The strength of a nation comes from that nation’s workers, farmers, fishermen, domestics, and so on. The education of a nation is vested in that nation’s engineers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants, business executives, and so on. The special qualities of each group are not exclusive. There are highly intelligent workers, and there are very strong and active professional people.
In the European and Eastern European world, the conversation in the twentieth century featured capital versus labor. That conversation became violent when the Russian workers overthrew their capitalist monarchy in 1917 and established a communist state. After World War II, East Germany went communist. So did several Eastern European states. Then, in 1949 Mao Tse-tung was victorious in a revolution and made China a communist republic.
Now where our African and indigenous American ancestors were concerned, European capital met African/American labor more than five centuries ago and subjugated that labor through a system called slavery (sometimes peonage). European capital fed and clothed and housed African/American labor as cheaply as would keep the labor alive, and worked that labor for free.
Slave labor is the foundation of the massive wealth of all these “civilized” European countries you see in the European Union today – Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Spain, Portugal, etc. All these European countries were desperately poor when they invaded Africa and America in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Today, Europe is surpassingly wealthy. The reason is centuries of free labor, not to mention stolen gold, silver, jewelry, copper, and all sorts of minerals and natural resources. According to European apologists, the Africans and the indigenous Americans had no use for these things, so the Europeans were doing primitive peoples a favor by robbing them of their natural resources, in addition to Christianizing them.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, the European nations decided to develop a more sophisticated, more “humane” form of slavery, which became known as colonialism. The brilliant European thinkers, and remember, they had a lot of time to think because they and their thinking were being financed by slave labor, decided that this colonialism would be a more efficient economic system than outright slavery.
One aspect of the colonialism model was that the master encouraged the rise of a small native class which helped him to administrate the colony. So, in the case of British Honduras, the British trained and used our own people to run the place. This class of natives became grateful and loyal to the British, became admirers of the British, and they thought, they trusted, that the sun would never set on the British Empire.
Well, in the case of Belize, the British sun began to set here in 1950. The strength of the country – workers, farmers, fishermen, domestics, and so on, began to rebel against colonialism, even as their slave ancestors in the settlement of Belize had risen in rebellion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It so happened, however, that the leadership of the labor strength of the colony ended up in the hands of the educated class in 1956.
There were important ethnic questions which had been dividing the people of the colony. The class question had been dividing the original slaves/colonials, who all called themselves “Creoles,” from late in the eighteenth century. The arrival of the Caribs in the early part of the nineteenth century and the coming of the Maya/Mestizos in the latter part of the same century, created tribal and ethnic complexities in British Honduras.
The educated leadership which came to power in 1956 set about building a Belizean nation out of these different groups, and they succeeded in achieving self-government in 1964 and political independence in 1981. But there was rot which had begun to affect the nationalist educated leadership as early as the 1960’s. That rot was a combination of nepotism, favoritism and arrogance. Because of that rot, the educated leadership of the “peaceful, constructive revolution,” after staggering in 1974 and 1977, collapsed electorally in 1984.
In Belize in 2010, the strength of the Belizean nation – workers, farmers, fishermen, domestics, and so on, has been sapped by the chicanery of greedy and insincere members of the educated classes. Inside the former capital city, the perfect example of that is what happened to the Civic Center in 1992. The Musa/Fonseca group gave several millions of taxpayers’ dollars to an aristocratic crony to “refurbish” the nation’s only acceptable basketball auditorium. The 1700-plus capacity of the Civic Center had proven too small for the standing room only crowds which swarmed the games in Belize’s inaugural semi-pro basketball season. But the “refurbishment” of the Civic facility was an absolute rip-off. The Civic became a large oven, and it ruined the semi-pro basketball industry. A pattern was set here which became the hallmark of Musa/Fonseca – rip-off of labor by capital.
Musa/Fonseca have refused to accept the blame for their misdeeds, and they are trying to regain control of the labor-based political party which they betrayed. In 1867, Benito Juárez said, “ … peace is respect for the rights of others.” The pro-capital “old guard” do not respect the rights of the workers, the farmers, the fishermen, the domestics, and so on. If they did, they would be hiding in shame and wearing sack cloth and ashes instead of fighting for power in the party built by workers, farmers, fishermen, domestics, and so on.
Power to the people. Power in the struggle.