Jamaica: Coke by name
Posted on Wednesday 26 May, 2010
Filed Under International
CHRISTOPHER Dudus Coke would be just too laughably obvious as a soubriquet for a smalltime crack dealer on a Hackney sink estate. But that really is the name of the most influential drug boss in Jamaica, a title that is apparently hereditary.
At least 48 people have been killed on the streets of West Kingston in recent days, as the security forces attempt to enforce his extradition to the US. But what for me is the most intriguing part of this story is the light thrown on the relationship between the Jamaica’s politicians and Jamaica’s gangsters.
Dudas’s outfit is known as the Shower Posse, supposed from its habit of showering its opponents in bullets. It is, in effect, the armed wing of the governing Jamaica Labour Party. In another example of the Caribbean’s apparent penchant for ironic nomenclature, the JLP is the country’s main rightwing formation.
Despite being ostensibly on the centre left, the People’s National Party is just as complicit, and runs its own pocket mobsters too.
Prime minister Bruce Golding has finally buckled under pressure from Washington to enforce Coke’s deportation, after having stalled on the decision for some nine months.
But academic specialists on Jamaican politics say that until recently, the relation between Golding and Coke was ‘almost symbiotic’. Even now, leading figures in the JLP insist that Dudus is simply ‘a legitimate businessman.’
In financial terms, Coke is to the JLP what Lord Ashcroft is to the Tories. That makes him, to all intents and purposes, an integral element of Jamaica’s ruling elite. That a coke dealer can hold such a position says plenty about the social structure of many countries in the third world.
As Ralph Miliband once pointed out, the experience of imperialism has warped the economic development of these places to the extent that they do not have a cohesive capitalist class in the sense we use the term in the first world.
The state thus becomes a field that is contested by various interest groups, by force of arms if necessary. Jamaica is a case in point.
The Shower Posse run the show in Tivoli Gardens, a district of the capital where unemployment, poor access to health and education, limited supplies of drinking water and poor sanitation are the norm.
The rude boys are in charge of the collection of ‘taxes’, the allocation of jobs, the distribution of food, and the punishment of those who transgress gang rules.
In short, organised crime is effectively the state, and the state is effectively organised crime. That is not a condition in which meaningful democracy can possibly cohere, something to which a pile of corpses sadly now attests.
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“As Ralph Miliband once pointed out, the experience of imperialism has warped the economic development of these places to the extent that they do not have a cohesive capitalist class in the sense we use the term in the first world.”
Not that this is intended as a defence of Mr. Coke or his acolytes, but isn’t it possible that this is simply what happens when the capitalist class’s export resource of choice is arbitrarily declared illegal and made subject of a “war”?
Perhaps of more interest is how the heroin trade props up many of the Afghan ‘democrats’. Apparently the British state is doing something progressive in Afghanistan, what with drug dealing warlords being far more progressive than fundamentalist peasants.
I wonder if Dudus Coke’s Shower Posse will be taken up by some in the left the same way that Thaksin’s red shirts of Thailand are?
INTERNATIONAL CAMPAIGN FOR SOLIDARY WITH THE SHOWER POSSE !
The market for the Andean Marching Powder – whether among the rich, cool and groovy or the poor, uncool and distinctly ungroovy – is demand-driven, not supply-driven but which came first – the chicken or the egg – is really anyone’s guess …
http://amconmag.com/article/2010/jul/01/00024/
… the yarn about the wicked people at the CIA taking time off from fabricating exploding cigars to send to Castro is on an extraparliamentary RIGHTIST website but written by an extraparliamentary LEFTY.
“The wife’s gone t’West Indies.”
“Oh Aye. Jamaica?”
“No, she went of her own accord”
———- attributed to U.K. comedian [Les Dawson (?)] ———
This is not at all about Jamaica but all about a VERY GOOD conspiracy / cover-up tale …
http://amconmag.com/article/2010/jul/01/00010/
Back to Ramboland
That ‘Jamaica’ joke is an old music hall joke, Les Dawson merely interpreted it.
