Co-Operative Citizens? Development, Work and Protest in Guyana, c. 1970–1985

Abstract

Abstract Histories of Third Worldism have received renewed attention from historians in the past decade. Much of the resulting scholarship has focused on the international to the exclusion of the national. This article addresses this relative neglect by focusing on a particular iteration of Third World nation-state-building: co-operative socialism in Forbes Burnham's Guyana. Refuting the argument that co-operative socialism was imitative and implemented for reasons of political expediency only, the article contends that Burnham's doctrine should be regarded as a meaningful attempt at remaking Guyana's society and economy through its core principles of self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and self-discipline. These principles gave rise to a specific conception of citizenship in 1970s Guyana, where the People's National Congress (PNC) sought to link political belonging and participation with a moral ethic premised on the notion of hard work in service of the nation. The article examines how this collectivist understanding of citizenship gave rise to a particular set of struggles at the turn of the 1980s, as the co-operative republic began to collapse. What emerged from these struggles was an alternate but parallel imagining of citizenship espoused by the Working People's Alliance (WPA), which rejected the PNC's vanguardism in favour of empowering the Guyanese people through the creation of non-hierarchical systems of collective authority. The article concludes by arguing that the failure of the WPA's attempt to overthrow the PNC through popular revolt signified the ends of decolonization and Third Worldism in the Caribbean, and the beginnings of new struggles against new forms of coloniality in the guise of the emerging neoliberal and good governance agendas.