1:28ATo make this examination, I will engage in a very brief historical analysis. One needs to refer at least Traces far back to 1963, which was the year in which the Guyanese people were engaged in a national struggle for the normal self-government and national independence which eventually came to the Caribbean and to Africa, which came just after the Second World War to the countries of Asia. And in the process of this struggle, the constitution which had been won by popular struggle was suspended by the British government. In other words, the British government exercised a judgment that the pace of change in Guyana was faster than that which was to be tolerated by our colonial masters, that when we were given a chance to choose a government, we chose a government which was led by an individual, Cheddi Jagan, who I remember in those days used to be described as a self-styled Marxist.
2:29ASo one was not supposed to choose a government led by a self-styled Marxist. Now, after that constitution was suspended in 1953 -- in other words, constitutional political rights were abrogated and taken back from the Guyanese people -- we entered into a period of political division in which the then nationalist movement fragmented, and the 2 most important segments became the People’s Progressive Party, as led by Dr. Jagan, and the People’s National Congress, led by the present Prime Minister, Mr. Forbes Burnham. Come 1960, 1962, the country entered into a state of communal clashes, violence between the African and Indian sectors of the population, because we in Guyana had this distinction of importing labor from practically every part of the globe.
3:27AAfter Africans have had their spell of being exploited on the plantations, Indians were brought from the subcontinent of India to work on the plantations. Chinese were brought from Marathons of Macau. Portuguese were brought from Madeira, and that has been our pattern. The results, as imposed upon certain population patterns, certain demographic patterns -- Indians of the subcontinent, that is, constitute the largest single segment of the population. And in 1953, the Indians and the Africans, who are the second largest segment, came into head-on confrontation of the type which was described as ritual violence. We know now that a great deal of that confrontation was instigated and encouraged and promoted by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States.
4:27AAnd that knowledge does not come from any radical sources. It doesn’t come from, you know, uh, Prensa Latina in Havana. It doesn’t come from the Soviet press. It comes from the revelations and the disclosures within this country. itself on the activities of the CIA in Latin America during the 1960s. In effect, the CIA in the 1960s, early 1960s, used Guyana almost as a prototype for the, for the attack which was later launched on the Chilean people, the attack which came to be known as destabilization. Intervene in a country not directly through the military, not by landing the Marines, but by penetrating a subverting certain institutions, trade unions, getting certain civil servants, getting particular political parties to play a special role, and latching on to some national issue, making it an overriding grievance which leads to violence and instability.
5:33AThis is precisely what occurred in 1960, 1962, leading ultimately to the, uh, to the rise to power of the present Prime Minister So that the government in power in Guyana, this government which I have just been describing, is a government that was spawned by international imperialism. It was not the choice of the Guyanese people, and day by day it became less and less the choice of the Guyanese people, because on every occasion on which there was something approaching a public election in which the Guyanese people were asked to choose or asked to have a say in their government, they came out against the government in power.
6:20ABut it retained its power partly through its international alliances, but mainly through the buildup of its own coercive apparatus and an apparatus of fraud and political chicanery which allows them to make majorities out of nothing. So this government retains itself in power as a child of the international imperialist system. It has been fashionable in recent years to refer to the regime in Guyana as socialist or even as communist, or as being led by a socialist or communist-inclined individual, that is Forbes Burnham. But it seems to me that even on a casual examination of the facts, this is, uh, this cannot be sustained. But what is true is that there have been a number of tensions, even contradictions, between the government in Guyana and the government here, because the sector of the petty bourgeoisie which seized state power in Guyana recognized the need to make certain innovations in order to buttress its own class position.
7:28AOne of those innovations forced by the people was the nationalization of large private property in bauxite and in sugar. And having nationalized, they then used the nationalized entities in the interest of this very small clique that surrounds the state. So the nationalization created tensions between our governments and the central metropolitan powers. The move towards supporting liberation movements in Africa was a move demanded for many years by the Guyanese people, not only by the African sector but by the Indian sector of the Guyanese working people, had been committed to a forward policy in the African continent for many years. And our government eventually accepted that as the national policy, and this also created tensions with the U.S.
