Brian Meeks, Contributor
The following is the first part of an excerpt of the Inaugural Professorial Address by Brian Meeks, delivered at the UWI, Mona, November 28, 2006.
There are two competing views about the state of Jamaica in its fifth decade. On one hand, the pessimists invoke the notion of a failed state with the nightmarish images of the Hobbesian war of all against all, the Yeatsian mantra that the centre cannot hold and of things falling apart. Undoubtedly, there are features of the present moment that give grist to this particular mill.
The murder rate in itself, accompanied by the remarkably low threshold required to commit murder; a pervasive sense of incivility in all social spaces; frequent incidents of barbarism on the roads, in the prisons and in the home, all support this view. Yet surely, the keen observer must make the distinction between the truly failed instances and the state that is merely in crisis.
In the former, the normal facilities associated with civilisation, such as reasonably functional utilities, a basic security force as a final resort, a system of law and a working economy, have all ceased to exist. This might describe Somalia or, for a certain time over the last decade, Sierra Leone. But it is hyperbole and bombast to suggest that Jamaica, with all its known warts, is close to any of these instances, involving the utter abandonment of the civil and the absolute reign of fear.
The optimists
On the other pole of perception are the optimists, who invariably point to light at the end of the tunnel. The statistics, they argue, suggest that things are improving. If only we tighten our belts a little more, boost the reserves to that crucial comfort level and hold strain on all the macro indicators, then investments will flow, real growth will resume and good times will follow. The statistics, while certainly not all heading in a favourable direction, do suggest that there has been some movement in recent times. Poverty indicators have generally improved, unemployment, with some reversals on the way, is marginally down and there has been growth, though anaemic, which, however, is better than none at all. Unfortunately, this is the moment when Disraeli's famous quip that there are 'lies, damned lies and statistics' must, perforce, be exhumed. Marginal movement is better than no movement at all, yet, incremental changes, if they lead to the complacent assumption that we were on the road to some sort of East Asian miracle, would be deceptive at best and dangerous at worst.
The basic requirements for an East Asian style take-off are decisively missing in today's Jamaica. Many commentators wrongly assume that the success of Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea et al, was predicated on some prior insight into the advantages of neo-liberalism with its entire baggage of privatisation, downsizing, marketisation and the like. Nothing could be further from the truth. Almost to the letter, most East Asian Tigers followed the Japanese route to success, which required an intimate cooperation between the private sector and the state, and an equally close if not written contract between these two entities and the broad mass of the citizenry.
The latter contract, in particular, was achieved through a complicated process of give and take. In Taiwan and South Korea, extensive, one might even say revolutionary land reform programmes preceded the phase of rapid growth. This laid the foundation for more balanced urban-rural development and simultaneously gave large swathes of the population purchasing power and access to capital, creating a significant market for goods and laying the foundation for an indigenous entrepreneurial class. Closely following this was an unprecedented human investment in education, housing, health services, and perhaps most critical of all, the emergence of labour regimes that assured relative job security.
The combination of these prior investments in what is loosely referred to as human capital, together with the existence of a Confucian culture in which unquestioning loyalty is given to the benevolent father, lay the foundations for a social pact that allowed for high savings, low consumption and high productivity. This ultimately led to rapid economic growth and the Asian miracle that is so often lauded, but so often for the wrong reasons.
Jamaica, I submit, is not even on the same playing field. Decades of structural adjustment and belt-tightening have undermined the little trust that might have existed between the state and capital on the one hand, and both to labour on the other. Free trade policies, if largely imposed from the outside, have eroded agriculture and along with it, the once vibrant rural culture. Investments in education and health, while by no means entirely wasted, have been insufficient to redress the structural problems in these vital sectors. Most critically, not only is there no social pact commensurate to the experience of East Asia, but the society is moving in an opposite direction.
The crucial statistic here is migration. The massive and continuing outflow of people is the surest indicator of dissonance in the Jamaican social space. Jamaica, over the past two decades, despite the heralded benefits of remittances, has lost, according to a recent IMF study, more than 13 per cent of its entire GDP to migration.
