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Guerrillas, Games and Governmentality Nalini Persram Paper presented to the Caribbean Studies Association Conference St Maarten, May 2001 Please do not cite without author's permission. Department of Political Science University of Dublin Trinity College Dublin 2 Ireland Tel. +353 1 6083596 persramn@,tcd.ie

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Guerrillas, Games and Governmentality

Nalini Persram

Paper presented to the Caribbean Studies Association Conference St Maarten, May 2001

Please do not cite without author's permission.

Department of Political Science University of Dublin

Trinity College Dublin 2 Ireland

Tel. +353 1 6083596 persramn@,tcd.ie

Guerrillas, Games and Governmentality Nalini Persram

Britain has handled us and the question of our independence not in our interest, but in hers.

Cheddi Jagan, The West on j rial'

Introduction

The period 1953 to 1963 in the history of colonialism in British Guiana is remarkable. For

the British Empire, the year 1953 was a disaster. During that year a radical, class-based

nationalist movement led by a group of indigenous professionals and a Jewish-American

Marxist woman was swept to power in the colony. It was like poetry in motion for

proponents of international socialism, yet it caught the British government almost totally by

surprise; within the frigd anti-communist climate of Western world politics the victory left

behind an imprint of British absent-mindedness and colonial impotence. Indeed, less than six

months later, colonial authority felt itself sufficiently threatened by the party it had once

denied was unacceptable to the British as to be forced to declare a colonial

emergency, suspend the constitution and remove Cheddi Jagan and his socialist party from

power. The suspension was a move that, for the British Colonial Office, was considered to be

deeply damaging to the liberal ideology that buttressed empire with its benevolent images of

enlightening paternalism. As an unprecedented act of colonial force, and it was to have major

ramifications throughout the British colonial world.

Yet the eventual demise of Jagan and the PPP in the era of anti-colonial politics was to

take another decade to complete. During that time, a new era in the struggle against

colonialism was initiated which was to see the re-election of Jagan and, for one very crucial

period, to contain the strong possibility that it would be he who would lead British Guiana to

socialist independence. What followed was nothing less than political disaster for Jagan and

the People's Progressive Party. Its culmination came in 1962 when another colonial

emergency occurred, but, crucially, this time upon the initiative of Jagan hlmself. By the

following year, the political events following the emergency would provoke Jagan's allies to

denounce h s final move - the transferral to the British Colonial Office of the authority to

decide whether or not a new electoral system would be established before the next, crucially

pre-independence, election - as nothing less than a gift to his Westkrn-backed opponent, and a

spectacular fall into the jaws of neo-colonialism. For the people of British Guiana what had

1 Jagan, The West on Trial: My Fight for Guyana's Freedom (London: Michael Joseph Ltd., [1966]), p. 341, hereafter referred to as WT. ,

Robertson (Constitutional) Commission: Discussion between The Chairman, the Archbishop of the West Indies and Sir Donald Jackson", 3:20-4:00 pm, 18 February 1954, CO 89111.

been a uniquely successful indigenous anti-colonial force operative in defiance of colonial

history's self-declared trajectory ended up as another casualty of the imperial and liberal-

capitalist containment of democracy's radical potential.

This paper investigates the ten-year period spanning Jagan's rise to power and retreat

from it in order to critically interrogate some of the now mythologised events that have

produced the profoundly debilitating politics, coalesced around the discourse of "race

relations7', that characterises contemporary Guyanese life.3 In seelung to understand the role

of colonialism in this process, the avenue of inquiry known as "governmentality" will be

taken. Pursued alongside those of Guyanese history and politics, it is an avenue that can

illuminate both the rationalities of colonial rule as well as the conditions under which

resistance to it is organised - and, by extension, the ways in which resistance can be made

either successful or unsuccessful.

Political Imperatives in Caribbean Thought

Raymond Smith has recently written with resignation about the prevalence of race

conceived as a fundamental feature of Guyanese society in even the most sophisticated

sociological, cultural and political analyses.4 Curiously, the recognition that race was not a

"natural" or autonomous presence that operated as a dormant feature waiting to erupt

nevertheless is often contradicted in the same breath by a resort to the assumptions of the

pluralist thesis: the result is that the crucial identification of politicisation as a fundamental

aspect in the history of Guyanese social conflict is undermined by deference to an ontology of

racial antagonism. The concept of "race relations" seems to liquefy critical thought. As

Smith insists, "the question is not whether cultural constructions of race continue to exist in

the modem world - they do - but under what conditions does 'race' or 'ethnicity' come to be

a major fault line in the society, making for violence of the kind that was seen in British

Guiana in the 1960s."~ The work of influential Caribbean scholar, Gordon Lewis, contains,

perhaps unexpectedly, an illustration of one of the ways in which race has become sedimented

as a category of political analysis in much of Caribbean thought.

3 See Gordon Rohlehr, "Articulating a Caribbean Aesthetic: the Revolution of Self- perception" in My Strangled City and Other Essays (Port-of-Spain: Longman Trinidad Ltd. 1992), p. 13.

4 Smith identifies the work of Clive Y. Thomas and Brackette Williams as prime examples. Thomas locates the roots of racial violence in the functional aspect of the division of labour between &cans and Indians. In Williams7 anthropological study of contemporary Guyanese society, her ultimate conclusions veer toward the idea that "race" has now become sociolo~cally and politically sedimented. More mainstream work that exlxbits similar tendencies is that of Ralph Premdas. Raymond T. Smith, "Living in the Gun Mouth": Race, Class, and Political Violence in Guyana7', N m West Indian Guide 69 (3&4), 1995: 223-252, pp. 225,245.

Smith, ibid., p. 237.