8:23Agovernment, more particularly around the question of Angola by 1974 and 1975. But these quarrels apart, the fundamental relations between our society, our economy, our policy, and the metropolitan world led by the United States -- these relations were not altered. And I would put it to you that today that government in Guyana is still the creature, the creation of the international capitalist system. It does not represent a form which transcends international capitalist relations. Indeed, when one looks at the present negotiations between the Guyana government and the IMF, one sees that even the facade of seeming independence from international political control is now being eroded. They are dispensing even with the facade and returning to make it clear that openly our society still resides within the framework of international capitalist relations, because the conditions which are imposed by the IMF are all conditions designed to reintegrate a seemingly errant government, whether that government is in Peru, in Jamaica, in Guyana.
9:48AThe IMF to it that these Third World governments return to the fold if they ever had any illusions, uh, that a particular class would carry them away from capitalism. And while the IMF were negotiating with Guyana, there was a very revealing document. It was called a letter of intent written by the Guyana government to the IMF, in which the Guyana government signaled its intention of meeting the conditions of the IMF. A very abject letter, a letter in which one can take no pride even as an opponent of the government, because it was redolent with a certain abasement, self-abasement, in which they simply said to the IMF, we will do everything which you have asked.
10:34AWe will bend over backwards to make sure that we remove all subsidies from the working people. We are not in the least concerned with what degree of suffering is, is brought to bear on our people.
10:45CWe will meet the conditions which you have laid down.
10:48AIt was that type of letter. The letter had one small qualifying clause. It said in effect to the IMF, we have certain political difficulties of a temporary nature which we need to attend to, so we are asking your patience until we have resolved these small political difficulties. And the IMF was quite patient and allowed the Guyana government to resolve this small difficulty, which in fact was simply that the government had come to the end of its term of office and needed to find a way of continuing in office without going to the Guyanese people. That was the small political problem. They resolved that by calling a referendum in which, in effect, they said to the Guyanese people, we’re asking you to vote whether you would ever like to vote again.
11:40AAnd according to their results, the Guyanese people said we would not like to vote again, that this is our last vote. So it seems to me that the collusion here between international capital and our government is very clear. The IMF was perfectly prepared to enter into this relationship knowing fully well that it is dealing with an authoritarian, anti-people regime. There were a few remarks in the international press. I remember one, and I think it was the London Times, where there was actually an editorial in which someone was suggesting maybe the IMF UNESCO used its leverage to introduce some human rights concerns in Guyana, but no one took that particularly seriously.
12:30AIt was possible to move ahead to restructure the links between Guyana and the international economy without regard to the fact that the Guyana government was moving in a most authoritarian direction. It seems to me that the authoritarianism in Guyana, the authoritarianism at the Jonestown settlement, and the links between Guyana and this society are issues which have not been dealt with in a satisfactory manner by citizens, by individuals who are part of this metropolitan society. Perhaps we haven’t dealt with it satisfactorily even in our part of the world, but certainly I would like to say suggest that when, uh, we think of Jonestown as an international phenomenon, we see that it has a great deal to do with the imperfections in our analysis of the nature of the relations between the metropolitan centers and the Third World countries.
13:39AAnd these are imperfections which, curiously enough, extend across the conventional designations of left and right, of Marxist and non-Marxist, etc. A whole lot of metropolitan forces have continually failed to recognize what are the desiderata in trying to appreciate what is happening in society such as ours. And in the case of Jonestown, it is all the more striking because of the size of the phenomenon, because of the sort of human dimension of the phenomenon. Because if you take the so-called leftists, a lot of Marxists have been willing to look at the Guyana and say, well, it has nationalized, so that is point one that we’re going to tick on our list of things that socialists or communists or progressive governments are supposed to do.
14:34AAnd then it has set up foreign policy links, it has recognized the Soviet Union, or its prime minister’s gone to Cuba and he’s got a José Martí Award and so on, and we tick that as another set of progressive indicators. And they then turn around and say to us, because look, Guyana, that we have a socialist government, that we have a progressive government, and we would just like to reply politely and say we are the ones who will determine what is the social character of the government in Guyana. Only those of us who live within those contradictions, who understand what has been done or not been done at the point of production, what has not been done or what has been done to dehumanize social relations, we will determine whether our government is to be labeled socialist or progressive.
15:23AAnd we have not yet seen fit to apply those labels.
15:26BAnd there are black groups in this society.
15:29ABut they’ve also said that our government is very progressive. There are a number who have gone to Guyana and they have been welcomed, and we are all glad that they have been welcomed because that is part of a worldview that we have shared for a long time, that we have with Black people in this country a commonality of interest, not just the common nature of our skin color, the common fact of skin color, but the history that goes with that of common suffering and exploitation, and the fact that if we make cause today to end that suffering, we automatically then become brothers in struggle and not simply skin brothers.
