Globalization and the Deformation of the Antiguan Working Class

Paget Henry

The working class of the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda (used interchangeably with Antigua) is currently in current in a spiral of deformation and decline. This downward turn is particularly surprising as this class had been on a path of self-formation and self-organization that made it a social force to be reckoned with. The purpose of this paper is to trace the rise and decline of this class, and to examine the conditions for its self-reassertion.

In Antigua, as in the rest of the Caribbean region, the ups and downs of the working class are inextricably bound up with the rise and global expansion of European capitalism. Indeed, the major phases in the formation and deformation of this class-slavery, plantation wage labor, unionized plantation labor, and unionize and non-unionize tourist labor - correlate with major changes in relations between the Antiguan economy and the Western capitalist system. As we will see, the current phase of deformation is inseparable from the new phase of global capitalism that is still emerging - the informatic phase.

Slaves, Planters and Mercantile Capitalism

Like Jamaica, Barbados, Haiti or St Kitts, Antigua and Barbuda developed as a classic sugar plantation colony in the seventeenth century. With the near extinction of the Carib population and the increasing demand for labor on the plantations, Antigua and Barbuda joined in the regional solution of importing Africans, who were legally commodified, enslaved, and put to work on the plantations. As a result, the Antiguan working class began as a severely dominated and restricted group that was primarily of African descent. Enslaved and economically exploited by European capitalists, this class-in-information was also profoundly racialized. Consequently, to their commodification and exploitation was added a distinct layer of racial domination.

This imposing of race onto the commodity form is important for any understanding of challenge confronting this emerging class. It introduced a distinct set of dynamics into the life of this class that both reinforced and contradicted the accumulative and extractive dynamics of class domination. It dehumanized and transformed Akan, Yoruba and other Africans into blacks, negroes and niggers. As Fanon has pointed out, racial domination strives to maximize the othering and excluding of its subjugated group, and not the extracting of surplus labor.¹ The logic of racial domination is realized in apartheid, while that of commodification manifests itself in capital accumulation. These two contradictory tendencies came together in the practice of plantation labor to define the life and identity of the Antiguan working class.

This racializing of the working class required a similar reinscribing of the Antiguan capitalist class. Overwhelmingly European, racialization transformed this class into a group of whites - one that was superior in culture, intelligence, business and every other human capability that mattered. This class of sugar planters was founded in 1640s by prominent families such as the Warners, the Codringtons, the Hills, the Mathews, the Watts, Byams, the Martins, the Carlisles and Lavingtons, who had migrated from England.² A century later, this class reached the apogee of its power, when approximately sixty-five of its families were the major landowners, slaveholders, sugar producers and controllers of state power.³ This class gloried in its meteoric rise, its wealth, its Englishness and its whiteness. This superiority was used to justify their invasion of the region, the monopoly on state power, and their decision to enslave Africans.

In spite of this yawning gap that racialization and commodification created between blacks and whites, there were sexual unions between members of these two groups that gave rise to a small mulatto middle class. This was an intermediary class both in terms of color and social position. Thus they occupied a number of occupational positions that were above the black working class but below the white capitalist class. They considered themselves superior to blacks, longed to be accepted by whites, but were in fact held in contempt by them. Members of the mulatto middle class refused to engage in field labor, and thus lived and worked primarily as artisans and small traders in St Johns, the capital city. Their economic activities were legally restricted by the White Servants Act, which prohibited mulattoes from being overseers or managers of plantations, and from holding top positions in the militia of Antigua and Barbuda.

In short, global expansion of the mercantile phase of European capitalism brought Antigua and Barbuda its first form peripheral capitalism. This capitalist order rested on a slave plantation economy that gave rise to a three-tiered class structure that was also a tripolar construction of race. In this regard, Antigua and Barbuda, exemplified the patterns of class and race for which the Caribbean region has become well known.

In this mercantile/plantation order, the lion's share of the profits went to the British merchants who financed the planters, and purchased the products of the plantations. The remainder went to planters who secured land and labor, and coordinated these factors of production in the colony. In other words, the profits of the Antiguan economy were shared between the planters and their merchant suppliers.

The actual work of growing sugarcane and extracting sugar from it was the responsibility of the enslaved black working class, whose members had no share in the profits generated by their labor. In performing these tasks, the slaves were organized into gangs driven by white overseers and/or experienced slaves. After the cane had been reaped, it had to be crushed, boiled, clarified and clayed, all of which were done by black slaves under the watchful eyes of white overseers. The sugar was then packed in hogsheads and put on board ship for England. This labor of imported Africans was extracted under the most repressive and exploitative of labor regimes. As slaves, the members of this African working class received no wages, but were given instead the barest of supplies for their bodily reproduction. Consequently, large amounts of surplus value were extracted from this black working class to generate the profits of the white planters and merchants.

