Comrade Ralph speaks
Comrade Ralph speaks
The false frame of democracy versus autocracy
I first became aware of Comrade Ralph at an event in 2020 in Havana, where he delivered a memorable address in his capacity as Prime Minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, in which he maintained that the fundamental conflict of our time is between imperialism and anti-imperialism. Now Comrade Ralph arrives to the 78th Session of the UN General Assembly, held from September 19 to September 26, 2023, to declare that the imperialists are putting forth a false frame, in which they present themselves as defenders of democracy, while they characterize as autocracies those governments that adopt anti-imperialist policies in defense of their sovereignty.
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is a small Caribbean island nation, with a territory of 142 square miles and a population of 104,332. Its territory includes the main island of Saint Vincent and two-thirds of the northern part of the Grenadines, a chain of thirty-two smaller islands and cays, eight of which are inhabited. Five of the nation’s six parishes are in the territory of the main island of Saint Vincent. Kingstown is the capital and principal port.
Prior to the sixteenth century, various Native American groups settled on St. Vincent and the Grenadines, including the Ciboney, Arawak, and Kalinago peoples. Columbus and the Spanish conquistadors undertook slaving expeditions beginning in 1511, driving the inhabitants to the rugged interior of the island. But the Spanish made no attempt to settle the island, being more focused on the quest for gold and silver in other lands of the Americas.
The French were the first Europeans to permanently settle and colonize Saint Vincent, bringing with them African slaves to work on plantations of sugar, coffee, indigo, cotton, and cocoa. The British captured the island during the Seven Years War, with British control formalized in the Treaty of Paris of 1763.
The Garifuna people, of mixed indigenous and African ancestry, formerly known as the “Black Caribs,” resisted the British occupation, resulting in the First Carib War (1772-1773) and the Second Carib War (1795-1797). Following the second war, which was a decisive victory for the British, some 5000 Black Caribs were exiled to Roatán (off the cost of Honduras), Belize, and Baliceaux in the Grenadines.
The abolition of slavery in the British West Indies in 1834 led to labor shortages in the plantations of Saint Vincent, with was addressed initially by indentured servants; and later by Portuguese immigrants (from the island of Madeira) in the late 1840s and then by East Indian laborers, who arrived between 1861 and 1888.
As a result of these dynamics of conquest, settlement, forced labor, and immigration, Saint Vincent today has a population that is 66% African descent, 19% mixed descent, 6% East Indian, 4% European (mainly English and Portuguese), and 2% indigenous. English is the official language; most Vincentians speak Vincentian Creole, an English-based Creole language.
Saint Vincent was granted “associate statehood” status in 1969, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines gained full independence on October 27, 1979. The nation has a democratically elected parliament and a constitutional monarch, with Charles III recognized as King of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and is represented on the island by a Governor General, who has mostly ceremonial functions. De facto control rests with the Prime Minister and a unicameral House. There are two political parties, the New Democratic Party and the Unity Labour Party.
These formal structures of parliamentary democracy and formal independence do not, of course, nullify the neocolonial situation. The economy is dependent on the exportation of bananas. Manufacturing is limited, in spite of government efforts to expand it. Unemployment is high.
Comrade Ralph
Ralph Gonsalves was born on August 8, 1946, in Colonaire, Saint Vincent, which at that time was part of the British Windward Islands. His father was a farmer and small businessman, and his mother was a small businesswoman. His ancestors arrived in Saint Vincent in 1845 as indentured servants from the Portuguese island of Madeira. He attended Catholic primary schools and subsequently the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and in 1971 a master’s degree in government. He received a doctorate in 1974 at the University of Manchester. He subsequently studied law, and he was admitted to the bar in 1981.
As a student at the University of West Indies, Gonsalves was involved in politics, and he was elected President of the Guild of Undergraduates and Debating Society. In 1968, he led a protest against the deportation by the Jamaican government of Walter Rodney, a Guyanese historian and political activist who subsequently became internationally known for his book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. During the 1970s and 1980s, Gonsalves wrote a number of books and pamphlets on such themes as imperialism in the Caribbean, the non-capitalist path of development in the Caribbean, the Rodney affair, the labor movement in Saint Vincent, the production of sugar and the banana in Saint Vincent, Marxist-Leninist ideas, among others.
