On 13 March 1979 the working people of Grenada, led by their revolutionary party, the New Jewel Movement, overthrew the pro-imperialist dictator Sir Eric Gairy. Pat Kane, recently returned from three years in Grenada, analyses its revolution.
This revolution sent shock waves throughout the Caribbean. For the first time ever, a black English-speaking country decided to reject the road of neo-colonial development offered by the imperialists. Westminster-style democracy was rejected, in favour of the direct involvement of the working people, through their own organisations, in the running of their country. The revolution not only overthrew Gairy, but its leaders decided to chart a completely new course of development — one which challenged imperialism and the domestic capitalists. They decided to reject the failed reformist path of Manley in Jamaica and Allende in Chile, and to follow the revolutionary road of Cuba.
This was a genuine revolution, which smashed the governmental power of the local capitalists, and installed a workers' and farmers' government. The Grenadian revolution is full of valuable lessons and examples for socialists throughout the world.
Grenada is an island of 110,000 people. Some say it's tiny. Well, there are ten times more people than in the Malvinas and it's just as close to vast oil fields in Venezuela and Trinidad. Imperialism has already spent billions of dollars in military manoeuvres against Grenada, Nicaragua, and Cuba. Thatcher and Reagan recognise what the leadership of Cuba recognised, that 'Grenada is a big revolution in a small country.'
Size does not remove fundamental problems of revolutionary strategy. To make a revolution you have to base yourselves on the revolutionary action of the masses; on small islands, trade unions have reformist and bureaucratic leaderships which have to be confronted and replaced: the repressive state power of the old regime has to be smashed; the creation of new agencies of workers' power have to be planned beforehand: the military defence of the revolution has to be planned and installed by the revolutionary leaders. These problems do not evaporate when you reach small islands.
So, first of all, this was a proletarian revolution. When 47 members of the New Jewel Movement stormed the barracks of Gairy's army, and later seized the radio station, they were beginning the revolution. These militants judged three things before acting in such a bold manner. If they had been wrong, they would all have lost their lives.
1. They judged that a majority of Grenadians would actively join the revolution
2. They assessed that Gairy's minority political base would not oppose the overthrow.
3. They estimated that within the army and police, morale was so low that they would offer only minimal resistance.
They were right on all three judgements.
On 12 March 1979, Gairy left the island to address the United Nations Outer Space Legal Sub-Committee. He was a firm believer in Unidentified Flying Objects, and he spent more time money on UFO research than on medical research. But despite his eccentricity he was given a knighthood for his services to British and later American imperialism. He left instructions that the leadership of the NJM had to be executed. Maurice Bishop, now the island's Prime Minister said later: 'It was either them or us, and we didn't plan on it being us.'
In late 1978, workers at Barclays Bank had struck for the recognition of their union, which was and still is led by militants of the NJM. This strike received huge support and solidarity, the results of years of agitation by the NJM. It convinced the NJM leaders that the time was ripe for revolution. The NJM moved forward — boldly — to seize the power, and forged their partnership with the Grenadian people which has survived three years of the revolution and is now stronger than ever.
When the Grenadian people heard over the radio of the NJM's victory, thousands took to the streets. The call for a strike in support of the revolution was supported by nearly 1,000 of the island's workers, a majority in the capital city St Georges. Telephone workers seized the switchboards, and used the telephone system to track down Gairy's ministers. Then they went out in their own cars, and arrested them. There are hundreds of similar stories of mass involvement in the revolution.
Gairy stayed in America, a guest of the US government. On 20 March he announced his formal resignation. Two huge rallies were held in different parts of the island, on different days. Some 20,000 people attended the rally. They chanted 'Freedom come — Gairy go, Gairy gone with a UFO.' When asked to vote on the 'Declaration of the Peoples Revolutionary Government,' every hand shot up. The Grenadian people had made their revolution. Revolutionary Cuba, which had inspired Grenada's revolutionaries, had a new ally. Fidel Castro announced 'we are no longer alone,' and told the Cuban people of this 'big revolution in a small country.' For only the second time in the Americas, the struggling masses had carried though a successful revolution which established, what we can call a workers' and farmers' government.
The tasks of a workers and farmers government were outlined in the 'Theses on Tactics' adopted by the Fourth Congress of the Comintern. They are 'to arm the proletariat, to disarm bourgeois counter-revolutionary organisations, to introduce the control of production, to transfer the main burden of taxation to the rich, and to break the resistance of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie.' As we will see, the Grenadian government has done all these things, and many more besides in its three years of existence.
