Contributed photos
Audrey Marks (left) and Joan Duncan.
Arnold Bertram, Contributor
At the outset, let me state that my views on the private sector, its political significance and its role in national development have been sub-stantially modified over the last two decades. First, by the lessons learned as a member of Michael Manley's democratic socialist administration of the '70s, and, subsequently by the experience of running a business.
Regular interaction with a small group of businessmen over the last 16 years has also afforded me a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by the private sector in the process of wealth creation.
It is against this background that I want to assess the capacity of the People's National Party (PNP) to respond to the major challenge of recovering the ground lost to the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) within the private sector.
The extent of the ground lost was clearly reflected in the levels of financial support, technology, management and communication skills which the private sector brought to the JLP's campaign.
The PNP's first task is to re-examine its views on the political and economic importance of the private sector as it exists today and not as it was in 1938 when the party was formed. Then, it was a clique of land barons and commercial tycoons who, to a large extent, maintained the social relations of slave society. The owners of capital then were hostile to the view that labour had a right to organise itself in order to defend its interests and improve its living standards.
Today's private sector comprises of Jamaicans from all walks of life who invest in a range of economic activities, including transportation, commerce, broadcasting, agriculture, tourism and entertainment. They are at different stages of development and they are still differentiated by factors of class and race, but they increasingly share the same aspirations and business practices. More importantly, they concede that organised labour has earned a place of respect at the table.
Jamaicans have always shown a remarkable aptitude for enterprise. The conservative planter/historian, Edward Long, estimates that "in 1774, of the £50,000 in currency circulating in the island, at least £10,000 or 20 per cent was in the hands of slaves, most of it in the form of small coins". What this means is that in addition to providing some 12 hours of labour daily under the most inhumane conditions on the plantations, the slaves still found time to cultivate a surplus of food and craft, which they sold weekly in the Sunday market.
The pattern of successful enterprise continued after slavery, for as Eisner points out in her study of economic growth in Jamaica, in 1850, just 12 years after abolition, the peasants contributed some 11 per cent of the value of Jamaica's exports and 39 per cent of the ground provisions consumed locally. In the 1920s a major factor in the universal appeal of Marcus Garvey's UNIA to Africans at home and abroad was its ownership and operation of large-scale economic enterprises.
Successful enterprises
Equally significant are the more recent examples of successful enterprise development by persons without any family tradition of entrepreneurship or easy access to capital. One such was Leo Henry, who began his working life as an employee in a furniture-making establishment and went on to create Modern Furnishing Company. Another is Monica Hawthorne Campbell, a former employee at the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation, who now presides over one of the leading communication services con-glomerates in the region. Audrey Marks left the employ of Air Jamaica to start Paymaster, Jamaica's first bill-payment business. Joan Duncan stepped out from the shelter of NCB and created JMMB, one of Jamaica's most successful financial companies. Richard Burgher, after years of employment as a clerk in the corporate world, went out on his own and in less than a decade, built Marathon Insurance Brokers, and is currently charting new dimensions in the financing of micro- and small-business enterprises as well.
Of even greater import is the speed at which the present generation is turning to entrepreneurship, with a willingness to leave behind the security of job tenure and to take the market risks which come with business enterprise. I became even more personally aware of the extent of this trend when my son, Richard, left the security of employment to start a range of business enterprises with two of his colleagues.
The political significance of this development for the PNP's rebuilding process derives from the fact that the overwhelming majority of young professionals and business persons supported the JLP in the last election. Fortunately for the PNP, only 40 per cent of them had a vote. For this stratum, it is a positive vision of the future and their place in it, more so than a history of solid achievements, which would make them take an interest in the PNP.
New political ball game
A brief review of the role played by the private sector in electoral politics since 1944 will certainly help to shape the understanding the party needs to rebuild a broader political base.
It was the granting of Universal Adult Suffrage in 1944 which brought an end to the political monopoly exercised by the planter/merchant class since the first elections to the Assembly in 1664. The expansion of the electorate by some 1,000 per cent created a brand new political ball game by giving every Jamaican over the age of 21 the right to vote.
For the first time, the private sector was confronted with a political opposition that was not only more powerful, but diametrically opposed to its interests. This opposition included the PNP, which two years after its launch in 1938, declared itself socialist and made clear its commitment to state ownership and the subordination of the private sector. Four of their leaders had been detained by the governor during the war and charged with having political aims and ideals - markedly anti-British and revolutionary in character.
An even more formidable adversary was Alexander Bustamante, the undisputed leader of the National Labour Movement, who had also been detained by Governor Richards in 1940 for having threatened both the colonial state as well as white owners of capital: "The niggers of this country shall rise. We want revolution in this country and before whites destroy us, we will destroy them. I am going to paralyse all industrial works of the country," said Bustamante.
The political response of the private sector to the prospect of the PNP's state ownership and Bustamante's incitement to racial war came in 1942 with the formation of the Jamaica Democratic Party (JDP) led by Thomas Hicks Sharp, a solicitor and major landowner from the parish of Manchester. Around him were Robert Fletcher, Abe Issa, D.G. McMillan, Douglas Judah and Gerald Mair.
Convinced that the governor was actively promoting the JDP as a conservative option to the PNP, Bustamante moved quickly to disassociate himself from PNP's radicalism by publicly describing himself "the most staunch, the most vigorous, the most consistent and determined opponent of self-government". By the time he launched the JLP at the Ward Theatre on July 8, 1943, "attired in brown shorts, a grey coat and a preacher's white tie," the radical Bustamante of 1938 had all but disappeared. He was now a conservative Labour leader who pledged that the JLP would "keep within a moderate conservative policy in order not to destroy the wealth of the capitalists".
While the JLP did not win a single seat in the election and all its candidates lost their deposits, the party would have felt secure in the fact that it was the conservative Bustamante and the JDP who carried the day, winning 22 of the 32 seats and 41.4 per cent of the popular vote. The PNP, against whom they principally campaigned on ideological grounds, won only four seats and 23.5 per cent of the vote.
The socialist offensive
There was no let up for the private sector, as in the post-election period, the radicalism of the PNP and the militancy of its trade-union affiliate, the Trade Union Congress (TUC), dominated both the political and the labour fronts. The Gleaner strike called by the TUC in 1947 introduced mass picketing for the first time in a labour dispute. This was followed by the even more spectacular bus strike of 1948, in which the TUC skilfully combined military tactics with effective propaganda.
In the election of 1949, the private sector watched in awe as the PNP won six of the seven seats in the Corporate Area, after forcing Bustamante to flee from West Kingston, to seek a safer seat among the sugar workers in Clarendon. Only the cultural conservatism of the peasantry stood between the PNP and victory in 1949, as the party won the popular vote, but only 14 of the 32 seats.
After the election, the socialist offensive continued and by 1951, Ken Hill, the leader of the Marxist left in the PNP, was also the party's second vice-president, president of the TUC, Member of the House of Representatives for Western Kingston and mayor of the Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation. The membership of the TUC had grown from 4,000 in 1945 to 23,312 in 1951, and was now representing workers in utilities, the light industry, hotels, sugar, service industries and bauxite.
To be continued next week.
Arnold Bertram, a historian and former Minister of Government, is currently Chairman and CEO of Research and Project Development Ltd. E-mail: redev.atb@gmail.com