Immediately after the anti-colonial struggle in British Guiana had officially ended, at a

time when disillusionment was deep and political wounds were still raw, Lewis published a

review of Jagan's political autobiography, The West on Trial: My Fight for Guyana's

Freedom. Though merely a book review, the commentary is politically charged and highly

rhetorical, not least because of the timing of the appearance of the book, which was the year

Jagan7s arch rival, Forbes Burnham, had been sworn in as the first leader of a newly

independent Guyana. Taking a position starkly opposite to Smith's, Lewis criticises Jagan for

not talung seriously enough the race "rea1ities"of Guianese society and in fact attributes

Jagan's historic downfall to his overpoliticisation of the race issue.

Jagan recognises, of course, the early historical roots of racialism; he can see that occupational differences within the colonial prison generated racialist feelings and that such feelings have indigenous roots. He also recognises the deep power of the creolisation process, creating an aggressive Indian commercial bourgeoisie demanding entry into the social power structure. But he prefers to subordinate these elements of the total process to the thesis of imperialist assault upon racial harmony ... 6

Although Lewis speaks of race relations as being historical in character and thereby subject to

contingency, his organic treatment of race relations seems to ground race in Guyanese society

so as to make it autonomous of politics and history - to reify into a fundamental feature of

identity.

But there is another aspect of Lewis' comments that has far-reaching implications for the

analysis presented in this paper, one that relates to the issue highlighted by smith but extends

to the role of race in the political strategy of anti-colonial resistance. Lewis focuses on the

tensions between Jagan's political discourse and his policy implementation, maintaining that

Jagan's rhetoric about the divide-and-rule policy of British colonialism was deeply

inconsistent with his own politics. Jagan was ultimately left out of the historic transition to

Guyanese independence because he did not sufficiently understand that the imperialist assault

upon racial harmony

concerns itself with the vital question of colonial political strategy. Once his own premises about colonial ruling classes were accepted, he had no right, logically, to trust the British . . . Yet his policy after 1953 was, in fact, based on such a trust, culminating in the astonishing act of unconditional surrender to the Colonial Secretary in the last sad act of the drama in November 1963.'

As far as Lewis is concerned, it was Jagan's "over-simplified" marxism that blinded him to

the race issue - that led him to underestimate the potency of race as a major component in the

social-economic process and instead elide it under arguments about the legacy of colonial

6 Lewis "Review", Caribbean Studies 7(4), 1967: 59-61, p. 60. 7 aid., p. 6 1.

rule. As for the actual mistake he made, it was, says Lewis, to persist - even after the

dissolution of the official nationalist movement - in "playing the game according to British

rules". It was "a game, of course, [the PPP] were bound to lose, for ... the difference between

American sports and British sports (as also colonial policies) is that whereas the Americans

defeat their enemies, the British disqualie them".8

Aside fkom the politically dangerous assumptions Lewis makes about race it is the notion

of "trust" that provokes a critical reading of his analysis of Jagan's political manoeuvres. The

perspective known as "governmentality" seems particularly useful in this regard. As a mode

of inquiry emerging from the work of Michel Foucault, the object of scrutiny in

governmentality is that characteristic rationality of governing and its accompanying

technologies of domination upon which official authority relied for the realisation of its

political objectives: liberalism. But Foucault also stated that "in order to understand what

power relations are about, perhaps we should investigate the forms of resistance and attempts

made to dissociate these relations". Thus, most crucial for the analysis here is not just an

examination of the dynamics the colonial "conduct of conduct" in British Guiana but one of

the anti-colonial strategy that tried to resist it - and for a moment succeeded. At its most

basic, this paper investigates how the history of colonial conduct became interwoven with the

history of dissenting, anti-colonial "counter-conducts".'O

Governm entality

There has been a great deal of interest recently accorded to the notion of governmentality.

In contrast to classical political philosophy which is concerned with the legtimate

foundations of political sovereignty and political obedience - that is, the best government -

governmentality, according to Foucault, is about how to govern.'1 "We live," he says, "in an

era of a 'governmentality' . . . [where] the problems of govemmentality and the techniques of

government have become the only political issue, the only real space for political struggle and

c~ntestation".'~ As Rabinow notes, "the art of government and empirical knowledge of the

state's resources and condition - its statistics - together formed the major components of a

Ibid., p. 60. 9 Foucault, "Afterword: The Subject and Power" In Hubert Dreyfus and Paul

Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Hempstead: Harverster Wheatsheaf, 1982), p. 21 1.

10 Colin Gordon, "Governmental rationality: an introduction", in Burchell et a1 (eds), The Foucault Eflect, p. 5.

11 Ibid., p. 92. 12 Foucault, "Governmentality", in Bany et a1 (eds), Foucault and Political Reason,

p. 103.

new political rationality. A rationality, Foucault assures us, from which we have not yet

emerged."I3 This is known as the "conduct of conduct".

During the 1 8fi and 19@' centuries, the political focus had been on how policing - that is,

the transmission of the principles of good government of the state to individual behaviour and

the management of the farnily14 - "would manage to penetrate, to stimulate, to regulate, and to

render almost automatic all the mechanisms of society". Now the focus is on the possibility

itself of government. The practice of government is considered a techne - a "practical

rationality governed by a conscious goal".15

The issues are about, first, the limitations of governmental activity for the purposes of

enabling the best possible outcome whilst remaining aligned with the rationality of

government, and, second, the avoidance of intervention. As Foucault explains, "it is here that

the question of liberalism comes up. It seems to me that at that very moment it became

apparent that if one governed too much, one did not govern at all - that one provoked results

contrary to those one desired".16 Liberalism, from this perspective, represented less a

diminution of government than a mode of careful, economic and moderate rule. If the basis

upon which liberal government is possible depends upon maintaining the autonomy of society

from state intervention, then the political spaces that allowed for critical reflections on state

actions have to be cultivated through the activity of rule.I7 As Burchell has explained, it is

this activity - the ethos or techne- rather than the institution of governmentality that interested

