What is economic revolution?

July 21, 2004

What constitutes economic revolution? It is really at this point a philosophical question. The term "economic revolution" is today being bandied about without anyone attempting to define the concept or practically clarify what the term constitutes.

Some radio talk show commentators have been saying that the T&T economy is being controlled by a small minority belonging to a particular combined or racial groupings, ie the French Creoles and the Syrian/ Lebanese, commonly referred to as the "white people," and that there has to be an "economic revolution" for the economy to be brought at some point under the control of the majority of Afro and Indo-Trinidadians and Tobagonians who comprise the "grassroots" people in the streets.

With the sudden rise and flexing of muscle of the Hindu Credit Union, with its boast of a broad membership of 100,000-plus grassroots Indo and Afro-Trinidadians and Tobagonians, the call for "economic revolution" has become even more vociferous.

Inadvertently, much of this sentiment and this kind of talk have been fuelled by the Government’s initiating of a draft 2020 vision statement and plan which seems to suggest and purports that the eventual intention is to make every citizen of T&T, to the very last person, share equitably in the social wealth of the country.

But how is this to be achieved? How is every single citizen to be brought into the picture and share equitably in the national product and national income? How is private ownership to be brought in line with such a vision? Or even, more importantly, how is the exercise of constitutional reform to impact and inform the discussion on the 2020 economic vision statement?

No one says. No one indicates any connection between private ownership, public sector ownership, the 2020 vision statement and constitutional reform. No wonder we keep floundering and the "bla-bla-bla" has no direction and is never grounded in any fundamentals.

We will continue to make little sense of the issues until and unless the connections are made and are elucidated. We cannot continue to fraudulently separate phenomena!

We set up 28 sub-committees of civic-minded individuals, professionals and industrialists to draft proposals for the 2020 economic vision for development and we keep them and their engagement totally separate from the political exercise of constitutional reform. That is nothing short of madness.

We wish to say boldly that, philosophically, there is no separation of division between politics and economics. Any such division is artificial and blinds us to certain fundamental realities.

To start, we must accept the premise that everything is based on social relationships. Politics and economics are merely different expressions of social relationships: the social arrangements between people and people and people and things.

When humanity first appeared, everything was based on individual activity. When the mode of production, the way production was organised, began to change from an individual to a social base, that is people working in consort, mankind found himself in a much more complex situation than before.

Then, he simply produced for himself and his immediate needs, owned and controlled what he produced and exchanged (ie barter) the surplus of what he produced for whatever he required but did not himself, nor could not himself, produce.

The beginnings of systems of social production as distinct from individual production brought more and more complicated problems of economic relationships—relationships between people and people in regard to distribution, exchange and control.

Mankind soon realised that the time had come to start setting up a body of laws and regulations to bind individuals and groups to certain privileges and obligations to facilitate smooth transactions and new socio-economic relations.

It became absolutely necessary at this point to establish a system that would supervise and administrate the new economic relations that were emanating out of social production and, at the same time, be a system of representation that would allow every social grouping a say in the management of the affairs.

And so, as a result of economic changes, politics, as we know it today, evolved, that is, politics as the administration of all economic and social relations in society.

There can be no economic revolution without significant and fundamental change in the manner in which we administrate and manage our daily affairs and our social relations.

That is the philosophical position with which we should begin to underscore all our engagements in the struggle for change and betterment.

Butler, on his death-bed, was quite correct when he formulated what his life of revolutionary activity had taught him: capital and capitalism must be subjected to the reasoning of human beings.