The fundamental tension

June 02, 2004

The most intelligent statement I have heard about crime came from Ramesh Deosaran, the professor of psychology.

He made the point on, one of the morning programmes on TV, that we all seem to be talking about crime and moreso the criminals as if they were alien beings from another planet and he chided all and sundry for not recognising that we are "a society at war with itself."

The criminals are not external to what obtains here, they are social products of the system of relationships that make up the society of T&T. And we must be mindful of the fact that we are a young society, only 42 years of holding responsibility for our own development since our departure from colonial arrangements and status in 1962.

Yet we keep comparing ourselves with societies that are hundreds of years older, societies that, after decades and decades of blood-letting and being torn apart, successfully worked out a common vision and a common purpose and determined their own unique path of development based on their specific history.

Societies that possess settled layers and strata of people committed to relative moral functions, habits of industry and professional disciplines that are second nature or are deemed as essential to patriotic duty.

What these social captains help to do most is steady the ship of state on its chosen path forward. It is why these settled societies always seem to possess direction that is commonly accepted.

There is acceptable social leadership at all levels. And there is tradition, and rules of behaviour, written or unwritten, that have over time become social convention.

There is little need for coercion as people come to behave and act in certain ways as a result of conditioning through social requirement.

Most of all, their institutions work, independent of individual power-wielders.

We are not there yet. Our institutions are borrowed and lack the glue of social conventions. We are still a cluster of social groupings, desperate and disparate peoples without any context of firmament, "transients," some say, "half-made," others say. How and why we came here being still the key factors of conditioning and the major catalyst of our varied forms of consciousness.

There are two distinctions relative to how and why we came.

There are those who came willingly, induced by the necessity to fulfil their dreams, in search of an "El Dorado" in whatever form, and with the hope to stake out for themselves, private property, that specific relationship to ownership that would enrich their lives.

Then there are those who were brought here unwillingly, not in search of property but as private property.

Any attempt to equate these two distinctions is perilous and fraught with grave danger. Anyone who does not understand that, understands nothing about T&T and by extension the Caribbean.

It is clear then why some find it important to celebrate their "arriving" in the new world of the Caribbean, while others see as prerequisite the need to celebrate their "emancipation" from being deemed property.

Those who came willingly came with their peasant consciousness intact, with their traditions of affinity to land and private property, as means of generating wealth and prosperity.

The idea was to work on the sugar plantations for a while, maybe five years, then seek to establish one's independent means. And even if they were duped by the colonial structures, their consciousness and cultural manifestations remained intact and provided them with the spirit to endure and to fight the system at every turn.

Those who came unwillingly as private property were in the process stripped of any consciousness of a relationship to private ownership, the most devastating effect of slavery.

In the course of their struggles for total emancipation from all forms of bondage, the worse and most fundamental being their very classification and treatment as private property, they were forced to develop and inculcate a proletarian zealousness for what they deem the only legitimate form of property, ie collective ownership.

The ex-slaves of the Caribbean still harbour a most deep-seated resentment to private property and moreso the capitalisation of the proceeds of private property. It is what the other peoples who came to the Caribbean seem to least comprehend or wish to comprehend.

Sou-sou, gayap, len-hand, friendly societies, credit unions, the steelband, Unit-Trust, etc are all creations of a specific kind of general consciousness.

In the same context the Baileys' Carnival band of the '60s could never have developed into the private commercial monster that Headley's and Penny Mendes' Poison have come to be today, the Baileys' membership would never have allowed nor even tolerated the idea of such a transformation.

We can only grow up as a nation when we choose to come to terms with the apparent healthy tension between the two fundamental forms of general consciousness that have emerged in this Caribbean context and which are at best displayed by the socio-economic tensions that currently are at play in T&T.

The society has to work out how the concrete manifestations of these forms of consciousness are to co-exist. What are to be the accepted parameters to define the functioning of these opposed forms of property? Of course all this can be posed another way.

Collective property is best exemplified by the state corporations in the gas and oil and petrochemical sector that work in tandem with foreign investors and collect rent and taxes (ie foreign exchange), most of which are consumed financing the imports including machinery and licences and fees, required by this very sector which stands out of sync with the forms of private property that predominate the domestic market.

Integrating these two sectors into a viable home economy is the very first step in the process to reconcile the two opposed forms of consciousness and to bring this society to the point wherein it will work out a common way forward and cease to war against itself.