This was the zero position from which the Antiguan working class would have to fight its way back to freedom and owning its labor; the position from which it would have to fashion itself into a socio-political force that could reclaim its liberty, re-establish its humanity, and transform the social order. This project would profoundly historicize and creolize the African identity of this class. The making of these changes accumulated around an ethic of liberation, which would mature into an anti-slavery, anti-colonial insurrectionary consciousness. In addition to this ethic of liberation, the experience of living away from the African homeland also helped to creolize and transform Africans into Afro-Antiguans. Africans also had to adjust to their new natural surroundings; to processes ethnic homogenization that resulted from the forced mixing of Akans, Yorubas, and other African ethics; to the pressure to speak English and to adopt English names. Thus many Afro-Antiguans were soon answering to last names such as Martin, Warner, Watts, Byam - names of their owners. Thus culturally, this class moved between trying to preserve its African traditions and adjusting to the conditions of its new Caribbean home.

The earliest manifestations the liberatory ethic of Afro-Antiguans were to be seen in the practices marronage or running away, and those of outright revolt. The first of these led to the formation of maroon communities of runaway slaves in the Boggy Peak area, the most mountainous part of the island.⁴ It was only after 1723, that the Antiguan Militia was able to destroy these camps.

Lasting much longer than marronage was the practice of outright rebellion. Here the laboratory ethic manifested itself in organized drives to expel the colonizers and take control of the island. As early as 1666, the Colonial Records reported that "at Antigua strict guard is kept for fear of the Negroes."⁵ Clearly a threat that required a military response. On December 25, 1701, the slaves on Major Samuel Matin's plantation rose up and murdered him. The murder was precipitated by the major's refusal to give his slaves their usual holiday for Christmas. The event created such a panic among the planter class that the militia was put on high alert, and given reinforcements of small arms. The nineteenth century historian, V. Oliver records five other insurrectionary outbreaks that occurred in the years 1708, 1709, 1736, 1738 and 1831 - the last occurring just three years before the end of slavery in 1834.⁶

Of these uprisings, it was the aborted insurrection of 1736 that revealed the comprehensive and national scope of the revolutionary consciousness that was forming within the hearts and minds of the Antiguan working class. It began with several secret meetings of slaves in the woods. At one of these with an estimated two thousands present, a king was crown, and the plans to establish him as ruler finalized. These plans included the blowing up of the Governor's ball on the evening of October 11, which was to be a signal for slaves in other parts of the island to pass the word still further that it was time for slaves on all plantations "to rise and destroy all the whites in their respective districts and so have made themselves masters of the whole island."⁷ Unfortunately the death of the governor general's son led to the postponing of the ball and the uncovering of the plot. As a consequence, by January 15, 1737, sixty-nine slaves had been executed. Of these, five were broken on the wheel, six starved to death after which their heads were cut off and fixed on poles. The remaining fifty-eight were chained to stakes and burned.⁸ In spite of this major failure and the horrible punishments, this ethic of liberation continued to spring anew in the hearts and minds of the Antiguan working class right up to the eve of the emancipation proclamation. Although this resistance did not by itself succeed in overthrowing the slave order as in Haiti, it certainly contributed to the demise of that system.

Peasants, Planters and Liberal Capitalism

As Eric Williams has shown, the abolishing of slavery for the Antiguan and other British Caribbean working classes was an integral part of the reorganization of British capitalism on competitive principles in the 1840s.⁹ Making use of the theories of Adam Smith, industrial capitalists rejected the mercantile order of which the plantation and its form of slavery were classic expressions. Both were now seen as inefficient, and outmoded, and hence as fetters on the new order of liberal competitive capitalism. Consequently, as in the American South, it was against the resistance of the planters that this new order was introduced. The rise of liberal capitalism confronted Antiguan planters with two crucial problems: (1) how to maintain their mercantile economy in the new era of liberal capitalism, since they either refused or were unable to make the conversion; and (2) how to secure the labor of the working class now that it was legally free.

In spite of some attempts at reform, it is clear that the Antiguan planter class was not able to make a successful adaptation to the new liberal order. As their economy stagnated, the planters began a slow decline from which they never recovered, and the Caribbean region as whole rather quickly became a forgotten corner of the globe. Given British support for the rule of this dying class, the post-slavery period can also be viewed as a long and comfortable retirement these planters who had once served the empire well.

