This title is printed to order. This book may have been self-published. If so, we cannot guarantee the quality of the content. In the main most books will have gone through the editing process however some may not. We therefore suggest that you be aware of this before ordering this book. If in doubt check either the author or publisher’s details as we are unable to accept any returns unless they are faulty. Please contact us if you have any questions.
Cheddi Jagan (1918-1997) was the first major politician in the Anglophone Caribbean
enraptured by Marxism-Leninism as espoused by the Soviet Union - the beacon for the radical
transformation of colonies like his country, British Guiana (Guyana). Moreover, he sought to
persuade US President Kennedy, that although this was the essence of his post-colonial vision,
it would not vitiate the fundamentals of liberal democracy.
Jagan's political mission of fifty years was deeply rooted in his repulsion by 'bitter sugar' - an
anti-sugar plantation, anti-Booker obsession refracted through Marxism/Leninism. Engrossed
by class analysis at the core of his epistemology, he routinely minimised, if not circumvented, the
racial anxieties and religious and cultural complexities of colonial Guyana. Yet his aspiration to
create a communist society never did resonate with African Guyanese, nor was it apprehended
by his unfailingly loyal Indian supporters, most of whom disclaimed that he was a communist.
But this work establishes that Jagan's fidelity to Marxism was incontrovertible from the
inception; and this was at variance with America's Cold War susceptibilities, in their 'backyard.'
Seecharan locates the intellectual origins of Jagan's 'secular religion' - Marxism - as a 'pure
science' applicable to human societies, equally valid as the natural sciences and validated by the
supposedly irreproachable Soviet example. This was what led to his sleepwalking into the Cold
War on the side of the Soviets and the Cubans. As early as 1960, enchanted and emboldened by
the Cuban Revolution, Cheddi deemed Fidel Castro the greatest liberator of the twentieth
century.
Jagan lost power in 1964 through subterfuge hatched by the Kennedy administration, with the
belated connivance of the British, who had magnanimously counselled him (in 1961 in
Washington) not to divulge his Marxist predilection to President Kennedy. Cheddi ignored
them. This precipitately facilitated the resurgence of the clever, slick, and ideologically
amorphous L.F.S. Burnham, culminating in his fading Guyana to Independence. In
Seecharan's words, 'Cheddi had all the trumps in his hand and still lost the game.' By his
ideological intransigence, he opened the door for Burnham's 'Cooperative Socialist Republic,'
thereby entrenching electoral rigging, the undermining of liberal democracy, economic
stagnation, and the flight of the country's best and brightest of all races to the heartlands of
capitalism.
This study does not duplicate the well-documented subversion of Jagan by the US and Britain.
Its principal aim is to explore the prompting and character of Jagan's Marxism, particularly his
conviction that the Soviet Union was paving the road to the communist utopia. In so doing,
Seecharan does what no other researcher has done - dig deep into the vast writings of Jagan
himself, publications of his People's Progressive Party and its precursor, dating back to the late
1940s; in addition to the hitherto unexamined copious correspondence between Cheddi, his wife
Janet and Billy Strachan (their foremost ideological mentor), a leading communist in the
Communist Party of Great Britain. The work is enhanced by a series of interviews with several
notable personalities who worked with or against them.
