The pnp’s inability to overthrow economic dependency was centrally determined by its failure to use the favourable conjuncture of the seventies to transform its own traditional structure and ideology. revolution constituted by Jamaica’s neo-colonial political system with its singular contraposition (on the right) of an oligarchic ‘labour party’ with a powerful trade-union base and (on the left) a bourgeois nationalist-populist party with a Fabian façade. It must confront the huge obstacle to social. footnote 2 A Marxist balance-sheet of the Manley experiment therefore, must be more than a narrative of imperialist machinations, imf ultimatums and internal intrigues. Although in Jamaica there was an attempted coup, as well as a state of de facto civil war in the slums of Kingston and other towns, footnote 1 there is no way to deny the fact that the ultimate weakness of the pnp was its failure to unite and mobilize the small peasants, farmworkers, urban wage-earners and casual labourers who comprise the overwhelming social and political majority of Jamaican society. Yet there is an obvious and decisive difference between the Chilean and Jamaican cases: despite economic sabotage and rampant inflation, the Chilean popular classes continued to stand behind Allende, who could in the end only be toppled by one of the most bloody putsches of the twentieth century Manley, on the other hand, was voted out of power by sections of the same super-exploited mass of ‘sufferers’ whose plight he had promised to change forever. The defeat of Manley has been widely compared with the overthrow of Allende, and, indeed, many of the same counter-revolutionary forces- imf, cia, North American mineral corporations, etc.-which conspired against Unidad Popular were also busy subverting the pnp. In particular it increases the grave dangers of intervention against the unfolding revolutions in Grenada and Nicaragua, both of which had enjoyed Jamaican support in their efforts to escape the noose-hold of us economic and political isolation. At the same time, the restoration of the stalwartly anti-communist jlp provides the Reagan Administration with an invaluable collaborator in its crusade to contain and roll back the wave of revolutionary mobilization that has swept the Caribbean and Central America since 1979. footnote ＊ The fall of Michael Manley, the Socialist International’s most important representative in the Third World, has dealt a serious, if not fatal, blow to the gradualist strategy of social change advocated by broad sectors of the Caribbean left and somewhat hesitantly endorsed in recent years by the Cuban leadership. T he landslide victory of Edward Seaga’s Jamaica Labour Party ( jlp) in the October 1980 general elections brought an abrupt end to the People’s National Party’s ( pnp) eight-year-old experiment in ‘Democratic Socialism’.
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