A Practice of Professional Social Change
By LLOYD TAYLOR
“Stare hard and reason, lady, where I come from and where I go”
—Martin Carter’s, Do Not Stare at Me
Dennis Pantin
The subject of these reflections is the life and times of our late departed brother, our relative-in- action, and our dear, Dennis Alberto Pantin. My thoughts are not about his station as professor of 30 years in the economics’ department of the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. Yet it is about a person, who treated the study of economics as a door to an understanding of his own reality, the better to participate in its transformation with some modest sense of accomplishment.
But to talk about an ancestor, from a transcendental and therefore substantive pitch, is to reflect on ourselves as well, on the people of the Caribbean, the descendants of ancestors, the majority of whom, arrived on the shore-lands of the islands of the Antilles in shackles, or by force of one kind or another, and of we who are fated to convert our lives and living conditions, by our own innate creativity, from the waste of the globalized vomit of Western European ruling-cum-merchant classes’ drive for capital accumulation, into masters of our destiny. That is the only meaningful translation of what the poet means when he warns of his ultimate coming thus:
I come from the nigger yard of yesterday
leaping from the oppressors’ hate and the scorn of myself.
From the agony of the dark hut in the shadow
and the hurt of things,
from the long days of cruelty and the long nights of pain
down the wide streets of tomorrow, of the next day
Leaping I come, who cannot see will hear.
(Martin Carter, I Come from the Nigger Yard)
To leap forward into bold and brilliant futures is the everyday challenge of West Indian peoples. I believe it is our collective mission, and its relentless prosecution is the process by which we will earn the capacity to found, shape and create a civilization we can be proud of, as that mission becomes part of many persons’ lives. From what we know, Dennis Pantin joined that collective mission, and the pan and Carnival cultural traditions, as a first generation Trinidadian of a family with roots in Venezuela on the South American continent. In that respect, his adoption of the participant-observer status is even more remarkable and is perhaps explained by family ethos and the impact of the St. James’ environment during his younger years.
From that angle of vision, the responses to Dennis Pantin’s passing would suggest that we need to celebrate more deliberately the truest contributions- intellectual or otherwise- of the life missions of our exemplars while they are still alive. Without that practice, we often only pass on for posterity anecdotal personal experiences. But slight recollections are no alternatives for the eternal footprints that our search seeks to identify in order to advance the agenda for future generations to build upon.
The public outpouring of praise does tell us that on the most personal of levels Dennis Pantin touched many individuals and many different types of organizations. It means that he was a good man; not a perfect one. And people experience good deeds from good men and they talk about them. Kari Levitt, now in her eighties, described to me how physically demanding it was for her to travel from Port of Spain to St. Augustine everyday to work on the publication of Essays on the Theory of Plantation Economy and how much she relied on Dennis Pantin’s time and access to resources to facilitate its completion and its launch in the early part of 2010. Illness shut him out from attending the book launch, but he ensured that everyone who mattered was invited. In the role of facilitator, Pantin made a huge difference, I suspect, to many similar causes.
Our venerable pastoral cleric, Father Clyde Harvey’s homily, came closest to fingering what was truest about our erstwhile friend. The cleric assured us that God never asked the quick to perform mighty deeds. It would be enough for God, if like Dennis you lived justly, loved mercy and walked humbly before Him, after the fashion laid-down by the biblical-prophet, Micah. And it can be said of Dennis Pantin, that he never burnt the bridges which first nurtured his social sensibilities while he sustained a humble search within the Immortal Creative Existence for answers to the intractable social problems besetting local and regional Caribbean society. To the extent that the preacher’s homily represented Dennis’ life, it is not an unreasonable assumption to think that he would scarcely have recognized himself in what were lofty thoughts of him.