Because of the elimination of maroon communities and the lack available land, Antiguan planters were confident that they would have adequate supplies of labor in the post-slavery period. Consequently, they did not import indentured labor from India as planters in Trinidad and Guyana were forced to do. All they had to do was to change the terms under which ex-slaves would be hired. They were now hired under the terms of the Contract Act. This act allowed ex-slaves to occupy their slave huts and small gardens rent free in exchange for work on plantations that carried a wage of sixpence a day. This agreement had to be entered into for at least a year, but could be terminated by either party with a month's notice. These were the new conditions that freedom and wage labor brought to the Antiguan working class.

Although a significant improvement over chattel slavery, the new wage workers were very dissatisfied the terms of the Contract Act. They were without land, housing and other basic material resources. Not surprisingly the conflicts between these two racialized classes continued although in changed forms. Black working class resistance would take the form of a struggle for land that the planters would strongly resiSt For these workers, the post-slavery period was anything but a period of deformation and comfortable retirement. On the contrary, it was an important period of self-formation and self-organization, in spite of the general economic decline produced by the inability of the planters to take Antigua into the era of liberal capitalism.

This process of Black working class self-formation can be divided into two crucial phases: village formation, and the attempts to transform the ex-slave class into an independent peasantry. The village movement took off in 1837 when government lands that had been set aside for attracting whites to Antigua, were put up for sale in spite of planter opposition. These were non-arable plots of land and thus could only be used for residential purposes. They were purchased by the ex-slaves who were now able to vacate their slave huts and be more independent of the planters. Even more land became available as planters were forced to sell land in some cases to workers. Most of these lands were at Drew's Hill, Wiers, Buckleys and Sweets. The latter two are still major villages today. Other villages were formed and given names such as Freetown, Freemans Village, and Liberta, embodying the liberatory ethic behind the village movement. The planters hated the village movement and tried to block it but could not.

The second phase in the post-slavery formation of the Antiguan working class was its self-redefinition as an independent peasantry and the struggle to realize that new identity. This class was now clearly putting its slave identity behind it and looking forward to a new and different future. In this future, the members of this class saw themselves as independent peasants living in villages of their own rather than as plantation workers living in plantation huts. In short, they were a class in transition, a peasant class-in-formation; a class whose consciousness and solidarity was also shaped by the resistance to racial domination. Consequently, this project of self-redefinition and self-realization placed the Antiguan working class on a path of direct confrontation with the needs of the still hegemonic but declining planter class.

The village movement by itself did not challenge the monopoly that the planters had over arable land. Further, it left the villagers dependent on plantation work as it did not provide them with arable land for independent cultivation. Thus the project of a peasantry in the making was in danger of being blocked by planter control of arable land. Consequently, by the last decade of the nineteenth century, the liberatory strategies of this class-in-formation shifted from the formation of villages to a struggle for arable land. This push for arable land was vigorously opposed by planters and led to outbursts on the part of the working class. The regional significance of this conflict was made clear by the setting up of The Royal Commission of 1898, which recommended a land settlement program for peasants. Resisting all the way, the planters succeeded in blocking effective state implementation of this program. By 1917, the program had virtually collapsed with tensions rising between the two classes. These exploded in the insurrection of 1918 led by George Weston, John Furlonge and Sony Price. Workers battled the police and the militia in St Johns, while in the rural areas plantations were seized and burned. This upsurge in particular was highly racialized as workers conceptualized their struggles through the racial lens of Garveyism. In spite of this violent confrontation, the planters did not yield, but continued to block working class access to arable land. Thus by the end of the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Antiguan working class remained very blocked in its struggle for economic independence and self-transformation.

Planters, Tourism and Monopoly Capital

After a brief lull, this peasant/planter conflict erupted with new intensity. The big difference in these struggles was the shift from the more racial outlook of the Garvey years to a more explicit class-based ideology. This shift manifested itself in the formation of laborist organizations such as the Antigua Workingmens Association and a little later a trade union. The trade union movement emerged out of the insurrectionary struggle of the 1930s that swept across the region. Erupting first in St Kitts in 1935, this wave of revolts moved through Trinidad, Guyana, St Vincent and St Lucia. After a short pause in 1936, urban worker and peasant resistance picked up again in 1937 and peaked in Jamaica in 1938.¹⁰ By this time about forty-six people had been killed, hundreds wounded, thousands arrested, and British warships patrolled offshore.

Between 1935 and 1938, Antigua was clearly one of the calmer territories of the region. This deceitful calm was the result of a number of pre-emptive concessions made to middle and working class demands. First, five seats in the legislature were made elective. This concession opened this body to only the middle class as there were still income restrictions on voting and running for office. Second, there was the eliminating of the Contract Act in 1937. Third, the government announced an "Antigua Recovery Programme" to counter the local impact of the economic depression in the imperial countries. Fourth and finally, in 1938 the British Government dispatched another Royal Commission to study the problems of the region.

