Cultural Domination

Cultural Domination and Political Subordination: Notes towards a Theory of the Caribbean
Political System
Author(s): A. W. Singham and N. L. Singham
Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Jun., 1973), pp. 258-288
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Cultural Domination and Political
Subordination: Notes towards a Theory
of the Caribbean Political System
A. W. SINGHAM and N. L. SINGHAM
Howard University and The Univ,ersity of Michigan
It is no accident that the study of comparative politics, and especially the

study of political development, has been dominated by scholars from the
metropolitan countries, or by those trained in metropolitan universities.
This interest in the politics of the subordinate world has resulted in a
series of case studies, which we have assumed have added substantially to
our knowledge about these hitherto neglected areas. However, until
fairly recently, little attention has been paid to the underlying assumptions
and ideologies of these metropolitan scholars, and the distortions, con-
scious and unconscious, introduced into scholarship on these areas under
the guise of scientific and value-free methodologies.
Among social scientists, the first group to actively concern themselves
with the study of non-Western political and social systems were the
anthropologists. In Britain and France a strong tradition developed
around the field of social anthropology, which produced a series of case
studies of the political experiences of the peoples of Africa and Asia.
Kathleen Gough, in numerous instances, has very effectively demon-
strated the close connection between these studies of traditional societies
and the ideologies of imperialism and the old-style colonialism. George
Balandier, the French anthropologist, has documented extensively that
much of the anthropological literature has tended to analyze the experi-
ences of the African peoples in isolation from the imperial system with
which they were inextricably linked and which was transforming their
traditional institutions. This academic dichotomy between indigenous
political institutions and the imperial system within which they operated
was an early manifestation of the use of the concept of the dual society
This paper was based originally on a series of lectures given by A. W. Singham in various
Caribbean countries in 1971. We are grateful to Marshall Sahlins, then at the University of
Michigan, and to a number of our friends in the Caribbean for their many suggestions and
criticisms. We would particularly like to thank Lloyd Best and Pat Emmanuel in Trinidad,
Willie Demas and the CARIFTA group in Guyana, C. Y. Thomas in Barbados, Jean
Crusol from Martinique, L. N. Falcon and Bob Anderson at the Puerto Rico conference,
Carl Stone, Louis Lindsay, Rosina Wiltshire and Trevor Munroe from the seminar group
in Jamaica, and, finally, C. L. R. James.
258
CULTURAL DOMINATION AND POLITICAL SUBORDINATION 259
which was later extensively adopted by orthodox social scientists in other

disciplines.1 While the economists have perhaps most persistently used the
concept of dualism as a major theoretical tool in their analysis of the
'underdeveloped' societies, many political scientists have readily accepted
the concept without much question. Thus, most of us were trained to
accept as valid the distinction between traditional and modern, Western
and non-Western, developed and underdeveloped.
Immediately after World War II, with the shift from European colonial-
ism to the North American variety of neo-colonialism, there was a flurry
of activity among the political scientists similar in many respects to their
anthropological predecessors. They borrowed from social anthropology
the convenience of dichotomizing the societies they studied and readily
accepted Parson's modification of structure-functionalism. The structure-
functional approach encouraged the study of political systems in isolation
from their nexus in the international system, providing a more sophisticated
version of the dualist theorems. However, to view the politics of India,
Ghana or Jamaica in isolation, without placing them in the context of the
worldwide struggle between capitalism and socialism, between dominance
and dependence, is to commit an error of omission (and, one suspects,
an error of commission) on the scale of the earlier anthropologists. As
Marshall Sahlins concludes:
Anthropology was conceived in the first place out of the dominance power of high
civilization. In those 'new worlds given to the world' by the European expansion were
peoples and customs that could not fail to provoke an anthropological curiosity. But
anthropology, indeed all social science, will have to keep up with the accumulating
consequences of the spread of dominant cultures. The scale of functional interdependence
between societies has enormously expanded. The histories of different parts of the planet
draw together. The several cultural systems of mankind become subsystems, specialized
parts of a larger complex of cultural relations. In social science we will need the perspec-
tive of adaptation more than ever. For no culture can be understood in isolation, apart
from its adaptation to others in the world-cultural net. It is impossible to carry out
analysis of any extant cultural order merely from the inside: the class structure, composi-
tion of the economic product, the political form, the prevailing ideas, nothing inside the
system is sui generis. Each society's history has become every other society's history.2
Dealing with their isolated case studies, most metropolitan scholars have
been able to abstract the ugly realities of slavery, indentured labor and
I Perhaps the best-known exponent of dualism was J. H. Boeke (Economics and Economic
Policy of Dual Societies, Institute of Pacific Relations, 1953) whose sociological theory of
dualism influenced a whole generation of development economists in the post-war period, even
when they rejected his metaphysical concepts such as the 'limited wants' of Eastern peoples.
Like the political scientists of development, few if any of these economists recognized that the
'backward' sector of the dual economy is functional and necessary to the 'modern' sector,
and is thus linked in a situation of domination-dependency, just as the 'backward' countries
are linked in the same manner to the metropolitan powers. In the 1960s a growing number of
scholars have effectively demolished this concept of dualism, one of the best known of whom
is Andre Gunder Frank.
2 Marshall Sahlins, 'Culture and Environment: The Study of Cultural Ecology', The Voice
of America Forum Lectures, Anthropology Series 9, n.d.
260 A. W. SINGHAM AND N. L. SINGHAM
racism from their historical context as an integral part of the expansion

of Europe, and have instead treated them as unfortunate, isolated acci-
dents of history. This ahistorical type of analysis has been facilitated by
the movement away from the unifying constructs of political economy to
the compartmentalized and depoliticized social science disciplines, with
scholars in each discipline usually abysmally ignorant of the other disci-
plines. Thus, partly because of their lack of knowledge of economics,
political scientists have been unable or unwilling to see how the motor of
capitalist expansion has transformed, and continues to transform, political
and cultural institutions. One of the consequences of this fragmented
approach is that these scholars have consciously or unwittingly been
espousing the ideologies and goals of their own political systems, under
the guise of science and objectivity.
However, in the past decade there has been a growing awareness of the
ideological role played by metropolitan social scientists and their 'satel-
lites' in the less developed countries, clearly revealed in such examples as
their roles as key policy advisors in the U.S. government's Vietnam policies,
and the Project Camelot fiasco in Latin America. It is therefore refreshing
to have an explicit, ideological theory of political development such as
that propounded by Samuel Huntington in his well-known book, Political
Order and Changing Societies, which makes no claims to be value-free
and which draws the logical conclusions from the underlying assumptions
of orthodox social science. This is the high premium placed on stability
rather than change, which supports the present international division of
power. We will return to Huntington's views at a later stage in this paper.
Growing awareness of the ideological biases of orthodox social science,
coupled with its increasingly poor predictive performance, has led to a
number of devastating critiques in recent years by a new breed of social
scientists, both in Third-World and metropolitan countries. In a recent
article, Susanne J. Bodenheimer has painstakingly and brilliantly spelled
out the epistemological premises of political science and the substantive
theories about development based on these premises.3 While she reiterates
the generally accepted view that political science has not yet acquired a
scientific paradigm, she stresses that this does not mean there is no
consensual basis at all:
In fact, despite the great variety of competing techniques and theories and the absence of
a truly scientific paradigm, most research in the field is governed by a paradigm-surro-
gate. The paradigm-surrogate is a strikingly pervasive consensus on fundamentals,
whose core is liberal democratic theory as modified by the particular conditions of
twentieth-century America.4
3 Susanne J. Bodenheimer, 'The Ideology of Developmentalism: American Political

Science's Paradigm-Surrogate for Latin American Studies', Berkeley Journal of Sociology,
February 1971.
4 Ibid., p. 97.
CULTURAL DOMINATION AND POLITICAL SUBORDINATION 26I
She sums up the consequences of this consensus in concise fashion:

What was initially perceived as an intellectual construct (the paradigm-surrogate)
takes on an additional meaning when seen in the context of a given social order. The
particular values and assumptions prevalent in American political life, and underlying
American social science, have their origins in specific social relationships and in the
interests arising from them. Far from being a disinterested or 'neutral' observer of those
relationships, the social scientist is actively involved in them, and hence acquires certain
specific interests which condition his observations. In this sense (as spelled out by Marx,
Mannheim, and others), the paradigm-surrogate may be seen as an ideology-a body of
ideas whose substantive content reflects concrete interests of particular social classes,
which seek to maintain or alter their position relative to other classes, both domestically
and abroad.5 [Author's emphasis.]
It should be obvious that our concern here is not based on a narrow,

chauvinistic nationalism but rather with bringing ideological assumptions
and biases out into the open where they can be dealt with. We have tried
briefly to deal with some of the root causes as to why orthodox metro-
politan scholarship has obscured or neglected the fundamental phenomena
of dominance and subordination or dependency in treating Third-World
countries. This has understandably caused a reaction by some scholars in
these areas who have attempted to refute the biases of metropolitan
scholarship by arguing from a cultural nationalist point of view. This
appears to be a transitory phenomenon, although we must beware of the
dangers of a purely nationalist critique of metropolitan scholarship,
instead of emphasizing the sociological origins of ideas.6
Our main concern in this paper is to examine in more detail the relation-
ship between the super-state system and the subordinate system in world
politics. The growing body of literature on domination and dependence
has tended, understandably, to place more emphasis on the economic
sphere, while less careful study has been made of the ramifications of this
relationship in the international political sphere, and the actual political
mechanisms devised to maintain this system. What we propose to do at
this stage is to identify certain critical areas of theory construction and
empirical research.
Some students of international relations have recently constructed
'linkage theories' to try to explain the relation between national systems
and the international system. However, we feel that it is more fruitful to
look at the international system not primarily as a system of political
arrangements but rather as a cultural system. It should be pointed out
that we are using the term 'culture' in a somewhat different way than it is
normally used by political scientists. The latter have tended to use the term
5 Ibid., p. 98.
6 Some critics of my previous work have concluded that by using the concepts of Weber
and Easton, regardless of how I used them, I have been disqualified as an original 'Third-
World Theorist'. This problem is also at the heart of the Munroe-Beckford debates at the
University of the West Indies, in 'Black Dispossession' (mimeo), Mona, Jamaica 1971.
(A.W.S.)
predominantly in a non-technological sense-the view that culture is a

