The ideas of the Jamaican political leader Michael Manley had a global impact that continues to be felt today. As the leader of the People’s National Party (PNP) from 1969 to 1992, and particularly in his first period as prime minister of Jamaica from 1972 to 1980, Manley promoted a wide range of ambitious reforms that were guided by strongly articulated ideas of democratic socialism and economic decolonization. He recognized that Jamaica, like many other countries, had gained constitutional independence, yet remained wedded to a world economy structured by colonialism.
Manley therefore sought to pursue these ideas on an international level. Along with other leaders such as Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, as one of the leading spokespeople in the 1970s for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) based on more egalitarian principles through cooperation among countries in the global South. Despite the successful implementation of many reforms, Manley’s policies faced strong opposition both from groups within Jamaica and from international actors, most notably the United States. His government struggled with the difficult economic circumstances of the 1970s, and lost elections in 1980 after several years of austerity that came as a condition for loans by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Anthony Bogues is the Asa Messer Professor of Humanities and Africana Studies at Brown University. He has written extensively on Caribbean and African intellectual, cultural and literary history and political thought, including the life and political ideas of Michael Manley. In the late 1980’s he was also an advisor to Manley. More recently, he has supported efforts to rethink the political vision of the People’s National Party.
In this interview, Bogues reflects on the life and legacy of Michael Manley, whose hundredth year birth anniversary was celebrated last month. Considering Manley’s influence in both Jamaican and internationalist politics, the conversation explores Manley’s political formation in the Jamaican labour movement, his ambitious efforts to decolonize the Jamaican economy, as well his efforts on the global stage, on issues ranging from the US embargo of Cuba to the IMF. Bogues discusses inheriting a generational burden to rethink the philosophical vision of democratic socialism in Jamaica, expressing hope for a united Caribbean.
An interview with Professor Anthony Bogues
will kendall: Can you tell us about your relationship with Michael Manley? How did you first meet him, and how did your relationship develop?
anthony bogues: I met him formally after the 1980 election, which was a critical moment in Jamaican history. The year of the election was a period of political crisis and immense violence—over 800 people died between the beginning of the year and the election in October. From the late 1970s onwards I was a left-leaning journalist working at the Jamaican Broadcasting Corporation. The election was in October, and with the conservative Jamaica Labour Party in power I was fired in December. During the election campaign, myself and other journalists were threatened by the conservatives that we would never work in Jamaica again. Myself and a colleague, Brian Meeks, took the government to court and won a case for unfair dismissal.
So after my dismissal the question was: what was I going to do with my life? I considered doing a PhD. But I was approached by two leading members of the PNP, the party’s then general secretary, DK Duncan and the now former wife of Michael Manley, Beverley Manley, asking me to come and work for the Party as a researcher. I said yes, and that decision led me to work for the Party secretariat. I became the secretary of the Political Education Commission of the Party, and that is the role in which I met Michael Manley. We became very close over the years. When he became Prime Minister in ‘89, he asked me to come to Jamaica House—the country’s 10 Downing Street if you will. I still wanted to do a PhD, but I ultimately agreed. We had our political disagreements, but our relationship deepened. I worked with him as his special assistant and what is today called a chief of staff.
In this capacity we travelled to many meetings. On one occasion, he had to visit the White House. Typically, on those occasions the Prime Minister would be joined by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, but Manley wanted me there in the private meeting in the Oval Office with President Bush Sr. When the meeting began, I understood why Manley wanted me there. There were three main items on the agenda. The first was the drug problem which was beginning to create real problems for many Caribbean states. The second was about the multilateral debt of Jamaica and the region. The third was to ask the US to lift its embargo on Cuba. The plan was that Prime Minister Manley would go speak to Fidel Castro. Former President Carter would then visit Cuba to advance the negotiations. And the White House would stay out of it until it was clear that the conversations and negotiations had arrived at a certain point. The one US condition was that Cuba would release a number of political prisoners.