However, these concessions only delayed the explosion that was summering beneath the surface of calm in Antigua. A dispute at the Antigua Sugar Factory on March 27, 1939 was all it took to ignite it. Workers struck and took to the streets. They were joined by waterfront and plantation workers. As in the insurrection of 1918, these workers organized themselves into "roving bands" armed with sticks and bills, traveled from plantation to plantation and brought production to a complete standstill for two days. On the third day, the police and the militia were dispatched to various plantations.

The concessions gained from this uprising were minor and very disappointing. It produced wages increases but no concessions on the land issue. However, of much greater significance was the formation of the Antigua Trades and Labor Union (ATLU) a few months earlier in January. The decision to form a union had been taken by a group of men that included Emanuel De Sousa, John Allen, Leonard Benjamin, Randall Lockart and Reginald Stevens, who became its first president. Advised and supported Walter Citrine, General Secretary of the British Trade Union Congress and member of the Royal Commission, the ATLU began organizing workers. Antiguan workers welcomed the union, with some celebrating its birth by refusing to work the following day, while others marked the occasion by ringing bells on plantations without permission. Several were arrested and charged with illegal bell ringing or with using plantation property to incite rebellion.¹¹ By the end of April 1939, membership in the union reached the 3000 mark. Noting the growth of this drive but hoping that it would collapse, the Antiguan sugar factory and the Antiguan Planters Association soon recognized the union. Regular bargaining sessions over contracts became a yearly occurrence between the union and these two organizations. From these beginnings, the union went on represent workers at other places of business. In 1944, the union began publishing its paper, The Worker's Voice, which would become one of Antigua's major newspapers. Thus began the unionization of the Antiguan working class, which would be a major milestone in its self-foundation.

Building on these successes, the union entered a slate of candidates for the elective seats in the legislature council and won four positions. With this voice in the legislature, the union began pushing for policy charges that would improve the lives of workers and facilitate the drive for self-transformation into an independent peasantry. Among its most important policy positions were (1) universal adult suffrage; (2) nationalization of the sugar industry; (3) self-government; (4) more land for peasants; and (5) security of tenure for peasants. In support of the latter two goals, union leaders pushed for a more vigorous implementing of the land settlement program recommended by the Royal Commissions of 1898 and 1938. By 1943, this pressure led to the formation of the Land Settlement and Development Board, which was authorized to acquire land and make small plots available to peasants. At this time, the Board controlled 6,219 acres of land on which 1220 persons were settled. By 1954, the latter number had risen to 4,457 and the acreage to 8,027. However, in 1956, the planters drew a line in the sand, insisting that there had to be an end to this process of land acquisition. Consequently, after 1956, the growth of this peasantry-in-formation was effectively blocked. Just how final that line would have been we will never really know as this peasant/planter conflict was essentially surpassed by the American penetration of the economy, which had little use for the plantation order of the region. As the leaders of the monopoly phase of capitalism, American capitalists were now twice removed from the plantation order of Antigua's economy, and hence saw the peripheral possibilities of the island very differently.

From the American perspective, the crucial peripheral possibilities were those of tourism and light, labor intensive manufacturing. These were the new areas in which the Americans had already started making investments. Hence the change in the nature of the peripheral capitalism that now structured the Antiguan economy. This shift finally brought Antiguan capitalism into the competitive era by establishing it on industries in which it had comparative advantages. However, these industries were largely foreign owned and so continued many of the peripheral dynamics of the mercantile phase. Consequently, these were not the best adjustments to the new monopoly phase.

The rise of this American owned tourist economy initiated a major break in the earlier patterns of self-formation among the Antiguan working class. It surpassed and made obsolete the project of self-transformation into an independent peasantry. The lure of "the Yankee dollar", the increasing number of jobs in tourism and the declining numbers in sugar all worked to undermine the life of that project. Its place was slowly taken by the new project of a consumerist lifestyle that would be supported by working in the hotels, casinos, restaurants, taxi and construction companies associated with the tourist industry. These were the new horizons that would guide the formation of the Antiguan working class in the second half of the twentieth century.

However, it is important to note here the significant milestones achieved by the Antiguan working class before this tourist economy swept aside both planter and peasant. First, the levels of class solidarity and class-consciousness achieved by Antiguan workers were very high. Their labor, the market value of that labor, and its exploitation by the planters figured very prominently in the identity and consciousness of members of this class. Second, with the formation of the ATLU, this class was better organized than ever before. With the entry into politics, it now had a share in state power. Together, these achievements produced a level of mobilization and unity that marked one of the major high points in the formation of this class. This sense of achievement and triumph are clearly reflected in Novelle Richard's The Struggle and the Conquest, one of the earliest works by an insider to chronicle this rise in the power of the Antiguan working class.