Since 1994, Gonsalves has been a Member of Parliament, representing the district of North Central Windward. In 1994, the Unity Labour Party (ULP) was created from a merger of the Labour Party and the Movement for National Unity, and Gonsalves was elected its deputy leader. In 1998, Gonsalves became the party leader. In the 2001 elections, the ULP won a majority of seats in the Parliament, and Gonsalves became Prime Minister. The Party maintained its parliamentary majority in subsequent elections, and in November 2020, Gonsalves was sworn in for his fifth consecutive term as Prime Minister.
I provide here excerpts from Gonsalves’ address to the General Assembly of the United Nations on September 23, 2023.
“Your Excellencies, across the world today, in large measure, men and women are pained, gripped with melancholy, and are adrift; they are perplexed, even confused, at the complexities and challenges of our human condition, which is awash with multiple contradictions, from which arise a yearning for sustainable resolutions. Large numbers of people, globally, are possessed of an admixture of resignation, a sense of futility, a routinization of indifference — even cynicism; and yet at the same time, there is resident in them—in us—an elemental hopefulness and a sense of social solidarity, a search for justice and goodness, a pursuance of equity and equality, and a quest for peace, security, and prosperity for all — not only for a privileged few in a handful of privileged nations.
“It is widely acknowledged that the global political economy is broken and needs fixing, not by tinkering here or there, but through fundamental restructuring of a kind that endures for the benefit of all humanity, especially those who are disadvantaged, dispossessed or marginalised. . . .
“Excellencies, powerful countries and blocs of like-minded states are unwilling or unable to fashion inclusive and efficacious modalities, through a genuine multilateralism, to address the extant global challenges facing humanity. Their reflex actions in quest of a continuing imperium or an emergent hegemony are dressed up as self-serving calls for a “New World Order”— all sauce and gall but of little or no substance, difficult to swallow. From the tough trenches of the periphery, St. Vincent and the Grenadines poses, yet again, in response, three haunting queries: What’s New? Which World? And Who Gives the Orders? . . . .
“Let us clear certain ideational cobwebs from our brains. It is, for example, wholly unhelpful to frame the central contradictions of our troubled times as revolving around a struggle between democracies and autocracies. St. Vincent and the Grenadines, a strong liberal democracy, rejects this wrong-headed thesis. It is evident to all right-thinking persons, devoid of self-serving hypocrisy, that the struggle today between the dominant powers is centred upon the control, ownership, and distribution of the world’s resources. It has been so from time immemorial; colonialism and imperialism have in fact exacerbated the exploitation of the resources of developing countries for the gain of the rulers of the colonial, the imperial, citadels of monopoly capitalism. The struggle has been, and is, about who gets what, when, where, and how. Civilised life and living now demands fairness, justice, peace, security, and prosperity for all. This civilised goal is unlikely ever to be satisfactorily attained if the strong and powerful continue, with impunity, to do what they can, and the weak and fragile suffer what they must, despite their oft-times enfeebled resistance.
“Throughout history, powerful countries exhibit a certain schizophrenia: They possess and deploy all their instruments of domination; yet they are racked by bewildering insecurities which frequently turn them into beasts of unreason to their own detriment; in this way, they overreach and sow seeds of their own downfall; in the process, sadly, they hobble humanity needlessly.
“Excellencies, let us accord mature consideration to a matter of immediacy in “Our America” — to use José Marti’s telling formulation. We urge the United States of America, our friend, the most powerful and economically dominant country since the dawn of human civilisation, a nation which espouses humane values, to end its unilateral and oppressive sanctions and impositions, that are contrary to international law, which have been rolled out against Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Such actions are unworthy of a great power; and they are counter-productive in every material particular. Engagements based on mutual respect, without pre-conditions and without unilateral sanctions or impositions, are sensible, practical paths for mature leaders of understanding and wisdom to pursue in the interest of peace, security, and prosperity. In a world so racked by awesome existential challenges, these egregious punitive measures against the heroic people of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela reek of vengeance, and possibly more. I plead with our American friends in Washington to act justly, show goodness, and exercise power with an ennobling restraint as befits greatness. Isolation, exclusion, sanctions and unjust declarations make no sense in today’s interconnected world. It is also plain silly and factually incorrect to label Cuba a sponsor of state terrorism—a label prompted by partisan domestic politics of South Florida; but it hurts the Cuban people massively and unnecessarily.