After that meeting, we went to Cuba and spoke to Fidel who said, “We don’t have any political prisoners.” When we conveyed that to Brent Scowcroft, the US National Security Advisor, the deal fell flat. Those are the sort of things Michael and I were involved in and the foundation for our relationship. We remained close long after he left office. When he passed away, I was doing my postdoc in the United States at Howard University, and I flew back immediately to help organize his funeral.
WK: Can you paint a picture of the social and political environment that Michael Manley came of age in? On the one hand, there’s the the class and racial contexts in Jamaica, such as the “color-classism” of the planter class, and on the other hand, there’s the “political unionism” of the labor movement and its relationship to the two mass parties.
AB: Michael was born in 1924, when Jamaica was still firmly in the grip of British colonialism. He was born to an upper middle-class family and his father was one of the most important lawyers in the entire Caribbean. His mother, who was born in the United Kingdom, became a widely revered artist and very important in Jamaica’s artistic community. Both of his parents lived their lives according to a powerful ethic of public service. She was known for challenging the racial colonial representation of Black people in the colonies. One of her most important works was called Negro Aroused. His father Norman Manley actively served working people alongside his list of very important clients. Living in London as a Rhodes Scholar, Norman Manley also developed Fabian Socialist ideological views.
In 1938, major workers’ riots broke out across the country as well as across the Caribbean. The strikes prompted Britain’s colonial office to reflect on how it would manage this emerging trade union movement. Prior to ‘38, we had the Universal Negro Improvement Association in the Caribbean, which was founded by Marcus Garvey. That is important because many Garveyites later joined the People’s National Party (PNP). After the labor riots in the 1930s we had the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (BITU) and the PNP led by Norman Manley—an organized labor movement, and a nationalist anti-colonial movement. That was the political configuration of the time.
I have argued that the PNP was a mass anti-colonial movement that transformed itself into a political party in 1944 with the advent of universal adult suffrage. The BITU was a mass trade union movement linked to Bustamante, who was originally a member of the PNP. He was imprisoned for his union activities and left the party upon his release, forming the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) in 1943. So the union movement is attached to that party, and so when Bustamante leaves the PNP, Norman Manley and others in the PNP leadership form the Trade Union Congress as a counter to the BITU. So both parties in the 1940s were rooted in organized working-class activities. You can say following conventional labels that the JLP is center-right and the PNP is center-left, but it’s important to note that both parties engaged in a relationship with mass movements that no longer exists today.
The PNP also had immediate connections to the British Labour Party and Fabian Socialism. Stafford Cripps, the left leaning former Chancellor of the Exchequer, was present at the PNP’s inaugural conference. So while at its birth the PNP’s primary objective was political independence, it also had a socialist foundation.
Michael grew up in this environment, he would come home and hear his father’s political arguments. Both his mother and father were both actively involved in public life. He attended the same elite colonial school that his father had gone to, Jamaica College, after which he briefly studied at McGill in Canada before moving to London. At the LSE, his greatest influence was the English Socialist and later chairman of the Labour Party Harold Laski. Initially, under the influence of his mother, he had wanted to study Art criticism, but by the time he finished the Latin requirements he ended up opting for a degree in Government/ political science.
Laski’s left-wing socialism, which was to the left of the Labour Party at the time, enormously shaped his thinking. As did the cohort in the West Indian Students Union—which included figures like Errol Barrow, later Prime Minister of Barbados, and G. Arthur Brown, later governor of the Bank of Jamaica. Elsa Goveia, the extraordinary Guyanese historian who became the first chair of West Indian History at University of West Indies, was also there. This was not the generation of the ‘20s and early ‘30s who had come to London, people like CLR James, George Padmore, Amy Ashwood Garvey as well as the cricketer Learie Constantine. It was an explicitly anti-colonial generation who came together in the ‘40s and ‘50s in London, primarily as students. It was also a Federalist generation. They thought of themselves as not only participating in the separate political life of Guyana, Barbados, and Jamaica, but advancing a Federation of the Anglophone Caribbean.