Cooptation, Consumerism and the Rise of Political Parties

Between 1956 and 1971, Antiguan economic growth was dominated by major expansions in tourism and minor ones in manufacturing. In 1958 tourist arrivals totaled 12,853; by 1971, they had jumped to 67,637. Over the same period, agriculture continued to decline. In 1966, the Antigua sugar factory went into receivership and was bought by a now labor dominated Antiguan government. The few remaining planters made their exit; the long retirement period was now finally over. But even this move by the government could not save the industry, and sugar production ceased in 1971.

This collapse of sugar ended not only the life of the planters but also the project of peasant development. As these classes declined, their places were taken by an expanding, but American dominated, class of hotel owners in the first case, and by the growing number of workers turning to these service establishments. This shift from a British planter mode of insertion into the global capitalist system to an American tourist one, created a major break in the self-formation of the Antiguan working class. This break was not of their own making and so required a shift in direction that was external in origin and somewhat arbitrary at the level of experience. Consequently, integrating experiences of the peasant project into the new one would be extremely difficult. Between the two there would only be the experience of rupture rather than of continuity, agency and growth.

With this rather abrupt turn to service work, came a new identity, a new consciousness, and new aspirations for the Antiguan working class. First, there were fundamental changes in the balance of class power. The new American capitalists who owned the hotels and the manufacturing establishments did not constitute as hegemonic a ruling class as the planters. They were not as well organized, and did not have as great a control over state power. Consequently, although they wielded great power, it was not of the magnitude of the planters. With this weaker ruling class, there was also a weaker institutionalizing of racist practices. Many of the caste-like features of plantation racism began to evaporate as the social spaces and positions occupied by Afro-Antiguans continued to increase. Explicit ideologies of white supremacy disappeared from the labor-dominated public realm. The bases for the racist practices that persisted were in the private sphere and affected public life by hiding behind the unequal and discriminatory practices of market allocation.

In this changed class/race situation, some room was created for the upward mobility of the working class. The social barriers to entering the mulatto-dominated middle were being removed. The tripolar construction of race had now collapse into a bipolar one. As a result, the possibility of joining the middle class was not the closed one that it was two decades earlier. Indeed, one of the more remarkable features of Antiguan society between 1970 and 1990 has been the fluidity of is class boundaries.

With incomes from the tourist industry, Antiguan workers aspired to fill the social positions opened up by the changes in the class/race compromise. This meant focusing on such activities as acquiring land for building homes, trying to get their children into good primary and secondary schools, thus improving the social and material status of the family. This familistic shift brought with it unprecedented emphases on individualism and private consumerism that were in tension with values of class/race solidarity, and projects of broader social transformation. Indeed, it is the opposition between these two tendencies that mark the consciousness of Antiguan workers between 1970 and 1990.

Contributing greatly to the polarization between these two tendencies were changes in the political organization of the working class that began in the late 1960s. Earlier, we noted that the ATLU had been running slates of candidates for political office since 1943. Thus the union had what was called at the time its Political Committee, or its "political arm." The currently ruling Antigua Labor Party (ALP) emerged out of this political arm of the ATLU, as other parties formed to contest the elections. Thus the 1956 elections were also contested by the Antigua National Party, a middle organization, and by the Port Union, a splinter group from the ATLU. Between 1943 and 1965 the ALP/ATLU combination defeated by wide margins all of its opponents. Consequently, this was a period of one-party dominance. However, throughout this phase the ALP as an organization remained subordinate to the ATLU.

Between 1965 and 1971, this dominance of the ATLU came to an end through a series factional fights that led to a phase of two-party dominance. This phase would also bring with it a major reversal in the relations between political parties and trade unions. The former would now come to dominate the latter with the competition between the parties splitting the earlier unity of the workers and feeding their consumerist tendencies. Although a very active and lively period, these developments also contained seeds of the decline of this class.

The factional fights that triggered the rise of the two party system were the result of oligarchical tendencies that developed within the union, and produced a pattern of periodic purges.¹² In 1944, V.C. Bird, replaced Stevens as president of the union and remained in that position until 1969. Over the years, the Bird faction had been able to emerge victorious from several of these factional fights. At the same time, Mr Bird was also the leader of the ALP, which was becoming progressively more powerful as the state went through the various stages of constitutional decolonization. Bird's power reached its peak in 1967 when Antigua and Barbuda became internally self-governing with the constitutional status of an associated state. Bird was both president of the ATLU and Premier of Antigua. Here we had not only an awesome concentration of power, but a dramatic increase in the power of party roles. Mr Bird as Premier now eclipsed Mr Bird as union president.