Foucault. Considered "a rationally reflected way of doing things that functions as the

principle and method for the rationalization of governmental practices" rather than "a theory,

an ideology, a juridical philosophy of individual freedom, or any particular set of policies

adopted by a government", the aspect of liberalism of interest to Foucault was its tactics

rather than its strategy for legitimising political authority.18

Political power in this approach is conceived as a network of technologies for creating

and sustaining self-government.19 That is, the objectives of government depend upon the

ignorance of both the individual and the population as a whole as to what is being done to

them. Coverture is accomplished by the disposition of things in the service of convenient

13 Paul Rabinow (ed.), "Introduction",The Foucault Reader (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 15, 16.

14 Gordon in Burchell et a1 (eds), The Foucault Eflect, p. 7:' 15 Foucault, "Space Knowledge and Power", in Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader,

pp. 242,255,256. 16 Ibid., p. 242. 17 Andrew Barry, Thomas Osbome and Nicolas Rose, "Introduction", in Barry et a1

(eds), Foucault and Political Reason , p.10. 18 Graham Burchell, "Liberal government and techniques of the self' in Barry et a1

(eds), Foucault and Political Reason , p. 21. 19 Peter Miller and Nicholas Rose, "Governing Economic Life", in Mike Gane and

Terry Johnson (eds), Foucault's New Domains (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 102.

ends instead of the impositions of law.20 In its quest to identify the contours of power,

governmentality is thus more materialist than theoretical in na t~ re .~ '

Colonial Governmentality

David Scott's recent work on what he calls "colonial governmentality" involves the

political rationalities of government as they occur, in their specificity, in the colonial

domain.22 In moving beyond the task of revealing the agency of the colonised or

colonialism's practices of inclusion/exclusion, or the attitudes or mentalities of the colonisers

toward the colonised - that is, the tasks of critiques of 0r ien ta l i~m~~- Scott shifts the critical

eye towards the problematic of how the colonised have been inserted into modernity through

that characteristic mode of British colonial governance, liberalism. His assumption is that the

older problem-spaces of postcolonial criticism surrounding nationalism and socialist

revolution have been superseded by a new one that, as Foucault seeks to demonstrate, has

situated itself firmly and ubiquitously in the present. In contrast to Partha Chatte jee, Scott

emphasises not the distance -arising out of the effects of race -between the colonial state and

forms of the modern state in Europe that now needs emphasis, but the change in the targets of

governmental practice that produced the distinctly modem in whch "race" was to operate.24

Drawing upon liberalism as the locus of critical inquiry and focusing on it as a means by

which the activity of rule derives its inspiration rather than as an ideology or principle

requires, says Scott, a turn towards the metropole and its modes of domination, hegemony and

power in the search for ways of understanding how those modes produced specific and related

effects in the colonies.25 The political rationalities of Europe are important because they

produced novel ways of interacting with and maintaining rule over the non-Western world,

and thus new grounds upon which responses to those changes could be made. For with the

20 Foucault, "Governrnentality", Barry et a1 (eds), Foucault and Political Reason, pp. 94, 95, 100.

21 Rabinow, "Introduction", The Foucault Reader, p. 10 and Mitchell Dean, Govemrnentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999), p. 3.

22 Scott, "Introduction", Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality (Princeton University Press, 1999).

23 Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1978).

24 Scott, Refashioning Futures, pp. 25,28-9, 30,31,40. 25 Ibid., p. 25. A perusal of the rapidly burgeoning literature on governmentality

shows that the term "government" is not limited to official state power - the state is merely a particular form that government has assumed25 - but refers to any rational regme of power, regulation and production. It is thus more useful to view Scott's assertion as more of a political imperative directed towards a body of scholarship that he considers to be increasingly in danger of anachronism.

development of the political rationality of the modem colonial state, "not only the rules of the

political game but the political game itself changed".26

One form of this shift is documented by Frank Furedi in his comparative study of the

colonial emergencies that took place in Malaya, Kenya and British Guiana. The term

"emergency" served public-relations by allowing the British government to use coercion

whilst sustaining the semblance of normal civil rule. Nevertheless, Furedi notes that these

colonies were held up as symbols of imperial failure; this was due to the belief that the need

by the Britlsh government to resort to systematic repression when conventional methods of

political management proved unsuccessful represented a break-down in colonial power.

Regardless of who emerged victorious from the anti-colonial revolts, and Furedi notes that

Britain did manage to "shape, influence and ultimately transform the nationalist challenge it

faced", it was thought that the imperative to get involved in such conflicts guaranteed that,

inevitably, Britain would have to abandon its imperial pretensions.27 To the contrary, and

despite the thesis of imperial historians which held that colanial reforms were not a survival

strategy but the unavoidable (and unregrettable) fulfilment of Britain's imperial mission, the

will to imperial power continued after WWII, as the policies of the 1945-5 1 Labour

government indicated. Thus, regardless of their threatening appearance in the initial stages,

the emergencies eventually became a hnd of controlled experiment in change that used

tactics of "rearguard action" in an "attempt to shape the manner in which change could be

achieved by constructing an environment which restrained mass participation and created a

political framework that was insulated from popular pressure.'728

The central question arising out of Lewis' critique of Jagan's anti-colonial strategy that

draws upon the inquiries of governmentality is about those tactics of government that are

aimed at the continuation of empire under certain political and geopolitical conditions:

namely, the anticolonial nationalist movement in British Guiana during the height of the

Cold War.