set of psychological responses to public objects. In other words, they have
tended to restrict the use of the word 'culture' to one aspect of the cultural
system, to what Leslie White has called the 'ideological sub-system'.
If we follow the school of anthropology associated with White, we
emerge with a different and broader conception of culture.7 Further, by
extending White's definition we can see the fundamental role played by
culture in determining the evolution of world political systems. White
begins by differentiating three aspects of culture. He talks of these three
aspects as inter-related parts or sub-systems of the cultural system. These
sub-systems include technology, social structure and ideology. At the base
of any culture is its technological capacity; at the next level is the sociologi-
cal realm, including notably the system of class relations; and at the
third or top level is the ideological or the belief system. What most
political scientists have attempted to do is to isolate the third factor, the
ideological arena, and deal with it as the most important part of the culture.
In his analysis, White has postulated a deterministic theory of social
causation when he identifies the determinant factor in any system as the
technological base. While he is aware that social and ideological sub-
systems condition the technological system, he is very insistent that there
is a distinction between the conditioning factors and the determining
factor.8 For White, technology simply means the capacity by a particular
culture to develop tools to transform nature. A culture has the capacity
to sustain itself primarily by its ability to adapt its technology to the
changing environment.9
In extending White's view, a number of anthropologists10 have suggested
that one can identify both the conservative and the creative capacity of
cultures. Sahlins extends the notion of cultural evolution by emphasizing
the fact that some cultures have a capacity to dominate other cultures,
by utilizing their technology to bring other cultures into a subordinate
role. This dominance is usually obtained by a culture's superior capacity
to adapt. While the dominant culture in a particular system tends to destroy
its subordinate culture, in some instances it allows the subordinate culture
to co-exist in a dormant way.
The results of cultural evolution are summarized by Kaplan:
7 Leslie White, The Science of Culture, Grove Press Inc., 1949.

8 Some scholars have questioned whether in practice the distinction makes any difference.
However, it appears to us that for analytic purposes the distinction is understandable and
useful, as long as it is not applied in a simple-minded way to the complex nature of social
reality.
9 The question has been raised that use of the term 'technology' could be misleading,
that technology is neutral, and thus the critical question is the economic and social structure
in which technology is utilized. However, it is clear that White's concept of the technological
base is a broad one including the organizational structure in which it is used. There are ob-
viously strong similarities with the Marxist concept of the modes of production.
10 Sahlins and Service, eds., Evolution and Culture, University of Michigan Press, 1960.
At the same time the potential range of dominance of each successive culture type has
been correspondingly increased. In its spread, the higher type has been able to dominate
and reduce the variety of cultural systems by transforming them into copies, more or
less exact, of itself. Thus, cultural evolution has moved simultaneously in two directions:
on the one hand there is an increasing heterogeneity of the higher cultural type; and on
the other hand there is an increasing homogeneity of culture as the diversity of culture
types is reduced. Undoubtedly this latter trend toward the homogenization of the world
of cultures will continue in the future at a more accelerated rate than in the past."
At the risk of great over-simplification, we now want to apply this

theory of cultural evolution to the arena of international politics. In the
international system today, especially since World War II, we have seen a
major shift from the once dominant European cultural system to two of
its off-shoots, the North American and the Russian cultural systems.
We accept the view that there is a growing convergence between the two
systems. In the initial stages, the European system exported its technology
through direct colonization of the world, creating a number of political
and economic subordinate units called colonies. European expansion in
this period required the conquering of Asia, Africa and parts of Latin
America, where political control was achieved through the use of military
power.
However, internal considerations within the Euro-state system, and
especially the conflict of the Allies with Germany and Japan, resulted in a
shift in the balance of power from Western Europe to North America
and the Soviet Union. The high cost of maintaining direct political control,
and the fact that indirect control became more feasible under the new
mercantilism, led to the creation of a number of newly-independent
nation-states in the post-war period. However, these new nations have now
become part of the subordinate systems of North America and the Soviet
Union, which have also absorbed the formerly dominant European
cultural system.
The technological superiority of these two powers has led to a new
stage in the international political system, the 'superstate cultural system'
which now dominates the world. We must in this sense join with others
(e.g. Frank, Jalee et al.) who reject the concept of the Third World as a
valid theoretical construct, although like others find it useful in its popular,
political sense. Undoubtedly the most controversial aspect of this hypo-
thesis is the argument that the global system is dominated by a converging
Euro-American cultural system which shares a common technology and a
common concern to control and dominate the weaker cultural systems,
despite different forms of economic and social organization in the two
powerful superstates. The role of China in the international political system
cannot be discussed in detail here. At present China does not have a
11 Ibid., p. 74.
technological base sufficiently powerful to subordinate other systems, and

hence to be classified as a superstate. While the present leadership denies
that China will ever become a superstate, she will eventually have the
technological base to become one.12
If we accept this particular conception of the world political system, it
means that the nation-state, upon which so much of our theorizing in
political science has been based, is rapidly becoming obsolete in both
analytical and political terms. Of course, because of the nature of the
uneven development of capitalism, this does not mean that nationalism is
still not a meaningful force in the world at present. As MacEwan puts
it in a recent article:
One of the complications of historical development is that it does not take place in well-
delineated time phases. Thus, colonialism had begun before nations were fully integrated
internally, and before the era of colonialism had come to an end the move towards
international integration of the capitalist economy had begun.'3
Indeed, the lingering force of nationalism is one of the major barriers

to the total penetration by the now dominant superstate cultural system,
with the multinational corporation at the technological base. Kari Levitt,
for example, has shown how these multinational corporations have made
a mockery of the concept of national sovereignty; even the 'advanced'
countries of Canada and Europe are proving incapable of resisting the
onslaught of this new form of technological dominance.14 She quotes a
much-publicized statement by one of the architects of American policy,
former United States Undersecretary of State George Ball, who gave
explicit recognition to this conflict: 'The multinational corporation is
ahead of, and in conflict with, existing political organizations represented
by the nation states. Major obstacles to the multinational corporation
are evident in Western Europe and Canada, and a good part of the
developing world."'5
The technology of the dominant cultural system is transmitted through
economic and bureaucratic forms of organization. In this respect, the
studies and pioneering works produced by a growing number of social
scientists, particularly in the Caribbean and Latin America, have begun
to clearly reveal how subordination is achieved and maintained by the
dominant Euro-cultural system. Spearheaded by the economists, these
12 This was written before China's dramatic entry into the institutional structure of the
international political system. I am now in the process of completely re-examining the entire
classification of the international system, particularly the whole relations of the socialist
and imperialist sectors. I am grateful to C. L. R. James who has suggested major modifications.
These revisions will appear in the final version of my paper, 'C.L.R. James and the World
Revolution', in the proceedings of the Conference on the Revolutionary Legacy of C. L. R.
James, held in Ann Arbor, March 31-April 2, 1972 (forthcoming). (A.W.S.)
13 Arthur MacEwan, 'Capitalist Expansion, Ideology and Intervention', The Review of
Radical Political Economics, Vol. 4, No. I, Winter, 1972.
14 Kari Levitt, Silent Surrender, Macmillan of Canada, 1970.
15 Ibid., p. 98.
scholars have been working on similar lines, known broadly as the

domination-dependency school of thought.16
One of the most concise definitions of dependency is that of Dos Santos,
the Brazilian economist, as quoted by Bodenheimer. Dependency is
defined as:
an historical condition which shapes a certain structure of the world economy such that
it favors some countries to the detriment of others and limits the development possi-
bilities of the (subordinate) economies .. .; a situation in which the economy of a certain
group of countries is conditioned by the development and expansion of another economy
to which their own (economy) is subjected ... .17
Among the scholars of Latin America, Andre Gunder Frank has shown
concretely and historically how the regions in Latin America which
are the most underdeveloped today are the ones which had the closest
ties to the metropolis in the past; more specifically he lists the 'once sugar-
exporting West Indies, Northeastern Brazil, the ex-mining districts of
Minas Gerais in Brazil, highland Peru, and Bolivia, and the central
Mexican states of Guanajuato, Zacatecas, and others whose names were
made world famous centuries ago by their silver'.18
In the English speaking Caribbean, the works of Lloyd Best, George
Beckford, Norman Girvan, Kari Levitt and C. Y. Thomas are perhaps
among the better known of those who have been working along the lines
of the mechanism of the plantation society and how in all its historical
phases it has created dependence.19 For the modern period, perhaps the
best analysis of the working of the system is provided in the path-breaking
work of Levitt and Best on Plantation Society. They label the modern
16 Norman Girvan in Jamaica is currently working on an important paper comparing

