ONE OF THE CLAIMS often heard in Barbados in the context of a post-2008 economic crisis that has resulted in sharp reversals in its post-colonial socio-economic development trajectory, is the claim that “one should never waste a good crisis”.
Significantly, those who express this sentiment betray their smugness and class arrogance that any burdens of adjustment will be borne by groups other than the ones to which they belong.
If indeed, however, the moment is “too good to waste”, the articulation and creation of a new order is not a task for those driven by narrow class perspectives.
It is the responsibility for a political group of broad vision, and standing above narrow class or group interests, to make a decisive intervention into national development.
Political parties and organic intellectuals therefore have a unique responsibility of participating in the articulation and active struggle for the emergence of a new order.
Sadly, however, the current moment in Barbados is one of “stalemate” precisely because no new material political reality has been created either at the level of ideas or political practice to break the logjam.
Given its current role as ruling administration, the governing Democratic Labour Party (DLP) administration must carry much of the responsibility for not leading in the clear articulation of a vision of the new order.
Caught largely unprepared by the scale and depth of the crisis, and lacking any demonstrated pre-election intellectual understanding of the requirements of a new-social democratic alternative in keeping with its own party history, its only response has been a narrow “technical” managerial capitulation to internal and external neo-liberal dictates.
Given its political investment in its current response and in managing the existing order, the ruling DLP is hardly expected to be in the vanguard of shaping the new order, and indeed, its current tendency to silence and the avoidance of an honest debate on an alternative future is part of its political management of its current hamstrung nature.
Without a deliberate and conscious internal transformation within the DLP, this prognosis is unlikely to change.
However, despite the fanciful wishes of most, there can be no overcoming of the crisis and the establishment of a new order without first the articulation by some group of a new vision, and without a test of political wills over a concrete set of political alternatives.
This will be the next step in the political life of Barbados.
Whoever can lead in the articulation of a new, coherent and well-thought-out vision, and whichever political grouping can galvanise support around a concrete policy alternative relevant to the 21st century will have made an important contribution to the future development of Barbados.
Those who lack the intellectual capacity and political will and commitment to such a task will have failed their generation and the ones to follow.
Email tjoe2008@live.com.