16:07AAnd some of our brothers have come to Guyana, but there has been that illusion that they were coming into a society -- that’s the first illusion -- and in fact they were, they were coming into a society in which African people, uh, now minority, were at best -- that is when the government had mass support amongst Afro-Guyanese -- it was a situation in which at best the Afro-Guyanese were manipulating state power to the exclusion of the Indian majority. And one does not enlarge the area for anti-racist cooperation by entering into society where racism is prevalent, even if that racism happens not to be aimed at one’s own particular group.
16:57AIn other words, the Africans from this society came to Guyana and thought that they could be indifferent to the fact that the Indian majority had been disenfranchised, they were quite incorrect, because no society which is engaged in racist manipulations can be consistent in any anti-racist policy. So they were wrong on that score. They were also wrong in thinking that the government of Guyana was building some new kind of society. They used to call it the Cooperative Republic. In fact, we are still called officially and internationally the Cooperative Republic, the first cooperative republic, as the government used to boast. And someone pointed out out to me, not just the first but the only, and unlikely to attract any further states to copy the pattern.
17:44ASo this first and only cooperative republic used to be held up by some Afro-Americans as a model. I know for sure that there are some on the West Coast here who were in Guyana and had some very unfortunate experiences, and they tried their best when they returned to, uh, to educate a few others as to the real nature of social relations in Guyana. But things being the way they are, problems of communication and what have you in a large society, I don’t suppose that they really, uh, reached a large number of people. Certainly if they had reached the common folk who went out of Jonestown, they might have thought a second time about what kind of society they were entering, a manipulated society that had nothing in common either with, with the Black people as Black people who had suffered, and nothing in common with all Black and white who were aspiring to build some new kind social life.
18:42ASo it seems to me that on the left and among so-called Black progressives, the errors of interpretation have been many, and they have also been linked to the fact that many of us have not yet come around to understanding that authoritarianism, which is defined as a political phenomenon, is also a definition of what is reactionary. See, there are many people who call themselves progressives who will accept all kinds of authoritarian, uh, development provided that it is supposedly in the interest of economic development or some other kind of mystical political development, not recognizing that the moment that a structure is located in a particular way so that the mass of those who are supposedly involved have no control over that process, it cannot in any way be described as progressive, socialist, or any other term other than straightforward authoritarian and quasi-fascist.
19:37AFor many of us continue to make that error. And then the liberals, the groups who would say, well, we’re not Marxists, and we could see that, you know, whatever was going on in Jonestown, it was because these Christians got misled and started to get involved with this, um, strange type of communism or socialism of Reverend Jim Jones. And this, um, religion and communism don’t mix, and that’s why you had the explosion. Well, I’ve already suggested that I don’t think it had anything to do with socialism, not on the part of our government, not on the part of the leadership of the People’s Temple. And at the same time, what is curious is that while the U.S.
20:22Agovernment has admitted a degree of responsibility and our government has not, that is not cause for self-congratulation on the part of a U.S. citizen. It’s not possible any longer to sort of lord it over the rest of the world and say, those people there, you see, people like in Uganda, They had Amin, and in Guyana they have Burnham, and they had People’s Temple, and Nicaragua they have Somoza. It’s in these parts of the world where the natives do not know how to run their political affairs that you get authoritarianism. But of course, over here, our government is more civilized, it’s more responsible, it’s people, and we have actually been able to have an investigation where the government is accepting a measure of the responsibility.
21:08CThank you.
21:09AThe truth that I would like to put to you is that the existence of certain forms of, of debate and backward political practices in the Third World is itself an integral part of the international political economy. It is the precondition for the existence of other forms of bourgeois democracy in the metropolitan parts of the world. I think this is an understanding that has not been fully explored. Many of us accept that profits flow from the underdeveloped portions of the world to the metropolitan portion. One doesn’t have to make a big case when we’re speaking about, about capital, about the accumulation and transfer of funds. People accept the multinational corporations and so on transfer resources from the Third World world to this part of the world.
22:05ABut the subtler, ultimately perhaps the most profound understanding, is that the nature of the international social system has been to create a certain modicum of values and stable life in this part of the world at the expense of destabilizing and bastardizing and dehumanizing sectors of the Third World. Now, the two are not unrelated, because what else does one understand from relationship between the IMF and our government, where the IMF is going to say we are going to strengthen their position knowing full well that they are engaged in the deepest political chicaneries, when in their own system they would be boasting that they have a parliamentary democracy.
