ABSTRACT
That Caribbean Marxism is in a state of crisis is a well-recognized fact. The collapse of socialist experiments in Grenada, Guyana, and Jamaica, as well as in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have raised serious doubts about the viability of its praxis. These failures have given rise to several attempts at examination and criticism. For example, there is Carl Stone’s social democratic assessment, Folke Lindahl’s postmodern evaluation, Brian Meek’s insurrectionary reflections, and David Scott’s poststructuralist critique.1 Not surprisingly, the results of these analyses are quite divergent. Stone’s doubts about the future of Caribbean Marxism derive from difficulties in its economic practice. Lindahl’s rejection is based on postmodernist evaluations of problematic discursive totalizations such as “the people,” or Clive Thomas’s “the logic of the majority.” Scott’s critique is based on a deconstructive reading of the concept of revolution, which shows that its salience has evaporated in our time. In Meeks, concern is focused on the problem of structure and agency.