Concern over this eroding position of the union produced a major fight within the ALP/ATLU combination which was led by George Walter. The dismissal of Walter and others in 1967 by the Bird faction resulted in a mass exodus from the ATLU and the formation of the Antigua Workers Union (AWU). To compete with the ATLU, the AWU very quickly acquired a political arm which later became a political party, the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM). In 1968, conflicts between these two union/party combinations erupted in insurrectionary violence that came close to overthrowing the Bird regime. From this mass insurgency, the PLM would go on to defeat the ALP at the polls in 1971. After this dramatic defeat, the ATLU went into a steep decline. Most of its trained officers had left, worker confidence in the union was at an all time low, and its public meetings were heckled and disrupted by supporters of the new opposition group.

However, this rise of the PLM did not really halt the eclipsing of unions by political parties that triggered the conflict. Indeed, many of the oligarchical tendencies that characterized the ALP reappeared in the PLM.¹³ Thus in 1969, before the election that brought it to power, two factions were purged. One was the left wing of the party that included Tim Hector. This faction would later reorganize itself as a third party, the Antigua Caribbean Liberation Movement (ACLM). Under Hector's leadership, the ACLM followed closely the political theories of C.L.R. James.¹⁴ Particularly important for this party was James's claim that within the creative imagination of workers there is always forming original solutions to the problems confronting this class. These solutions the members of the ACLM believed were of a socialist nature. Hence they were often surprised and embarrassed by the consumerist tendencies of workers, and vigorously opposed their cultivation by the ALP and the PLM.

In short, the political terrain of the working class had been radically remapped. On the one hand, the ALP and the PLM were competing with each other for the opportunity to lead workers in the promised land of modern consumerism, and integrate them more centrally into the peripheral capitalist order of Antiguan society. On the other hand, there was the ACLM encouraging the alternative (socialist) tendencies that workers carried within them, and thus their impulses to transform Antiguan peripheral capitalism rather integrating into it. In this new political order, the trade unions would remain distant seconds to the political parties.

From these three political options, the Antiguan masses have consistently chosen the ALP to lead them toward the goal of a middle class existence, with ever rising levels of consumption. This they have done by re-electing the ALP every five years since 1976. Consequently, entry into the middle class has been the project of working class self-formation between the years 1976 to 1990. So far, this project has achieved only a very limited success. The return to power in 1976 brought a very different ALP/ATLU combination to the helm. Party leaders made a firm decision that unions would never again be strong in Antigua. Consequently, they pursued a policy of containment to ensure that unions would never again be able to unseat an ALP government.¹⁵ But at the same time the ATLU had to be rebuilt if the popular base was to be maintained and some measure of solidarity with workers recovered. Under the vigorous leadership of Robin Bascus, the party watched carefully the rebuilding of the union, controlling the growth of its finances and resisting all efforts such as the formation of a Trade Union Council that would bring workers from both unions together. In addition to these, patronage and the industrial court were used to contain and undercut power of unions. In the first case, access to new job in the hotels and construction were channeled through party leaders rather than union officials. In the second case, stiff fines would be imposed on union leaders for calling "illegal strikes."

At the same time that ALP leaders were putting these self-protective measures in place, they also brought many workers into government service to fill positions they had never held before. However, these workers had to be ALP supporters, which only reinforced the political division in the working class. ALP leaders also embarked on a massive program to encourage foreign investment in the Antiguan economy. It eliminated personal income tax, and promised increasing levels of personal consumption. As a result, the tourist industry continued to grow quite vigorously until the late 1980s, causing per capita incomes to rise significantly. However, this economic growth was not enough to incorporate the majority of the working class, and keep pace with rising expectations about the consumer lifestyle. This gap was and continues to be filled by rising levels of corruption, stealing, drug trafficking, and other illegal activities in all sectors of Antiguan society. The consumerism of this period has unleashed unprecedented and previously undreamt of levels of greed that have severely eroded the moral fabric of social life in Antigua.

In spite of these efforts by the ALP and the high social and moral costs, Antigua is far from being a middle class society. It remains a poor society, with a large and divided working class that accounts for much of this poverty. The disappointments and frustrations associated with this inability to realize the middle class transformation of the consumer life style of the working class has resulted in high level of out-migration to places like London, Miami, New York and Toronto in search of what could not be found at home. Thus, the end of the 1980s found the Antiguan working class in an impasse that was forcing it to abandon country, fellow workers, and its long history of struggle, self-organization and institution-building. Divided between political parties, out of touch with its own vision of society, and clinging to a rapidly vaporizing consumerist project, this was not only a class in decline but also one that had lost its way.