and contrasting the 'economic dependence' schools of thought in Latin America and the
Caribbean. He notes that the differences in the two schools reflect differences in the terms
upon which the two areas were incorporated into the international economy and a different
historical sequence, but that in the recent period there is a growing convergence of the schools
of thought due to a growing convergence in the institutions of structural dependence. Until
recently there have been few links between Caribbean and Latin American scholars working
in the same general direction, except for the informal contacts of people like Best, Girvan
and McIntyre. That is why Girvan's paper is important, as is the growing awareness in both
areas of the need for closer links, both formal and informal. We are grateful to Norman
Girvan for making available to us a preliminary paper he is now expanding on 'The Develop-
ment of Dependence in Latin America and the Caribbean', prepared for the Conference on
External Dependence and Problems of Development in Latin America and the Caribbean,
sponsored by the Latin American Studies Committee of the University of Toronto, Toronto,
April 1972.
17 Bodenheimer, op. cit., p. 124.
18 Andre Gunder Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution, Monthly Review
Press, 1969, p. 13.
19 Cf. Lloyd Best and Kari Levitt, Studies in Caribbean Economy, Volume 1, Models of
Plantation Economy (forthcoming); Lloyd Best, 'Outlines of a Model of Pure Plantation
Economy', Social and Economic Studies, September 1968; George L. Beckford, Persistent
Poverty, Oxford University Press, New York, 1972; Norman Girvan, Foreign Capital and
Economic Underdevelopment in Jamaica, Institute of Social and Economic Research, University
of the West Indies, Jamaica, 1971; and C. Y. Thomas, Monetary and Financial Arrangements
in a Dependent Economy, ISER, University of the West Indies, 1965.
period (dating from about 1940 in the West Indies) as Plantation Economy
Further Modified, consisting of the emergence of new export staples, such
as bauxite, petroleum and tourism, domestic manufacturing, and an active
public sector. They go on to demonstrate how many of the features of
the original model, Pure Plantation Economy, are strikingly similar
to those of the modern period, because many of the new institutions,
and particularly the multinational corporations, have the same characteris-
tics and consequences as the joint-stock trading companies under the old
mercantilism. Both product and factor markets continue to be fragmented
within each Caribbean territory, and the new mercantilism under the
multinational corporations enforces dependency as under the old mercan-
tilism.
Best, in another article, has succinctly summarized the similarities in
operations between the new and the old mercantilism:
James, it was, I think, in Black Jacobins, who reminded us that, having landed in the
New World, Columbus praised God and enquired urgently after gold. Nowadays the
Industrialists arrive by jet clipper, thank the Minister of Pioneer Industry and enquire
after bauxite. 'The Enterprise of the Indies' is still good business.20
It is clear that in such a fragmented system, the role of the nation-state

assumes only secondary functions. In an important article, the West
Indian political scientist Vaughn Lewis makes it clear that what we have
in the case of these dependent countries integrated into the new mercantilist
stage of capitalism are not national economies, but corporate-appendage
economies. The type of conflict that arises in such a system is between the
corporate system and the government:
But the object of the conflict insofar as the government is concerned, is to extract a
greater monetary return from the corporate-appendage economy controlled by the
corporate economic system; it cannot be, given the symbiotic and unequal relationship
between corporate and appendage, the creation of an autonomous national economic
system--and partly because ... in this system the creation of the backward and forward
linkages necessary to the development of a self-sustaining internal economic dynamic
is virtually precluded.21
As he points out, the conflict occurs because of two political functions

of the government: to provide welfare services in situations where the
government has come into office in popular elections, and because it
tends to be a substantial employer of labor. He states that the government
does have some politico-economic autonomy relative to its own nationals
in the appendage economy sector, but that in the final analysis its conflict
with the corporate system is a non-zero-sum game, unless total nationaliza-
20 Lloyd Best, 'Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom', New World Quarterly,
1967, reprinted in Readings in the Political Economy of the Caribbean, New World Group,
Jamaica, 1971, p. 13.
21 Vaughn Lewis, 'Comment on Multinational Corporations and Dependent Under-
development in Mineral Export Economies', Social and Economic Studies, December 1970,
p. 531.
tion occurs. But, he goes on, the political consequences of this domestically
(apart from almost certain retaliation by the dominant government of the
corporate concerns) are severe: it is likely to lose its political base among the
national elements most predominant in the appendage sector. We shall
return a bit later in this paper to explore some of the linkages of key
groups in the national society with the international corporate system.
Thus, we can see clearly that the political systems of the world are mainly
reflections of the more fundamental technological system, although as a
Brazilian political scientist has stressed we should avoid a mechanistic
interpretation by deriving a directly correlated form of state from the
economic analysis. While the relation exists, it is mediated by the cumula-
tive political experiences of each country and social group and by the con-
crete forms of ideologies prevailing in different societies. In a critique of the
domination-dependency model another Brazilian social scientist has
pointed to a weakness of the dependency model in its present form: that
it is over-determined and does not give ample weight to the autonomy of
politics in breaking out of dependency. In other words, a new type of
vicious circle which can lead to pessimism and impotence may result from
the theory. Unfortunately, both of these Brazilians must remain anonymous.
We can now extend the formulations of culture of White et al. to the
international political system. At the base level we have a dominant
technological cultural system, i.e. the capacity of some cultures to more
efficiently exploit the environment and to export these techniques to other
societies. At the second level, the sociological level, we have a number of
nation-states that play the role of classes within the hierarchical system of
the dominant system, and whose internal class structures are integrally
linked to the dominant system. Finally, at the ideological level, the domi-
nant system exports its values and ideologies through such cultural
devices as law, religion, education, the manipulation of folk culture by co-
optation through advertising, and the arts, to overcome the resistance of
national cultures to this new form of domination.
While this new breed of social scientists recognizes the increasing
irrelevance of the nation-state because of the new mercantilism, the more
orthodox social scientists have also begun to move away from the nation-
state as the basic tool of analysis in an attempt to develop more dynamic
models of the international political system. Rosenau, for example, uses
the concepts of 'linkages' and 'penetration' in his analysis of the inter-
national political system. He defines the concept of linkages as 'any
recurrent sequence of behavior that originates in one system [that] is
reacted to in another'.22 He isolates three types of linkages: penetrative,
22 James N. Rosenau, 'Towards the Study of National-International Linkages', in Rosenau,

ed., Linkage Politics, Essays on the Convergence of National and International Systems, The
Free Press, 1969, p. 45.
reactive and emulative. However, these terms tend to suggest an equality

of power roles between nations. While he is quite clear when he talks about
penetration, he does not carry his analysis to its logical conclusion,
which is that of domination and subordination. Most of those associated
with the concept of linkage politics have tended to focus on inter-societal
and inter-ideological relations, rather than on the determining techno-
logical relations. This reflects the ideological biases of orthodox social
scientists against any theories which accord primacy to the economic or
technological base of society, and particularly the phenomenon of im-
perialism. As Vaughn Lewis points out:
At the turn of the century, as is well known, analysis of imperialism, initiated by the
English liberal Hobson, becomes 'Europeanized' and 'politicized' through its adoption
and extension by Marxists like Lenin, Hilferding, Luxemburg and Kautsky. Partly
because of its politicization in this particular way, the analysis of imperialism as an
important part of economic and political analysis became unattractive to Western
intellectuals 23
As we have attempted to demonstrate, the role of the nation-state in the

dependent world has now come to assume only secondary functions.
It is essential to look more closely at the mechanisms that have been
created to enforce this new type of domination, or what Bodenheimer calls
the infrastructure of dependency (author's emphasis).24 Complementing the
network of economic relations (the multinational corporations), a whole
complex of political, military, social and cultural international mechanisms
have been created to reinforce economic dependency to replace the old
colonial model of direct political control.
The essential link in this process has been the creation or reinforcement
of clientele social classes in all the dependent countries (the local bour-
geoisie, certain elements of the government bureaucracy, professionals, and
technical elites). To quote Bodenheimer again on the model as it works in
Latin America, and as others have shown works in similar fashion else-
where,25 'dependency does not mean simply external domination, uni-
laterally superimposed from abroad. No less important than foreign
exploitation is the fact that all classes and structures in Latin society have
to a greater or lesser degree internalized and institutionalized the legacy
of dependency'.26
For the Caribbean, the Guyanese economist C. Y. Thomas has shown
how the co-optation mechanism works for the domestic elites at the stage
when the demands of the society for some element of participation in the
23 Lewis, op. cit., p. 528. 24 Bodenheimer, op. cit., p. 126.
25 For Asia, for example, this type of analysis is being carried out by scholars associated
generally with the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, and a number of Japanese
scholars. For Africa, Walter Rodney of the University of Dar-es-Salaam, in a lecture given
at the University of Michigan (March 1972) indicated that there is a growing body of analysis
being undertaken in Africa along similar lines.
26 Bodenheimer, op. cit., p. 127.
corporate system result in partial 'nationalization', joint stock ownership

and other limited concessions by the corporate system. He says that this
process, known as Guyanization,
can be described as organizational substitution. As more and more Guyanese are taken
on locally to fill positions held by expatriates, so does the firm shift the decisions which
were made by expatriates back to the Head Office. The Guyanese fill the posts, they
empty it of any decision-making significance. We take the form. They keep the essentials
and the substance. The result of this is that Guyanization as it has been practiced does
not extend any meaningful participation to the Guyanese people. It does not contribute
to expanding our knowledge of the operations of these industries at the higher managerial
and professional levels. It supports the non-participatory system by absorbing our skilled
elites into expatriate plunder. It creates a brain-drain which takes place before our eyes.
We do not see it because we associate brain-drains only with the crossing of the geo-
graphical frontier. As a consequence we are actively supporting it.27
It is only very recently that the full implications of the technological

superiority and the control of world markets by the multinational corpora-
tions for Third World countries have begun to receive the attention they
deserve. Thus, partial or even total nationalization may prove only a
pyrrhic victory, even when there is no direct military or political inter-
ference with the nationalizing country. A Tanzanian who was quoted
anonymously in a recent article has put the problem succinctly:
It is only within the last few years that some Third-World countries began to nationalize
those firms which were financed by foreign capital, and at the same time began to
move towards partnership or profit-sharing ventures. As soon as this process started,
both sides began to learn. The international monopolies have already quickly adjusted
their sights and their policies to this new reality of nationalization. Because their view
of the international economy is more comprehensive than the view of any individual
country, they have been able to decide that if they could continue to control the manage-
ment and the decision-making operations, then they would still be in control of the
international economy.28
The dilemma of Third-World countries trying to overcome these

difficulties by turning to the Soviet Union for technological help in certain
key areas such as oil and mining has been clearly revealed, for example, in
the recent agreement between the Soviet Union and The Occidental
Petroleum Company for a three billion dollar contract for the company
to supply a wide range of scientific and technical services to the Soviet
Union. A report of a confidential meeting of the Council on Foreign
Relations in April 1971, published by the North American Congress on
Latin America emphasizes the dilemma for Third-World countries in this
situation:
Mr. Campbell asked those who had recently negotiated with the new governments in Peru,
27 Clive Thomas, 'Meaningful Participation in Industry: Meaning and Scope', Ratoon

