The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. – Antonio Gramsci
Italian thinker Gramsci often advised that we should maintain an optimism of the will despite the pessimism of the intellect. However, the current Caribbean conjuncture makes it extremely difficult to adhere to this dictum.
All around us are morbid symptoms of deep crisis in which the previous economic and social arrangements – upon which the hopes and dreams of our development aspirations had rested – have been destroyed and our thinkers and practitioners appear unable to construct new ones.
Of greatest concern among those morbid symptoms is the inability of anyone to say, with any certainty, what are the new areas of production around which renewed economic growth and reignited Caribbean futures can be constructed.
Bananas, sugar, tourism, financial and other services have all lived and died, or are currently experiencing their death throes. Yet there is no visible sign that anything new is taking their place or that our finance, economic planning and development officials have imagined new possibilities.
Instead, as further symptoms of morbidity, greater intellectual effort now seems to be expended on effecting a “correction” in peoples’ expectations, in bringing trade unions to heel and in forcing the population to accept that a focus on growth rates is “inconsequential”, in light of other factors upon which the stability of our countries can be assured.
This tendency was seen most recently in the remarks by Central Bank Governor Dr DeLisle Worrell, to the Barbados Chamber of Commerce, where he argued that since “quality of life is more important than growth rates . . . we may therefore take our time to establish sound foundations for growth that will endure . . . no matter the future state of the world”.
Similarly, he argued that the proper comparison for Barbados “is not with the growth of countries like Guyana and the Dominican Republic whose [gross domestic product] is less than a third of our own, but with The Bahamas and Bermuda where GDP is much higher”.
While all of this is logical and sound from strict economic thinking, what is missing is an answer to our thousands of school leavers who are unable to be absorbed into meaningful productive life due to lack of growth. These are real social and development questions
that cause social explosions and cannot be answered from economic logic only.
Further evidence of morbidity is seen in our reluctance to abandon our traditional dependence on areas of production that are tied to the crisis North Atlantic (not global) economies. Hence, the governor argued that “growth is not about starting with a clean slate”, but about building on the familiar.
Isn’t the present crisis a failure of the familiar in all its dimensions?
• Tennyson Joseph is a political scientist at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, specializing in regional affairs.
