Constitution Reform: Take Six

By Bukka Rennie
October 22, 2003

There is absolutely no desire here to tinker with what obtains. No desire to increase the Senate into any big "macco" anything. No wish to see the present type of Lower House reformed into any new reality that can give it the power to be ever more than what it is: ie the rubber-stamp of the PM's Cabinet.

This participatory, representative system of governance cannot and was never designed to facilitate the voice of the whole people. It was always geared to express the voice of the powerful, the minority, the monarchy, oligarchy, the successful elites of the world, never the powerless mass of people, the untouchables, the nobodies.

The social contract that constitutes the present arrangement is not worth the paper on which it was recorded. The whole shebang must be torn up, spat on and thrown to hell away.

For the past five columns we have sought to trace the struggles of people for a better day, to show their instinctive bend towards greater and greater forms of democratic expression.

In fact, one can certainly dare to advance that the history or the story of humanity is one story with various branches of humanity coming to "rendezvous" with centre stage at various points. The different results of struggles only indicate the incremental gains that were possible given then respective and objective options.

It was shown, for instance, that what took the people of Britain 700-odd years to work out in battle and around the table, only took 100-odd years in the Caribbean.

Nothing is strange about this. Recall that centuries ago only certain people possessed the weapon of knowledge, first the clergy, then the nobles, then the professional trades and the merchants, and only lastly the working masses on the shop floors or those tenanted to the land in the various forms of serfdom and/or slavery.

Such severe social fragmentation necessitated participatory democracy and representative forms of governance. The quest for power could in this context only be conceptualised in incremental terms over the past centuries.

Today, however, modern socialised production on the shop floors, integrated, co-operative modern farming, the level of involvement in all cultural activities and the universality of knowledge have changed the world entirely.

No longer can empowerment of the people be viewed in terms of a little more of this and a little more of that and the other. And representative government and participatory democracy are now hindrances to further development of the people; these forms are now too limited to embrace the new articulation and demonstrations from below.

The logic must be to open up rather than limit in any way the democratic process. It is necessary now to seek to constitute the widest possible forms of democracy, or as we say "mass democratisation", ie everybody to the last person must be involved in the decision making process.

It is interesting to note that whenever people are faced with an immediate crisis they all throw up their own self-organisations or instruments to deal with threatening problems. That is what the community gayaps and panchayats are all about - instruments that comprise the involvement of all the people in the decision-making process.

Similarly, during the days of slavery and indentureship, there is evidence that there were always significant increases in the levels of combativity whenever such self-organisations at local level appeared with the purpose to do battle. The evidence of such instruments as key to progress is there even at the turn of the century with the increase in agitation for political and economic changes.

Yet each step brought not the institutionalisation of these people's forms but the cementing of minority representative forms on the pretext that such minority representative structures are much more wieldy and more manageable. But at every crucial juncture these minority forms were quickly compromised and transformed into their opposites, in other words, quickly transformed from being agencies of development into hindrances against further democracy and progress.

Both the political party and trade union as instruments of the people were transformed by the system once they were given official status and recognition; that was the experience of both Cipriani and Butler.

The rally that was the PNM according to their People's Charter of 1956 was transformed into an empty shell once they inherited the State, and all the people's forms therein such as the village councils, party groups and conventions became mere rubber stamps of the Prime Minister, power personified.

By the 1970 social explosion, the people threw up their own people's parliament. Once the University of Woodford Square, as utilised and so termed by Williams in his heyday, was renamed the People's Parliament, people all over in their localities convened local parliaments and sent contingents to the national People's Parliament in Port-of-Spain.

The NJAC leadership admits that most times the people gathered spontaneously at the square and sent for them. But no one had the vision to fight to formally constitute this network of people's parliaments.

And again in 1975-76 when the mass movement erupted, it was notable that it was the COSSABOs , the Conferences of Shop Steward and Branch Officers, of the leading trade unions that decided that a political party be formed to contest the elections. The moment the ULF was formed, the COSSABOs were forgotten.

Only people with our vision insisted that the COSSABOs had to be extended to job sites throughout the length and breadth of the country and to link with community assemblies as the basis for the fundamental transformation of the whole society and a new form of governance. No one took us serious, for everyone had sights fixed on the party, a minority representative structure, and an "end in itself ".

Today, in this globalised world in which all and sundry stand to be reduced to a sickening sameness by the dictates of market factors, we know for certain what constitution reform must bring. The assemblies of people where they live and work must be the only existing power-base. There must be no power, no authority above them organised in their active communities.

The power to decide and act and the wherewithal to decide and act must be removed from "representatives", "divine rulers", "absentee rulers" and all their "touts" and placed squarely into the hands of the whole people.

Anything less today and sooner rather than later, there will come the necessity to shoot people down in the streets, matters not how nice, how Christian, "divine representatives" may appear to be.



Pt I | Pt 2 | Pt 4 | Pt 5 | Pt 6