(mimeo), Occasional Paper No. 1, Georgetown, Guyana, 1971, pp. 5-6.
28 Quoted in M. R. Bhagavan, 'Problems of Socialist Development in Tanzania', Monthly
Reviewt, May 1972, p. 32.
Bolivia and Chile what impressions they had of how these leaders see the alternatives
ahead of them in managing their mines, whether by themselves, with European help,
or whether there have been any threats to 'turn to the other side.' On the last point
Mr. Barber responded that the Soviets applied to Japan unsuccessfully for help in
developing their mining, and that they are now talking with the Rothschilds in France.
They are in no position to help the Peruvians.29
However, it should be pointed out that these subtle processes of internal-

ization are also reinforced by overt subversion of the national loyalties of
citizens of dependent countries. One of the most striking examples of this
to come to light was the publication by the Africa Research Group of an
actual transcript of a Council on Foreign Relations discussion meeting in
1968 on Intelligence and Foreign Policy, and marked confidential. The
discussion group included a number of prominent American officials and
academics (whose names are listed in the publication). The following
quotation from the Report clearly reveals this process of overt subversion:
The United States should make increasing use of non-nationals, who, with effort at
indoctrination and training, should be encouraged to develop a second loyalty, more or
less comparable to that of the American staff. As we shift our attention to Latin America,
Asia, and Africa, the conduct of U.S. nationals is likely to be increasingly circumscribed.
The primary change recommended would be to build up a system of unofficial cover;
to see how far we can go with non-U.S. nationals, especially in the field ... such career
agents should be encouraged with an effort at indoctrination and training and with a
prospect of long-term employment to develop a second loyalty and they could of course
never be employed in ways that would conflict with their primary loyalties toward their
own countries ...
The central task is that of identifying potential indigenous allies-both individuals
and organizations-making contact with them, and establishing the fact of a community
of interest.30
The historic role played by the essentially comprador middle-class

groups in the dependent areas of course facilitates their co-optation into
the dominant system. Fanon's scathing attack on the national middle
classes who take power at the end of the colonial regime is too well known
to reiterate here.31 Lloyd Best has continually stressed the imitative
nature of this class. C. L. R. James has traced historically the reasons for
the impotence of the present West Indian middle classes which are worthy
of our attention.32 He points out that for racial and historical reasons they
are today excluded from those circles in control of big industry, and thus
as a class have no knowledge or experience of the productive forces of their
29 'Liberated Documents: New Imperial Strategy for Latin America', Nacla's Latin America
and Empire Report, Vol. V, No. 7, November 1971, p. 23.
30 Intelligence and Foreign Policy, The CIA's Global Strategy, Introduction and analysis
by Africa Research Group, Africa Research Group, P.O. Box 213, Cambridge, Mass., 1972,
pp. 17-18.
31 Cf. Frantz Fanon, The Damned, Presence Africaine, Paris, 1963.
32 C. L. R. James, 'The West Indian Middle Classes', Munroe and Lewis, eds., Readings in
Government and Politics of the West Indies, Dept. of Government, University of the West
Indies, Mona, Jamaica, 1971 edition.
societies. Further, they have no long-term actual political experience, no

political tradition.
It is such a class of people which has the government of the West Indies in its hands.
In all essential matters they are, as far as the public is concerned, devoid of any ideas
whatever ...
This middle class with political power minus any economic power are still politically
paralyzed before their former masters, who are still masters.33
These new elites perceive their main function as creating an atmosphere

conducive to ever greater investment by the corporate system, one of the
main requirements of which is political and social stability. This stability
is bought at the price of dampening demands for greater political partici-
pation by the populace. Despite the rhetoric of nationalism flaunted by
this new class, when the demands from below threaten their interests,
they turn to authoritarian political regimes. Jose Nun, Soares, Petras
and others have shown convincingly how earlier populist regimes in Latin
America, and particularly Argentina and Brazil, were replaced by authori-
tarian regimes when the interests of the new middle classes and the old
elite classes (whose interes-ts are intertwined and parallel, not antagonistic
as is often claimed by orthodox social scientists) were threatened by
demands for increased participation by the masses. James, a decade ago,
pointed to the same phenomenon building up in the West Indies:
It is obvious to all observers that this situation cannot continue indefinitely. The popula-
tions of the islands are daily growing more restless and dissatisfied. The middle classes
point to parliamentary democracy, trade unions, party politics and all the elements of
democracy. But these are not things in themselves. They must serve a social purpose
and here the middle classes are near the end of their tether. Some of them are preparing
for troubles, trouble with the masses. Come what may, they are going to keep them in
order. Some are hoping for help from the Americans, from the Organization of American
States ...
Some are playing with the idea of a dictatorship, a benevolent dictatorship.34
James originally wrote this prophecy in 1962 on the eve of independence

in Jamaica and Trinidad (first published as Party Politics in the West
Indies35), when most of the new middle class and its educated elite were still
optimistic about the ability of the orthodox model of economic develop-
ment and parliamentary democracy to bring about change, with the notable
exception of the young group of dissident intellectuals of the New World
Group. Actual events in the West Indies in all the islands since 1962, with
particular modifications in each territory, more than bear out James'
analysis. As the orthodox development model (Best early dubbed it 'in-
dustrialization by invitation') showed itself incapable of bringing benefits
to the mass of the population, and as unemployment and income distribu-
tion problems worsened, the ruling elites have in fact chosen the option of
3i Ibid., p. 195. 34 Ibid., p. 196.
35 Vedic Enterprises Ltd., Trinidad, 1962.
increasing authoritarian political measures, rather than that of dramatically

broadening the base of participation, despite a flood of rhetoric to the
contrary. Thus, as in other dependent areas the nation-state increasingly
functions as a police state for the interests of the corporate system. The
primary loyalty of these new elites is best revealed by their behavior when
popular regimes come to power, as in Cuba and Chile, when they first
send their money out of the country, and then emigrate to the metropolis
when they see the new trend is irreversible.
The difficulties of maintaining the present international political system
in the face of the disruptive effects of the increasing demand for participa-
tion in the subordinate areas of the system have only in the past decade
begun to force a re-examination of the underlying tenets of 'development'
theories by orthodox social scientists. The school of development theories
in both economics and political science that mushroomed in the 1950s saw
no contradiction between 'economic development' predicated on U.S. aid
and capital investment and 'political development', which involved mass
participation through imported models of Western electoral systems. In
fact, they were seen not only as compatible, but as reinforcing each other.
A harmony of interests was also seen between the interests of the dominant
cultures, particularly the United States, and the dependent countries.
Many have forgotten in light of the political realities of the last few years
that the 1960s were optimistically declared the development decade for
the underdeveloped countries. Progress in these areas was to lead to
increased stability in the international system.
But by 1970, the gap between the dominant countries and the dependent
countries in economic terms had grown rather than decreased, and some
countries had actually gone backwards in an absolute sense. The method of
capitalist development imposed on these countries, with its highly capital-
intensive mode of production, not only has excluded the large majority
of the populations in these countries from the fruits of development but
also increased the gap between them and the small group of the national
elites and middle classes who were integrated into the new international
economy. Thus, not only was there growing unemployment and under-
employment, there were also growing income inequalities within these
countries.
This dramatically brought out into the open the inherent contradiction
between this model of economic development and increased political
participation, through which the excluded masses were demanding their
rightful share in the development. Vaughn Lewis has made a useful
distinction between 'economic nationalism, having its inspiration among
the national elements in the appendage sector, as a form of political sup-
port for government, and a populist nationalism, ethnically or otherwise
determined, deriving from sectors of the national population to which no
returns accrue directly from the corporate-appendage economy' (author's

emphasis).36
The actions of the United States government beginning in the immediate
post-war period (early Indochina policy, Guatemala, Iran, to name only
the most conspicuous examples) revealed that policy makers were aware
from an early stage of the dangers of popular participation to the main-
tenance of the economic and international political system. This was
further emphasized in the 1960s when the emphasis in policy changed from
economic development to stability. Aid funds and experts were increasingly
diverted from areas like agriculture, public health (except for population
control measures) and community development into the areas of political
control like 'public safety' (an American euphemism for police and security
measures) and the military. One of the most forthright statements of
official thinking on nationalism and participation in Third-World countries
was expressed by General William Westmoreland in an address to the
'Eighth Conference of American Armies' in Rio de Janeiro in September
of 1968:
Nation-building is essentially equivalent to combatting insurgency.... Although nation

building sounds like a function of civil agencies, it has been our experience that military
forces-our own and those of the nation we are seeking to help-must often play
a major role and use their special equipment and capabilities to help the people help
themselves.37
However, there was a decided time lag before orthodox scholarship

caught up with realpolitik. This probably explains in part the massive
impact of Samuel Huntington's book, Political Order and Changing
Societies published in 1968.38 Academic ideology had at last caught up
with the realities of imperial policy and provided a respectable, academic
rationalization for the support of authoritarian regimes in the developing
countries.
Huntington stresses that the ultimate source of instability in these new
countries stems from the demand for high participation by previously non-
politicized groups at precisely the time when there is a low level of political
institutionalization. The problem arises in that these groups are attempting
to enter the political arena at a time when the economy is being trans-
formed from a traditional one to a modern one. In other words the
modernization process is itself the cause of this instability:
Modernization thus tends to produce alienation and anomie, normlessness generated

by the conflict of old values and new. The new values undermine the old bases of associa-
tion and of authority before new skills, motivations, and resources can be brought
into existence to create new groupings . . .
36 Lewis, op. cit., p. 533.

