State violence

This litany of terror does not end here of course, but the important consideration is that these occurrences are not un- connected or un-related events. They form part of a common network that rests on a base of state and/or state-sponsored violence and terror in Guyana today. Like all social phenomena, understanding them requires that we decipher the inner dynamic or logic that drives these events forward. To achieve this, we should recognise for a start that they have common root causes. One of these, which I hope to demonstrate, is the pathological degeneration of the state into the routine use of overt and covert violence. As we shall see, this degeneration embraces all arms of the state, but perhaps least of all the Parliament, mainly because it has not been meeting. Nonetheless, our argument will be that the Parliament has violated international laws/norms and has sought to give ‘legal cover’ for this pathological degeneration, particularly through its terrorism legislation.

Why focus on state violence?
My focus is going to be on state violence. This is, of course, by no means the only major form of violence in society. The present choice is based on several considerations, two of which I refer to here. First and foremost, there is the consideration that worldwide experiences of war between states, civil war, and dictatorship indicate that these have been the deadliest forms of violence in terms of taking human life. The present global distribution and ownership of weapons of mass destruction in the possession of states further indicate that there are enough of these weapons around that, if used, they would certainly end life as we know it on planet Earth. I therefore, do not believe that I need to say more either about the historically destructive or present potentially destructive capacity of state violence, to win support for the view that it is the overwhelmingly dominant institutional source of violence.

Secondly, the state, by its very social construction is distinguished by the fact that it alone exercises the ultimate monopoly of violence in any organised society. It is important for the later discussion if readers were to recognise that although the state has a monopoly of force, this force is most effective when it is least used. Government by ‘consent’ of the governed reduces recourse to the state as an instrument of violence. As that consent diminishes, however, the resort to state violence increases.

Corruption and violence
There are several ‘dialectical’ counterparts to the pathological descent of the Guyana state into the increasing violence referred to above. Two of these are of particular concern at this point. One is the rapid transformation of the state - in contradistinction to the government - from an engine to provide economic and social development, the guarantor of the rule of law, the preserver of political stability, and the protector of national sovereignty, into a criminal enterprise. That is, the state has become little more than a vehicle for blatant individual self-enrichment, unconscionable plundering of our resources with the ‘blessings’ of the state, and grabber of the wealth produced by the broad masses of ordinary working and self-employed persons. This transformation has produced in Guyana the classic situation of a ‘state-for-itself.’ This state impedes economic growth, stifles the productivity of all productive factors, scares away ‘legitimate’ investors, and encourages hustle and other corrupt and bandit forms of capital into the country. In other words, the state serves the interests of backward capitalism, which I have argued on several occasions in this series, best describes the Guyana economy today. This backward capitalist environment spawns the state violence and terror around us.

On the economic front, such a state is characterised by, among other things, endemic corruption; the regular suppression, distortion, manipulation, and falsification of economic information; the betrayal of public trust; and, a systemic failure to exercise fiduciary and prudential responsibility in the use of both local and overseas taxpayers money. The donor countries and the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) (or at least their local representatives), which provide substantial resources to such states are aware of these features, but in their effort to be ‘diplomatic and comfortable’ with the authorities become in effect complicit in these undemocratic outcomes. To the extent that this is so, the international community weakens rather than strengthens the environment for democratic development.