The Rationalities of Rule and Resistance

The Problematic

In 195 1, not long before Jagan would be elected to power, the Waddington Commission

had been set up to investigate the political organisation and economic possibilities of British

Guiana. The results were that the society showed some indications of racial tension but that it

was only a positive sign of growing pains for a colony in transition to self-government. East

26 Scott, Refashioning Futures, pp. 3 1-2, 5 1. 27 Fuedi, Colonial Wars and the Politics of Third World Nationalism (London:

1.B.Tauris Publishers, 1994), Preface, pp. 1, 3,86, 188.

Indians, the Commission observed, were indeed competing to enter and integrate into creole

society; but since it was their demand for equal participation in creole society that was the

basic source of the agitation between East Indians and mainly Afro-Guianese, this was

essentially a progressive development. Moreover, the same communities lived harmoniously

in the rural areas of the country, further evidence that British Guiana was not fundamentally a

racially fragmented society.29

The Commission, moreover, did not believe that the development of disciplined political

parties in British Guiana was Thus, although the members of the People's

Progressive Party had already been identified as communist subversives, they were not

considered to be serious candidates for politics in the near future of the colony. It was

because of, rather than despite this view, that universal adult suffrage based on English

literacy was agreed upon as the first step towards local self-government. By winning the

election in 1953 the PPP surprised the entire colony, not least the small Guianese middle

class. It was a victory that had been achieved democratically on the basis of class and racial

unification and over the next few months, rapid attempts at pushing through radical social,

political and economic changes were made. The first step towards the realisation of the

political and socio-economic objectives of the nationalist movement was taken. These were,

according to Jagan, avoidance of the "chronic underdevelopment, backwatdness and poverty"

of Latin ~ m e r i c a ~ ' through nationalisation, democracy, "revolutionary scientific socialist

Marxist-Leninist ideology", industrialisation, class struggle, development, and nation-

building.32

It was over the sugar industry that disputes leading to the confrontation between colonial

authority and local government eventually occurred. This is not surprising gven that a high

degree of centralisation of political authority - characteristic of colonial rule - was evident in

the political power of the planter class.33 When capitalist investment began leakmg out of the

colony after a prolonged strike by sugar workers, the Archbishop of the West Indies accused

the PPP of promoting the strike. He called on the colonial secretary "to take such action as he

may see fit to ensure confidence in the Government" since the Party was "trying to use the

28 The Whig Interpretation of African history takes the triumph of nationalism as the culmination of Afnca's socio-political development. Ibid., pp. 10, 64, 189.

29 Thomas Spinner Jr., A Political and Social History of Guyana, 1945-1983 (London/ Boulder: Westview Press, 1984), pp. 33-4.

30 These figures included Critchlow (the "father" of trade unionism), Edun and Jacob. Jagan, The West on Trial WT, p. 60.

3 1 Jagan, Forbidden Freedom (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1954), p. 62. 32 Jagan, The West on Trial, p. 419. 33 Clive Y. Thomas, Plantations, Peasants, and State: A Study of the Mode of Sugar

Production in Guyana (Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, LA and Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, 1984), p. 13.

machinery of democracy to destroy democracy and substitute rule by one party on the

Communist - and since they were "extremely good at organisation and

propaganda".35 The Governor, furthermore, was convinced that the PPP was going to take

over the unions. 36 When Harold Ingram's report on his fact-finding mission to British

Guiana called for covert operations to be organised by MI6, there was no alternative, as far as

colonial authority was concerned, but to wage a secret war against the PPP.~' Fearing the

nationalisation of industry and PPP dominance over the unions, the British resorted to the

form of political control that was retained in the new constitutional arrangement, and made

the unprecedented move of suspending the Constitution and dismissing the Party from office

after only 133 days of being in power.38 Armed forces entered the colony "to support the

police and prevent any public disorders, which might be fomented by Communist supporters"

- even though at the time the only imminent crisis, as one observer noted, would have been

over the cricket match with ~rinidad.~' The official statement by the colonial authorities was

that the suspension of the constitution was carried out on the basis of political problems at the

domestic level but, more crucially, to prevent its subversion and the establishment of an alien

ideology in British ~ u i a n a . ~ ' Jagan later said of the suspension of the constitution in 1953,

that "in the field of local government, [the PPP] were simply putting into practice what

prevailed in the United Kingdom @]ut, apparently, what was acceptable in the West was not

to be tolerated in Guiana; what was deemed democratic in the United States and its

possessions was considered dictatorial in British ~uiana" .~ ' This echo-ed what C.L.R. James

had observed in 1933 - that what was in Britain the greatest virtue became in the colonies the

greatest crime.42

34 Cited in Spinner, A Political and Social History, pp. 42,43. 35~obertson (Constitutional) Commission: "Note of Private Session with the

Archbishop of the West Indies", p. 3, 30 January 1954, CO 89111. 36 Peter Simms, Trouble in Guyana: an Account of People, Personalities and Politics

as They Were in British Guiana (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1966), p. 12 1. 37 Furedi, Colonial Wars, p. 194. 38 Hintzen, The Costs of Regime Survival, p. 36. V.S . Naipaul states that the Jagans

were the "pariahs" of the West Indies when British entered Guyana-in 1953. Naipaul, The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies - British, French and Dutch - in the West Indies and South America (Harrnondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1962), p. 10 1.

39 Spinner, A Political and Social History, p. 45. 40 Smith, "Race and class in the post-emancipation Caribbean", R. Ross (eds), Racism

and Colonialism (The Hague/Boston/London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982), p. 208. 41 Jagan, The West on Trial, p. 133. 42 C.L.R. James (from "The case for West Indian self-government") cited in Harold

A. Lutchman, From Colonialism to Co-operative Republic: Aspects of Political Development in Guyana (University of Puerto Rico: Institute of Caribbean Studies, 1974, p. 44.

