Submitted by Pachamama

For years we have been the canary in the coal mine for misguided Caribbean elites as we shouted to the top of our voices our central refrain that capitalism has failed and that that failure presented Caribbean peoples with equally great opportunities to play a larger role in the world as we determine our common destiny. Despite our best efforts nobody in officialdom in a backward Caribbean took us seriously. The elites in academia, like Hilary Beckles, thought it impossible – impossible for capitalism to collapse. The elites in economy were so busily gorging themselves with the crumbs from massa’s table to think about such a tectonic shift and its implication for Caribbean peoples. The political elites, like Chris Sinckler, Mia Mottley, Owen Arthur and their parties were, and still are, so captured by a faux and dead political-economy model that they found it impossible to raise their heads from the cool aid of a Washington Consensus, neo-liberal, monarchist acili. They have failed to accurately measure the internal contradictions of capitalism and now must be removed as the system continues to fail.

We however welcome the remarks, late as they are, from Saint Lucia’s Prime Minister Kenny Anthony as covered by a nearly useless Barbadian newspaper. We quote below:

SOME CARIBBEAN COUNTRIES are near the brink of collapse but one wouldn’t get that impression from the way governments are behaving. St Lucia’s Prime Minister Dr Kenny Anthony made that charge Tuesday night at the University of the West Indies (UWI) Cave Hill Campus, while fielding questions after delivering a lecture: Education In The Caribbean: Challenges And Opportunities Facing Small Developing States.

The programme was organized by UWI and the St Lucia Student Association. He told the gathering of about 150 students and academics that the Caribbean was facing an economic crisis the likes of which it had never encountered and was “almost on the brink of collapse”, but leaders were in self-denial. “The tragedy of the times is that we are in the throes of a major crisis like the Caribbean has never ever experienced before, but we are refusing to face the reality that confronts us and all of us are engaged in one form or another of self-denial,” Anthony said” The Nation Newspaper, Nov 2013).

In the same newspaper, on the same day, Chris Sinckler was featured putting a political spin on reports relative to his engagement of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). His comments demonstrate why people of his ilk are so very dangerous to Caribbean peoples. Instead of a debate about exiting these colonial structures Sinckler, as Minister of Finance, is trying to sell a case for another kind of, not so bad relationship, with an institution that has an impeccable record for the underdevelopment of peoples wherever it has had a chance to. In fact the record of the IMF presents a negative correlation to development. Countries with no involvement with the IMF have been shown to have an inverse range of development indicators. We are not telling any secrets here. Sinckler knows this truth or should, but has us so caught up in the death spiral of capitalism that he can see no way out. His colleagues, on either side, from Jamaica to Guyana are no better. And of course his narrative or point of reference must not include the experience of Bolivia, Ecuador and other countries in the wider region which are combating a dying but still dangerous capitalism. Poor Sinckler, those in academia should have had decades to prepare for this and are deeper in the darkness of a capitalist collapse.

For years we have tried to tell the so-called Caribbean intellectuals of a pending political-economy calamity. We argued then that current thinking was taking us into a development cul de sac. We have been, many times surprised by the lack of knowledge about the real internal workings of global capitalism as demonstrated by the Caribbean intelligencia and other elites. Still the leaders of Caribbean academy think it right to continue to make demands on the public purse to support a system which has never delivered, could never deliver and was never constructed to deliver anything other than eternal dependency and death to the peoples of the Caribbean. We seek to inoculate ourselves from the missives of the defenders of the establishment and their proxies when we concede that Caribbean countries individually, are small and because of this so-called ‘smallness’, we have to wait on others to lead us. Not so! We judge that the flip side of that narrative is more persuasive to us for in smallness we also have strengths including flexibility and speed of transformation. These are valuable weapons in this war for survival.

Now that our narrative has been given ‘official’ acceptance in the Caribbean our people must now wake up. For Caribbean peoples seem only to recognize the truisms of their existence when ‘respected’ officials first accept a lived reality. We must wake up to interrogate the elites with a view of popularizing democracy and flattening all systems and structures. We must recognize that these useless place-holders are more interested in being the cultural inheritors of brutal systems of exploitation than providing an independent path for our peoples. We must rise up to free ourselves from the mind of the colonialists which has been planted in our so-called leaders. We must rise up and put a stop to the mis-education of our people as is currently happening from infant to post graduate levels, 24/7. We must rise up and ‘shake off’ the useless Caribbean elites as a necessary precondition for building a different kind of organic society. A society where intellectuals are not just slaves of foreign thinking and dictators over who we should be as a people. A society where a prime minister will never again be no more than an elected dictator. Or where a university professor can send us down a river on a useless mis-education raft that is good for history alone, but useless for foretelling the future. Or a minister of finance who is no more than an agent for imperialism.