37 'The Vietnamization of Latin America', Nacla's Latin America and Empire Report, Vol. VI,
No. 5, May-June 1972, pp. 24-5.
38 Yale University Press.
If these relationships are accepted, then obviously the promotion of education,

literacy, mass communications, industrialization, economic growth, urbanization,
should produce greater political stability. These seemingly clear deductions from the
correlation between modernity and stability, however, are invalid. In fact, modernity
breeds stability, but modernization breeds instability.39
The ultimate solution to this problem, it follows, is to create conditions

which will lower the rate of participation and increase the level of institu-
tionalization. In many ways Huntington's notions of institutionalization
are very similar to what Franz Neuman in another context and what Max
Weber earlier called the 'bureaucratization' of the personality. If one
bureaucratizes the individual to the point where he can be integrated into
the body politic through neutral organizations, then his demand for
universalistic goals will decrease. Ideology is thus perceived as dys-
functional when its content is universalistic: the politics of developing
countries must be 'de-ideologized'. Mass participation should remain
ritualistic, and the governors must be allowed to govern without interrup-
tion.
It should not be surprising that the solution Huntington comes to is
military government: 'The military . . . may possess a greater capacity
for generating order in a radical praetorian society. There are also military
governments and political parties which have come out of the womb of the
army. The military can be cohesive, bureaucratized, and disciplined.
Colonels can run a government; students and monks cannot'.40 (Emphasis
ours.)
Huntington's work has attracted a great deal of praise and a great deal
of criticism. Since he is primarily an ideologue whose main concern is to
rationalize the preservation of stability, which means maintaining the
present system of dominance-subordination, it is difficult to deal with his
work analytically. In a recent critique Charles Tilly has pointed out that
while 'the most attractive general feature of Huntington's scheme is its
deliberate flight from psychologism,'41 nonetheless, Huntington's analysis
of the Western experience with revolutions and violent conflict is weak
'because the scheme founders in tautologies, contradictions, omissions
and failures to examine the evidence seriously'.42 Further on he adduces
evidence to challenge Huntington's assertion that 'the degree of instability
is related to the rate of modernization. The historical evidence with respect
to the West is overwhelming on this point'. Tilly says 'I beg leave not to be
overwhelmed by the available evidence.'43 He goes on to detail a large
number of specific historical examples which contradict the Huntington
model.
39 Ibid., pp. 37 and 41. 40 Ibid., p. 239.
41 Charles Tilly, 'Does Modernization Breed Revolution', prepared for presentation
to the Seminar on Revolution and Social Change, Pennsylvania State University, May 1971
(mimeo), p. 10.
42 Ib id., P. 9 43 Ibid., p. I11.
In a recent essay Halpern has incisively pointed out the underlying

biases of social scientists in the field of political development, noting that
Huntington's book reflects many of these conventions, but also conceding
that it sometimes rises brilliantly beyond them. He says that
Works in the mainstream of social science dealing with 'political development' tend to be
better prepared to speak about order than change, and therefore obscure and cripple
both. They also tend to concentrate on structure rather than process, on action rather
than interaction, on relationships functional or dysfunctional to existing systems rather
than on alternatives and potentials. They concentrate on efficiency, quantitative growth,
and public security, but rarely speak of justice or the relationship among justice, order,
and change.44
Just as the new breed of economists have produced increasing evidence

that economic underdevelopment was not an historical accident but an
essential feature of capitalist development, so the evidence is mounting
that political underdevelopment is not an accident or a phase in the
gradual but inevitable evolution towards liberal political democracy but is
essential to the maintenance of the present international political system.
Political scientists in particular have obscured or ignored the technological
imperialism that is at the base of the phenomena of subordination in the
political sphere. This has also allowed them to continue to use the nation-
state as one of their primary units of analysis, despite its increasingly
secondary role as the basic economic forms of organization, the multi-
national corporations, have become internationalized. The new metrop-
olis-satellite relationship transcends the nation-state relationship, as we
have tried to show throughout this paper.45 We are still assigning a nine-
teenth-century importance to the nation-state: our economic theory is in
the twentieth century, our political theory is still in the nineteenth century.
In the Caribbean we are still faced with theoretical inadequacies in our
analyses in a number of areas. The early and growing body of literature on
the economics of dependency is well advanced, but we are just beginning
to analyze the mechanisms of dependency in the social and political
spheres and the interdependency and complexity of these mechanisms.
The peculiar needs of the plantation system resulted in the creation of a
social order which was fundamentally different from both the feudal and
44 Manfred Halpern, 'A Redefinition of the Revolutionary Situation', in Miller and Aya,
eds., National Liberation, Revolution in the Third World, The Free Press, 1971, p. 46.
45 Since we wrote this paper, Norman Girvan has pointed out to us a classic case of the pre-
eminence of the multinational corporations over national sovereignty. He cites the Alcoa-
Costa Rica bauxite agreement of 1968: 'This agreement has the status of a so-called "contract-
law"-i.e. it has the properties both of a contract and of a national law. Now since the
agreement can only be terminated under provisions contained in the agreement and all of
these provisions require the agreement of the company, in effect the state of Costa Rica is
constitutionally bound to the provisions of the agreement for its entire life of 40 years. Neither
the Government nor the Legislative Assembly can make any regulation or pass any law until
the year 2010 which unilaterally alters any of the provisions of the agreement, or terminates it.
Thus in this case the abrogation of national sovereignty is total and complete.' Norman
Girvan, 'Making the Rules of the Game: Country-Company Agreements in the Bauxite
Industry', Social and Economic Studies, December 1971, p. 416.
the metropolitan capitalist models. Nor was the plantation

on a traditional society, such as in Ceylon and other par
and Latin America. There was no 'dual' economy, society or polity. The
political and social forms of organization that were imposed were designed
to service the plantation system totally. In the case of the Caribbean we can
postulate a pure system of subordination.
The Caribbean as a pure case of subordination means that our analyses
of every aspect of the society must be put into a framework that will deal
with the system in its totality and its inter-relatedness. The model of the
plantation society as developed by Best, Levitt, Beckford et al., as part of
the larger theoretical framework of domination-dependency being
developed in many areas within the framework of imperialism, must now
be employed to specify and trace the linkages of all aspects of these soci-
eties in an empirical fashion, particularly in the area of politics and social
structure.
The sociologists in the area have made a notable contribution in attempt-
ing to derive frameworks and theories that would allow for a more mean-
ingful analysis of Caribbean social structures. However, borrowing
heavily from the orthodox social science theories of the metropolis,
neither the advocates of the theory of pluralism (M. G. Smith) nor the
advocates of stratification theory (Braithwaite, R. T. Smith) have been
able to overcome the inherent biases and limitations of the theoretical
tools they have borrowed, although by their modifications they have
certainly advanced our knowledge of Caribbean societies. The next
generation of social scientists will have to synthesize their insights and
contributions within the larger framework of the domination-dependency
and plantation models. The crucial variables of class and race are certainly
in need of further analysis and theoretical formulations.
Analysis of the political system has lagged behind the- other disciplines,
though serious work is now being undertaken by a younger group of
political scientists at the University of the West Indies. However, from the
work that has been done we can summarize some of the distinguishing
features of the political systems in the West Indies. Despite a number of
important differences in political forms in the four independent Common-
wealth Caribbean countries, in all cases political institutions and con-
stitutional devices have been firmly based on the Westminster model. In
fact, these countries, especially Jamaica, have been considered exemplary
models of the peaceful transition to political independence, both by
the mainstream of Western scholars and by the political leaders who
presided over the independence era (Jamaica and Trinidad became
independent in 1962, Guyana and Barbados in 1966).46
46 Because of the political strife in Guyana where the two major political parties were
deeply divided by race and by ideology, there were more modifications to the basic West-
In a careful and detailed recent study of the process of political de-

colonization in Jamaica, Trevor Munroe stresses the continuity between
the political system in the pre-independence colonial period from the
inception of universal adult franchise in 1944, and that of the post-
independence period. Munroe amply documents his thesis that there was
very little innovation throughout the period by the political leadership
which emerged out of the struggle of the late 1930s in attempting to adapt
or modify the British model to Jamaican conditions, even at the symbolic
level. Public documents of the period reveal the remarkable consensus
between the two major political parties who devised the 1962 independence
constitution in keeping to the form and letter of the Westminster model.
For example, proposals made by various groups of citizens for a repub-
lican form of government instead of a constitutional monarchy with a non-
elected Governor General as titular head of state were rejected by the
Joint Constitutional Committee of the two parties without any substantial
explanation for their rejection. Munroe indicates that the arguments
advanced by the Joint Committee for a bi-cameral parliament with an
appointed Senate instead of a unicameral system consisting only of elected
members revealed even more clearly the strict adherence to the British
model:
What is certain however is that the attitudes implicit in the maintenance of bi-cameralism
and the inconsistencies evident from the justification were not incidental to the political
process. In this case, perhaps more than any other, the preservation of the status quo
was indicative of the uncritical approach characteristic of an essentially emulative
political leadership and which superficially, seemed so inconsistent with the hyper-
critical rhetoric of most decolonizing processes.47
Given this resistance of the Jamaican political leadership to even minor