22:50AIt seems to me that there is that integral connection, not a policy connection, but an integral connection that the way in which the world has been structured for 500 years, the development of the world system, has at all times found first value in more than the commodity sense of the word value. It has transferred all of the institutions which regulate social life in some humanized fashion. It has tended unequally to concentrate those institutions. So whatever may be the shortcomings of a democracy in this society, people here can begin to struggle around some forms that are stable, whereas in other parts of the world the marginalization is constant.
23:36AAnd the way in which the metropolitan society, as it were, makes good at the expense of the Third World is constantly recurring. Just some months ago, I read a news review which was quite startling. It had to do with Africa, with Egypt, but I think I’ll bring it in this context. It was a statement that indicated that President Sadat had gone to Austria and France and he had discussed with them the question of nuclear waste. Well, you know, even before Three Mile Island, those who are familiar with the problem know that explosions or no explosions, one of the most insidious aspects of the nuclear power is the question of disposing of the nuclear waste.
24:27AAnd there has been a strong environmentalist group in Europe which has held back the development of nuclear power plants because the European governments could not assure them about the safe disposal of the nuclear But when Sadat was in Egypt -- when Sadat of Egypt left and went to Austria and France, he discussed with these respective governments the possibility of Egypt importing the nuclear waste from these territories. There was some curious explanation given about the subsoil conditions in Egypt are more stable, so he feels that they can safely store them in Egypt. But basically what it meant is that the metropolitan part of the world once again was prepared to make a third world country into a nuclear garbage dump.
25:11ATo satisfy, we have to say, the pressures, the democratic pressures of its own citizens that it should not expose them to nuclear waste and to transfer that to third world countries. A very dramatic illustration. And of course, they weren’t transferring it by force. They were transferring it because already the development of international, of the international economy has indigenized the system that Saddam is as much part of the system. The Burnhams are as much part of the system, and therefore there is no need to send a battalion to carry the material by force. It is possible to have indigenous leadership volunteer and find the rationalizations necessary for making one society into a nuclear garbage heap.
25:59ANow, that may seem dramatic, it may seem overstated, But I would argue that the inequality of wealth and power is also accompanied by the inequality of human rights. And that is why it is always, to my mind, rather curious that in this part of the society, those responsible for the international system should claim to have a concern about human rights. Because if there were -- if there is a concern about human rights, it has to be realized in practice by changes in the structure of the international political economy. Not by so-called criticisms of this or that government in the Third World. It requires social change in the Third World and social changes in the relationship between our parts of the world and your parts of the world.
26:50AI say then, in conclusion, that while it is true that Jonestown took place in the jungle of Guyana, in a more profound sense it also took place in the jungle of international capitalism.
27:40BASCRIA and CLAM.
27:44AYes, that group still survives. The question was about a certain Pan-African group in Guyana, principally around an organization known as ASCRIA, the African Society for Cultural Relations with Independent Africa. It survives in a different form, but a number of its members were placed under attack when the group broke with the ruling party. The group used to be, uh, a They broke with that ruling party and therefore they were victimized in large measure and they started to regroup. They now form part of another organization which is known as the Working People’s Alliance and they have retained an interest in African culture but this has been subordinated to the principal political involvement of social change in Guyana.
28:39AIndeed, they are no longer solely concerned with Africans in Guyana. One of their principal platforms now is the building of bridges between Africans and Indians in Guyana. We have read that there were some Afro-American groups that had settlements built in Guyana. Can you say a word about whether they have at the same time, tied in the same way, formed towns here? You just said our There are a few still, there are a few still, right? There are really very few. There is a group called the East, which is based in Brooklyn in New York, which still has a few members, and they have some amount of land in Guyana too, on a much smaller scale than Jonestown.
29:35AI would say that these groups, or these individuals within that group, are undoubtedly persons who are trying to build a new life, would like to see a new set of social relations. But they too have become trapped in Guyana because to enter Guyana at the present moment, there is impossible not to pay a political price. The government demands from them, as one can see from reading the newsletters of the East over here, a certain political allegiance. They have to become unpaid ambassadors of the -- not of the country, but of the government in particular. And no doubt people would also have heard about a few individuals who have gone to Guyana on a flight different circumstances.