Dennis enjoyed a broad appeal from many circles of endeavor. That was in part inspired by a willingness to deploy his skills and abilities to initiatives in pursuit of a civic passion for enhancing society’s general welfare and improving each individual’s access to that welfare. That tendency to target change by personal social action was a common feature of the generation that came to adulthood in the 1970’s, 14 years after Eric Williams began his ministry of a new nationalist movement. Two important questions were, how was that passion ignited and nurtured in Dennis Pantin’s heart and how did it bloom?
The seminal influences on Dennis were certainly his early years in the Tapia House Group. Even the noble Allan Harris claimed that Tapia was the place where he did his post-graduate work. Dennis arrived as a student on the UWI, St Augustine campus, and together with Keith Smith, Lennox Grant, Angela Cropper, Esther LeGendre and Pat Downes, established a Tapia slate of candidates for the student guild elections in the early 1970’s. That outer core would include Albert Vincent, Anthony Bartholomew, with Vanus James who functioned somewhat, as a non-participant observer. The first three of these persons added a Fatima old-boys contingent to the core Tapia activists, the majority of whom then, shared a common Queen’s Royal College (QRC) high-school tie. This fact would reflect itself in a quasi-ethnic kind of loyalty that never really surfaced as such on issues. But Dennis also had his own personal nexus of an off-on- and-from- campus cohort who belonged to ‘the Polis’ that reflected his passion for carnival fete and a capacity for a good Trinidadian lime (ribaldry). Years after from his position in the university he would expand his public collaboration to include labor and non-governmental organizations.
From the THG experience in the years up to 1976, Dennis Pantin adopted the prescriptions for decolonization in post-independent Trinidad and Tobago. These were Constitution Reform, Economic Reorganization and Unconventional Politics. The major policy planks were designed to deliver respectively the goals of power to the people, localized ownership and decision-making of the economy, and a participatory republican democracy.
The idea of a participatory republican democracy and the debates meant to localize it inside Tapia in the years from 1973 to 1980 provided the circumstances that made Dennis then, and thereafter an unrepentant Tapia dissident. He wore the self-proclaimed mantle proudly, but it would ever so often mask his acceptance of the body of Tapia-thought that he took from generously to inform his own private initiatives for change.
Founded by Lloyd Best, as the antithesis to that particular variant of authoritarian leadership he labeled ‘Doctor Politics’, the Tapia House Group/Movement was confounded by internal attempts to identify and extinguish similar authoritarian tendencies within its walls. Ironically Best, for far too many persons, would become the representative sample of the plantation society’s variant of the authoritarian virus. Often in my judgment our colleagues and friends, well-intentioned though they were, commingled form with essence, mistook the mortar for the pestle and the baby for the bathwater. The aim to slay maximum leadership, one of the THG’s leading reasons for existence, was targeted wrongly, and was hazardous to the organization’s existence. But slaying the beast that was a cultural phenomenon of 400 years of centralized colonial government was always potentially troublesome, especially if one looked outside oneself to find it. That is often so because those who sought to destroy maximum leadership tended to locate the limitations of governance more on the centralizing drive and misrule of the governors, and less on vigilance, and other responsibilities that is demanded of the governed in a socio-cultural context that is endowed with a narrow total democratic capacity.
