book reviews 113 © brian meeks, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/22134360-09001016 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (cc-by-nc 3.0) License. F.S.J. Ledgister Michael Manley and Jamaican Democracy, 1972–1980: The Word is Love. Lanham md: Lexington Books, 2014. xii + 129 pp. (Cloth us$75.00) Fragano Ledgister’s Michael Manley and Jamaican Democracy is a welcome foray into what one hopes will become a new wave of literature reflecting on theManleyregimeofthe1970sandtheseveresocialandpoliticalconflicts that erupted when it sought to reform the Jamaican class and racial social struc- tures inheritedfromthecolonialperiod.Asthetitlesuggests,Ledgister focuses less on Manley’s international dimensions (for a New International Economic Order and against Apartheid, for instance) and more on his personal philoso- phyandthepoliticsofhisdeclared“DemocraticSocialist”government.Thishe doesmainlybyreviewingManley’sbooks(The Politics of Change, A Voice at the Workplace, and Struggle in the Periphery) and critiquing the respective roles of Manley’snemesisandsuccessorasprimeminister,EdwardSeaga,andtheerst- while leader of the party’s left wing, D.K. Duncan. The results provide a critical sketch of the country’s challenges in addressing urgent demands to improve thewelfareofthepoorinthefaceofadverselyshiftingtermsoftradeandinthe teethof the1973game-changingenergycrisis.Ledgisteralsocapturesverywell the essence of Manley’s philosophy, with its peculiar hybridity—advocating a radical participatory democracy by maintaining liberal, parliamentary forms and legislating for greater social equality, while at the same time operating within an essentially capitalist framework. It is a useful sketch of the man and histurbulenttimes,thoughquiteevidently, thereismuchmorethatcouldhave been said. In examining the electoral defeat of the regime in the violent elections of 1980, Ledgister steers clear of discussing Manley’s charges of external destabi- lization.Manleyhimself inhis retrospective Struggle in the Periphery isexplicit as to the nature of foreign intervention, but here it is largely missing. Even on the local front, Ledgister avoids serious analysis of the burning questions of causality and which parties are to be blamed for the initiation and escalation of violence before and during that decade. There is a dark lacuna in studies of Jamaican politics in which references to who did what and when is either absentaltogetherorpaperedoverthroughtheanodynenotionthat“bothsides are to be blamed.” Ledgister, despite devoting chapters to both former jlp Prime Minister Seaga and sometime pnp General Secretary D.K. Duncan— certainly perceived as among the leading protagonists—fails to shed light on this critical dimension, so central to a fuller reading of Manley and his legacy. Thereareafewotherquestionablecallsandelisions. InChapter3,anexplo- ration of Manley’s A Voice at the Workplace and his early stewardship of the Downloaded from Brill.com04/06/2021 01:14:23AM via free access http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ 114 book reviews New West Indian Guide 90 (2016) 81–194 National Worker’s Union (nwu), Ledgister reports on Manley’s involvement in the union without reference to its historical role as the alternative to the left- dominated Trades Union Congress (tuc). The nwu emerged to shore up pnp supportamongtheorganizedworkingclassafter thepnp’s leftwing,whobuilt thetuc,hadbeenexpelledfromthepartyundersevereColdWarpressure.This historyandManley’sroleinunderminingtheinfluenceofthetuciswellestab- lished and the irony is that the very person who consolidated the nwu—and by affiliation, confirmed the pnp as a moderate party, acceptable to Western Cold War sensibilities—would, some two decades later, re-emerge as a major gadfly and irritant to u.s. interests as “Joshua,” the democratic socialist hero of the people. This entire metamorphosis is unexplored. The D.K. Duncan chapter is particularly unsatisfying. Ledgister introduces Duncan as the left-wing counterpoint to Manley’s more moderate version of democratic socialism. But instead of focusing in any depth on the substance of Duncan’s history as a former black power advocate and carefully tracing his points of agreement and disagreement with both Manley and the more radi- cal elements within and outside the pnp, Ledgister hinges the chapter on the strangeanecdotesurroundingDuncan’scontroversialstatementattheopening of the Jamaica German Automotive School. Duncan, then Minister of Mobi- lization, is purported to have said that the school was too sanitized, imply- ing, depending on one’s interpretation, that he was either condescending to Jamaicanworkingpeople,hostileandunmannerlytotheGermangovernment, orsimplygauche.Despitetherelativeobscurityof theincident, thiscouldhave been used to launch a far more textured investigation of Duncan’s ideological positions, but the chapter ends with the rather tentative conclusion that Dun- can stood for a “proletarian democracy” (which, however, is never explored in any detail). Ledgister has managed to put together a compact and accessible reintro- duction to one of the most significant postcolonial leaders and his protean attempts to tear the country away from its colonial moorings. At the same time,amoresubstantialanalysis stillneedstobeundertakeninorder tobetter understand Manley and take us beyond this not-insignificant effort. Brian Meeks Africana Studies Department, Brown University, Providence ri 02912, u.s.a. brian_meeks@brown.edu Downloaded from Brill.com04/06/2021 01:14:23AM via free access mailto:brian_meeks@brown.edu