30:21AThey’ve gone from fugitives from quote-unquote justice in this society. Now, those are the ones who are perhaps in the most invidious position because irrespective of whether or not they were in fact criminals, irrespective of whether they were direct or indirect victims of the system here, when they get to Guyana, the conditions under which they stay have as the first postulate that they must pay political loyalty to the regime. And more than political loyalty, unlike, say, the East They actually have to engage in political thuggery, armed violence, etc., on behalf of the regime. That is one of the conditions under which they stay, because alternatively they would be handed -- returned to, quote unquote, justice from which they have fled.
31:11CYes, when you talk about corruption, it reminds me of For example, in Sierra Leone a few years ago, the economy was in shambles because the government said that too many people were digging diamonds, you know, illicit diamonds, and the government sent a detachment of the military to go take over, but they had to be withdrawn because they didn’t get digging. So it’s been that kind of involvement, you know, third world countries have faced with that kind of involvement.
31:48BBut I wanted Right.
32:08AWe have argued that we need to make particular structural changes in the society, which in the first instance eliminate or close off a great deal of the opportunity. is normally associated with political office or high public office of a political type. Because the instance that you have given really is a very logical instance in which the ordinary soldiers who were sent there as attachés, exercising what I consider to be a correct judgment, determined to get into the act. Because if the act is already on and everyone knows that the corruption starts from the very top, why should an ordinary rank-and-file soldier, uh, up the opportunity to engage in some -- what is really petty corruption when he knows that has become the norm.
33:02AAnd all of these states try to solve it by making moral appeals to the people upon whom this corruption is vested. It’s as though the people are corrupt when everyone knows that the very ministers making the appeal are themselves deep in the corruption. We say that it has to start with the apex of the state structure, a variety of controls which make it extremely difficult. I don’t suppose one could say impossible, but extremely difficult for public political officials to exercise control over national revenues without having to account to anyone. Now, what is accountability? Ultimately, accountability is not just legal. We’re not speaking about drafting it in a constitution that they are accountable to a particular official, etc.
33:50AIt is the political accountability The sense in which if we cannot re-establish democratic control at various sections of our national life, we will never be able to cope with even as straightforward a problem as corruption. I will have to draw an example from Guyana, but I’m pretty certain what I know of the political structure in Sierra Leone and the referendum in Sierra Leone, which was just like ours, etc., that one -- that there would be many parallels. But in our national life at the moment, the principle of democratic involvement has been breached on every conceivable front. Workers do not run their own trade unions. They cannot elect their own trade union officials.
34:35ACommunities cannot have their own local governments. Even religious organizations find it difficult to organize and have choose their religious leaders as the members and leaders of their own communities. There is no segment of the national life into which electoral fraud and manipulation has not been extended. The student government of the university cannot be free to elect its own leaders. In Guyana, we have a situation which I am absolutely certain must be unique in world history, because normally all student governments, however compromised they may be, tend to have some degree of quote-unquote progressiveness and radicalism. And while you may argue sometimes that the student government might have a police agent, he will certainly have -- he or she will have to there as an undercover agent.
35:30AIn Guyana, we can boast of the fact that our student government at the National University for 2 years running was, um, was in the hands of 2 separate senior police officers. They were the chairman of the student union. On one occasion was a, was a senior police officer, and then when he handed over, handed over to another senior police officer. I mean, it’s that level of, uh, anti-democratic penetration. And I say, and what I am in fact saying is that unless you can build structures where people are accountable, or rather leadership is accountable to people everywhere, where they work, where they live, in their cultural organizations, etc., you cannot then hold people accountable in financial terms.
36:17AThe question is how you make that kind of transfer. We are talking about obviously a people’s revolution. So many words have become sullied, even the word revolution, that who on earth has a agitation and using it. But I’m speaking about a transformation in which when the mass of people win gains -- because only the majority can win social advances -- when they win those social advances, they do not relinquish the said social advances to anybody, not even to those who appear plausible, not even to those who appear uncorrupt. You know, people do not relinquish those gains, because to relinquish the gains, to ask someone Yes. To supervise the activity is bound in the long run, it seems to me, to be disastrous.
37:08AAnd this has been our pattern in the Caribbean and the Third World. We have -- and I think we have the capacity to go beyond this so that the next time the people move, they don’t move, take the power and hand it to somebody and go back to their occupations. They recognize that power is inherent in their day-to-day lives, where they work, where they live, where they recreate, and so on. Well, one thing.
37:33CGo ahead.