Immigration, Deformation and Informatic Capitalism

By the start of the 1980s, Western capitalism was once again in the throes of another major reorganization of its productive structures and routines. This change in the mode of production was an information-based transformation that was made necessary by a hegemonic challenge from Japanese capitalism.. This reorganization is still very much in progress, but when completed will establish the post-monopoly phase of Western capitalism - one that I've called informatic capitalism.¹⁶ So far, what is distinctive about this phase is that through ongoing revolutions in the field of informatics, modes of material and cultural production are being transformed and globally restructured. Informatics is the science of how information is transmitted and received, stored and retrieved from electronic systems such as telegraphs, telephones, radios, televisions, fax machines, computers and robots. Using coded information to issue and to stop commands, informatics has now made it possible for machines to control other machines.

From the point of view of capitalist production, the most innovative of the early applications of the new informatic technology were made by the Japanese - particularly the engineers at Toyota. Japanese capitalists pioneered what has come to be known today as the Toyotaist or high-volume, flexible mode of production. It is a post-Fordist mode of production that has overcome many of the rigidities of the Fordist mode without losing the latter's capabilities for mass production. This was the achievement in autos and other fields that gave the Japanese challenge hegemonic significance. This challenge achieved great momentum in the mid-seventies with American market shares and major sectors of American industry falling to Japanese competition.

The definite outlines of an American counter-strategy emerged in the early 1980s. It was a package of neo-liberal reforms that continues to guide the American attempt at regaining economic dominance. At home, it has meant protectionist policies, mergers and acquisitions, bailing out of key industries in trouble, massive transfers of capital to the upper classes, the weakening of unions and the strengthening of private sector initiatives and leadership. Abroad it has meant increasing Western access to third world markets and resources, the opening of financial markets, downsizing the state and increasing the room for private initiative. Within this neo-liberal space, the U.S. economy has been making the shift from Fordism to high volume, flexible production and so has been able to contain the Japanese challenge. These shifts to the Toyotaist mode of production by Asian and American capitalism, with Europe on the way, constitute the global changes that have introduced the informatic phase of world capitalism. However, the collapse of "dot.com" companies in the closing months of 2000 followed by the collapse major companies like Enron, Worldcom and Tyco indicated that there were still major instabilities in the American economy.

As in the cases of the liberal and monopoly phases, the rise of the informatic phase has created a more adverse environment for Antigua's economy. The island's tourist-based peripheral capitalism is having almost as difficult a time adjusting to the new phase as its plantation-based predecessor had adjusting to both the liberal and monopoly phases. Once again, Antigua's economy has been rendered obsolete by a capitalist class that has not been able to keep pace with changes on the global front. This class has not been much more dynamic than the planters were at the start of the liberal era. Just as the latter increased the levels of international competition, so also has the informatic phase. The slow down of the Antiguan economy in the decade of the 1990s can be traced in part to the rather passive and non-dynamic nature of the responses of this class to the more competitive nature of informatic capitalism. The most devastating impact has been on the manufacturing sector, which is now practically non-existent. In contrast to the monopoly phase, Antigua has ceased to be a competitive site for locating the labor-intensive phases of manufacturing concerns owned by metropolitan capitalists. These have now been moved to sites in Asia, Mexico and Central America, where labor is cheaper and less unionized.

The ruling ALP's response has been to resist going to the IMF inspite of major debt burdens. Nevertheless, the regime has been under a lot of pressure from both the IMF and the World Bank to neo-liberalize the Antiguan economy, and provide the new conditions that would make it attractive to American capital now in its informatic phase. In this new economic order, third world countries are expected to make up the drastic cutbacks in foreign aid with external investments in local capital markets, the privatizing of state assets, the lowering of wages, the weakening of unions and other measures that would increase the inflow of investment capital. Like capitalists in the tourist industry, the ALP has created the illusion that it has been implementing some of these reforms, but in fact has not. Rather, it has implemented selected elements of these structural adjustment programs that were consistent with its plans for its own political survival. From the point of view of workers, the most important of these was the IMF recommendation for changes in immigration policy. The new policy would admit large pools of laborers who would work for wages that were below those of unionized workers. This change would help to reverse Antigua's declining attractiveness to foreign capital in the informatic age. At the same time, it would also help the ALP at the polls. As a result, estimates of up to 20,000 workers from the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Guyana, and Dominica have been imported into Antigua, where the population has remained around 70,000 for several decades.

Along with this shift in immigration policy, the ALP has responded to the new informatic order by attempting to diversify the Antiguan economy, taking it into the areas of information processing, offshore banking and offshore gambling. However, the latter two moves have brought the ALP into a head-on conflict the U.S., Britain and France, who had all placed financial advisories on Antigua, because of concerns over taxes and money laundering.¹⁷ At the same time, the ALP has so far avoided more mainstream types of e-commerce such as those that have developed in Puerto Rico.