By the time Michael returned to Jamaica in the late 1940s, he had abandoned his dream of being an art critic and he decided to pursue a career as a political journalist. He started working for a newspaper called Public Opinion, publishing a remarkable column called “Root of the Matter.” Politically, he became an ordinary group member of the party and when the party split in 1952, he began to play a more active role. This split was brought on by the increased pressures of the Cold War. In Jamaica, during the period of anti-colonial twentieth century agitation Soviet-aligned Marxists led by Richard Hart and others along with the radical leftist Ken Hill had become incredibly influential both within the PNP and within the labor movement . The Right of the Party became increasingly concerned with getting the Marxists and left-wingers out, and they did so during the party conference of 1952.
After the split, Michael became part of an internal campaign which sought to articulate the difference between communism and democratic socialism. In this process, his political ideas were sharpened by attending hundreds of Party groups and listening and participating in the debates between Party members. At this point, he’s a journalist and a minor figure within the Party. But I would argue that his subsequent participation in the labor movement was perhaps most formative. He was brought into the labor movement through an invitation to observe negotiations by a PNP member and trade union leader. The story goes that at the negotiation meeting, the leader unexpectedly exited and left Michael in charge of the discussion. Hearing the list of worker grievances at this meeting is what turned him into a trade unionist. It’s his work in the sugar and bauxite belt that brought him in contact with the organized working class and shaped him into the politician he was.
Neil Warner: After Manley became prime minister, his government pursued a large number of ambitious reforms. Manley described his economic and political approach as an attempt to pursue a “third path,” contrasting it to the Puerto Rican Model—which Jamaica had initially pursued and which focused on seeking to attract overseas investment—and the Cuban Model—which was based on Marxism-Leninism and central planning. How would you describe this approach? What would you say were the most important and successful of these reforms?
AB: As I mentioned, Michael Manley’s upbringing is enormously shaped by the anti-colonial struggle. But after Jamaican independence was granted in 1962, Jamaican society did not decolonize in any substantive form. The plantations were still powerful and racial and class hierarchies remained intact. The dominant social order was constructed around black oppression drawn from the various structural legacies of the colonial order.
As a result, decolonization remained one of Manley’s core aims into the 1970s. But you couldn’t pursue decolonization without raising fundamental questions about equality, justice, and the structure of the national economy. In his first book, The Politics of Change, Manley elaborates ideas on changing the actual colonial structure of Jamaican society. That involved overturning colonial laws like the Master Servant law, putting forward public programs like free education, and bringing ordinary Black people to the centre of Jamaican society. In his political practice, he attempted to dismantle the legacies of the old colonial order.
So it’s a period of, on the one hand, what Rex Nettleford calls “somebody-tization”: how the Black person becomes somebody. On the other hand, it was a period of reorganizing the Jamaican economy. Sugar was one of the most important industries in Jamaican society. In the decolonization process, a question emerged: Could those workers, whose ancestors had been slaves, participate in redesigning how the industry would operate? This was both a historical and political question given the island’s history as a slave sugar-producing colony. In the late 1970s, myself and others went to Westmoreland, a sugar-producing area, to help turn that land over to workers so it could function as a cooperative. That was just one of the programs Michael had put forward. Another was on literacy. Nearly 80 percent of the Jamaican population was illiterate as a result of British colonialism. Young people like me at the time were deeply involved in these programs that the Manley government had created.
In his negotiations with bauxite companies, Michael Manley opted for bargaining higher rates of compensation over nationalization. Bauxite is an extractive industry and as a result it is finite, so it made sense to get the best conditions we could during that period of extraction. How do I summarize the 1970s reforms? What I’ll say is that Michael Manley pursued a program of full decolonization.
All of these reforms made many members of the Jamaican national elite very uncomfortable. When low wage workers are given a minimum wage and domestic workers are granted rights, things just can’t continue to operate in the way they had before. In other words, when the power balance begins to shift, the elites become jittery. By the 1980s, elite opposition and opposition from multinationals had crystallized. As recent documents from the US National Security Agency demonstrate, the US also became concerned, and it is now clear that it acted on these concerns. Remember now this was the middle of the Cold War. Moreover, Michael supported Cuba and its intervention in Angola on behalf of the radical People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). The MPLA at the time was struggling against South African expansion, which would not only spread apartheid but also weaken the anti-apartheid struggle within South Africa. All of these things came together in the 1980s.
