Word: burnham
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...People's Progressive Party, led by dedicated Marxist Cheddi Jagan, had agreed to take its seats in Parliament. The return of the opposition did not mean that Jagan, who misruled Guyana into economic chaos during the early 1960s, had mellowed. In fact, Jagan noted that Prime Minister Forbes Burnham, his political archrival and head of the governing People's National Congress, was the one who had really changed...
...that point, Jagan was surely right. Under Burnham, the Guyana government has shifted markedly to the left, most visibly in cultivating relations with Jagan's idol, Cuban Premier Fidel Castro. Washington, which lavished millions on Guyana in development projects to encourage Burnham's election in 1964, is upset. So are neighboring Venezuela and Brazil. Outsiders' suspicion has provoked a kind of fortress mentality on the part of Burnham, who optimistically called Jagan's return to Parliament "a warning to our enemies that we are a united people...
...fact, Guyanese are far from united, but the country stands out in South America these days because of its surge toward a socialist economy. Guyana began nationalizing its major industries in 1971 with the takeover of the Canadian-owned Demerara Bauxite Co. Declaring that "I was always a socialist," Burnham has said that he hopes to establish not a Marxist state but a "cooperative republic"; so far, however, a network of small farming, marketing and labor cooperatives involves only a fraction of Guyanese society. Last week, as Opposition Leader Jagan noted with satisfaction, the government announced the nationalization...
...four men during their radical years was their inability to accept the whole of the Marxist conception of the world. None of them were convinced of the validity of Marx's interpretation of history, which Marx regarded as central to his entire construction. They had other doubts--Burnham and Dos Passos about the role of art, Herberg about the existence of objective, material reality, Eastman about Marx's epistemology, among others. If there is a single explanation for their conversions, it is that each man began with substantive disagreements with Marx and only gradually worked out the logic of their...
DIGGINS HAS PROVIDED a lucid and accurate intellectual biography of Eastman, Herberg, Dos Passos and Burnham, as well as a useful picture of the temper of the age in which they lived. If his interpretation of the reasons for their conversions is faulty, his book nonetheless presents a complete picture of the material facts. If Diggins fails, it is because he ignores his own evidence, and because he prefers a neat, all-encompassing solution to a more complex and perhaps less satisfying...