Jamaica’s Democratic Socialist Path: An Evaluation

Abstract

Because of the seven consecutive years of economic decline, most observers, left and right, consider the PNP experiment with democratic socialism in Jamaica to have been a failure, and, indeed, we have argued that it was in the area of economic strategy that the Manley government made its most serious mistakes. However, this should not obscure the significant, and permanent, achievements of the PNP government, such as the bauxite policy, land reform, the State Trading Corporation, labor legislation and social inclusion policies. Moreover, since some of the PNP’s failures were correctable and others were due to the very unfavorable conditions for pursuing a democratic socialist path faced by the PNP at the outset, the economic decline experienced by Jamaica in the 1970s does not demonstrate that the democratic socialist path is not a viable one. To evaluate that question, one needs to assess whether idiosyncratic and country-specific features of the Jamaican experience in the 1970s were primarily responsible for the decline or whether it was caused by the very characteristics of the path itself. We will address this question both in this chapter and, in a comparative perspective, in the final chapter.