions, productive culture, and committed leadership become the agencies through which transformation from the old dependency to a new development become possible.
As economists, the original model of Best and his colleagues was too narrow and the information and knowledge base of the old PNP intelligentsia was limited. Today's intelligentsia is more equipped for the task being more diverse and informed, better networked, with better research tools, and greater access to policy-makers.
It seems that the challenge of today's intelligentsia is to do what Best wanted us to do but to do it better. It is to research Caribbean problems because good research is the basis for educated governance. It is to be creative because the Caribbean is a unique and creative place and Caribbean governance should not be imitative. It is to provide leadership
because people must take responsibility for their ideas since ideas alone do not sell themselves. Leaders must act out their ideas, that they can do better than Best and his generation is to create models for understanding society and the world better. There is no unified model for this but there are fundamental principles and programmes for 'sustainable development', 'human development' and 'governance' that should form the basis for sound policy.
Caribbean thinking has come a far way. So has Best's generation. That generation is now in power in politics, economy, academia, and civil society across the region. It is not a unified movement but a new agenda is discernible, a policy-directed way to have better governance, deeper regionalism, stronger democracy, fairer international trade, improved values and attitudes, more developed infrastructure, greater application of science and technology, higher environmental consciousness, engagement of the diaspora, and benefits from the region's competitive advantages in tourism and culture.
But a range of social problems remains, as do remnants of the old classes, their attitudes, perspectives, and political influence. Best wanted Caribbean people to have self-confidence to create their own future. The obstacles to developing that confidence was part of the problem, a social and psychological plantation legacy that this generation must continue to struggle to overcome.
Robert Buddan lectures in the Department of Government, Mona, UWI. Email: Robert.Buddan@uwimona.edu.jm