According to Mitchell Dean, governrnentality is usually concerned with "the moments

and situations in which government becomes a problem".43 The problematisation chosen in

this discussion arises out of the suspension of the constitution in 1953 and the tumultuous

decade that followed it. The question posed relates to the assertion of the liberal character of

British colonial rule in an attempt to respond to the charges Lewis lays against Jagan. It is

placed within the more immediate historical context that involved the British obligation to the

liberal doctrine of self-determination, the historical move towards decolonisation, and the

dualistic ideologies of empire and the Cold War that drove the extremist and unprecedented

conduct of the British government.

Racialised Interest

One can begin to respond with an extremely revealing point that has been made about the

function of creole society with respect to the civilising mission. Creole society has been

described as the stage in the development of the colonial state whereby it begns its

withdrawal from s o ~ i e t y . ~ With the issue of creolisation Scott's comments about .the shiftmg

grounds for political struggle become relevant in the British Guianese context. If there is a

shift by colonial power &om targeting the colonised as the wealth-producing Other, to

targeting the social conditions of the increasingly Westist subject as the effect of colonial

conduct, this is where it happens most visibly. This is where a new form of colonial power

takes effect prominently and enables the initiation of the process of colonial authority's

withdrawal from Guianese society.

The work of Thomas Holt is particularly instructive in t h ~ s regard. In his study of race,

labour and politics in Jamaica and Britain over the century leading up to 1938, Holt observes

that changes in the arenas of British politics, colonial policy and ideologies of race initiated

novel perspectives on the problem of freedom.

The political dimensions of that problem for British policymakers paralleled the economic: how to reconcile eeedom with coercion, or more specifically, how to structure a political system in the colonies nominally consistent with liberal democratic principles, while maintaining ultimate control over black political expression.45

43 Dean, Governrnentality, pp. 28-29. This is one of the first, sustained, single- authored texts to appear that is devoted to the concept and interpretation of Foucault's notion of governmentality.

44 George Danns, "The colonial state in a Caribbean society: the case of British Guiana," University of Guyajla, c. 1985: 1-43, p. 36.

45 Holt, The Problem of Freedom; Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832- 1938 (Baltimore: The Johns Hoplans University Press, 1992), p. 2 17. Also cited in David Scott, Refashioning Futures, p. 88.

Liberalism as a doctrine, says Holt, contained its own racist c~ntradiction.~~

In examining the history of British Guiana between the years of the early twentieth

century and those in which indigenous political activity first began to emerge, it is not

difficult to see a similar process at work. As previously indicated, the issues surrounding the

decision about universal suffrage for the Guianese people were, to a large extent, about the

cohesiveness of a society that was considered to be divided by racial animosity and

competition. British attitudes towards West Indians in particular during WWII had stressed

the condition of moral decay rendering the anti-colonial responses that came later as mere

greed, frustration and, irrationalism: racism redressed itself in the notion that colonised

subjects were not prepared for self-determination. The pluralist thesis held that West Indian

societies were not "whole fabrics woven by the passage of time" like the countries of Europe,

but "indigenous peoples" existing within different culturally-bound sections "created by a

sequence of political acts".47

These "political acts" are explored by Jagan in his discourse of nationalism. Historically,

says Jagan, there had been the feeling that the only way to break out of the structures of the

colonial value system was to assert either Afro-Guianese or Indian racial solidarity against

colonial d~minat ion .~~ Jagan traces this tendency to life on the sugar plantation. His account

illustrates how the socio-economic and politico-economic strategies for the survival and profit

of the plantations lay the conditions for the naturalisation of race relations into a sociology of

Guianese life. Similarly, the economist Clive Thomas has noted that during the 19" century

and into the 20th the planters used many "stratagems, particularly psychological and cultural

ones" to manipulate the increasingly separate and distinct ethnic groups of Ahcans and

Indians to their own advantage." These "stratagems" were also supported by the Colonial

Office whose interest was to contain the Afkican and Indian peasantry, despite the British

authority's "contempt for the 'saccharine oligarch^"'.^^ Smith has observed that even when

immigrants escaped from plantation labour, they continued to be identified primarily by race.

This is what has brought complications to the class system and worked to undermine the

creation of broad class movement^.^^ The British relied on the notion that competitive entry

into creole society by mutually antagonistic racial groups was a diminishing force for any

46 It is important to note, however, the particular aspect ofjiberalism that Holt addresses, which is "the pure ideals of liberal democracy". Looked at as a doctrine or set of principles in relation to its manifestation within the post-emancipation period of Jamaican history, Holt's account of the dynamic between liberalism and race arrives at the accurate conclusion that the fkeedom that was produced by this dynamic represented "ideologically, a freedom that internalized its own antithesis". Holt, The Problem of Freedom, pp. xxiv, xxv.

47 Furedi, Colonial Wars , pp. 126, 128, 132. 48 Smith, "Race and class in the post-emancipation Caribbean", p. 115. 49 Thomas, Plantations, Peasants, and State, pp. 83,25.

Smith, "Race and class in the post-emancipation Caribbean", p. 1 13.

indigenous political developments that might threaten the power of the colonial state, even in

the face of serious political agitation.

Thomas uses the term "interest7' to refer to the planters' unadorned economic objective of

profit-making using the smallest labour force possible, the fulfilment of which occurs through

the racialisation of the plantation labour force. With respect to Smith's concern, the notion of

what may be deemed "racialised interest" is what allows for the inversion of Smith's

problematic such that the racial origins of the political crisis in Guiana (from the mid-50's

onward) is rearticulated as the political origins of the racial crisis in Guyana at present. That

is, the basics of racialised interest are what allow for an argument about the colonial

production of a Guyanese sociology.