The NJM did not hold parliamentary elections. The new revolutionary government had an overwhelming majority of NJM supporters, and two members of the Grenada National Party, the main pro-capital party which had opposed Gairy. They were judged by the NJM to be 'no obstacle to the revolutionary process.' Immediately the government had to face the reaction of US Imperialism, which sent East Caribbean Ambassador Frank Ortiz to visit the PRG. Ortiz demanded that the new government cease all contact with Cuba. When asked for compensation for the years of Gairy's rule, he pulled out his cheque book, and made out a cheque for US$5,000 from his discretionary fund. He made it clear — no more aid while the government developed links with Cuba. Despite the desperate need for aid, the Grenadians sent him home, announced next day across Radio Free Grenada that the Grenadian revolution would pick and choose its own friends and that 'Grenada was in no-one's backyard.'
A whole programme of legislation was embarked on which strengthened the organisation and confidence of working people. All Gairy's repressive legislation was repealed. The right to strike was established in law. It became compulsory for employers to recognise unions. Equal pay, maternity leave, and laws against sexploitation were all passed. They were all included in the 1973 manifesto of the NJM.
But laws by themselves mean nothing. Proletarian parties have to organise them. This is the crucial difference in revolutionary Grenada — it is a workers' and farmers' government that acts to use legislation and governmental power to advance the workers' struggles, and defends them against the capitalists who still exist in Grenada. In every single dispute between capital and labour since the revolution, the government has intervened on the side of organised labour, women or the youth. The government has called on the trade unions to struggle to implement basic minimum wages and conditions in the small private sector.
At its founding conference in 1973, the NJM declared that after the revolution, the new government would rest on and encourage the development of a new system of popular assemblies, which would eventually elect a national assembly of delegates to run the country. They viewed the government as a transition towards such a structure, with its immediate task of creating the foundations of this future system through mass involvement of all Grenadians in the affairs of the country. This government has kept its promise, and encouraged the development of local assemblies thoughout the island. Workers, women and youth have additional geographically based meetings.
Trade unions have registered growth from 30 to 80 per cent of the workers and these new unions have had to confront the old leaders and remove them. This has been done by the NJM organising broad coalitions to democratise and involve the unions in the revolutionary process. The NJM consciously rejects economist views of trade unionism.
The police force has been disarmed, and the most corrupt officers sacked. I once had occasion to call the police, something I wouldn't do in London, to intervene with a small car rental firm. The policeman arrived, a member of the National Youth Organisation, and sided with us. He was worried that it would affect our view of Grenada. He thought we were tourists. He said: 'You have to realise, comrades, that the manager is a capitalist, and one day the revolution will sweep him away. Just now we have enough problems, but one day we'll get round to organising him.' Again, given the choice, this young Grenadian revolutionary, like his government, sided with us, not the capitalist.
Agricultural workers were won to a new union after the revolution. Fitzroy Bain, President of the Agricultural and General Workers Union, explained to me their trade union policy: 'We told the agricultural workers of the great importance of the relationship between government and trade unions. From the very first day, we told them that our path would be a revolutionary trade union, not a union of the past that works only on the economic side of life, but one that looks at the whole social, political, and all-round being of the worker. We do not believe that a trade union is one that goes every three years, and asks for higher wages, and you do not keep up with the cost of living or solve the workers' daily problems — their children, education and things like that,'
The struggle against the right-wing, whether Gairyites or leaders who supported the overthrow but not the subsequent direction of the government, has been waged in all of the unions established under Gairy. In all instances they have used methods to strengthen the democratic organisation of the rank and file, and have never resorted to repression or coercion. Even when the right wing leaders of the dockers' union, who supported the overthrow of Gairy, organised at their third attempt a strike against the revolutionary government, the broad masses were mobilised to isolate these right wing leaders.
Counter-revolution has been organised, and terrorist attacks were frequent in 1981. The pro-worker stance of the government had angered the island's capitalists, who can see their influence draining away. Sections of them supported these terrorists including a capitalist member of the government. They put him in jail, along with terror gangs he supported.
The old army has been smashed, and replaced with a revolutionary army based on the island's militant youth. The sight of black youths with Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles, chanting anti-imperialist slogans in English, inspired me, as it inspires every black youth in London's ghettoes, who finds out about the Grenadian revolution. Unlike Grenadian youth, if London's black rebels were given rifles they would use them against the state. In Grenada the youth support their government and revolution.
The terror campaign led the NJM to extend and strengthen the mass organisations, to ensure that the working class and its allies had the strength and clarity of political ideas to stand up to this type of destabilisation. The National Youth Organisation, and the National Women's Organisation were turned outwards, and their membership increased by thousands. Their members became activists, fighting to implement the gains of the revolution throughout the island.
