Ian Boyne, Contributor
THIS PAST Wednesday, February 4, marked the 25th anniversary of the slaying of one of West Kingston's most vicious and hardened criminals, the don Claude Massop, Jamaica Labour Party enforcer extraordinaire.
We have come a long way from the days when Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and People's National Party (PNP) criminals and gangsters were seen as constitutive of the Jamaican political landscape. It was simply taken for granted by the middle classes that once you had politics you would necessarily have these political leeches. Edward Seaga could feel free to drink beer under the glare of television lights with known criminals and enforcers in his constituency, and Michael Manley would feel no compunction in leading a delegation of PNP stalwarts to the funeral of Winston 'Burrey Boy' Blake, head of the PNP-affiliated Garrison Gang.
Indeed, at a public rally on November 21, 1974, two years after he won national elections, then Prime Minister and Central Kingston MP Michael Manley was heard thanking his political enforcers by name, referring to them as his 'paseros' and as the 'glory' of the constituency. West Kingston and Central Kingston, controlled by two former Prime Ministers, had some of the most ruthless and nefarious political gunmen and terrorists this country has ever produced. But it did not cost those men their seats.
In an article published in the University of the West Indies' Mona academic journal, The Social and Economic Studies last year on the Jamaican lumpenproletariat (52:1) Osika Gray could tell us that "As with the case with other political enforcers of the early '60s, (Burrey Boy) Blake played an important role in the political wars in Kingston. There with a gang of political toughs he helped two top PNP candidates Michael Manley and Dudley Thompson compete for coveted seats in Central and West Kingston.
"But," continues Gray, in "the political gang war unleashed in West Kingston during the run-up to the 1967 elections, Blake and the PNP's Garrison Gang were beaten back by the withering firepower mounted by gunmen defending the political incumbent Edward Seaga."
The links between Jamaican politics and criminality are well established and the transaction costs of these links are incalculable. But we must not lose heart. There are still criminals associated with the political parties and criminal gangs still exploit their party political connections to carry out their illegal, drug-running activities, but they operate in a social and political environment which has changed significantly.
As a result of the revulsion of civil society and the impressive advocacy work of the media, particularly of Wilmot Perkins, the resignation to the alliance between criminals and politicians is gone, and there is in fact a new militancy for the political parties to distance themselves from the criminal underworld.
Both the PNP and the JLP have pledged their commitment to end political tribalism, and the report of the National Committee on Crime and Violence, perhaps the most holistic and captivating work on the subject yet, was signed by both Prime Minister P. J. Patterson and Opposition Leader Edward Seaga. The report notes that "Treating with political tribalism and strengthening the moral authority of the country's elected officials to demonstrate the political will in leading the fight against crime and violence are central to the overall recommendations of the Committee."
Significantly, the joint Executive/Parliamentary Group of the PNP met on January 17 this year and adopted the PNP Policy Commission's report of November 10, 2003, prepared after the brutal Temple Hall murders over political spoils. The Commission, chaired by the intellectually sharp and forward-thinking former Foreign Affairs Minister Anthony Hylton, prepared an impressive report.
The report quotes from a number of previous reports and analyses and notes in apparent exasperation that, "It is absolutely clear that the partisan distribution of work, its contribution to crime and violence as well as its corrosion of all aspects of democratic governance has been analysed to death, yet it still lives on. Why?" The PNP Policy Commission was honest: The answer is "Non-implementation and partial implementation of past recommendations," including the recommendation of the National Committee on Political Tribalism that the Social and Economic Support Programme given to MPs be scrapped, giving MPs no power over resources.
TRIBALISM
The Policy Commission deepened the frankness: "The main reason for this failure is clear: Despite all the words against tribalism, critical sections of party leaderships and followerships have hitherto been convinced that from a party electoral point of view, the benefits from tribalism, in terms of votes, outweigh the costs to the party and to national development."
The Commission did an eminently sensible and strategically smart thing in a political culture like ours, which is very low on morality and principle. It argues against political tribalism on pragmatic, utilitarian grounds, showing its declining utility. I believe this is done not because the authors are themselves ambivalent about morality, but because they realise that as a communications strategy, pragmatism usually trumps morality especially in Jamaica.
The Commission shows that with "the deepening of globalisation, the heightening of the national crisis and declining voter support for tribal politics, the cost-benefit calculation (must be) urgently revised." The Commission points out that the largesse of the Jamaica state has declined significantly in this era of neo-liberal development and the minimalist state (my words).
The PNP Policy Commission speaks to the narrow tribalists in the party and reminds them that the hard-core party supporters are shrinking and so is their ability to pull out votes.