One just has to imagine a small quasi-political group that was too fledgling to have a clear cut demarcation between its executive and its council of representatives; with general-assemblies populated by more well-wishers than members, led by a democratic -style political leader who was “highly driven” (Lennox Grant); two permanent full-time administrative staff members (expanded to five by 1976 to accommodate electioneering for parliament); 8 years old (and up to 1986 without access or participation in government), and endowed richly with an idealistic desire to spread the word among all flesh. Penny-pinching with every breath-creating liability to meet the costs of survival the THG, not unlike the National Joint Action Committee (NJAC) and the New Beginning Movement (NBM) was lucky to enjoy a surfeit of idealism in the form of men and woman who were young enough to make their participation a labor of love. In that context, THG members debated the choice of constitutional party reform that would restrain centralized decision-making and widen participation at all party levels. The evolution of the growth of the group from a small-knit organization to one with increasing membership and greater social significance demanded at each stage a necessary adjustment of its constitution. But too often the debate centered on the role and powers of the group’s political leader Lloyd Best and how to contain or share them. The flip-side to those efforts is that the burden of expansion and growth fell on a few persons, many of whom shared Lloyd Best’s interpretation that the slaying of “doctor politics” also required clearly defined responsibilities of all executive officers in particular, and an active Council of Representatives drawn from the national community as the legislative arm of the party. For many reasons these were tall orders. It required experience, discernment, personal and collective self-knowledge, patience, creativity and humility. In those respects, we suffered an insufficiency of the human capacity needed. THG was forging a new, unscripted path to political organization in an intensely restrictive authoritarian atmosphere that was dominated by highly circumscribed access to public media by opposition and non-parliamentary political parties and the omnipresence of personalized government.
With elections looming on the horizon, the debate on party reform consumed time and energies enough to distract and dampen enthusiasm from the task of electoral mobilization. Dennis Pantin entered that fray as spokesperson for a diverse group of Tapia members who sought to focus on the election campaign by postponing the debate for internal party reform until after the elections.
Years later Dennis referred the group as The Manzanilla Group (MG). The MG first met in Manzanilla at the late Jeremy Mar’s home on August 1976. Its resolution for the postponement of the debate on party constitution reform was accepted by the Council of Representatives (COR) on August 8, 1976. No doubt the participation of its 16 supporters would have helped to carry the vote on the resolution. After general elections, the general assembly was reconstituted on December 5, 1976, but it broke up over a clash between those who sought reforms along the lines of a collegiate leadership which proposed to eliminate the need for a personality called the ‘political leader’ and those who sought a clear locus of executive decision-making combined with an ambiguous articulation of executive responsibilities. It is perhaps too much of an understatement to say that Best could not endure more of the relentless focus on him as the central object of party reform debates for the better part of 4 years. No side would give quarter and Best walked out saying that he was on “a new road”, from the next day.
Fifteen members, presumably reflecting the sentiments of the Manzanilla Group, wrote the Secretary in early 1977 calling for an extra-ordinary General Assembly. But that call went unheeded, although it was formally in line with the 1973 Tapia constitution. That did not happen, not because of Best’s refusal “…to talk through the issues… “, as one journalist wrote publicly years later. It did not happen because the Executive decided to expand participation by summoning the parliamentary candidates, and the COR to decide on the timing of the assembly. The COR decided on the date for an assembly, and in a subsequent meeting to discuss electoral participation in the local elections of 1977, decided against holding it. Attendance by members had dropped to very low levels as the realities of defeat at the 1976 polls and the difficulty of winning consensus for internal reforms set in. Those who sustained participation and assumed responsibility for Tapia’s public presence felt that psychologically, the climate was still too acrimonious for discussion. For these reasons a decision was taken to collapse all existing party organs into a single meeting of ‘party workers’. The idea was to distinguish those who worked to advance the organization’s mission from those who talked about it. After the elections very few members shouldered the costs of building a permanent professional party, in human or physical capital terms. Still fewer members shouldered responsibility for paying the election debt off, and the bulk of that was assumed silently by a list of committed monthly contributors and Lloyd Best 30 years after the 1976 elections. .
In April 1980, Dennis Pantin, on the Manzanilla Group’s behalf summarized its position on the reform debate in an issue by the same name. Purportedly written and published jointly by Junior Wiltshire and Errol Mohan, the document concluded that: 1. On April 3, 1977 the debate was blocked by ” a completely undemocratic and authoritarian decision by the group of 8 present….to rescind the decision to recall the Assembly.. and disband existing agencies”; 2. That the resumption of the debate by those who since participated contained ” …no discussion of the fundamental isssues..” ; and 3. “No attempt was made to produce, or to refer to, the accumulated experience of the membership as evidenced either, by the existing constitution or the differing proposals presented to the Assembly of November 14, 1976.”