Nw: This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the declaration of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), a program led by countries in the global South for a restructuring of the rules of the international economic system to end economic colonialism and dependency. Manley was known as one of the most influential advocates of the NIEO. Can you talk about Manley’s role in the NIEO?
ab: Manley realized that even though countries like Jamaica had gained constitutional independence, they remained wedded to a world economy structured by colonialism—what people like Kwame Nkrumah would call “neo-colonialism.” Transforming the world economy depended on altering price setting mechanisms and developing technological and energy independence. We grow the commodities, but we don’t set the prices and we rely on importing machinery and oil to process them. Because he was deeply invested in political and economic democracy, Manley was also very concerned with the rise of multinational corporations.
These problems could only really be dealt with through what Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and others called the Trade Union of the Poor. At the core of the NIEO was a new economic world order. It was based on the idea, as elaborated in 1979 in Arusha, Tanzania, that there was the need “to complete the liberation of the Third World countries from external domination.” Third World countries therefore had to band together to gain a say in the structure and operations of the world economy. Julius Nyerere and Michael Manley were a tag team in the NIEO. Both grew up in former British colonies. One had studied at Edinburgh University, the other in London. And importantly, they shared the sense that a real threat to postcolonial societies was the rise of a domestic elite that would mimic the old colonial rulers. Nyerere developed the Arusha Declaration, which was really about cauterizing the power of the new elite and their capacity to corrupt the state. Michael didn’t get that far, he was operating in a different political culture. But his ideas on socialism and decolonization were about constraining the power of the elite to leverage the state for their own purposes.
The NIEO ends up gaining the support of Willy Brandt and others in the Socialist International. James Callaghan, who was then Prime Minister, ultimately came on board. This became an international campaign to get the world to think about the structure of the global economy and alter it in a way that will benefit newly independent countries. This was not entirely the same as the Non-Aligned Movement, which was a political movement more than an economic one. The Non-Aligned Movement was transformed by Nyerere and Manley into a robust movement that challenged both the economic and political structures of the world at that time.
WK: You have spoken about the trauma of two defeats in the Caribbean—Michael Manley’s 1980 election loss, and the defeat of the 1983 Grenadian revolution. These were political, ideological and military defeats. Manley was prime minister of Jamaica for a final time from 1989 to 1992. This time, his government seemed to have been more reconciled to capitalism. How did he think about that change?
ab: The problems Jamaica faced with the IMF were global problems. There was a sophisticated analysis of these problems coming out of the journal Development Dialogue in a special issue edited by Tanzanians and Jamaicans. Within the PNP, you also had a huge debate about the IMF. The IMF was one of the core entities ensuring that Manley would lose the election. The structural adjustment programs were very harsh, and they explicitly called for the reversal of the reform program that he had initiated. This, combined with oil prices, political destabilization, and rising violence, all contributed to his defeat.
Let’s think about the 1980s. There are three key figures in the world during this decade: Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, and Ronald Reagan. They were united in their intention to shut down every progressive movement, domestically and internationally—whether it was the miner’s strike, the NIEO, or the anti-apartheid movement. These three individuals had an ideological view about what society should be. To quote Maggie Thatcher, “there is no society, there are only individuals.” Stuart Hall called this moment a revolution in ideas and social practices.
After Manley’s defeat in 1980, there was a meeting in Cancún in 1981 chaired by Reagan. Julius Nyerere attended to represent the NIEO arguments. When they got to that part of the agenda, Ronald Reagan said: “next item.” No one protested. That is what was reported back to Manley and he started to realize that the world had dramatically shifted. But he was still a politician, he had to lead his party to victory.