Moral and political appeals were only one part of winning new links, and consolidating old links between the revolution and the broad masses. The masses had to be shown, in a practical way, that the revolution and its government were indeed different from other regional governments. The government had to provide the material basis to transform the living standards of the Grenadian people. That meant organising the economy in which capitalist relations still predominate. Social and economic advances in a developing country are very closely linked. Free milk, education, health care, the expansion of culture — all products of the revolution — have to be paid for. Grenadian capitalists are mainly concerned with the service sector and agriculture. Their importance in the economy is decreasing.
The state and government take all the initiatives in the development of the economy, and last year 95 per cent of investment in the economy was from the state. They now have the first ever domestic bank, and state property is expanding rapidly to all sectors of the economy. It is not possible to discuss every aspect of this process of economic development, only its highlights. What are they?
Well, today, Grenada is a country where any school child can explain economic terms like the social wage or the gross national product. The mass organisations, formed in the revolution and strengthened afterwards, are the cornerstones of this process. Grenada is an agricultural country, still dependent on and affected by the economic crisis of capitalism.
Yet they have introduced a whole range of welfare benefits never seen in the Caribbean and it all has to be paid for. Alongside this are their attempts to lessen the domination of their economy by the imperialist markets, and to develop new markets and products. Imperialism grossly distorted the island's economic development, and squeezed it into its own international division of labour. This meant that a Caribbean island was prevented from processing its own agricultural product and having a modern fishing fleet, and it took a revolution to end the situation where a majority of its fish was imported from Canada.
The PRG has demystified the process of economics, by involving the broad masses in every aspect of debate about the future of their island. Since the first days of the revolution, they have struggled to introduce planning and budget control. This year they have now embarked on their first one year plan, and this very minute they are working on their first three year plan, to be introduced next year. These plans do not descend from on high, but are the conclusion of a dialogue between the masses and the government. As the planning has been extended so has the number of people involved increased, until over 30,000 people took part in the discussions around this year's budget. This process attacks one of the fundamental pillars of capital, business secrecy. When the Grenadians use the phrase 'opening the books', they really mean it.
During the budget preparations, all the local assemblies and workplace meetings received preliminary reports on plans for the economy. The government declared 1982 the 'Year of Economic Construction'. All the mass organisations elected delegates, including ordinary soldiers from the Army units, to a conference to discuss the economy. One thousand attended from a population of 110,000. After the conference, every delegate reported to their organisation. Then the broader masses were involved again through the local assemblies, called Parish Councils.
As a result a whole series of committees have been established in state workplaces to monitor and control production. The government has called on the unions to struggle in the private sector to establish similar committees. They have reduced taxation for workers by 25 per cent, and have refused to increase taxes to pay for the country's social wage. Instead, they have chosen to increase productivity and expand the economy. Capitalists who do not co-operate face a whole system of punitive taxes, introduced at the insistence of the masses during the Parish Councils. They call this the carrot and stick approach.
None of this could be possible without the existence of a revolution which is still moving forward, which has a revolutionary leadership, which exercises the power of organised working people through a workers' and farmers' government.
This revolution is a model from which socialists can learn and it has lessons for people struggling against capitalism everywhere. It is not only how an experienced leadership leads the government, but how revolutionaries can organise working people in democratic mass organisations; how we can mobilise and educate masses of people, and move them along the road to an understanding of the tasks of a socialist revolution; how to do this by standing firmly on their own organisations, engaging these organisations in activity, and through these actions raising and developing consciousness. The Grenadian leadership is constantly learning from the achievements of its people, and we should do the same.
The leadership of the NJM are proletarian revolutionaries, and there are lots of lessons in their experiences. The revolution was the result of years of struggle by the Grenadian people. From its foundation in March 1973, the NJM had developed proletarian methods of struggle. Che Guevara was their hero, but they rejected strategies based on guerilla warfare. Instead they organised mass mobilisations to confront the dictatorship, and to extend the self organisation of the masses.
Alain Krivine, interviewed George Louison, a government minister and a central leader of the NJM for the French Trotskyist paper Rouge: 'We have never hidden that we are struggling for socialism', Louison told Krivine. 'This is our programme, and we consider our party to be a vanguard socialist party. Because of the anti-communist campaign carried out by the dictatorship against our party, a minority is still opposed to socialism. But the workers have confidence in us. Our relations with the bourgeois parties are non-existent...we always preserved our independence as a party.'
Bernard Coard, now the Minister of Finance pointed out: 'That kind of (elaborate) party organisation was forced on us by the making of our newspaper illegal, by the refusal of permission to use the loudspeakers, by the refusal to allow us to hold public meetings, to demonstrate and so on. The other side of the coin was that it forced us to be a disciplined tightly knit security conscious party... to call on our people... and to move swiftly'.