This alarming statistic does not even try to calculate the social damage incurred in the collective loss of the most active, educated and talented citizens at the peak of their careers. The toll of absent fathers, mothers, Sunday school teachers, role models and caregivers is immeasurable.
Hegeminic dissolution
If not failed state or light at the end of the tunnel, what then describes Jamaica today? In 1994 I offered the notion of hegemonic dissolution to illuminate an earlier phase of the phenomenon that I still think largely describes the state of the nation.
At the political level, the loyalty that was an integral part of the old patronage networks (what I refer to as the pact of 1944) had been eroded over time. The ability to grant largesse was undermined by the downsizing of the state. Party enforcers, particularly in so-called garrison communities became more autonomous from the party leadership, due to newer independent sources of financing through drugs, protection rackets and the like.
The state's role as an employer had weakened as privatisation gained momentum and poor people, the clients in Carl Stone's system of Patron-Clientelism, were less dependent on it as they went forth to establish new trading circuits in the Caribbean and beyond. The middle classes too, as a source of employment and role model of social progress, became less important, as relatives, legal and illegal, gave many among the poor new, independent resources for survival via the ubiquitous barrel and Moneygram. More critically, the social mores of postcolonial Jamaica, rooted in an Anglico-Methodist morality and a Creole nationalism, best exemplified in the slogan 'Out of Many One People', no longer satisfied, nor did it provide the reflexive touchstone for national unity.
Twelve years later, I think that much in this assessment still holds true, with at least one crucial adjustment. Kingfish may have disrupted some networks and various peace initiatives in violence-prone communities have been laudable, but the overarching structure of violent and semi-autonomous communities, verging on becoming states within a state, remains largely intact. The breakdown of social cohesion, by its nature a far more difficult symptom to calculate, I nonetheless suggest, has proceeded apace.
Quantitative work
Far more quantitative and qualitative work needs to be done, but the spaces to search for the relevant signals include the rate and particularly the character of murders, the rate and character of domestic violence, and violence in schools at all levels, and in the most overt expressions of popular sensibilities in the popular music and the dancehalls.
If one listens carefully to the dancehalls in particular - and it is not difficult to do so - then it is evident that the volume of anti-establishment lyrics has been turned up to full watts in the past decade. More so, despite the existence of countervailing trends, the proliferation of 'shotta' lyrics and other expressions glorifying a certain kind of violence is, even if it is given the most optimistic, metaphorical reading, important as a symbolic indicator of a new turn.
The critical adjustment is that in my 1994 analysis there is a clear underestimation of the durability of the state, its institutions and its integuments. The assessment made then of 'the collapse of the political project' has simply not happened.
The political project, if understood to mean the parties, the state apparatus and its institutions, is alive and well, albeit less powerful and rampant than it was a decade ago. The present moment, therefore, is characterised by an invidious stand-off, in which the people, broadly defined, are more disconnected from the old national project, though the political, as exemplified in its institutions, remains battered, but relatively intact. This is, perhaps, accounted for in the fact that the popular disconnection has taken the form of a cultural revolt, a physical leaving of the national space, a psychological and individualistic de-linking from the formal economy of government and private sector.
If indeed this popular revolt had taken an institutional form, i.e., the proliferation of alternative anti-systemic parties and movements, then Jamaica today might be looking at a pre-revolutionary situation. Or alternatively, if the political institutions had collapsed or become increasingly moribund, then the genuine option of the 'failed state' might have been a closer description of contemporary reality.
As it is, however, the present moment takes the form of an impasse, in which the formal exists alongside the informal, the police co-exist alongside legal and illegal protection agencies, gated communities and gated hotels seek to wall themselves off from the presumed hordes without, and violence proliferates at the margins. Such a state may experience episodic economic growth, but this is unlikely to be sustained. Periods of advance will inevitably be followed by periods of retreat, as profits are taken and exported or individuals choose to export themselves.
In such a space there is, essentially, no entrenched commitment to the common ground, no sense of an inter-generational imperative to stand and build, no need to save as everything is in the here and now, and hyper consumption is therefore the only rational choice.
Professor Brian Meeks is Professor of Social and Political Change and director of the Centre for Caribbean Thought, Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