The fact is that by the time of publication of The Manzanilla Group’s issue of Vol. 1. No.1., Dennis Pantin and many of his cohorts were politically inactive inside the THM, although they were not without political interest in the business of social change. The consequence is that debate on intra and inter-party political reform was underway in earnest between 1979 and 1980 and right down to 1986, without the critical inputs of many whose participation waned. In every sense of the word, informal political reform was a hot button issue. Between June and September 1979 a full contextual statement on the debate on party reform was prepared for consideration. The contextual statement dealt with an entire gamut of issues raised in the context of party reform. By May 12, 1980 active members of the THG/THM were meeting for the first time to consider a proposal from Lloyd Best that would usher in the era of the first elements of inter- party-reform, to involve all opposition forces and introduce coalition politics in the formation of the National Alliance of Trinidad and Tobago in 1981 (NATT), and, in a second phase, to its consummation in the form of a party of parties against the PNM in 1986.
Participation among members declined for many reasons. The debate took a toll on those who had “no gumption” or taste for conflict and hard words. There were those of us who could no longer sustain the high personal costs of unrewarded participation. Still many had professional and career dreams to pursue. Most however just could no longer sustain the hope for change after a rout at the 1976 general elections for parliamentary control. But Dennis Pantin, although no Alexander Solzhenitsyn railing against repression of a totalitarian Soviet state, chose to call himself a Tapia dissident, over the manner in which issues were being resolved. But he remained faithful to the Tapia message. In fact it was to defend the integrity of that message that he wore the mask of a dissident. To say that Dennis Pantin’s view of the debate was truly more of a dissenting one, is not to belittle his position. From our conversations in 1986, it was clear that without additional political investment inside Tapia, he had bought in to the party-of-parties idea with sufficiently strong convictions to be disappointed when Tapia announced its reservations and a qualified participation in the National Alliance for reconstruction. Six years or so later, it mattered not that the party-of-parties idea was created and endorsed by the only existing Tapia caucus of ‘party workers’.
In 2010, twenty-six years after our sharp exchange one night in Tunapuna at a PNM meeting in 1986, and my own forecast that NAR would deliver more political disaster than we cared to contemplate, I would share with him my own doubts on the political wisdom and the beneficial effects of Tapia’s 1986 decisions. Albeit, Tapia’s criticism that Mr. Robinson’s style of political leadership, ignored the fact that the party of parties was a coalition, was not the only reason NAR was a one term government. For reasons germane to his illness, we had little opportunity to explore these issues, even though Pantin remained accessible to the very end.
Years after his initial dissent from what he saw, wrongly in my view, as undemocratic procedures, Dennis Pantin would turn his intellectual energies to the issues that bedeviled the decolonization process, despite formal independence status. He offered to re-examine the economic structure in the Caribbean against the background of what he understood from the theoretical models advanced by the Best-Levitt team and by Dudley Seers. He proposed an alternative interpretation of what he thought was wrong with the way Caribbean economies functioned. He set out his model in a paper entitled, The Caribbean Rentier- Economy and Society, published in The Thought of New World (Jamaica, 2010) and edited by Brian Meeks and Norman Girvan. Here Pantin offers to provide “…the missing link in the explanations of how Caribbean economies work”. He advanced the view that both the Model of Plantation Economy (Best, 1968) and the Mechanism of an Open Petroleum Economy ( Dudley Seers, 1964) suffer from a common deficiency. Both models, he contends, obscures the role of human agency in the replication of Caribbean type economies (pp 107). He concludes that “…rentier economies beget rentier states”(pp114). He summarizes his position thus:
“The reality of a Rentier economy is such that s/he who controls the state, controls rents. The more opaque, non-transparent and non-accountable is the state, then the greater is the capacity for a small group (including foreign investors) to control economic rents…. This process begins with the political parties, that contest for state power, and their financing” (pp 116).
