- Grenada: Whose Freedom? by Fitzroy Ambursley and James Dunkerley (Latin American Bureau) and Grenada: Revolution, Invasion and Aftermath by Hugh O’Shaughnessy (Sphere Books).
These two books cover nearly the same ground. They look at the history of the New Jewel Movement (NJM), the policies of the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG), the split in the NJM and the aftermath of the invasion. Both books give a virtually identical account of the events which led up to the bloody carnage in which a major part of the NJM leadership were executed. More surprisingly, the book by Dunkerley and Ambursley—two openly declared Marxists not unsympathetic to Trotskyism—ends up coming to similar conclusions to that of the liberal journalist O’Shaughnessy who works for the Observer.
Both books confirm that the NJM was never a party rooted in and organising the mass of workers and peasants in Grenada. Having organised itself from 1973 as a highly selective and tightly-knit organisation, the NJM had only 45 full members when it seized power in March 1979, and by the end of 1983 no more than 300. This was a tiny number in a population of 110,000.
This weakness was not just a question of size. The model on which the NJM was organised was a Stalinist one. The party was run from the top down, with the Politburo changing its own composition and that of the Central Committee without reference to the membership. Political decisions were taken by a small grouping at the top of the party.
This method of organisation was fostered not only by the Coard wing of the party, but by Bishop’s supporters as well. Bernard Coard, who had been close to the British CP while at Sussex University, quickly organised a ‘Marxist-Leninist’ (i.e. Stalinist) wing of the party (OREL), on his return to Grenada in 1976. Bishop, Unison Whiteman, Vincent Noel, Kendrick Radix and others were in fact much closer to the politics of the Socialist International, to which they affiliated the NJM.
Despite much talk about ‘the masses’ by the NJM, their involvement in directing the course of the revolution was strictly limited. Bishop was no doubt genuinely popular, as proven leader of the opposition to Gairy’s tyranny.
Bishop naturally leaned towards the plebiscitary, populist type of ‘democracy’ which is still fostered by Fidel Castro as an adjunct to his Stalinist regime. Dunkerley and Ambursley accept the organs of ‘Popular Power’ virtually uncritically. Against the bourgeois Westminster-style system, they argue, Grenada offered ‘by contrast a form of continuous direct democracy’ (p. 39). Yet at the same time they refer to these bodies as organs of ‘popular consultation’. There is a difference. They had no real power or control over the government.
Because of this, these authors cannot explain the dramatic falling-off in participation in these bodies, which they suggest was the ‘normal’ falling off of revolutionary impetus. Any worker or student involved in useless ‘participation’ and ‘consultation’ committees could give them the real reason. Consultation without control is useless. In arguing that there was basically no alternative between these two systems—bourgeois democracy and bonapartist ‘popular power’—Ambursley and Dunkerley reject the only possibility of real workers’ democracy: soviets or workers’ councils.
On the economic policy of the PRG while in power, both books confirm the NJM’s pursuance of a capitalist stage of the revolution. Dunkerley and Ambursley point out that while the state sector grew to 30%, ‘the bulk of the economy and its most dynamic sectors remained in private hands’ (p. 40). O’Shaughnessy points to a number of World Bank and IMF reports praising Bishop’s economic management.
The economic and political sacrifices necessary were made by the workers and peasants of Grenada, in a society where, as the LAB book points out, the richest sectors, the merchant-houses, had considerably increased their profits (p. 44).
Neither of these books manages to make the link between the strategy of the PRG, the growing economic crisis it produced and the split in the NJM. As a result, both give the impression of an apparently motiveless factional battle, inexplicably breaking out over the NJM leadership.
In fact, March 1983 saw the start of the crisis, with Coard reporting that state employees could not be paid for much longer unless the budget was slashed by 20%. The situation appears to have evoked two responses. Bishop visited the USA seeking a compromise with Washington (a trip opposed by the OREL members) and delivered a promise of elections in 1985 to Caricom a month later.
Coard, who had just come back from a month’s visit to the Soviet Union, directed his supporters on a different course. In September, OREL launched an onslaught on the Bishop wing. What was needed was closer cooperation with the ‘socialist countries’—the USSR, Cuba, East Germany. All this meant downgrading the role of Bishop and his group in the government, and placing Coard in charge of the party and in ‘joint leadership’ with Bishop. While still absolutely committed to the ‘capitalist stage’, the OREL grouping clearly realised that the flagging enthusiasm of the masses and the future sacrifices they were about to exact from them, demanded a more homogenous Stalinist party and a strengthened army.
From this point on, the party was effectively split, with OREL in the majority. Within five days of returning from Cuba, Bishop was under house arrest.
When the news broke to the masses, kept in ignorance of the debates in the party, they entered into the course of the revolution again with a vengeance. Under the slogans ‘No Bishop No Revo’, ‘We don’t want Communism’ and ‘C for Coard, C for Communism’, a demonstration of 3–4,000 released Bishop, and under his direction seized the military headquarters of Fort Rupert. It was here that they met a murderous hail of fire from PRA units sent by the Central Committee—the same units that proceeded to execute Maurice Bishop and five other NJM leaders.
The strategy pursued by Bishop and Coard at the head of the NJM had led the revolution into crisis. The Stalinist response of OREL had aborted it. As could be expected, O’Shaughnessy puts the blame on the NJM for ‘trying to put into practice the theories of democratic centralism and the primacy of party over state’. In castigating the Stalinist norms of internal party organisation and its relationship to the masses, O’Shaughnessy follows many other bourgeois commentators in, genuinely or deliberately, confusing Stalinist and Leninist methods.
More surprisingly, Dunkerley and Ambursley give credence to the same view when they blame the NJM for seeking ‘complete imposition of their party-based conceptions of discipline and public order on the state’ (p. 35).
The lessons of the debacle in Grenada are not that ‘Leninist vanguardism = brutal dictatorship’, but that the Stalinist theory and practice of stages guarantees only bloody defeat for the masses.