Th~s is how Scott's notion of the way in which the move towards liberal modes of social

being comes "to depend upon a discourse of racew5' is decipherable in the Guyanese context.

It appears that political liberalisation in the colony proceeds on the basis that racialised

interest will act as the guarantee of the impossibility of a broadly based indigenous anti-

. colonial power. How this assurance operates cannot, it appears to me, be understood without

one other theoretical element.

That is, the role of both indigenous agency and epistemic violence. If the notion of

epistemological oppression conceives the subaltern as being acted upon and inhibited by

power such that representation involves little else than the mere trace of the original5' - the

emphasis being on what we cannot know about the subaltern - the investigation of political

rationality may illuminate something different. In revealing the technologies that produce

self-governing individuals, individuals who in following their own interests unwittingly do

what they should53, the elusiveness of subjectivity within structures of domination, may

become much less of an issue than the actual governability of the subject.

However, the subject, in being unknowable to itself, must be articulated in terms

associated with epistemological aporia. As such, epistemic violence in t h ~ s capacity

represents not just an incidental link, but a necessary condition for the successful effects of

governmental rationality: in order for agency as a political possibility to be assumed by the

post/colonial subject, it becomes a requirement of the tactics of power if they are to serve the

interests of governmentality.

The Crisis of Conduct

5 1 Scott, Refashioning Futures, p. 88. 52 The "orignal" being, of course, a theoretical impossibility. 53 Jeremy Bentharn as interpreted by Scott, ibid., p. 5 1 .

Foucault noted that power is power only when the agents upon which it works are fiee to

choose different paths of action, then power depends upon the ability of that agent to act. It

cannot arise out of the opposite, that is, the extinguishing of that ability.54 In the highly

illiberal move towards authoritarianism that was necessary in order to supplement colonial

authority's inability to split the PPP colonial rule is revealed to lack the fundamental power

for which it is named.55

Nevertheless, the failure of colonial conduct cannot be assumed to arise out of the internal

weaknesses of either governmentality or colonialism more generally. It was not simply the

case, as one British official put it, that "an underdeveloped and ill-educated population" was

given the vote "before they ha[d] learned how to use it". Such a position denies the power

and agency of the colonised and the will and capacity to resist colonial rule. Colonial

Secretary Oliver Lyttelton's said of the PPP that "the men and women round Dr Jagan are

cool, sophisticated politicians operating with full knowledge of all the weapons in the

Communist arrnoury. That is the menace in British Guiana." In more measured voices, the

PPP were said to be very different to other West Indian parties in the way it kept itself

together. But where British authority can clearly be heard acknowledging both the failure of

colonial governmentality as well as the power of indigenous anti-colonial agency is in

Whitehall: "the depressing fact is that it is only the Jagans who seem to understand how to

play the political game."56

One of the things that disturbed Foucault was the discovery of "the lund of power which

takes freedom itself and the 'soul of the citizen', the life and life-conduct of the ethically free

subject, as in some sense the correlative object of its own suasive capacity".57 But under

colonial governmentality, the "ethlcal subject" does not exist. That is because the legtimacy

of colonial governmentality rests on its claim to be able toproduce that subject. And during

the time and political space in which this production process occurs, the colonial subject -

contingently characterised through the logic of the civilising mission as one in the process of

transformation - is the target of the widely fluctuating negotations that seek to present, at

certain opportune moments, the ethical subject as artefact - that is, as something that is

shaped according to the legtimating requirements of colonial governmentality but which

cannot yet be named "free". There is a very specific "imbrication of resistance and rule" that

colonial governmentality embodies, constituted by the contradictions and tensions that this

54 Gordon in Burchell et a1 (eds), The Foucault Efect, p. 5. 55 Furedi, Colonial Wars, p. 262. 56 Ibid., pp. 2, 147-48, 165, 177. '' Gordon in Burchell et a1 (eds), The Foucault Efect, p. 5.

meddling with the colonial subject generates. It requires "subterranean practices of

government" in order to stabilise rule in the interests of retaining empire in rationalised

form.58 It would appear that the character of colonial governmentalit., at feast in the British

Guianese case, is reflected in its tactics. And by virtue of the way in which (contrary to

Foucault) legitimacy is the crucial issue and yet subversion is the crucial element those tactics

seem to me to operate along the lines of guerrilla warfare.

Guerrilla Governmentality change title?

Burchell has noted that the relationship between government and governed is one in

which "individuals are identified as, on the one hand, the object and target of governmental

action and, on the other hand, as in some sense the necessary (vo1untary)partner or

accomplice of government". This can lead to the paradox wherein the failure of

governmentality

may not of itself result in a public rejection or disqualification of this style or art of government. It would seem that the relationship between governmental activities and the self-conduct of the governed takes hold w i t h a space in which there can be considerable latitude vis-a-vis criteria for judgng whether government has met the criteria advanced by itself for its capacity to govern.59

This comment translates into a problem for thls perspective. It can be captured most basically

in the following questions about the period of British Guianese history under study. Did

colonial government meet the criteria advanced by itself for its capacity to govern? Did the

Guianese people, in the end, unwittingly do what they ought to have done?

Judging by Governor Patrick Renison's remark in 1958, the response to the first question

is "yes". "We have seen," he declared smugly, "the unusual picture of the communist Jagan,

both before and after the election, competing with all other parties and politicians to attract

and reassure capitalist investor^".^^ Lewis, as we have seen, would also a f h this position.