In April 1973 workers staged a huge strike against the police murder of a youth, one month after the formation of the NJM. On 10 May the NJM called its first mass rally. Ten thousand attended, ten percent of the island's population. They organised a general strike which lasted four days, which revealed their weak links with the organisations of the urban workers. On 4 November they organised a second mass rally, bigger in size, and called on Gairy to resign. The general strike that followed the right wing leaders of the trade unions and the regional supporters of imperialism.
The NJM drew a balance sheet — their organisation was only a year old. It had grown out of the black power movement. Its leaders were young professionals, who had been radicalised through their experiences in Britain and the United States. They decided to make a turn to consistent work among the urban workers and within their unions, towards establishing stronger links with the youth and women who had been in the vanguard of the struggle.
They stood for parliament, and used it as a platform to mobilise working people. They established a rank and file paper inside the unions called Workers Voice and challenged the collaborationist leaderships. They studied Marx, Engels, Lenin, Che and Castro. And finally, they developed a military wing under the control and direction of their party. The Grenadian revolution is not some insignificant and isolated exception. Its importance is threefold.
First, it is part of the revolution of the region. It has close ties with Cuba, Nicaragua and El Salvador. These other leaderships observe and participate as equals in each other's revolutions. Grenadians are in Bluefields, on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua, winning black English speaking Nicaraguans to the Nicaraguan revolution through the literacy campaign. Hundreds of Grenadians are in Cuba, and hundreds of Cubans are in Grenada. They learn from each other and compare their different processes. Most important is that they defend each other against imperialism and reject every attempt by the imperialists to divide them up.
Secondly, it is a revolution of the Caribbean, but because of its historical development there are strong links with the freedom fighters of black Africa. It is a different model of development and hundreds of Africans visit to observe and learn from the revolution. Grenada is itself deeply committed to international solidarity with Africa and the revolutions in the region. Bishop sums it up as a 'beacon of hope, and alternative to neo-colonialism and colonialism, to nineteenth century capitalism' for the whole region.
Thirdly, it is an ex-British colony, and hundreds of thousands of Grenadians live abroad in Toronto, New York and London. But more than this obvious link, it is seen by the Grenadians as an international revolution, and they identify with struggling people everywhere. The struggles of the Grenadian people inspire black and oppressed people throughout the world, including in the imperialist countries.
So what conclusions can we draw from this? This revolution shows the positive example of working people seizing their own destinies and moving forward. This leadership shares with Lenin an orientation to solving problems through the mobilisation and involvement of the working people.
They promote class independence and reject class collaboration. They create huge organisations which elect their own leaders, are self-financing, and have no material ties to the state. They see their future through the international extension of their revolution.
Recently British imperialism was at war in the South Atlantic. War is the acid test for revolutionaries. In Britain, the Labour Party leadership were in favour of sending the task force, but against it being used. They could only give Thatcher advice on how to conduct the war, not how to stop it. The Militant tendency within the Labour Party was in favour of a federal socialist republic of the Malvinas, Argentina, and wait for it, capitalist Britain!
But most importantly the government and people of Grenada opposed the war. Lech Walesa, at the time of the signing of the Gdansk agreement, answered his ultra-left critics by saying: 'It's easy to be uncompromising when there's no com[illegible].' For the Grenadians either compromise or aggression. Their price would be their principles. They passed another test of their political principles in their attitude to the Malvinas.
Imperialist military activity in the Caribbean is massive. Thousands of French troops are in Martinique. American military forces are pouring into the pro-imperialist islands, and the CIA is overtly active. Reagan and Thatcher constantly make attacks on Grenada, because they see Grenada as an example for working people everywhere.
You can't lead a revolution through all its twists and turns without a strategy, and the strategy of the NJM can be described as revolutionary, using a Marxist framework. They are revolutionaries, firmly committed to Marxism, and this is what makes the Grenadian revolution such a huge event, for the Grenadian revolution broke the isolation of the Cuban revolution.
Immediately after the 13 March revolution, both British and American imperialism discussed, and fortunately rejected, overt military action against Grenada. On 6 June 1979, the Washington Post revealed that the US National Security Council had discussed the idea of blockading Grenada. This committee is the most powerful military committee in the world today. They recognised the importance and example of the Grenadian revolution. They know that by basing itself on the mobilisations of the oppressed and representing the interests of the workers and peasants of Grenada, the workers' and farmers' government formed by the New Jewel Movement, has opened the possibility for the first workers' state in a majority black country. And that is why Thatcher and Reagan are so terrified of a tiny Caribbean island.
PAT KANE spent several months in Grenada as a reporter for the socialist journal Intercontinental Press.