The Last Bastion of Civility

05, Jul 1999
We are largely a society of clerks, commission agents, shopkeepers and peasants in which the culture of clerks predominates because clerks are crucially spinal to any semblance of social stability and to the circulation of whatever levels of value, profits and savings that are created and generated locally through the major commercial activity of "buying" and "selling".

Our story is the story of the "hinterland", the outposts and frontier towns, in which the nature and character of enraged speculators, the greed of hoarding, insecure commissioners, traders and transient settlers have left their indelible marks, and would have long since destroyed all attempts at society but for the civility of clerks.

We are vividly reminded of the "frontier town" mentality by the present litigation before the courts in which brothers of one family are at each other's throats, daring even to refer to offspring who are not fully of a certain specific ethnic pedigree as "outsiders", as they fight over the spoils of a commercial empire built up humbly by a patriarch selling rabbit meat brought in from St Vincent and Grenada.

In the recent past there was also a similar situation in which brothers physically battered and abused each other on the steps of a court as they awaited the outcome of the contestation of a father's will in which nothing was left to a particular son who was viewed as having already earned enough. This particular patriarch had come to T&T penniless and made his way by house-to-house selling of trinkets and inferior imported cloth.

What was being contested was the millions of US dollars he left in banks in Lebanon, London and Miami, all generated through his buying and selling activity locally. What in both cases the children lacked was the stabilising effect of the traditional culture of the old world with which their daddies came. The children were moulded here in a new environment.

In our early existence as hinterland-outpost societies, our "raison d'etre" was to satisfy the raw-material requirements of the "engines" of metropolitan industrial development, and be consumer markets of their surplus goods.

The early mercantilist philosophy led to closed shop economies involving epicentre and outpost, metropolis and hinterland, with enforced tariffs and regulations, such as the Navigation Acts, to control all trading and shipping between the two areas. But rather quickly the closed-shop situation proved to be a hindrance to the very global nature of "capital" as a social force.

The history shows that to further develop international capitalism required free, open trade in one world market, and capital as a social force required to be depersonalised, that is, to free itself of direct ownership by individuals and families such as described above.

Outposts such as T&T joined the modern world in the post-Colonial period at the point when the major feature of economic development was the internationalisation of a professional class of managers to not necessarily own capital, since ownership per se was no longer a prerequisite, but to manage and wield capital accumulation and generation as a purely objective global force, without subjective considerations. The IMF and World Bank and other lending and financial agencies being the classic cases in point.

Samir Amin in his study, Accumulation a World Scale, referred to this period in which the peripheral areas were "integrated into the world market" as the period in which "capitalism has become a world system, and not just a juxtaposition of national capitalisms." The results of this, according to Amin, are rapid urbanisation, structural imbalances (for example, demise of agriculture), disparity in income distributions and, most of all, rapid growth of the civil administration and expenditure to maintain it.

The clerks who maintained the social stability between the commission agents, shopkeepers and peasants long ago have now as a social force been transformed into a massive Public Service with the added responsibility of managing state enterprises and divesting or not divesting them in the interest of the society as a whole.

This much maligned Public Service is the most significant powerful creation of our peculiar development. It is the suppository of all kinds of superior human resource and financial management skills, as well as the embodiment of all the democratic traditions and practices that we have been striving to work out in the course of our social transformation and development.

Our particular history did not afford us the early emergence of a robust entrepreneurial spirit and we are only now attempting to foster this by the work of the very Public Service through various agencies such as ADB, YTEPP, DFL, SBDC, etc. In the absence of true "captains of industry" who have the nation at heart, the Public Service has fulfilled the role.

Various political regimes have had problems with the fact that the Public Service here is the motor of all development and have sought to curtail its powers since they view it as a counter-balance to executive power. But remove the Public Service and the Public Service regulations and we shall have nothing but open barbarity between the commission agents, shopkeepers and peasants as they jostle for the spoils.