INTERNATIONAL CAMPAIGN FOR SOLIDARITY WITH THE SHOWER POSSE
Can Les Abbey suggest which organisations and speakers will be at the rally?
Mrs Alibhai-Brown? Diane Abbot? Oona King? Cage Prisoners? Jeremy Corbyn?
Problem with the analysis of this post is that the capitalist business groups which funded the creation of the modern British state in 1688-89 were mainly drug dealers (tobacco, sugar, booze) and people-traffickers (slave-traders). So it’s problematic to look down from a loft moral height on the prominence of coke dealers in Jamaican politics.
The British state is also “a field that is contested by various interest groups”; what makes it more stable than ‘third world’ states is the reverse side of the imperialist coin. This has two aspects.
(1) is between the 1690s and 1940-41 the nexus between British financial capital and British naval power, and post-1945 the continuation of the City’s role as a sort of offshore for New York and the British state as a subsidiary US military ally in Europe (imperfectly analogous to the role of Amsterdam as a financial centre between 1713 and the 1780s).
(2), which flows from (1), is the inflow of the proceeds of financial operations and overseas investments, which has significant multiplier effects in the economy and in turn makes it easier to compromise over dividing up the cake.
Talking of Matters International, as we were, and mob mayhem, as we also were, this will prove of interest:
http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/3312/
Mike Macnair tells us that Jamaica has always had a pretty bad dark side to it. Well, yes, most of us knew that and most of us are morally ambivalent about dope dealing.
If one grows up poor in a Third World country like Jamaica, there aren’t really many avenues open.
Organised crime is probably the most promising.
But why aren’t Jamaicans actually the primary producers of coca/cocaine instead of being of being merely the middlemen?
Been going on for decades.
In 1978 Bob Marley got the leaders of the warring JLP & PNP together at a concert. At its peak Bob Marley & The Wailers’ performance of “Jammin’”, Marley joined the hands of political rivals Michael Manley (PNP) and Edward Seaga (JLP).
But it was only a token one-off event.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Love_Peace_Concert
Two years earlier Marley and his wife and manager were shot, but all survived the attack. The assasination attempt was two days before a scheduled free “peace” concert entitled “Smile Jamaica”. Some political elements saw the concert as being in support of Michael Manley (the then PM) and the PNP.
It was widely thought that the attack was executed by supporters of the opposition Jamaica Labour Party, but nothing has ever been proved.
After the attack and concert Marley and his family moved to the UK for two years, only returning for the One Love concert.
Do two wrongs make a right? That the British state (or any imperialist state) is built on oppression and expropriation does not excuse it’s continued existence. it is not a moral matter, it is political anyway. Why shouldn’t the people of Jamaica live in prosperity and peace? My mum has a friend whose daughter is married to a Jamaican (the girl is actually of mixed race herself) and the marriage is not happy, it was a holiday romance that got taken too seriously. He has told her that if he returns to Jamaica without shedloads of cash and as a bigshot, he will be forced to murder someone by the gangs to prove that he is not a wimp. Is that a nice way of going about things? is that a way of behaving that should be encouraged? It’s not a case of attributing blame, it’s a case of where do we/the Jamaicans go from here. Or as Marx put it, ‘Philosophers have only intrepreted the world, the point is to change it.’ (That’s my little bit of home-spun philosophy!)
By the way, does anyone know anything about land tenure inJamaica. My mum’s friend’s son-in-law told her that he never would have come to Britain if he realised that you had to pay rent to live in houses. We were wondering if the (very poorest) live rent free as a legacy of slavery. Does anyone know?
@ Les Abbey: http://ianbone.wordpress.com/2010/05/25/class-uprising-in-jamaica/ ;-(
Entdinglichung thanks – but I was hoping to be proved wrong.
Still if you were there and part of that community it would be easy to get involved, which is similar to what I see in the northeast of Thailand.