After 1955, Jagan and his party were viewed as having lost their revolutionary fervour

and were considered to have been pushed by the racially derived affiliations of the population,

instead of having led the people "for~ard".~ ' It has been said that national solidarity in the

form of class and racial unity gave way to a new form of race relations, that had been

ideologsed along party lines by the split of the PPP into two factions with Jagan and

58 07Malley in Gane and Johnson (eds), Foucault's New Domains, p. 156. 59 Burchell, "Liberal government" in Barry et a1 (eds), Foucault and Political Reason,

p. 26. 60 Furedi, Colonial Wars, pp. 203. 61 Martin Carter, "The race crisis - British Guiana," Speech at the Inter-American

University of Puerto fico, c. 1964, p. 10, University of Guyana library.

Bumham as the respective leaders.62 This is the result of the "imperialist assault" to which

Jagan referred. Furthermore, class ideology "had become dominant and racialism submerged

in the period 1950-53", however, during the 1955-58 period "race and ideology jostled for

supremacy, both playing an almost equal role on the political scene".63 Racialised interest, it

seems, was delivering well to colonial power. Once at the service of economic interests and

the political containment of indigenous power, it now served the objectives of both Cold War

strategies and vindicatory hopes of an outdated imperialism.

If we are to understand the change in the targets of governmental practice that produced

the distinctly modem in which race was to operate, in British Guiana this period of history is

of paramount importance. Scott spoke of the shift in targets fiom the subjugated as producers

of social wealth - via the institution of slavery, for example - to soclal conditions as the effect

of colonial conduct. The account of racialised interest, in locating its emergence in the

plantation, straddles the shift Scott identifies. This is by virtue of the fact that indenture has

been called a new form of slavery and that the colonial practice of labour stratification

constitutes one of the social conditions to which he refers. But within the nationalist

movement of the 1950s in particular, there occurs another (non-theoretical) historically

specific shft. Racialised interest as a political rationality comes to occupy not only the

domain of colonial governmentality but also the realm of anti-colonial rationality and the

strategy of indigenous party politics (which are mutually dependent).

But this dislocation is more than just a change of place. It is the very moment in which I

would argue the most formative episode of epistemic violence in the colonial history of

Guyanese politics took place - the ramifications of which have reached critical proportions in

the postcolonial present. It was the instance whereby the racialised interest changed fiom -

being consciously recognised as structurally and ideologically constitutive of indigenous self-

interest to being consciously internalised as essentially and inevitably constitutive of

indigenous self-interest; and, moreover, in absence of the recognition that this shift was the

guarantee of the continuation of the rule of colonial difference. If the success of government

in this colony is to be identified, it is in this hrstoric move. Here is where the distinctly

modem in which race was to operate in Guyana - the platform made available to the

colonised on which to produce their responses - was constructed.

By this analysis, a very different reading obtains of what Lewis characterised as Jagan's

simple-minded tactics of colonial blame. It is now possible to admit that, in the face of the

now split collective colonial subject, Jagan's imperialist assault upon racial harmony

represented a strategic exaggeration of Guianese social cohesiveness, at the same time as it is

Hintzen, The Costs of Regime Survival, pp. 39,46. 63 Jagan, The West on Trial, p. 174. Jagan refers to the political ideologies of

socialism and capitalism when he uses the term "ideology" in this instance.

possible to bring to the fore that this emphasis was politically much more. Not unlike Walter

Rodney's A History of the Guyanese Working People 1881-190.5~ it was an attempt to undo

the epistemic violence that was to throw Guyanese society back onto the plantation with the

masters this time being the Guyanese themselves.

In the year after he had admitted to the Prime Minister that the "conditions of the people

in the Colony were largely responsible for the support given to the communist led PPP at the

election" of 1953, the colonial secretary Lennox-Boyd stated that colonial policy and tactics

were now enabling the emergence of a new National Labour Front which would, potentially,

neutralise the PPP through coalition. The ultimatum given to Jagan was based on the

correlation between constitutional advance and political stability: Jagan's aims could not be

"inconsistent with Western Parliamentary democracy". Caught under a constitution that was

explicitly intended to isolate the radical movement in British Guiana, Jagan was left with the

choice of political obsoleteness or playlng the game according to colonial rules. 65

Later, under the Kennedy administration, it was Arthur Schlesinger who devised a plan to

establish a system of proportional representation in Guiana designed to undermine Jagan's .

electoral advantage (he had won 57% of the Parliamentary seats based on 42.3% of the vote).

After the British government and the CIA had proposed the plan to Burnham and Peter

D'Aguiar, (leader. of the United Force - a conservative party supported by Christian churches,

foreign multinationals and Western governments), these local party leaders officially

presented it to the colonial office. A racially based campaign of anti-communism was waged

against Jagan' party. It was a plan intended to delegrtimise Jagan's claim to power and

authority over the people of the colony, and it worked.66 Indeed, it was, as hstory testifies,

successful beyond all expectations. In February 1962, three unions representing a large

portion of government employees declared a general strike against the Jagan govemment. A

march with over 60,000 people led by Burnham and DIAguiar took place in Georgetown.

Rtoting, arson and the looting of Indian homes ensued, but the police and parliamentary units

were sympathetic to popular discontent and ignored the situation. Lefi without the support or

loyalty of the armed and security branches of the state, Jagan made a formal request to the

colonial government to send in British troops to restore order. To the wider pro-American,

anti-communist world, it was a picture of indigenous incompetence that, in its drama and

pathos, was treated as a glorious victory.