deviations from the Westminster model, it is not surprising that the room
opened up for maneuver in the Caribbean by the Cuban revolution was not
perceived by the leadership. Even in Trinidad, where the strongly national-
ist leader Eric Williams, the man who had analyzed brilliantly the nature
of colonialism in his famous book Capitalism and Slavery and who had
mobilized virtually the entire population of Trinidad over the issue of the
American military base of Chaguaramas in 1960, failed to perceive the
possibilities and eventually compromised with the U.S. government.
Lloyd Best has argued cogently what the scenario could have been:
Men do not have to be persuaded to support David against Goliath. But even if they
did, the issues of Independence and Federation which were so much in the air in 1959-60,
minster model. However, these modifications were in the main imposed by Great Britain
to prevent the return to power by the avowedly Marxist Cheddi Jagan rather than representing
attempts by the local political leaders to devise more suitable indigenous institutions and
instruments.
47 Trevor Munroe, The Politics of Constitutional Decolonization, Jamaica, 1944-62, Institute
of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, Jamaica, 1972, p. 156.
and the fall of the old regime in Cuba could have been persuasion enough. What was
needed was a linkage of the issues and an integration of the regional consciousness.
Consider what might have happened if the Government of Trinidad and Tobago had
declared the base nationalised, proclaimed independence and joined Cuba in taking
over the sugar industry.
The colonial answer is to say that the marines would have come and that the other
Caribbean governments would have sold out as they did in 1953 when the PPP ran into
trouble in Guyana. But 1960 was not 1953 and neither Castro's movement nor the PNM
a mere Marxist Trojan Horse! They had struck their roots in a Caribbean consciousness
and it would not have been easy to cut them down. Manley might have equivocated
following the endorsement he had just recently had for the Puerto Rican policies he had
adopted in his first term. But the tilt of opinion in the region as a whole would have
made that a very uncomfortable stance-especially if the stakes included sugar and the
land, and if the hand had been played in the way that both Castro and Williams then
had the moral resources with which to play it. Could either Jagan or Burnham for ex-
ample, have failed to respond if they had been summoned to attend a Havana Con-
ference on the reorganization of the Caribbean sugar industry?48
But this still leaves unanswered the question as to why the West Indian
political leaders were as cautious as they were, and indeed less innovative
in matters of form and content than allowed by the imperial power.
The examples cited reinforce the point made earlier in this paper that
dependency does not simply mean foreign domination, but that all classes
and structures in a dependent society internalize and institutionalize the
legacy of dependency. Munroe concludes in a similar vein when explaining
the strong continuity of the old order in Jamaica in the neo-colonial phase:
... what we have said about the Jamaican successor politicians, suggests that it would
be at best a half-truth to see the perpetuation of old relationships as purely the con-
sequence of the sinister manipulations of imperial puppeteers.... But the fact that the
strings of imperial control might have allowed much more freedom than the native
bourgeoisie actually perceived or used has received relatively little attention. Neo-
colonialism can certainly define the outer limits of colonial freedom of action but it is
inadequate for an understanding of why so little was done within those limits....
Features of colonial social structure and national bourgeois ideology must be taken into
account if 'false' decolonization is to be more fully understood.49
Of more substantive import than the almost unquestioning acceptance

of the symbolic aspects of the Westminster model was the entrenchment
of a ministerial system which gave a great deal of unchecked power to the
Prime Minister, despite the lack of checks and balances in the West
Indian situation as contrasted to the English practice. In a system in which
for over 300 years political autocracy had been almost total: first during the
period of slavery and then of Crown Colony government, this acted to
reinforce the exclusion of the mass of the population from meaningful
participation in the political system.
The autocratic nature of the political system in the recent historical
48 Lloyd Best, 'Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom', op. cit., pp. 27-8.
49 Munroe, op. cit., pp. 190-1.
period in the West Indies, and particularly in Jamaica, has been somewhat
obscured to many observers by the existence of strong two-party systems,
high electoral turnouts, and other outward manifestations of what appears
a highly participatory system. Mass political parties arose in all the terri-
tories in the decade or so following the large-scale upheavals of the late
1930s, which were sparked off primarily by widespread economic dis-
content. The emerging political parties of that period can be classified
in the main as populist parties. In Jamaica, with its fairly homogeneous
population racially, the two parties have been based on trade unions,
whereas in Trinidad and Guyana racial divisions between those of African
origin and the East Indians led to more racially oriented parties, although
class and ideology were not totally unimportant, especially in Guyana in
the 1950s. A distinction should also be made between those leaders more
directly in the populist tradition, such as Bustamante in Jamaica and Gairy
in Grenada, whose appeal was directed more to the economic grievances
of the lower classes, and leaders such as Manley in Jamaica and Eric
Williams in Trinidad who directed their appeals more to the nationalist
aspirations of the middle classes. Nonetheless, the substantive differences
between the two types of leaders and their relationships to the electorate
tended to converge within fairly short periods of time. Munroe dates the
'era of unanimity' between the Jamaica Labour Party of Bustamante and
the Peoples National Party of Manley as early as 1953.50
These essentially populist-type parties have been based on what can be
characterized as a hero-crowd type of relationship, in which routinization,
institutionalization and participation in the political system are minimal:
The hero emerges as a leader at a particular stage of colonial evolution, the terminal
stage of colonial rule. This period is marked by the advent of universal adult franchise.
It is this sudden emergence of the mass into political life that enables a hero to arise, and
which at the same time encourages the caesarist tendencies in this type of leader.51
Differences in the style of political leadership are the main distinguishing

features between the middle-class type of hero and the mass hero, although
some differences in party organization are also apparent in some cases.
Lloyd Best has characterized the political leadership in the West Indies as
that of 'Doctor Politics'. He distinguishes between three types of 'Doctors':
the 'Grammar School Doctor', produced mainly in Trinidad and Guyana,
the new Plantation colonies where education rather than property holding
has been the medium of advance, and whose prime examples are Williams
and Burnham, although Jagan and Capildeo also fit into this mold;
'Sunday School Doctors', produced in the mature plantation colonies
where there was no escape for potential leaders from organizing labor,
50 Ibid., p. 166.
si A. W. Singham, The Hero and the Crowd in a Colonial Polity, Yale University Press, 1968
p. 319.
where the education came chiefly from the Sunday school, and the rhetoric
is Biblical, of which Bird of Antigua and Bradshaw of St. Kitts are the best
examples; and the 'Public School Doctors', a Jamaican phenomenon,
where a local ruling class arose after the end of slavery, with many of the
values of their English counterparts, and in which class he places politicians
like Lightbourne, Tavares and Manley. However, irrespective of the type
of Doctor, 'the distinguishing feature of Doctor politics is that the Leader
is expected to achieve for and on behalf of the population. The community
is not expected to contribute much more than crowd support and
applause'.52 Munroe also emphasizes the lack of popular participation:
'In fact the Messianic nature of mass politics both expressed and probably
strengthened popular political attitudes. Sycophancy was hardly an
encouragement to effective participation.'53
While the populist movements produced without doubt certain benefits
for the mass of the population, particularly the recognition of trade unions,
the main benefactors were the new political leaders who were thrown up
and the middle class in general who were taking over the positions gradu-
ally being vacated by the expatriates of the Imperial power. While the
impetus for these popular political movements was largely economic
and social in origin, the leadership focussed their main energies on the goal
of political independence, subsuming economic and social goals which were
expected to follow as a matter of course.
The co-optation of the early populist movements in the West Indies by
entrenched economic interests has followed a classic pattern. While the
various populist movements gave prominence to the condition of the 'have
nots', by their ideology of obtaining a 'bigger share of the pie' for the
workers rather than one of challenging the given social and economic
order, their programs were acceptable to the elites. In Jamaica, this class,
which was largely white in a predominantly black society, by the late
1940s had adapted themselves to trade unionism and the two-party system,
financially supporting both parties and wielding increasing power behind
the scenes.
The extent to which the interests of this class were deeply entwined with
those of the international corporate class was unequivocally revealed
in Jamaica in the public debate over the question of entrenching property
rights in the independence constitution of 1962. L. E. Ashenheim, a
member of one of the most influential business families in Jamaica with
strong political connections, made this explicit in representing the views of
the Law Society before the Joint Constitutional Committee:
I represent... a number of foreign corporations who have invested largely in this
52 Lloyd Best, 'Options Facing Williams, the Ruling Party and the Country', The Express,
Trinidad, May 31, 1969.
53 Munroe, op. cit., p. 148.
country and who contemplate considerable investment.... I am constantly arguing

with them and telling them 'what are you worrying about this, that and the other, we
are not a Central American Republic, we . .. have been trained in democratic ideas
and you are never going to run up against any of the sort of trouble that you run up
against in your Central American Republics' . . . How am I going to face them? That is
my problem (they) like to see it in black and white.54
Since both political parties had openly embraced the passive model of
economic development of 'industrialization by invitation', it did not take
too much persuasion by Ashenheim and other economic interests to per-
suade the Joint Committee to entrench a very rigid property-rights provi-
sion in the constitution.
Thus, it is hardly surprising that the event of independence itself did not
occasion an undue amount of mass enthusiasm. Munroe quotes one of the
PNP's more popularly based politicians of that period, Dr. Ivan Lloyd,
the Minister of Health, to the effect that 'there has been no overflowing
enthusiasm, either within the House or outside of it, with reference to
Independence and Nationhood'.55 Lloyd Best has often referred in his
popular writings to the Jamaican who complained to him of the state of
affairs in the country 'now that Independence has come and gone'.
The co-optation by the economic elites of the populist movements has
been facilitated by bourgeois intellectuals in the society who see in populism
an ideology that unites them with the 'masses'. The people come to assume
a folk mythology and their actions and beliefs are invested with racial and
national overtones that provide the cultural resistance to colonialism.
This results in an ideology that is class integrationist. The key doctrine in
this process is that of nationalism. The type of nationalism that is propa-
gated is conceived as being above class interests, as in fact negating
them. Thus the economic and political elites co-opt the symbols of national-
ism. This class, and large elements of the middle class who have benefited
from the international corporate sector in their midst thrive on all the
outward manifestations of nationalism. In the West Indies this clientele
class has attempted to co-opt many of the symbolic manifestations of the
black consciousness of the mass of the population that surfaced quite
dramatically in the 1960s by adopting such token gestures as black beauty
queens, Afro hair styles and dashikis. In Jamaica this class has also ap-
propriated very heavily the cultural forms of the Rastafarians, the most
alienated group in the society, particularly their music and their
terminology. In the 1972 election the PNP came to victory after ten years
in opposition using the Rasta language and music in an almost totally
undisguised form. In the Caribbean nationalist leaders have a very power-
ful symbol in the racial issue. 'Respectable' and 'meaningful' black power
54 Verbatim Record of the Proceedings of the Joint Constituttional Committee, 1961-1962