“The sanctions and coercive measures against Venezuela, including the weaponizing of the US dollar, have caused the collapse of the Petro Caribe Agreement which delivered substantial benefits to over a dozen Caribbean countries, including St. Vincent and the Grenadines. We in the Caribbean have thus become collateral damage. . . .
“In order to avoid the desecration of the future, we must be serious about the challenges at hand and work assiduously, in solidarity, to address them satisfactorily. To be sure, there is no perfection this side of eternity, but we can do far better than we have been doing. Time is not on our side! Let us sleep not to dream, but dream to change the world, for the better!”
Imperialist lies and the epistemological dilemma
Let us focus on Comrade Ralph’s observation that it is “wholly unhelpful to frame the central contradictions of our troubled times as revolving around a struggle between democracies and autocracies.” I submit that this false frame is the origin of the epistemological crisis of our times. When imperialism claims that dominators and exploiters are defenders of democracy and that the defenders of the sovereignty of nations are autocrats, it establishes a practice in which everyone is free to declare whatever promotes their interests, independent of empirical reality, even if such interests are defined by motives no more noble than the obtaining and accumulating of wealth and power.
During the period from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, the U.S. Left became increasingly aware of the false claims of imperialism, and thus it became increasingly aware of the epistemological dilemma, which leftists expressed with the phrase, “One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.” The phrase implied acquiescence to the imperialist practice of casting aside reason, an acquiescence that was an indication of a great weakness. Because the moral duty of intellectuals is to resolve the epistemological dilemma created by the evidently false claims of imperialism; our duty is to seek to discover the basis for distinguishing truth from false claims, and not to accept uncertainty and relativism in knowledge as a contemporary fact of life.
The U.S. Left, in a mode of acquiescing rather than addressing and attempting to resolve the epistemological dilemma, was morally and intellectually unprepared to respond to the new intellectual trend of bad thinking known as postmodernism, which stands against all previous traditional and modern philosophies that had maintained that truth can be known through divine revelation, or reasoning based in empirical observation, or both. Postmodernism claims that truth is neither revealed nor discovered in reasoned observation; rather, it claims, truth is constructed, designed to function as an instrument of power.
Postmodernism entered the U.S. academic world by way of radical feminism, which was looking for an alternative narrative on human history. We are speaking here of radical feminism, not liberal feminism. The latter sought to rewrite human history from the perspective of women, just as Marx endeavored to rewrite human history from the vantage point of the working class, and Third World leaders and intellectuals have sought to rewrite human history from the vantage point of the neocolonized. Radical feminism, on the other hand, at least in some of its manifestations, sought to deconstruct the binary nature of the human being, which was proclaimed as nothing more than a construction by the powerful as an instrument for social control. It put forth an alternative narrative that proclaimed the existence of more than two genders. We should not overlook the fact that said narrative was functional for reducing the social marginality of individuals with same-sex orientation or certain desires related to sexuality. At the same time, this alternative narrative, because it is put forth in defense of those who experience discrimination, has been able to attain the moral upper hand, in spite of its setting aside of longstanding norms for attaining knowledge as well as longstanding norms guiding human conduct.
Postmodern freedom from empirical investigation, reason, and revelation was tapped to formulate a new ideology in defense of the particular interests of the black middle class. The evident fact that white society had overwhelmingly participated in the construction of new norms and practices with respect to race after the reforms of the period 1954 to 1965 was freely cast aside, thus enabling the creation of the concepts of “systemic racism” and “white privilege” as descriptions of the present racial dynamics. These constructions were convenient for promoting the interests of the black middle class in preserving structures of preferential treatment in the context of evolving social norms that made them less necessary and to some extent dysfunctional. The new ideology provided the basis for new possibilities for advancing careers in black activism. In addition, the corporate elite, apparently grasping that the new ideology was divisive among the people, took decisive steps in its dissemination.
Beyond postmodern relativism and toward the resolution of the epistemological dilemma
I first became aware of the epistemological dilemma in the early 1970s, when I encountered black nationalism, and I was persuaded of the basic tenets of its colonial analysis; and I recognized that it was a formulation fundamentally different from that of mainstream Western history and social science. Thus, I was able to see that there was a fundamental difference in the early 1970s between white historiography and social science, on the one hand, and black scholarship, on the other. Which implied that knowledge was inescapably tied to social position. However, I considered it unacceptable to let the problem of the relativity of knowledge stand unresolved, because it would mean that truth would become whatever those in power claimed it to be. I believed that it was indispensable for the future wellbeing of human civilizations for humanity to arrive to a consensual understanding concerning the method through which truth could be discovered, so that the difference between truth and false claims could be discerned.
