Ricardo Makyn/Staff Photographer
The silhouetted figure of the president of the People's National Party (PNP), Portia Simpson Miller, at the PNP press briefing on the party's 70th anniversary celebrations, at the party's headquarters, on Old Hope Road, on Tuesday, April 29.
Don Robotham, Contributor
September coming will mark the 70th anniversary of the People's National Party (PNP). A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. This organisation, which once embodied the hopes of large masses of the Jamaican people, is today a party divided and uncertain of the direction which it needs to take. How has the PNP come to this and what is the wayforward for it out of its difficulties?
In thinking about this very serious issue, the first thing to do is to depersonalise it. The tendency in Jamaica, as elsewhere, is to make everything a matter of personalities - of Portia versus Peter versus Omar.
Avoid problems
The second mistake to avoid is to think about the problems in purely organisational terms. Such a view puts the cart before the horse. Groups collapse and money dries up for a reason. The reason is that the motivation to join and sustain groups has withered and this is particularly clear in the younger generation. It has withered because the cause for which the PNP stood has also withered. No one knows for sure what, if anything, it now stands for.
Moreover, by focusing on per-sonalities, organisation and finance we lose sight of the fact that the problems of the PNP are inseparable from the problems of Jamaican society in general, during this particular period. The same applies to the problems inside the JLP. The crisis in the PNP is only a political expression of the crisis in values in Jamaican society.
This is clearest in the failure to take a firm stand on the corruption issue, despite the efforts of many in the leadership to get it to do so. But the problem goes way beyond the matter of corruption. Corruption itself is an expression of a loss of values and of the degeneration of the PNP, after 18 years in power, into a mere vote-catching machine.
Sources of the crisis
The root causes of the values crisis are both ideological and practical. In 1938, the PNP was founded as a social democratic party, modelled in many respects on the British Labour Party. It combined a programme of social, political and economic reform with a commitment to self-government and political independence.
The justification which the party gave for its existence was twofold. It argued that as long as we did not rule ourselves then the economic, social, cultural and political development beneficial to the Jamaican people would take second place to the interests of the British Empire.
Thus, the PNP united the argument for self-government with the argument for social democracy. Out of this came the import-substitution development policies instituted from 1955 up until the 1980s. The PNP also introduced the common entrance system, the central bank, land reforms, the Jamaica Welfare system of social development, new housing schemes and the National Housing Trust, important social reforms such as maternity leave with pay and the Status of Children Act. Further, the PNP was also an artistic and broad intellectual movement - it is impossible to understand the development of Jamaican journalism or painting, pottery, sculpture and literature without understanding the enormous impact of O.T. Fairclough, the 'Four Hs' and Edna Manley and her circle at Drumblair.
The economic foundation of this approach worked as long as the protected global regime of import substitution was accepted. However, in the 1980s and especially the 1990s, the entire ideological apparatus of social democracy and the import substitution deve-lopment model fell into crisis worldwide. At the global level, this begun as early as 1971 when the United States came off the gold standard and abandoned the post-war Bretton Woods system which had been established in 1944. This was the first step along the road to the liberalisation of both international trade and finance which unfolded more rapidly in the closing years of President Carter's regime and, of course, in the 1980s and 1990s.
'The thirty glorious years'
The French call the Bretton Woods era les trente glorieuses - 'the thirty glorious years' after World War II when global economic growth was strong and the welfare state was established in the developed world and import substitution regimes in the developing world. During this period, exchange controls prevailed and our present worldwide 24 hour stock and money markets were non-existent. All this changed in the 1980s and 1990s. Neo-liberal globalisation triumphed, not simply as a body of ideas, it triumphed in an already existing global economic environment as well.
Countries, incomparably more powerful than Jamaica - Britain, Germany, France, Sweden, the United States itself - were forced to submit to the new global regime, irrespective of ideological beliefs. In Jamaica, the advent of the second Michael Manley regime in 1989 coincided with these realities.
Michael, after much agonising, bit the liberalisation and deregulation bullet. Whether this was done in an appropriate manner is debatable; but that it had to be done, is not. Ultimately, it was the compelling necessity to adjust to this global economic regime which had to prevail, and did prevail. Faced with this fierce and unforgiving global marketplace, our tiny, weak underdeveloped economy with its overvalued currency and non-existent reserves, full to the brim with uncompetitive screw-driver manufacturing firms and mired in an archaic agricultural sector, went to the very brink of extinction. This is what lay at the root of the 1991 hyper inflation and the subsequent banking crisis out of which FINSAC arose. This is also what lies at the root of the upward spiraling of our crime rate.
Unprecedented inequality
As I have written previously, the 1989 deregulation did not only liberalise our financial and trade regimes. It also completed the liberalisation of our values. It also created unprecedented social and economic inequality. All this had already begun in the late 1970s with the ideological assault on socialism most clearly expressed in the 1980 JLP campaign slogan that voting for them would "make money jingle in your pocket." But it matured and came to fruition in the 1990s and beyond.
These are the forces - very powerful global ones - which have disoriented both Jamaica, the PNP and also the JLP, to this very day. It is highly important for us to understand that this is not a process peculiar to Jamaica. On the contrary, one can easily detect a broadly similar social and political process in South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Kenya and in many other countries. Every country in the world, including the most powerful and wealthy ones, has had to grapple with similar challenges with varying degrees of success.
Three approaches
In general, although this is an oversimplification, one can detect three broad approaches in the face of these global realities, in the current PNP, in Jamaica as a whole and, indeed across the global policy scene. One position is to accept this market framework as a given and to subordinate economic and social policy to the demands of the local and global market and to the imperatives of macroeconomic stability. A second approach is to attempt to bypass these market realities and to put the social needs of the population first, regardless of the macroeconomic consequences. The third position is an in-between one: to put social needs and macroeconomic stability roughly on par-trying to address as many social needs as possible while respecting the necessity for macroeconomic stability as well.
Many permutations
Although there are many permutations and combinations, if one looks behind these three policy positions one can discern three different core values. In the first, the ideal is a liberal market-driven economy and society. In thesecond, the ideal is a populist one-social redistribution to the poorer strata of the population. In the third, the ideal is the old social democratic one of social solidarity, but adapted to the present day realities of the global economic regime. Some would say that the National Democratic Movement - Jamaica Labour Party (NDM-JLP ) position represents a fourth option. This is the idea that the core problems of Jamaica can be reduced to legal and constitutional questions and solutions. In reality, however, this is simply the legalistic variant of the liberal market position.
Debating problems
These are the issues which the PNP, the JLP and Jamaica have to debate if we are to renew the country and our political and social institutions. Given the fact that we are a tiny society with a very particular history in a global regime, which is undergoing major strains and changes, these are not simple questions with easy answers. They require hard thought, research and careful analysis.
They are few models to which we can refer, although we should tap widely into the considerable body of global experience on all of these questions. Our media have a crucial role to play in facilitating this discussion. With their help both Jamaica, the PNP and the JLP will be able to come to grips with the challenges of the next 70 years.
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