In the perspective of the Rentier Economy State and Society (RESS), Pantin argues that what distinguished Caribbean economic structure was not the resource itself, but whether value is added to the natural resource by the owners of capital. In the context of his political economy, the primary conflict was therefore over the allocation of economic rents. Political reform demanded a system of accounts that brought transparency to the origin and distribution of those economic rents. To dismantle the Rentier Economy and institute economic transformation Pantin proposed five technical principles thus: a transparent national accounting along with - inter-generational equity, the maximization of value added along the value chain, measurement of value added, a system for resource owners to capture the rents and the reinvestment of rents.
To summarize, Pantin’s articulation seems to have disturbed none of the essential insights offered by the Best or Seers models. But that claim is to anticipate that debate. Pantin’s economic analysis and prescriptions pointed to constitutional reform as a priority issue on the domestic agenda, not unlike the thought of Best and Tapia. That is significant because his conceptualization of Caribbean type economies implied action orders for governance and politics. What he saw as the missing link in the PEM and the OPEM swept logically into an agenda for constitutional change in order to replace the opacity of rent collecting financial transactions with transparency. He seemed encouraged to pursue the constitutional reforms required by civic action, instead of direct political intervention. That placed his intervention somewhat above the fray of political contention and competition, and as a consequence, gave a more universal and therefore a less encumbered public access to his message for constitutional reforms. The CRF, because of the neutral political space it occupied. faced the dilemma of promoting a message for change while relying on the agents of direct politics for implementation. Despite this limitation, as a private initiative, in a culture that accords primacy to government authority, the CRF deserves our highest commendations.
It is upon the theoretical rock of his Rentier Economy that he founded, with others, the Constitution Reform Forum (CRF) to make a single theoretical statement that encompassed the relationship between economy and polity. It is safe to presume that his commitment to the CRF’s agenda was total. The CRF promoted reform of party campaign financing, electoral reform and a macco-senate - all designed to aid transparency and transformation. (www.caribelaw.net/crf/crfpapers/crfperspectives.html). But in that regard the issue over the appointment of senators in 2001, and which divided Prime Minister and ceremonial President, may have provided a convenient jumping off point for the formation of the CRF.
Whether Pantin’s theoretical alternative was a significant contribution to the body of thought on the political-economy of decolonization, or whether it challenged or enhanced significantly the dominant decolonizing paradigm at the center of the thought of Tapia and the New World Group, or even of contributions of W Arthur Lewis, Eric Williams and CLR James, are questions we are under obligation to answer. Likewise the work of the CRF also needs critical intellectual scrutiny against the background of the constitutional reform debate since the 1970’s.
We owe it to posterity to ferret out the contribution of every worthy Caribbean son and daughter which alone appropriately celebrate their lives. Dennis’ life is another solitary reminder of the work that awaits the attention of our innate creative powers. The reservoir of goodwill evoked by his passing should make hard thinking of his contributions a fresh endorsement of independent thought.
Lloyd Taylor worked as a business consultant and regulatory advocate for ground transportation in NYC for the last 2 decades. He is a one of many foundation members of Tapia. He has no other institutional affiliation.
In Guyana, reciprocated animosity has not even come close to plumbing the awful depths which exist in so many other countries and, God willing, such hideous animosity never will prevail. But the endless political and racial suspicions and outspoken antagonisms, the endless jockeying for position in purely partisan causes, the endless threats of trouble to come, the endless refusals to compromise, the continual putting of party before country, the ingrained and knee-jerk demonstrations of incivility in the dialogue between the principal parties – all this is immeasurably frustrating, morale-depressing and wearying. One yearns for an end to it, one yearns for a large patriotism to include all of us, one yearns for an uplifting sense of greater vision, one yearns for mutual civility, one yearns for peace. And I read Yehuda Amichai’s poem and I know what he means.
