Decolonisation, Democracy and Development
The Political Ideas of W. Arthur Lewis
(Reclaiming Lewis Within the Caribbean Political Thought Tradition)
Paper Delivered By:
Tennyson S. D. Joseph
To the
Sir Arthur Lewis Memorial Conference:
Development Challenges in the 21st Century
Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES)
St. Augustine Campus,
University of the West Indies
Trinidad and Tobago
September 25-28, 2009
Decolonisation, Democracy and Development
The Political Ideas of W. Arthur Lewis
(Reclaiming Lewis Within the Caribbean Political Thought Tradition)
By:
Tennyson S. D. Joseph
Abstract
W. Arthur Lewis is most notably appreciated for his contribution to Development Economics. However, intertwined in questions of development, are critical domestic and international political issues determining options and possibilities. In addition, Lewis himself was an important political actor, having served inter alia, as Secretary to the International African Service Bureau alongside the likes of George Padmore and C.L.R. James, advisor to Kwame Nkrumah and the first independent Government of Ghana, and as an activist for Pan-Caribbean Integration. Indeed, Lewis’ first published work, was not an economic treatise, but a political tract on the labour upheavals in the West Indies, written under the auspices of the Fabian Society of the UK. This paper therefore seeks to highlight the political thinking of W.A. Lewis. In doing so, the paper seeks to put Lewis’ economic ideas in the broader political context in which they were enmeshed, in order to enlarge understanding of these economic ideas. More importantly however, the paper argues that Lewis has been excluded from the tradition of Caribbean political thought, and explains the reasons for his exclusion, as well as presents arguments for reclaiming Lewis within that tradition. By isolating for scrutiny Lewis’ political ideas, the paper hopes to make a contribution to the documentation of Caribbean political thought.
I
Introduction
The response of Caribbean researchers to the work of St. Lucian born Nobel laureate W. Arthur Lewis, reveals two disquieting ironies. The first is the fact that despite the height of his academic and intellectual achievement, there continues to be a significant degree of ambivalence towards Lewis’ contribution among Caribbean intellectuals. Indeed, it is difficult to find a text written by Caribbean researchers devoted to the ideas of Lewis which does not have as its central feature, criticisms of Lewis economic prescriptions and questions about his authenticity as a genuine Caribbean thinker. In such works, Lewis’ reflections on West Indian identity in particular, but his wider economic ideas as well, are often branded as reactionary, or “pro-European”. (One critical exception to this is the biography on Lewis by Laljie (1996), the stated intention of which was to present a text on Lewis for the edification of young West Indians. This fact, in addition to the journalistic insider approach which he adopted, precluded any negative comment on Lewis).
The second irony is that, despite Lewis’ active engagement in political efforts aimed at decolonization, Federation, advancing Black Power and post-colonial development, and despite his writings on democracy in Africa and the Caribbean, as well as the direct political implications of his economic thought itself, there has been little attempt to isolate the intellectual contribution of Lewis as a specific body of Caribbean political thought for analysis and further discussion. It is as if Lewis’ economic thought emerged in a socio-political vacuum, and, in the main, little attempt has been made to understand the relationship between Lewis’ politics and his economic ideas. Similarly, little attempt has been made to isolate Lewis’ ideological influences, and political preferences for further clarity of both Lewis’ ideas in general, as well as the wider Caribbean condition at which they were directed. The single most important effort at isolating the political ideas of W.A. Lewis is the work of Premdas and St. Cyr (1991). However, whilst the work does contain important analyses of certain aspects of Lewis’ political ideas, it cannot be described as exclusively concerned with his political thought, given its equal concern with his economic ideas. As a result, whilst the work opens the ground into further research into Lewis’ political thought, it can be treated neither as a definitive or comprehensive treatment of the subject. Caribbean researchers therefore, have not adequately addressed Lewis’ ideas as a contribution to Caribbean political thought.
It is the persistence of these two reflexive responses (or non-responses) to the work of Lewis which has prompted this paper. The main aim of this paper is to isolate for further scrutiny the political thought of W.A. Lewis. However, this task is not undertaken in a normative vacuum. Instead, the paper seeks to identify Lewis within the tradition of Caribbean anti-colonial thought and to restore a degree of balance to the treatment by presenting arguments which can restore Lewis as a legitimate contributor to Caribbean political thought.