We had numerous conversations during this period. The way he put it to me was, in the words of Hamlet, “time is out of joint” for people like him. In his view we couldn’t, as an island of 2.5 million people, go against the tide on our own. So the new question was not abandoning all hopes of transformation, but rather how do we ameliorate the worst effects of the market? I want to emphasize that this was not a trajectory that he embraced with enthusiasm. But it was the only realistic path he saw.
There are many unpublished stories from this period. I’ll just recount one. When the PNP entered into office in 1989, one of the first things we did was go around to all the Socialist International countries. Michael met Felipe González in Spain and he told him that we’ve got a serious problem with foreign exchange, and we didn’t want to go to the IMF: “Can you help us out?” Gonzalez said: “talk to our finance minister.” That’s what they all did, they left it to the finance minister because they could not say yes. Every finance minister then asked if we had a standing agreement with the IMF.
Manley then sent me to the multilateral Inter-American Development Bank to negotiate a less onerous deal. There were some Latin American figures there, and we also had a Jamaican who was high up in the bank. I went to Washington to have breakfast with them. The first thing they said to me is that we had to privatize the Jamaica State Trading Corporation. That agency was scouring the world to purchase cheap pharmaceuticals and deliver them to public hospitals. In searching for arguments against this, I told them that if we put this before parliament, the public would turn against their intervention into our national sovereignty. And you know what they told me? They said, “as a debtor country, you have no sovereignty.” I put my knife and fork down, left the meeting, and told the Prime Minister that this was not going to work.
Manley became ill and retired, I finished my PhD, and we continued our regular discussions. As he got older he grew more and more convinced that the democratic left (and this is his phrase) had to assert a counter narrative to the neoliberal dogma. We even started working on a book together about the need for a distinctive kind of democracy and what would be the ideological and philosophical basis of a modern democratic left. But as his illness worsened the project fell to the sidelines. To be very frank, I felt I shouldn’t do it without him.
WK: More recently you led a commission that came up with a rethinking and restatement of the philosophical vision of the PNP. What was behind that rethinking and how did you find that experience? How are you thinking about sovereignty now?
ab: Once Michael Manley formally retired, people like myself began to feel that the party lost its vision and ambition to transform Jamaican society. We began to walk away. But a couple of years ago I was asked by members of the new leadership to help them revive the Party’s philosophical identity. I said yes for two reasons: One, which I said publicly, was because Michael had made it clear in our many discussions that it was my generation’s burden to put progressive and deep democratic ideas back on the agenda. Second, I felt that those of us on the left really did need to begin to do some of the work that Manley and I had begun to discuss before his death. It was an opportunity to work with a group of comrades and articulate where we stand.
To do this, I followed a democratic model of politics. I spent a lot of time in constituencies. I was back and forth between the US and Jamaica, doing surveys, interviewing people, doing deep listening. After that process was completed last year, we wrote up our impressions and submitted a document titled “ Where we Stand,” which was approved by the Party. We then set about translating these principles into economic policies. We received 602 recommendations from the party delegates at the last September annual conference about how to restructure the Jamaican economy. I can’t share that with you yet, but I think it is safe to say that there is a foundation for the process of transforming Jamaican society. However the jury is out on whether we will succeed.
The question of sovereignty remains important. I go back to the Caribbean writer and novelist George Lamming, who argued that the question of sovereignty is central for us in the Caribbean. And if you ask me, I would say to you that the only real sovereignty that we can have in the Caribbean is a Caribbean that is united. I mean the entire Caribbean, Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanic, Dutch and so on. It must first emerge in the imagination, through a belief that we are not overwhelmed by external economic and political forces. We have to imagine things beyond that which is given. And we must be united in doing so, because the structure of the global economy does not allow for individual sovereignty in the economic sense. The matter of sovereignty begins then with a political horizon. It will demand of us in the Caribbean a series of joint economic ventures as well as building the capacity to intervene in the world at the level of global politics. This means configuring new global relations and alliances outside of big power politics. There are still superpowers which dominate the globe but given the current multiple crises, new forms are called for. I think that is one of the contemporary legacies of Michael Manley.
Filed Under