(unpublished), quoted in Munroe, op. cit., p. 161.
55 Munroe, op. cit., p. 150.
is always defined, however, in terms of a model of black capitalism with an

emphasis on saving and hard work and slow individual accumulation of
capital. The elites place a heavy emphasis on economic nationalism, which
is defined as a gradual 'Jamaicanization' of the economy, joint ventures,
51 per cent ownership by Jamaicans, and similar measures; outright
nationalization is abhorred, and labelled as a foreign ideology that would
take black people back to the Stone Age.
This type of nationalism provides an ideological facade to the official
promulgations constantly reiterated in the media that the class interests of
all sectors of the society are the same. Those who oppose this formulation
are branded as traitors to the 'national' interest, and are accused of im-
porting sinister foreign ideologies that are not suitable for Caribbean
peoples. Socialism in any form, for example, is not only a foreign ideology,
but to counteract its possible influence on black power leaders it is branded
as a 'white man's invention'. The tightly controlled media in most West
Indian islands presents a very distorted picture of events in countries like
Cuba, China, Vietnam, Tanzania and other countries that have adapted
socialism to their own local conditions.
Perhaps the most ironic aspect of this situation is that the very political
leaders who have most emphasized this type of nationalism have, wittingly
or unwittingly, been most responsible for the erosion, if not the dis-
appearance, of the autonomy of the nation-state whose symbols they so
proudly proclaim. The deepening of economic dependence in the 1960s in
the Caribbean has led these leaders into becoming primarily enforcers of
the international corporate system. As Munroe notes in regard to the
political leadership in Jamaica at the time of independence:
The political elite, themselves thrown up in part by spontaneous rebellion against social
conditions, had set in motion economic forces which were now about to imprison
them.... The economics of inducement planning and 'industrialization by invitation'
had failed demonstrably to significantly improve the condition of the masses. At
independence it was asserting the independent power it had developed over the very
political elite who had helped entice it into Jamaica. The child was certainly threatening,
if not about to devour, its parents.56
Throughout the Third World, this class of nationalist politicians have

increasingly seen and been partner to the destruction of the nation-state
in any meaningful form as a locus of real economic and political decision
making. As the mass of the people in these new nations have remained
outside the benefits of the international corporate system that has so
deeply penetrated their countries, their growing discontent can only be
met by increasing repression, in many cases by their own nationalist
leaders they have elected to power. Thus, one of the major consequences
of the new mercantilism has been to reinforce the authoritarian nature of
56 Ibid., p. 161.
politics in the former colonies, this time under new guises such as national-
ism. The form of Crown Colony government has been replaced, its content
has not. Genuine political participation by the population at large is still
an unrealized goal, not a reality.
We now want to discuss briefly an important sector of the political
system, the bureaucracy, which historically has been one of the main
foundations of authoritarianism and which at present acts to reinforce the
new authoritarianism in different forms. The bureaucracy was one of the
most powerful political instruments of control in plantation societies.
The bureaucracy was an essential component of Western Europe's drive
to transform itself from feudalism to capitalism, and also one of the prime
agencies in the expansion of capitalism in the non-Western world. During
the period of Crown Colony government in the West Indies, however, the
bureaucracy was the main source of political authority, after the planto-
cracy abdicated its limited representative political system to the Crown
rather than allow increased participation by the emancipated slaves.
After the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica in 1865, the plantocracy
throughout most of the West Indies abdicated their direct political auth-
ority with unseemly haste, feeling that only direct rule by the Crown could
prevent them from being deposed by bloodshed and revolution. Historic-
ally, the administrative system under Crown Colony government per-
formed both political and executive functions simultaneously. Much of
the literature on comparative administration in the area has been under-
taken around the problem of legislative-executive relations, which has
tended to suggest a sharper dichotomy historically between the roles
of the politician and the administrator than existed in reality. Under
Crown Colony government the politician and the administrator had fused
roles. Thus the bureaucracy enjoyed virtually total power, accountable
only to the Colonial Office, which was far away in London, and dependent
on reports from the bureaucrat-politicians in the colonies for their
knowledge in any case.
With the coming of independence, the functions and role of the bureau-
cracy received new attention. An ofttimes bitter and prolonged source of
friction in all the territories was the transfer of power from the bureaucracy
to the newly created class of politicians. At the very least, it was naive to
expect a powerful, political bureaucracy to docilely demit their power
without a struggle, and to unquestionably accept the Westminster model,
which sharply differentiated executive and legislative functions, and where
the bureaucracy was expected to be neutral, anonymous and 'above
politics'.57 This underlines another feature of the political system in the
West Indies that makes it more vulnerable to outside control, and that is
57 For a detailed case study of this conflict in one of the territories, Grenada, see A. W.
Singham, op. cit.
its fragmented nature. Obviously, the oft-charged failure of the civil

service in the West Indies to adequately perform the task of structuring
change requires a much more fundamental analysis of its relation to the
political system than the usual critiques where failures are attributed to
structural deficiencies such as the lack of trained personnel, and other
deficiencies following the framework of orthodox public administration
theory.
In any case, it can be argued that the Westminster concept of the
bureaucracy is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of
politics-by attempting to depoliticize the bureaucracy, it makes the
bureaucracy impotent and incapable of structuring change. A 1971 issue
of Tapia, an independent newspaper in Trinidad pointed out that 'Politics
in the broadest meaning of the word is government in its widest sense.
Administration is politics in its day-to-day application.... By attempting
to keep the Civil Service out of politics the Government has stifled their
administrative capacities'.58
However, this raises deeper questions of the nature of the political
system in general, and what role the bureaucracy plays in this system.
Under colonialism, the main function of the bureaucracy was that of
law and order, i.e. political control. After independence it was in theory
assigned the role of facilitating development. We have already indicated
above that by depoliticizing the bureaucracy, it was to some extent
inhibited from taking a creative role in its new task. In this connection
Halpern has pointed out an important distinction between bureaucracy
and institutionalized power:
Institutionalized power does not mean bureaucracy. Modern bureaucracy is one of the
most valuable social inventions of mankind. Its relevance for modernization is tested,
however, not by any of the attributes usually associated with it, including its rational-
legal character, but by whether any particular bureaucracy is capable of employing its
collective power for structuring change.59
However, it is clear that the bureaucracy in a dependent political

system such as that in the West Indies would not be able to structure
change in the way Halpern suggests even if it was not so neutralized. For
while the political leadership functions to preserve control under the new
mercantilism, the bureaucracy also has a functional role in respect to the
international corporate system. The bureaucracy is the only organization
with the skills and experts to keep the system functioning smoothly, from
the granting of licenses, permits, concessions, immigration permission
and legal documents to planning for the public sector.
There has been a considerable amount of debate about the class and
58 Tapia, No. 16, May 23, 1971, Tapia House Publishing Co. Ltd., 91 Tunapuna Road,
Tunapuna, Trinidad, p. 3.
59 Halpern, op. cit., p. 40.
national loyalties of the bureaucracy in the Third World, and how they
perceive their position vis-a-vis the multinational corporations that
dominate the economic life of their countries. It is usually assumed that as
beneficiaries to some extent of the system, and because of their relatively
high social and economic position in these societies, they define their
interests in terms of preserving the status quo. There is ample documenta-
tion of the loyalty of bureaucrats in Third-World countries to authori-
tarian regimes and to the benefits to be gained by maintaining strong
ties with the international corporate system. This is reinforced by the
nature of their ties to the political regimes in these countries. Because of
the high unemployment and the desirability of civil service jobs, there is a
strong element of patron-client relations between many civil servants
and the politicians who are responsible for getting them jobs. Even
where this is absent, there is the strong fear of voicing dissenting views
because of the fear of losing employment.
However, there are other factors that predispose some elements at least
in the bureaucracy to be discontented with the nature of their societies and
their own positions in a dependent system. It is important to stress that
for more than a superficial understanding of the role of the bureaucracy
we need to disaggregate the levels of the bureaucracy. However, the follow-
ing considerations are more in the way of tentative hypotheses-this is an
area that needs a great deal more theoretical and empirical work. One
factor causing a great deal of dissatisfaction in the civil service in the West
Indies has been the erosion of their standards of living and their status in
relation to the private, corporate sector over the past decade or so. Many
of the most talented and best placed civil servants have been siphoned off
by these multinational corporations, but those left behind are often
inclined to bitterness. The gap between the government sector and the
private sector has been heightened in recent years by the very high levels
of inflation, a large part of which is imported into the system from the
metropolitan countries, and which their dependent monetary systems
cannot prevent.60 Another factor of some importance lies in the realm of
knowledge. Many ministries and departments deal directly and closely
with foreign companies and foreign 'experts', and are more aware than
other elements of the population of the extent of foreign ownership and
domination. The direct dealings with these foreign firms and particularly
with foreign experts, who are often patronizing in their attitudes, lead to
perceptions of a continuing colonial relation, and reinforce perceptions of
racism and metropolitan attitudes of superiority towards the natives.
These factors should be taken into consideration in conjunction with the
fact that at most levels of the civil service, but particularly at the middle
60 Cf. C. Y. Thomas, Monetary and Financial Arrangements in a Dependent Economy,