DEEPENING DISCONNECT
"Clearly, therefore, the electoral benefit of partisan allocation of scarce benefits is declining even as the costs to the party and the nation are increasing. Partisan electoral self-interest which hitherto would have argued for tribalism now demands demise." The Commission Report goes on to state significantly that "There is a deepening disconnect between the values, norms and behaviour of a 30 per cent minority of the Jamaican electorate who privilege the claims of party support over the rights of Jamaican citizenship and the increasing majority who take an diametrically opposed view."
The groundswell from civil society has been having an effect and the work of the media in campaigning against political tribalism and in putting it high on the public agenda has created a revolution in thinking. Besides, the costs of the violence and criminality spawned by the political class have been so horrendous and grotesquely obvious that it has not been hard for all classes, except certain elements in the lumpenproletariat commonly known in Jamaica as "Ragamuffin" or, more indelicately, 'riff raff' (not my words) to see this.
We must continue to shame the politicians on this issue and we must use every opportunity in media, in our churches, in community groups, in every civic and NGO group to press for the breaking of the links between politics and criminality, and the use of political favours and benefits to buy out the poor and corrupt the society including the business and professional classes.
In his enlightening essay in the Social and Economic Studies ('Rogue Culture or Avatar of Liberation? The Jamaican lumpenproletariat') Obika Gray shows how since the 1940s both the PNP and the JLP have recruited the ruffians, the chronically unemployed and the refuse of society to gain political power.
"Stoked by political patronage, granted cultural recognition as a racially demeaned class, and accorded a modicum of social power in the ghetto communities, this contingent became part of the political underworld."
Every class and social group strive to gain recognition, earn respect and gain political space. Ragamuffin (The lumpen proletariat as defined by Karl Marx) used politics to gain respect. At their height lumpens like Claude Massop, Burrey Boy, George 'Feathermop' Spence, Aston 'Bucky' Marshall, Dennis 'Copper' Barth and Jim Brown were heroes in the ghettoes.
Renowned political scientist Francis Fukuyama says human beings crave recognition and would do anything to gain and keep it. In the ghetto, the marginalised and socially excluded use badness, dog-heartedness and political connection to gain recognition and 'stripes'.
BURREY BOY
When the political gunman Burrey Boy was being buried on March 15, 1975 an estimated 20-25,000 persons turned out for his funeral. Commenting on this huge turnout, Obika Gray said the numbers demonstrated "the unmistakable social power that members of the political underworld had come to exercise in national politics." After noting the viciousness of the Garrison Gang and others, the academic cautioned that one should not just focus on "the innate viciousness of the group; it is worth recalling that elite middle class sponsors had for decades made the violent ascension of a political underworld in Kingston possible."
Values matter. It is the ascendancy of certain values commonly associated with the middle class like order, stability, peace-which are reasserting themselves. It accounts for the ideological counter-attack on the influence of the lumpens and their political sponsors. One of the characteristics of the lumpenproletariat is that they "belong to an urban subculture marked by powerful sense of alienation from traditional values and susceptibility to norms that see no awful shame to resort to crime, theft from the powerful, predation and participation in numerous forms of illegality..."
It is the same culture of the dancehall being promoted by the UWI apologists who cannot see the link between the promotion of negative dancehall lyrics and the erosion of progressive values in the society. "Commitment to traditional norms and values are either very tenuous or non-existent among these contingents of the urban poor."
There was a time when the values of the lumpen were cynically exploited by the political class to achieve their end of political power.
Now the political class, under pressure from civil society, is realising that these values cannot serve them any longer.
Says the PNP Policy Commission in its November 17 report: "The party leaderships nevertheless depend to a significant extent on this minority (the 30 per cent) for electoral purposes even as this force is able to deliver only diminishing electoral returns. Unavoidably, the electoral effectiveness of this core is declining as the distance widens between its tribal culture and the main body of all the social classes and sectors."
CHOICE
The PNP Policy Commission was blunt to the comrades: "The PNP now faces a choice either be proactive to take the moral high ground (increasingly coinciding with enlightened self-interest) and prioritise the break with tribalism in renewed exploration of a political partnership with the JLP, or to continue with the current path and later from a weakened position be reactive, compelled by the circumstances of the deepening crisis to seek an accommodation with the JLP in making the break with tribalism." Happily, the comrades ratified the report.
I believe the Policy Commission's arguments are compelling, coercively logical and passionate. This is the kind of thinking which needs to come from our politicians. It is no doubt taking place in the JLP, too. It shows all is not lost. We in the media and civil society must keep up the pressure.
However, we must not be short-sighted and believe that all that is needed is for politicians to distance themselves from the lumpen elements in the society and the criminal underworld and peace and stability will be ushered in.
No. Until we deal with the social deficits in the society, the poverty, marginalisation, social exclusion and unemployability of large sections of our people, we will produce lumpens not for the political class but for the drug cartels. And those creatures are not amenable to social pressure or rational discourse.
Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist. You can send your comments to ianboyne1@yahoo.com.