To achieve these aims, the paper has set itself two main tasks. First, Section II will examine the basis for the problematisation of the ideas of W.A. Lewis, within the tradition of Caribbean political thought. In this regard, the dominant conceptualization of the nature of Caribbean political thought and Caribbean philosophy will be examined, showing what has been generally identified as the characteristic epistemological features of Caribbean thought. The section will engage principally in an examination of the manner in which Caribbean political thought has been categorized in the literature and will demonstrate why that dominant characterization has worked towards the exclusion of Lewis from that tradition.
The second major task of the paper will be undertaken in Section III. That section seeks to present the principal ideas of W.A. Lewis with the main aim of relocating Lewis within the tradition of anti-colonial thought in the Caribbean. As such, section III, while accepting the broad outlines of the dominant characterization of Caribbean tradition of political thought and philosophy, endeavours to emphasise those aspects of Lewis’ ideas, which can assist in overcoming the ambivalence with which Lewis has been treated within that tradition. Critical to the task of reclaiming Lewis to the tradition of Caribbean political thought will be to engage in a “response to the critics”. In other words, having established Lewis’ credentials as an anti-colonial theorist in the section will respond to some of the specific arguments upon which Lewis has been excluded or grudgingly accepted within the Caribbean philosophical tradition. Section III will therefore seek to bring to the fore the value of Lewis’ thought as a body of ideas concerned with the formulation of the practical aspects of the post-colonial condition, in a period of retreating colonialism. It is there that the themes Decolonisation, Democracy and Development, as encapsulated in the title, will be developed upon as a thematic framework for understanding Lewis’ reflections on the practical aspects of the economic and political challenges of the post-colonial condition.
II
Caribbean Political Thought and the Problematisation of W.A. Lewis
Main outlines of Caribbean Thought
The systematic compilation, categorization and analysis of Caribbean political thought as a distinct and specific activity within Caribbean Political Science is still in its infancy (See Rupert Lewis 1990). Among the writers who have broken ground in this area are Gordon Lewis (1983) and Denis Benn (1987; 2004) whose efforts represent the earliest attempts at documenting the existing bodies of Caribbean thought, and providing historical and contextual comment critical to the establishment of a thematic analytical framework. Similarly, Nigel Bolland’s work (2004) is important for the thoroughness with which he has re-presented the selective writings of leading Caribbean thinkers from the English, French, and Spanish Caribbean, and for providing biographical detail and socio-political analysis of the frameworks within which the selected ideas emerged. Finally the work of Paget Henry (2000) seeks to highlight the key thematic lines along which Caribbean political thought has thus far been expressed. Henry’s work is important for making a case for the existence of Caribbean philosophy in response to the wider Western tendency to “draw lines in the sand around the use of particular styles or around particular sub-fields such as ontology, formal logic, or ethics” (Henry, 2000, 2). Henry’s main task therefore was to identify the contours of Caribbean philosophy, to explain and discuss how philosophical work is produced in the Caribbean, and to defend these productions as legitimate philosophy.
Whilst these and other texts have made significant contributions to mapping the development of Caribbean political thought, it is clear that there is a great degree of ambivalence in the treatment of the thought of W. A. Lewis, as genuine Caribbean political thought. While there is little doubt that that W.A. Lewis cannot be excluded from any chronicle of the history of Caribbean political thought, a far more formidable challenge is posed when the question of locating him within the Caribbean political thought tradition is raised. There are several examples of either the outright rejection or alternatively, a “reluctant acceptance” of Lewis as a Caribbean thinker to support this claim.
Denis Benn (1987) for example, in tracing the “growth and development of Political Ideas in the Caribbean”, presents the work of Lewis, not as a central narrative in its own right, but as necessary “background detail” for understanding the thought of Lloyd Best and the New World Group. In Benn’s chronicle of Caribbean political thought it is the thought of Best and the New World Group which is identified as Caribbean Political thought while Lewis is presented as heavily influenced by European concerns. Thus, Best’s ideas are presented as a “corrective” to Lewis and Demas’s dependence on “externally financed industrial expansion” (Benn 1987, 87). It is interesting to note that in a revised edition of the work, Benn includes a separate chapter on W.A. Lewis where he explores the “Intellectual Foundations of Modern Caribbean Economies” (see Benn 2004), itself a reflection of the changing attitude towards Lewis. However, in the revised edition Benn perpetuates the ambivalence towards Lewis by stating explicitly that the chapter on Lewis “provides a backdrop for the development of ‘New World’ political economy” (Benn 2004, x).
