Obika Gray, Demeaned but
Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica (Kingston:
University of the West Indies Press, 2004).
Obika Gray has made the political
role of the urban lower-class in Jamaica his central
subject. His earlier monograph, Radicalism and Social Change
in Jamaica, 1960-1972, dealt with urban working class
politics in the early years of independence. This book, by
contrast deals with a vaguer category, “the urban poor”, in
Marxist terms, the poorer urban working class and the
lumpenproletariat.
Gray’s central thesis involves a
dialectical relationship between what he calls the “predatory
state” and a lower class that resists the norms that state seeks to
impose by erecting its own values of “badness-honour”, a rival
standard to the middle-class nationalist values promoted by the
state.
Gray begins with an analysis of the
“paternal and authoritarian qualities” of the Jamaican state,
citing Carl Stone’s studies of clientelism, and emphasizing that he
seeks to reassess and revise Stone’s work. Gray defines the
Jamaican state as simultaneously “predatory and populist; violent
and paternal, as well as democratic and viciously abusive of human
rights.” The state is seen as parasitic, rather than
destructive, in its relationship with the urban poor.
The state’s relationship to the
poor is described as mediated by the needs of the political parties –
the People’s National Party (PNP) and the Jamaica Labour Party
(JLP) – which at different times have exercised control over the
state apparatus. This relationship is predatory and parasitic. Yet,
dialectically, the state’s predation on the poor has become the
source of the challenges from the poor.
Gray’s narrative moves us from
the development of partisan rivalries in the slum areas of Kingston,
starting with the conflicts between the PNP and JLP in the 1940s,
through the establishment of garrison communities in the 1960s and
the links forged between politicians and slum-dwellers. This was
never a one-way relationship. While political patrons certainly had
an influence on the urban poor, Gray notes that the poor also had
“sentiments of self-ownership and cultural pride” which provided
“relative protection” from the reach of the state.
The poor live in conditions of
marginality and presumed dishonour but construct their own
Afrocentric conception of an exilic social space from within which
Western and Creole conceptions of identity have been challenged
through assertion of a fundamental African identity, key elements of
which are provided by Rastafarianism.
In the 1970s, the conditions of
urban life changed as lower-class “badness-honour”, which Gray
describes as “the oral-kinetic practice in Jamaica that enables
claimants, usually from disadvantaged groups, to secure a modicum of
power and respect by intimidation” became a significant cultural
force as the parties intensified their conflict on the streets of
Kingston and found the militancy of the poor useful. The social power
of the urban poor increased as it penetrated the PNP.
While the PNP in the 1970s sought
to change the society, its conception of social transformation became
grist for communal conflicts, and this transformation of ideological
and political challenge into partisan warfare has become the defining
characteristic of Jamaican politics. At the same time popular music
and popular culture more widely popularized an attitude of defiance
towards the authorities. The state’s combination of populism and
predation was exemplified by party support for loyal poor supporters
and hostility to those supporting the rival party.
Yet, even as the dependency on
political party patronage seemed to indicate that the poor were
captives of the predatory state, they developed tactics which could
not be easily suppressed by the authorities which led them to achieve
greater control over the funds disbursed to them and resulted in
predation from below as well as from above. As Gray put it “In the
consciousness of the Jamaican poor, politics is about predation and
how to minimize its impact on their lives.” The predatory actions
of the poor are seen by Gray as an “understandable self-defensive
manoeuvre” against the predation of the state. Social bandits such
as Dennis “Copper” Barth and Wayne “Sandokhan” Smith appear
to slumdwellers as heroes who challenge the predations of the state,
even as they see them as personalized by specific state officials
In the 1980s, the effects of the
system of patronage that was firmly established in the previous
decade continued, and the culture of the urban poor came to be
centred on “martial values of a street culture that drew on
competitive individualism and on the agonism of heroic outlawry”.
This was the result of the growing influence of what Gray speaks of,
following Carl Stone, as the lumpenproletariat.
Increasingly, over the course of the 1980s, following the immense
outburst of violence during the 1980 election campaign, criminal
gangs acted with greater impunity and developed into independent,
self-organized bodies.
This involved both what Gray calls
the militarization of left-wing politics, among supporters of the
communist Workers’ Party of Jamaica (WPJ), and the deepening
criminalization of the state in part through the growth in importance
of criminal gangs which earned their revenue from the trade in
illicit drugs. Criminal leaders evolved into the “Drug Dons” who
controlled the export of cannabis and the transshipment of cocaine,
and built networks that connected Jamaica to criminals in
theUnited States. Gang culture in Jamaica, Gray contends “was
less a peculiarity of Jamaican experience than it was a disruptive,
radiating force in global culture”. The gun became a source both of
social mobility and social power, not to mention independence from
the political élite.
Gray sees the Jamaican state as
having developed a predatory relationship to the urban poor, and
inflicted considerable terror on them, creating the paradox that “A
key objective of Jamaica’s democratic order… was an everyday
form of rule that terrorized the ghettos.”Simultaneously, the state
“evinced protean, solicitous attributes” which incorporated the
poor into the political system through the rivalry of the major
parties.
In more recent times, Gray notes,
there is more talk among politicians and other public officials about
reform, and both the middle class and poor have been driven to become
more activist in response to the continuing crisis which Jamaican
society faces as crime and violence escalate and state repression
fails to rein them in.
What Gray has given us is a
complex, thoughtful work that sets Jamaica’s social and
political agony in the context of a changing capitalist world-system
and of conflicts between demands for a more inclusive democracy and a
state that simultaneously exalts democratic values and punishes the
poor and marginalized for being poor and marginalized. There are
flaws – political parties aren’t arms of the state and their use
of the urban poor as footsoldiers in their rivalries is less about
state predation on the poor and more about jockeying for power and
access to resources within the state. That is to say, analysis of the
relationship between political parties and the urban poor might point
us equally to the conclusion that the former mobilized the latter in
order to promote elite predation on the state, and the rewards doled
out for support were partial results of that predation. Even the use
of public force against the poor supporters of rival parties is less
about predation on the poor and more about keeping a particular party
elite in a position to cream off public resources.
A key paradox that Gray brings out
is that while seeking to use the urban poor for their ends, JLP and
PNP leaders ended up promoting the values of that segment of society
and making them appear to be normative lower-class values. Other
scholars, Deborah Thomas for example inModern Blackness:
Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in
Jamaica, have pointed out that the middle-class values which
dominated in decolonizing and early independent Jamaica have ceased
to be normative for poorer Jamaicans (and not only the urban poor),
as their need for middle-class patronage has declined. The rise of
the dons is not simply a case of the tail wagging the dog; it is the
tail becoming the dog.
Gray is, I think, correct to see
the process he describes and analyzes as a response to modernity and
a critique of it. He is equally correct when he contends that
theoretical as well as social renewal is needed. It is less clear
that the “alternative ways of living” that he sees as coming from
the “lived experience of Afro-Jamaicans” are either likely to be
more democratic or that they can constitute a successful response to
the ways in which the world is being reshaped in the aftermath of the
Cold War and the absence of a credible alternative to unfettered and
unbounded capitalism.
Review by FSJ Ledgister
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