37:39AWell, I use it simply as a feature that is supportive of imperialist relations of imperialist domination. That is to say, if we view imperialism as I would, essentially as a relationship in the political economy, relationship of power and an economic relationship, then it has to be buttressed by many other non-tangible forms -- by the transfer of the metropolitan culture, by the destruction of the indigenous culture, if there is an indigenous culture, as would be the case in Africa and Asia, and by placing barriers to either the colonized or the dominated come into a vision of themselves which is independent of the vision of the metropolitan world. I mean, that whole complex I would consider as cultural imperialism.
38:36BI’d just like to congratulate you and say that this is the first conversation that I think we have gotten on both sides that has made any attempt to place this in any believable sense. And we’ve got all the drama and all the psychological things, but I really want to congratulate you on arguing for the specificity of it happening in Guyana, and I was particularly happy about the whole context of the control by the people of power. But there are 2 things that came to mind that I want to ask you about. One was that it seems to me that one is going to need a new intellectual revolution, because I think if we notice that one of the reasons why, um, don’t stop it happening in Guyana was that you had an opposition who had to follow the Soviet line at the time, which was one of critical support for Burnham.
39:30BI think we have to see that not only was it the jungle of international capitalist relations, but the jungle of world power relations. And the point I’m sort of asking, the point I’m saying, is worrying that there is an intellectual crisis in the Caribbean because of an underdeveloped kind of Marxism which, far from going against authoritarianism, legitimates it. So that when you try to explain to people what is happening in Guyana, or I know I try to explain to people what is happening in Jamaica, I cannot cut through this barrier of Marxist legitimation which says that if we say in the name of Marx, everything is then possible?
40:11AI think it’s partly true that the Caribbean suffers from, uh, the constraints of what you call Marxist legitimation and also what is a corollary to that, the, uh, the schisms in international Marxist circles. But I would I would say that we are probably less victims of that than many other societies with which I’m familiar. I think that we have still to be thankful that some of the worst aspects of dislegitimation and schism have not yet reached the Caribbean. And certainly in Guyana, we have made tremendous efforts to, uh, to take Marxism as science, and that if it is a science, to say that it’s has to explain and has to derive from the material, the objective, the social reality of our own society. At least that is a crisis among Marxist intellectuals. And curiously enough, I think it is a crisis which comes from the fact that before they were Marxists, they were something else. I think we really should -- if we’re seeing it as a new intellectual problem, we shouldn’t really see it as a problem of Marxism qua Marxism.
41:35BI think that’s right.
41:37AI think it’s a problem of intellectual formation. I think, for instance, um, if one -- and this is sometimes the case -- had been, um, a Christian proselytizer, one had been the missionary type of Christian, uh, there are persons of that type who have become Marxists. But what will happen is that they will carry over to Marxism some of the presuppositions of the missionary endeavor, some of the suppositions about what is orthodox and what not orthodox, and about conformity and heresies and so on. I think it is part of an intellectual makeup which we have inherited for many centuries to want to move dogmatically, even if the ideology with which one is supposedly dealing is a dialectical and anti-dogmatic ideology.
42:28ASo I make that in part of self-criticism, because I think that all Marxists to greater or lesser extent are prone to these problems, to these weaknesses. But I see them as weaknesses that lie in the broader framework of our intellectual and historical formation, and that when we appreciate them as weaknesses, we can move towards transcending. And I certainly feel in Guyana we have done a reasonable job. The PPP and its longstanding connections with the Soviet Union notwithstanding, the left, quote unquote, in Guyana, certainly the groups with which I work, the Working People’s Alliance has made tremendous and successful efforts to avoid being part of that legitimation, whether it be of the Soviet Union or even of Cuba, with whom we are very friendly and to whom we pay deference as a society that has gone through the actual fire and crucible of transformation, making mistakes, yes, but making mistakes because it was possible.
43:27AI mean, it’s necessary to make mistakes to make anything at all. So they have been making some in the Caribbean. We pay them due respect, but we have refused to fall into some, you know, tutelary role or establish that type of role. I then -- what I’m emphasizing briefly is, yes, the risk that marches in Guyana, in the Caribbean, anywhere else can fall into a pattern which is internationally derived and fail therefore to function as effectively as they otherwise would in their individual But when we see that, I don’t really think it’s an argument against Marxism per se. It is a reflection perhaps of the immaturity of that branch of science, because it’s a relatively immature branch of science, and it’s a reflection upon the weaknesses of perception of which we are all victims.
44:20ASo we can’t single anyone out on that. Let me give a person at the back first, and I’ll come back. There would be parallels, yes, but I don’t really want to argue merely on the basis of parallels or analogies, although they have their value. I am suggesting that there is something Quality is really dead.