The failure of these efforts at diversification has left the Antiguan economy without a dynamic growth sector comparable to tourism in its peak period. This has slowed the creation of desirable new jobs in the private sectors. This reduction in international competitiveness has created significant disequilibria in the Antiguan economy that has slowed its growth and increased its instability. As the state has stepped into the breach many of these economic disequilibria have been converted into political disequilibria. These can be seen in overstaffed government bureaucracies as the state elites attempt to keep unemployment down. These high wage costs together with a heavy debt burden and inefficient tax collection have destroyed the states budgetary process creating current account deficits of such magnitudes that the state has been weeks late in paying its civil servants, has been unable to make its contributors social security and medical benefits schemes, and instead has been taking money out of the latter for salaries and investments. Thus, while these questionable methods have allowed the ALP to keep its social programs in spite of neoliberalism, it has been at the price of increasing instability.

Thus our final question must be: what has been the impact of these changes on the Antiguan working class? The impact has to speed up the decline of this class and initiate its deformation. First, the more adverse international conditions affecting the Antiguan economy have only increased the vaporizing of the consumerist project. This goal is in recession, slipping ever more rapidly out of the reach of Antiguan workers, and causing them emigrate in increasing numbers. It is this movement out that explains the rather stable population level inspite of the new immigration policies.

Second the growing numbers of immigrant workers have increased the levels of poverty experienced by members of the Antiguan working class, This increased poverty has finally turned the long depressed Grays Farm area of St Johns into a real ghetto by international standards. This in turn has significantly widened the gap between the Antiguan rich, who have been getting richer, and the poor.

Third, the presence of the immigrant workers has created new divisions between workers, as feelings of xenophobia, competition and solidarity get worked out. Feelings of xenophobia are particularly strong in relation to workers from the Dominican Republic as there are language barriers to be overcome. These additions and new divisions have changed the composition and identity of the Antiguan working class. A large section of it now has no concrete connections to the history of struggle outlined earlier. They have brought their own and these must now mix with the indigenous ones. What the outcome will be is certainly an open question.

Fourth, given the shady images surrounding the expansions into off-shore banking and offshore gambling, these have so far tended to reinforce the value that crime and other illegal activities as acceptable ways of reaching the consumer heaven of modern capitalism. These industries cultivate and reward the consumer lifestyle by operating on the edge or just outside of the boundaries of the law.

Given the dispersive impact of these four factors, the Antiguan working class has once again a rather steep hill to climb before it can regain the path of self-formation as a class. First, it has to see through the pitfalls of its consumerist phase, and put consumption in a more appropriate perspective. Second, it needs to pay closer attention to its own creativity, and to its own vision of Antiguan society. Flickering glimpses of this creativity and this vision can still be seen in the indigenizing of church music that has been taking place over the past two decades. Whether or not this is the last phase of the Afro-Antiguan nationalist project, or the surface manifestations of a new cultural transformation remains to be seen. Third, the Antiguan working class must overcome its growing internal divisions. It has to bring new creativity and vision to its political life that will enable it to move beyond its entrapment in the competition between its two political parties. Getting out from under their control is a must for any kind of meaningful recovery. It also has to bring new creativity and expanded capacities for creolization and assimilation if it is to heal the divisions in its ranks that have come with the change in immigration policy. Fourth, this reconstituted class will have to struggle to overcome the drop in its standard living that have come with the labor demands of the informatic phase. Fifth and finally, the Antiguan working will have to develop organizations of its own such as a trade union council where it can discuss its concerns, challenge current ideologies of narrow partyism and market fundamentalism, in settings that are not dominated by the political parties. Further, this class needs to deepen the regional nature of its trade unions, and together seek out a strong presence in organization of global governance such as the WTO.

Conclusion

The foregoing has been an attempt to analyze a slice of the experiences of blacks in the Caribbean. In particular, the experiences of the black working class of Antigua and Barbuda. I've tried to show the historic processes of formation by which this class came to be, and those associated with its decline. If the aforementioned work, The Struggle and The Conquest, represented a self-portrait of this class during it upward phase, then Keithlyn Smith's History of the Working People of Antigua is a self-portrait of this class in its current state of crisis. The tone of this work is anything but triumphal. On the contrary, it is sober and cautiously optimistic about the future. Indeed, this class needs to make a strong recovery.

Notes

17 "The Ugly Facts Behind the Financial Sanctions," Outlet, Vol. No.29 (Friday 21 July, 2000) p. 1.

© Paget Henry, 2004.

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