The PPP's inability to instil order in the country was used against Jagan to force him to

accept the constitutional change to proportional representation, and to agree to new elections

64 Baltimore: John Hophns University Press, 198 1. 65 Citation from Furedi, Colonial Wars; see also, pp. 202,206,207.

before a decision on the colony's independence would be made. Thus, although it was

formerly supposed to be the winner of the 196 1 elections who would be given full executive

and legxslative powers and lead the country to independence, it was not untll after the 1964

elections that a date for independence was granted. With the electoral system in place, it was

a coalition government consisting of the (officially) moderately socialist People's National

Congress and the capitalist United Force that attained office, and in the end Burnham who

became the first leader of an independent Guyana. The politics of race that had ensued after

the nationalist coalition between Jagan and Burnham had collapsed not only had guaranteed

the political isolation of the Marxists, it had produced a more ideologically acceptable group

of leaders who had a degree of influence over the lower c~asses.~' "That there were

hypocrisy, breach of faith and fraud", says Jagan in great understatement, "was recognised

widely" .68

Insofar as Burnham's plan for gaining political advantage now rested on the same

rationality as colonial authority's tactics of government, it may be said that Burnham himself

became an instrument of colonial govemmentality, the complicity between Burnham and the

British being a land of technology of power. Bumham appears on the scene as Jagan's

political and ideological Other and colonialism's effective accomplice, exacerbating through

his pseudo-socialist ideology and opportunism the conditions by which the anti-colonial

movement would be reduced to a discourse of race. If political rationality under colonialism

in the form of racialised interest had attempted to generate its effects through the production

of a sociology of Guianese society coalescing around the notion of sedimented race relations

arising out of the structures of plantation labour, in the hands of indigenous politicians -

Burnham especially - the effects of this rationality were more dangerous. They were to

essentialise, in the minds and psyches of the Guyanese, the idea that the society was, in the

discursive terms of pluralism, inherently fragmented and that this fi-agmentation was caused

fundamentally by the existence of organically antagonistic racial groups.

In response to the second of the two question posed, the natives did indeed do what they

ought to have done - and it was with an efficiency that was beyond the wildest expectations

of the British.

One final issue remains to be addressed. It is what Lewis referred to as the "the last sad

act" of the anti-colonial movement.

By the early 1960s Jagan continued to command popular support despite the success of

governmental tactics as manifested in the fraudulent power of Burnham. Hence the urgency

66 One of the reasons Jagan's Marxism was seen as a particular threat to the West was that the PPP victory had come two years after the Castro revolution and soon after the Bay of Pigs. Hintzen, The Costs of Regime Survival, p. 52.

67 Bid., p. 49.

felt by Burnham and the British to ensure that electoral reform would take place before the

next election immediately prior to the agreed conferral of independence. As previously

inaccessible documents in the Public Records Office are made available nearly forty years

after the incidents leading up to Black Friday in 1962 when Jagan called for British troops to

enter Georgetown, it becomes increasingly apparent that this is where the guerrilla tactics of

governance were most intense. And it gets more and more evident exactly how the conditions

fkom which the self-reforming colonial subject would emerge were established by a

conspiracy between colonialism and indigenous agents. Foucault's dictum about power

comes into play once again. Power depends upon the ability of the agent to act; it cannot be

demonstrated by the capacity to remove that ability. Lewis, therefore, is entirely correct to

attest to the utterly tragic and pathetic way in which the anti-colonial "nationalist" movement

ended. Where we in fact disagree is over the agent of this tragedy. It was, in effect, by the

removal of Jagan's capacity to act that colonial and neo-colonial interests were finally met.

By Foucault's account, t h s does not represent the might of colonial power, merely its self-

endowed right. And it certainly had very little to do with what Lewis depicts as Jagan's

political ineptitude, regardless of the factual degree of the latter. Indeed, it is the conflation

between what is quite probably political naivete with the conditions established through

guerrilla governmentality that, ironically, makes Lewis himself an unwitting subject. But we

do seem to agree unequivocally about one thing: the right disposition of things arranged to

produce convenient ends in the colonial context has very little to do with justice.

Conclusion

Survival continually haunts the dream of sovereignty with the possibility that failure is not the other side of success or

If we agree with Lewis that Jagan made his own history, even though it was not under

conditions of his own choosing, we must also concede that if the native did what he ought, it

was under threat of (political) death. As Scott insists, the issue has little to do with whether or

not the colonised re~isted.~' And, as Bhabha's remarks indicate, it has little to do with

success.

Rather, it has to do with power and the shaping of resistance. As a less theory-laden

example, the invocation of the colonial "emergency", allowed colonial power to transform

68 Jagan, The West on Trial, p. 286. 69 Homi Bhabha in Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, "Survivng Theory: A conversation

with Homi K. Bhabha" in Fawzia Afial-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (eds), The Pre- occupation of Postcolonial Studies (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000)

70 Scott, Refashioning Futures, p. 16.

anti-colonial nationalists into law-breakers, criminals, terrorists and guemllas.7'

Nevertheless, Foucault maintained that "every intensification, every extension of power

relations to make the insubordinate submit can only result in the limits of power".72 Thus,

colonial governmentality in the British Guiana of '53-'63 may ultimately have become what

he calls the "winning strategy" within the context of Cold War politics. But with the "tactics"

turned inside out and the "conditions" being manifested as coercion, all under the guise of the

colonial "conduct of conduct", not only did it hold contradictory and subversive - that is,

terrorist - implications for itself, but, the realisation of its self-stated power-seelung objectives

was, at most, a pyrrhic victory.

Governmentality is one thing, colonial governmentality another. But guerrilla

governmentality is something entirely different.

I would like to extend my gratitude to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the British Academy for research grants in support of this project. I would also like to thank David Scott, Ronit Lentin, Brian Torode, two anonymous readkrs,

and the participants of the Graduate Seminar, Department of Political Science, University of Dublin, Trinity College for their comments on earlier versions of this essay.

71 Furedi, Colonial Wars, Preface, p. 1. 72 Foucault, "Afterword: The Subject and Power" in Dreyfus and Rabinow (eds),

Michel Foucault, pp. 225-6.