Make Way for the Assemblies

16, Aug 1999
'The power to act and the wherewithal to act must be removed from "representatives", divine rulers and their "touts" and placed into the hands of the whole people'.

'The right of the individual within his/her specific community was paramount and had to be manifested further in the harmonisation and coordination of all such communities that make up the society as a whole'.

[Continued from last week]

It was indeed interesting to note that that particular reader of this column could have recalled with such clarity the concept of a new form of government that we posited some 30 years ago. It raises the question about the possibility or impossibility of measuring the impact of thought.

Back then, that was something with which from time to time we concerned ourselves for we needed to know and to assess how we were doing as a political entity. And what did we learn from our investigations and our day to day experiences out in the field?

For one thing, we came to know that by far the greatest force on this earth is the power of an idea whose time has come. That's an old saying which signifies that at certain historic junctures factors of time, place, levels of social consciousness, leadership, opportunity, etc, suddenly seem to fit each other, or as some may say, "subjective and objective factors harmonise," and the result is a tumultuous outpouring and movement of masses of people as they create new development or fashion changes in the fundamental socioeconomic relationships within society.

Such historic junctures have been described by social scientists as "revolutionary situations". The period 1965-1971, with the highpoint of 1970, was one such period in our history.

One recalls that in March, 1971, we laboured profusely over the question of an appropriate name for our proposed newspaper, rejecting many before settling on New Beginning, precisely because it, the name, had to suggest a complete start-over of Caribbean existence and the instituting of concepts and structures in our political and economic life that would be fundamentally different to anything that had been formulated, maintained and nurtured by the status-quo of formal Caribbean society since the time of emancipation back in 1834.

The philosophical assumption was that the masses of people below, at the bottom of society, the toilers in the fields and in the factories were the major providers of creative energy and demonstrate by their actions and activity the fundamental difference which they desire to make in their lives and their human condition.

Therefore for us to formulate anything we first had to assess all that had been done by the people previously, all the tools and instruments they created precisely in revolutionary situations when the demands for fundamental difference were most hot.

Having done that, having looked at the formations created on the slave plantations to struggle against slavery, and the people's councils that fought for trade unionism and political representation at the turn of the century, having looked at the struggles of the Indian indentureds through their panchayats, and all this leading up to the local People's Parliaments in 1970, the signposts became quite clear to us.

Power to the People must mean giving real power to the people's organisations rather than to mere representatives. And we were encouraged too by the many local groups that opted, after the 1970 experience, to withdraw from "centralised vanguard forces".

Thirty years ago, we proposed therefore that "every toiler, every scrunter, must govern in a society where the development of human beings rather than property or wealth is the main purpose of all activity. Where the masses of people through their self-organisation, could decide what they want, when they want, where they and how they want, without being choked or stifled by any group, hierarchy or class that puts itself above them.

"In other words, the power to act and the wherewithal to act must be removed from "representatives", divine rulers and their "touts" and placed into the hands of the whole people. For it is only when the masses of people have the power and are politically organised and have control of their local and national life that we can build the new society with the new relations between man and man, man and woman, and between people and property.

"And to cement all this together, we propose a new governmental structure based on the Local Community Assemblies and Local Worker Assemblies of the people, controlling where they live and where they work, to be culminated in Regional Assemblies and a National Assembly functioning solely on the power of the Local Assemblies. This we see as the foundation of the new State structure and institutions of the people that will tie all economic, political and cultural activity into a whole, assuring that each toiler is directly involved in producing, in decision- and policy-making, and in all cultural affairs. Only then can there be new values, new motivations, new attitudes, in fact new men and women involved together in a new beginning."

Initially the core group of personnel who organised and published the newspaper viewed ourselves as a coordinating council and individuals wishing to get involved were forced by the regulations to initiate small units of organisation either where they lived or where they worked or both. That was the major criterion for membership in the core group. Our philosophical view demanded that we work on developing a theory of organisation that would harmonise with the ultimate objective.

The core group, that eventually became New Beginning Movement, named after the newspaper, had to fashion itself structurally and ideologically to guarantee that the "means" justified the "end".

We worked to develop and nurture Assemblies of the People, we had to defend all self-organisations of the people wherever they may have emerged. We then, as a vanguard, had to develop and practise a particular kind of relationship to the people's organisations.

We could not view ourselves as the people's organisation, or as a substitute for it; we were merely conduits to its development. We saw ourselves as a strategic appendage to the people's assemblies, not as a command unit above it. We worked towards our own demise, towards that moment when as instruments we would be dissolved into the new forms of people's power.

We utilised the Hindu symbol of the "Dissolution" a baby on a leaf to make that point. And the African symbol of sustenance the "Ankh" as well as the seven principles of Kwanzaa, of community bonding, which today, 30 years after, has been taken up by so many led by the Anglican Pastor of St Clemens.

In addition, we were clear that the right of the individual within his/her specific community was paramount and had to be manifested further in the harmonisation and coordination of all such communities that make up the society as a whole. With such a view and approach, conflict and contradiction between the individual and the whole, even between regional economies and so on, could be sorted out and managed through engagement within the structure of the assemblies.

Tobago's problem as a regional economy, though more complex, we saw as part and parcel of the problems of self-determination of every other community, moreso a community separated by water and with distinct cultural traditions.

And we did not stop there. We extrapolated the assemblies concept of government to embrace the entire Caribbean. We made linkages in the Caribbean region with a view to setting up a Pan-Caribbean Bureau to coordinate the work through the region. Up the Caribbean there came to exist a number of organisations all with names incorporating the word "New". Movement of a New Dominica, New Jewel Movement in Grenada. In fact NJM was formed when Movement for the Assemblies of the People (MAP) joined with Jewel. When Abeng was reformed in Jamaica, it was called New Abeng and so on.

Many sought to embrace the vision but were faced with great hostility both from within and without. The results in some cases were horrific but that is another story. The vision is still there. There are people today who embrace it in the Caribbean and are unaware of the source of its origins but that too is of little import.

We recall the present Speaker of the House, before he re-entered the political arena, commenting in one of the newspapers about this great, new concept he had come across while visiting Jamaica and he outlined Assemblies of the People as a new form of governance, not too long after he joined the UNC. Obviously he had not fully inculcated the ideological vision because it brings with it a particular kind of personality that is different and easy to recognise.

Yes, the riders of this vision are astride and eager. For what else is the alternative to the present stage of capital globalisation and its demand for a sickening sameness devoid of all reason and beholden to nothing except the dictates of the marketplace? The assemblies form of governance is an idea whose time is about to come.

E-mail: brenco@tstt.net.tt