Back then, when I imagined a situation in which truth was what those in power claimed it to be, I was thinking of a situation like Nazi Germany. I imagined a situation in which government would claim that discrimination and persecution on the basis of ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and ideology were morally acceptable, dismissing as merely subjective opinions the claims of those who defended democratic principles, a dismissal backed by the institutions controlled by the wealthy and the powerful. Indeed, the phenomenon of Nazi Germany was the basis for Max Horkheimer’s analysis of “the eclipse of reason.”
The problem of reason eclipsed by political power has come to pass, but not exactly in the form that I had imagined. It has taken the form of the manipulation of words and the construction of narratives, without serious attention to empirical evidence, in the competition for power among different sectors in the society. It is a political game that anyone can play, not just the powerful. It is a political game that involves the manipulative use of words in situations of temporary power advantage in an ongoing process of competition for power. It is more like the mob rule that we used to see in Western movies, rather than systemic totalitarian rule in the style of fascist dictatorships or Orwell’s 1984.
However, not everyone today is oblivious to the complete unacceptability, from the point of view of political stability, of the unconstrained use of narratives in playing power games. The problem is that those who are ill-at-ease do not have a handle on what to do about it, beyond calling for civility and greater attention to the rules of reason.
I myself back in the 1970s initiated a journey under the guidance of two priests at Fordham University, one a professor of sociology and the other a professor of philosophy, Joesph Fitzpatrick and Gerald McCool. They guided me to a study of the Catholic philosopher Bernard Lonergan, who had formulated a cognitional theory based on the observation of human knowing in its diverse forms, including the various fields of science as well as common-sense intelligence. Lonergan had discovered that one could arrive to understandings that had a high probability of being correct, if the person is committed to truth as the highest desire, and if the person seeking understanding engages in personal encounter with other persons of different horizons, thereby discovering relevant questions that previously had been beyond consciousness. This insight into human understanding, applied to the problem of false imperialist justifications, makes evident that cross-horizon encounter is the key for discovering the questions that the imperialists had overlooked, questions that persons like Comrade Ralph in the neocolonial situation could not possibly overlook. The ongoing and collective process of cross-horizon encounter demonstrates the error of the imperialists and the correct view of the leaders and intellectuals of the neocolonized peoples.
Fathers Fitzpatrick and McCool blessed me and sent me on my way, a journey of personal encounter with the leaders and intellectuals of the revolutionary social movements of the Third World plus China during the last 100 years. I have become aware of many things during the journey, and among them is the fact that the leaders and intellectuals of the Third World are not sidetracked by the epistemological dilemma. They take as given that the world confronts serious problems, and they have the duty to resolve them. They recognize, of course, that individuals, nations, and regions have differing and sometimes opposed understandings. But they seek to resolve such differences in understanding through education as well as through what they call “the dialogue of civilizations,” which seems to me another way of expressing “cross-horizon encounter.”
The dialogue of civilizations is the de facto epistemology of the neocolonized peoples of the earth. It is emerging in practice, and it is the resolution of the problem of the relativity of knowledge, discovered by the colonizer during the twentieth century.
When Ralph Gonsalves arrived at the podium of the UN General Assembly, he was not merely expressing an opinion. He is expressing an understanding that is the common view of the neocolonized peoples, which ought to be taken seriously by intellectuals and so-called activists of the West, if they are committed to truth as the highest desire, higher than, for example, the desire for career advancement.
Previous commentaries on cross-horizon encounter, the dialogue of civilizations, and the de facto epistemology of the anti-imperialist revolutions of the Global South
“Dialogue among Civilizations: The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ revisited, versus the call of the peoples,” March 4, 2022
“Truth through cross-horizon encounter: A critique of liberalism (and postmodernism),” September 9, 2022
“The cognitional theory of Bernard Lonergan: The invariant structure for understanding the true and the right,” December 25, 2022
“The spiritual worldview: A traditional wisdom necessary for our times,” December 27, 2022
“Real socialism vs. today’s Radical Left: On the need for encounter with the revolutions and leaders of the Third World,” July 7, 2023
“Postmodern wokism destroys the foundations: Provoking confusion and division among the people, to the benefit of a few,” September 5. 2023
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