{"id":40866,"date":"2017-09-08T09:23:26","date_gmt":"2017-09-08T13:23:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/?p=40866"},"modified":"2017-09-08T09:23:26","modified_gmt":"2017-09-08T13:23:26","slug":"end-of-the-plantation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/end-of-the-plantation\/","title":{"rendered":"End of the Plantation?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By Ravi Dev<\/p>\n<p>It appears the days of the plantations, the raison d\u2019etre for Guyana\u2019s existence, are numbered. As one who grew up on one, I really do not mourn their passing, save for the callous way this administration has gone about the job. Surely, we cannot accept the neo-liberalism dogma that decisions rendering 10,000 persons jobless must be made by the \u201cmarket\u201d.<br \/>\nThe plantation has been described by some as a \u201ctotal institution\u201d that acted to socialize, through force and other coercive methods, the workers into an organized \u201cmachine\u201d for production. There is no question the planters had a clear picture of what the ideal plantation worker ought to be: docile, industrious, concerned about the plantation\u2019s interests ahead of his own, and willing to follow orders. That the workers would have resisted this dehumanisation of their being was also not unexpected, and the plantations were structured to overcome this resistance.<br \/>\nThe plantation, founded on slave labour, was predicated on violence backed by the always available State coercive institutions. The demands of the sugar plantations required comparatively large investments, which in turn demanded consistent and cheap production to deliver demanded high returns. Violence and coercion were integral features of the plantation economy, to discipline individuals into this new technology of production. The abolition of slavery, while a landmark change in the legal relations between planters and workers as owner and chattel, simply forced changes in the methodology of applying the violence to extract production during the indentureship period and after.<br \/>\nWorkers were organised into \u201cgangs\u201d under the direct supervision of \u201cdrivers,\u201d who were selected for the position by white overseers recruited from the underclasses of Scotland and Ireland. Drivers were men most willing and capable of obtaining the greatest amount of labour for the least amount of money from their fellow workers \u2013 by any means necessary. This arrangement was crucial, since the nature of sugar cultivation and harvesting created variable conditions necessitating daily bargaining over the content of the \u201ctask\u201d that had to be completed for a day\u2019s pay.<br \/>\nDrivers of women\u2019s gangs, as well as the White overseers, were notorious for taking advantage of the women in their gangs. These two issues \u2014 wages and women \u2014 were at the heart of most of the \u201cofficial\u201d violence against the Indians during their sojourn on the plantations, when they protested the quotidian injustices. The managers had a tactic of initiating the issuance of summons for any infraction, with its withdrawal contingent on the worker agreeing to pay costs. Up the 1880s, the majority of drivers over Indian gangs were Africans, and there were many reports of these drivers assaulting Indians. The plantation discipline featured floggings, assaults etc. that helped to fix in the Indian mind the image of the African driver as a \u201cbully\u201d, which was not alleviated when the Police Force formed in 1839 was staffed overwhelmingly from that section of the population.<br \/>\nThe attitude of the planters towards the sugar workers was exemplified by the planter William Russell, who agreed with the view of plantation managers that indentured workers should be \u201cat work, in hospital, or in goal\u201d. These locales defined the three institutions over which total control of discipline and domination could be exercised over the immigrant: the \u201coverseer\/driver\u201d system to deal with the immigrant at work; and the medical and judicial systems to impose the planters\u2019 wish and will over them within the \u201chospital and goal\u201d.<br \/>\nIn his indictment of the immigration system in 1869, Des Voux not only castigated the magistrates (who would typically have lunch with the local manager before presiding over his court that imposed criminal penalties on civil charges, and beside whom the manager would sit if charged by an immigrant) but the medical doctors who conspired to ensure that immigrants get back into the fields. The hospital became part of the system and surveillance of the immigrants to ensure that the ideal worker was available to the plantation.<br \/>\nIn the one hundred years following the end of indentureship in 1917, not much has changed in social relations on the plantations that were now ironically dubbed \u201cestates\u201d, invoking the \u201cestates\u201d of the English nobility with their serfs. Even local managers became \u201cnobility\u201d!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Ravi Dev It appears the days of the plantations, the raison d\u2019etre for Guyana\u2019s existence, are numbered. As one who grew up on one, I really do not mourn their passing, save for the callous way this administration has gone about the job. Surely, we cannot accept the neo-liberalism dogma that decisions rendering 10,000 persons jobless must be made by the \u201cmarket\u201d. The plantation has been described by some as a \u201ctotal institution\u201d that acted to socialize, through force and other coercive methods, the workers into an organized \u201cmachine\u201d&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorials"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"gutentor_comment":0,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40866"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40870,"href":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40866\/revisions\/40870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}