Similarly, Paget Henry’s reflections on the nature of Caribbean Political thought also reflect the tendency to treat Lewis as an outsider to the Caribbean political thought tradition. Like Benn, Paget Henry identifies Lewis as occupying the “negative side” of the coin of Caribbean thought, due to its apparent concessions to external capital. Thus Henry (2000, 223), identifies Arthur Lewis’ ideas as being part of a wider shift, with the attainment of independence in the Caribbean, from “resisting foreign capitalism to pushing local economic development”. The consequences of this shift, according to Henry, “are most evident in the work of Arthur Lewis who moved from a proworker position in Labour in the West Indies to a procapitalist stance in his later works”.
Other writers such as Percy Hintzen (1991, 108), whilst conceding that Lewis was “clearly anti-colonial, despite the criticisms of his detractors”, have identified Lewis as an ideologue of the middle-class, seeking to facilitate the hegemony of the educated, British-dependent petty-bourgeoisie, in a context of impending British colonial withdrawal. In Hintzen’s analysis, W.A. Lewis is portrayed as advancing an exclusively middle-class notion of the post-colonial order which was consistent with Rostow’s “high mass consumption society” (Hintzen 1991, 107). Whilst Hintzen recognizes that all nationalism of whatever variety, performs mobilizing and legitimizing functions, he was specifically concerned that Lewis’ brand of nationalism was congruent with “middle class interests” (ibid). Thus Hintzen (1991, 110), citing Lewis’ reflections in Politics in West Africa, argues that:
Lewis’ ideas on the politics and the economics of Africa provide a comprehensive picture of his class biases and of the institutional structures he had in mind to assure developmental transformation…Lewis argued that the educated middle class alone had the necessary skill prerequisites for organizing and running such a system. They alone had the wherewithal to satisfy the criterion of “administrative efficiency”. Such arguments led to his unambiguous support for any system of Government dominated by those with middle class skills.
Hintzen’s class based interpretation therefore, thus categorizes Lewis’ anti-colonialism as “false” in the Fanonist sense, since the post-colonial construct was not designed to advance the interests of the real victims of colonialism - the poor and the powerless. As such, Hintzen’ perspective provides yet another example of the “problematisation” of W.A. Lewis within the tradition of Caribbean political thought which this paper is seeking to overcome.
It can be safely argued that this discomfort with including Lewis as a major Caribbean political thinker springs from the very manner in which Caribbean political thought has been defined by Caribbean writers. On one side of the spectrum, are writers like Benn, who provide a broad and all inclusive definition of Caribbean political thought. Thus Benn (1987, 1) sees Political thought as including “any set of ideas, with varying degrees of systematization or coherence, which deal with matters pertaining to socio-political organization (in its widest sense) or some aspect of such organization, and which may or may not have direct or immediate implications for political action and conduct”. As such, Benn’s treatment of Caribbean political thought is inclusive of the productions of European writers and philosophies concerned with hegemony and control.
This view is shared by G.K. Lewis (1983, 10), who in his chronicle of the main currents in Caribbean thought, sees three broad constitutive elements as shaping its evolution. These include: “the growth of colonialism (following the initial conquest and settlement; the initiation and expansion of the slave and slavery systems; and a distinctive creole culture and creole institutions based on the twin factors of race and class”. Thus G.K. Lewis sees both pro-slavery as well as anti-slavery ideology as legitimate aspects of the Caribbean political thought tradition.
In the main however, it is the perspective of writers at the opposite end of the spectrum which have served in presenting a view of the nature of Caribbean thought which has been generally dominant particularly in the post-colonial context. The dominant conception by such writers concerned with the epistemological, eschatological, and ontological systematisation of Caribbean thought, have all emphasized the centrality of the need to overcome and resist Europe as a central feature of the Caribbean thought tradition. Thus writers who emphasize Caribbean thought as resistance to Europe are critical of the approaches of Benn and G.K. Lewis whose “analysis bears heavily on European and planter impact in the region and the writings of the Westernized creole intelligentsia who articulated the political and cultural values that laid the foundations for the modern concepts of sovereignty and independence” (Rupert Lewis ***, 154).