op. cit.
and lower levels, the civil servants themselves do not share in the owner-
ship and profits generated in the private sector.
Munroe, in noting some of the current dissatisfactions of this middle
sector cautiously suggests that:
This frustration in turn may encourage more middle-level personnel to leave government
employment for private industry or to emigrate from the country. The more strictly
political manifestation of the dissatisfaction of this layer might be a willingness to provide
some base for third party electoral designs in the short run.61
This consideration of the political role played by the bureaucracy raises

the question of the patterns of resistance by other groups in these societies.
The history of the West Indies has been characterized not only by its
extreme repression, but also by its high levels of resistance. In Jamaica
the Maroons, the runaway slaves from the period of Spanish control of the
island, harassed the British for 78 years, until 1738 when the British were
forced to sign a treaty with them, being unable to subdue them. A large
amount of historical research has been carried out by West Indian scholars
in the past two decades showing that the number and strength of slave
rebellions and revolts was much greater than had originally been thought.
In Jamaica, a dispute between planters and small farmers led to the pro-
longed and bloody Morant Bay rebellion in 1865, which had strong
repercussions in Great Britain in the famous debates over the repressive
conduct of the Governor, Edward John Eyre, who was eventually dis-
missed from the Imperial Service. It also had repercussions in the West
Indies, striking fear into the plantocracy throughout the region, and
evoking memories of the Haitian war for independence almost a century
earlier. In the 1930s the West Indian people again revolted in large num-
bers, this time against appalling economic conditions.
The post-independence decade of the 1960s has witnessed a new type
of resistance, this time centering around the urban unemployed and the
youth. In Trinidad the Black Power movement succeeded in staging large
numbers of public demonstrations, culminating in the February Revolu-
tion of 1970 when youthful blacks and East Indians attempted to make
common cause, and almost succeeded in toppling the seemingly well-
entrenched government of Eric Williams. Since that time the country
has lived through two prolonged states of emergencies, and a spate of
repressive legislation curtailing the rights of organized labor and many
civil liberties is currently being enacted. Jamaica has seen almost constant
instances of turmoil beginning with the 'Chinese riots' of 1965, in which
for over a week Chinese and other businesses in Kingston were attacked
and almost 100 people arrested. In 1966 the Government declared a state
of emergency because of clashes between armed gangs of the two rival
61 Monroe, op. cit., p. 217.
political parties. In 1968 the Rodney incident took place in Kingston.

The Government of Jamaica banned the popular Guyanese lecturer at the
University from returning to Jamaica from abroad, which led to spontane-
ous and peaceful student demonstrations, although demonstrations with-
out a permit by that time were banned in Jamaica. The demonstration
in Kingston attracted large numbers of the unemployed, particularly as
the demonstrators were tear-gassed and harassed by the police almost
from the beginning of the march, and sparked off looting and arson in
Kingston, with an estimated property damage of $2,000,000 (Ja.), the
death of three persons, and a political climate of fear and acrimony that
marked a political watershed not only in Jamaica but in all the other West
Indian territories. Isolated incidents have occurred since that time; in
June 1972, for example, one of the executives of an American textile firm
in Jamaica struck one of his Jamaican employees after an altercation.
This led to large demonstrations of workers in several areas of Kingston,
accompanied by attacks on white people in cars who passed through the
area of the demonstration.
The ideological focus of resistance has been the so-called Black Power
movement in the territories, which has leaned heavily on many of the
symbols and in some cases the doctrines of the Rastafarians in Jamaica.
While there is debate over the political potential of the Rasta movement,
with its strong millenarian base, there is general agreement that their
alienation and their doctrines have provided them with a strong measure
of resistance to cultural imperialism and that theirs is an authentic voice
of protest. While the symbols and doctrines of the various black power
movements in the area cannot be easily lumped together in a single,
coherent ideology, in all the movements and groups there is a strong
emphasis on the foreign domination and control of the economy, and the
complicity of the local elites and the politicians in perpetuating this
system.62 Since race largely coincides with class, both locally and in respect
to foreign domination, this is the element largely played up in the foreign
media, particularly in the U.S. and England. However, this should not be
allowed to obscure the strong class and anti-imperialist basis to this type
of resistance. In all the territories, growing resistance has been met with
increasingly repressive legislation and police powers. The high incidence
of crime in the urban areas in these countries has tended to frighten the
middle classes into abandoning the struggle for civil liberties for which they
had been in the forefront during the struggle for independence.
While the present international system of domination-subordination
may appear formidably omnipotent and unified, the pressures for increased
62 These views are amply documented in the radical newspapers that sprang into existence
after the Rodney affair, particularly Abeng in Jamaica, Moko and Tapia in Trinidad, and
Ratoon in Guyana.
participation in the system are evident not only in the subordinate areas
of the world, but also from those groups in the metropolis who increasingly
feel themselves powerless and alienated and who are also demanding
increased participation. There is also the growing rivalry between the
major capitalist powers which is increasing instability within the dominant
sector itself. For a broader, historical perspective we can do no better than
quote an anthropologist:
Advanced cultures can easily create the conditions of their own eclipse. Their develop-
ment on a particular line commits them to it: they are mortgaged to structures accumu-
lated along the way, burdened-in Veblen's phrase-with the penalty of taking the lead.
At the same time, they restore adaptability to previously stable and backward cultures
within their spheres of influence. These underdeveloped orders may now fight fire with
fire. Jolted out of equilibrium, they may seize the 'privilege of historic backwardness',
overturning their submission by taking over the latest developments of advanced cultures
and pushing on from there. Of course, as is made obvious today by the struggles of the
new nations, it will not be easy for them, if only because progress in the hinterlands
is not notably to the interest of dominant civilizations. Yet no matter how often under-
developed regions fail to gain evolutionary momentum, history shows that progress is not
so much nourished on the developed peaks as in the fertile valleys of the cultural terrain.63
What is perhaps most relevant in closing this paper is to note that all
groups who are demanding greater participation, whether in the metropolis
or in the satellites, are increasingly aware of the international nature of
the struggle. Hence, the nation-state is not only obsolete for the dominant
corporate system, but for all the oppressed who realize that greater partici-
pation and justice must be achieved on an international scale, if it is to be
achieved at all.
63 Sahlins, op. cit., pp. 6-7.

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Cultural Domination and Political Subordination: Notes towards a Theory of the Caribbean

Howard University and The Univ,ersity of Michigan

It is no accident that the study of comparative politics, and especially the

which was later extensively adopted by orthodox social scientists in other

racism from their historical context as an integral part of the expansion

3 Susanne J. Bodenheimer, 'The Ideology of Developmentalism: American Political

She sums up the consequences of this consensus in concise fashion:

It should be obvious that our concern here is not based on a narrow,

predominantly in a non-technological sense-the view that culture is a

7 Leslie White, The Science of Culture, Grove Press Inc., 1949.

At the risk of great over-simplification, we now want to apply this

technological base sufficiently powerful to subordinate other systems, and

Indeed, the lingering force of nationalism is one of the major barriers

scholars have been working on similar lines, known broadly as the

16 Norman Girvan in Jamaica is currently working on an important paper comparing

It is clear that in such a fragmented system, the role of the nation-state

As he points out, the conflict occurs because of two political functions

22 James N. Rosenau, 'Towards the Study of National-International Linkages', in Rosenau,

reactive and emulative. However, these terms tend to suggest an equality

As we have attempted to demonstrate, the role of the nation-state in the

corporate system result in partial 'nationalization', joint stock ownership

It is only very recently that the full implications of the technological

The dilemma of Third-World countries trying to overcome these

27 Clive Thomas, 'Meaningful Participation in Industry: Meaning and Scope', Ratoon

However, it should be pointed out that these subtle processes of internal-

The historic role played by the essentially comprador middle-class

societies. Further, they have no long-term actual political experience, no

These new elites perceive their main function as creating an atmosphere

James originally wrote this prophecy in 1962 on the eve of independence

increasing authoritarian political measures, rather than that of dramatically

returns accrue directly from the corporate-appendage economy' (author's

Nation-building is essentially equivalent to combatting insurgency.... Although nation

However, there was a decided time lag before orthodox scholarship

Modernization thus tends to produce alienation and anomie, normlessness generated

36 Lewis, op. cit., p. 533.

If these relationships are accepted, then obviously the promotion of education,

The ultimate solution to this problem, it follows, is to create conditions

In a recent essay Halpern has incisively pointed out the underlying

Just as the new breed of economists have produced increasing evidence

the metropolitan capitalist models. Nor was the plantation

In a careful and detailed recent study of the process of political de-

Given this resistance of the Jamaican political leadership to even minor

Of more substantive import than the almost unquestioning acceptance

Differences in the style of political leadership are the main distinguishing

I represent... a number of foreign corporations who have invested largely in this

country and who contemplate considerable investment.... I am constantly arguing

54 Verbatim Record of the Proceedings of the Joint Constituttional Committee, 1961-1962

is always defined, however, in terms of a model of black capitalism with an

Throughout the Third World, this class of nationalist politicians have

its fragmented nature. Obviously, the oft-charged failure of the civil

However, it is clear that the bureaucracy in a dependent political

60 Cf. C. Y. Thomas, Monetary and Financial Arrangements in a Dependent Economy,

This consideration of the political role played by the bureaucracy raises

61 Monroe, op. cit., p. 217.

political parties. In 1968 the Rodney incident took place in Kingston.

63 Sahlins, op. cit., pp. 6-7.

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