In last week’s article (Sandals Desperation), my foremost concern was to highlight the tendency of “every man for himself”, which was emerging as the underlying and hidden impulse behind the various sectoral positions on the economic future of Barbados. Thus I had argued that “the economic debate is now reduced to a dog eat dog begging exercise, in which competing levels of self-interest are falling over themselves to desperately extract greater levels of concessions from the state”.
In pointing to the dangers of the elevation of narrow group self-interest as the only basis of public intervention, I warned that this could only lead to greater levels of illegitimacy and disillusionment with politics, which can have disastrous consequences for ordered social development.
Sadly, the very week in which this assertion was made, the dog-eat-dog tendencies not only reached fever pitch, but revealed the extent of ideological emptiness among the key groups which had played key roles in shaping the earlier national project and which were expected to spearhead the economic recovery of Barbados, and was suggestive of a deeper level of existential crisis than had otherwise been grasped.
Nowhere was this seen more clearly than in the callous abandonment by a union leader of a section of the population which constitutes a significant section of his membership – the now universally despised middle class.
It is only the deepest form of ideological confusion in the face of an unprecedented economic crisis that has rocked the raison dêtré, the modus vivendi and modus operandi of trade unionism to its very core, and a sense of helplessness in representing his core membership, that would prompt a union leader to divide the working class into “us and them”. Indeed, a large cross section of the group identified as the middle class is only one pay cheque away from vagrancy.
Adding to the union’s confusion is its “opportunism” exhibited by its commitment to “siding with Government”. These combined factors leave the union leader with little room for legitimacy, except to pander to popular emotion. Hence the union emotively attacks the claimed “successfulness” of the middle class, as a desperate response to its existential crisis.
Interestingly, the union’s stance on the middle class mirrors that of the Government, suggesting that both institutions, as products of the anti-colonial movement, are being similarly impacted by the global crisis and are responding in similarly desperate ways.
However, while the attack on the middle class might provide short-term psychological relief from state failure, it is no substitute for genuine qualitative transformation.
Instead of scapegoating the middle class to deny its own helplessness, a progressive union should aim to broaden its thinking to embrace all working people in a redefined understanding of the role of a worker organization as an instrument of defence in what is capitalism’s greatest crisis.
Forward ever!
• Tennyson Joseph is a political scientist at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus, specializing in regional affairs.