101


SARGASSO


the political stage in Washington and share something of
the international limelight, Caribbean leaders, still
trapped in their roles as colonial subjects, wreaked
havoc on their Caribbean fellows by calling for an
excessive and unnecessary show of military and strategic
firepower, which brought along with it consequences
more far-reaching than they had ever bargained for.
Grenada: The Jewel Despoiled is at once an analysis of
that process and a user's manual for the future.
Caribbean and North American leadership would do well
to attend to its suggestions.

 In analyzing the Grenada Revolution, Lewis also
addresses issues central to the debate on the contemporary
"crisis of Marxism" and/or the "post-Marxist discourse,"
as it is variously named. Grenada Central.Committee
members saw themselves as "professional revolutionaries"
--"the revolution was the party, conceived in closed
Leninist terms." To counter that position, Lewis cites
the antiwar, antimilitaristic positions of Marx and
Engels in the nineteenth century and the Lenin and Rosa
Luxemburg debate on the role of party cadres in the
early twentieth century. He quotes Luxemburg, whose
1918 critique reads nearly as description of Grenada
over 60 years later:

 Without general elections, without freedom of
 the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of
 speech, life in every public institution slows
 down, and becomes a caricature of itself, and
 bureaucracy emerges as the one deciding factor
 . .Public life gradually dies. . .

Many new factors mediate traditional concepts of Marxism,
and by focusing on the "Leninist concept of party
structure," Lewis identifies for the Caribbean left the
dangers of state military socialism and proposes an
alternative "zone of peace." That idea, by returning
to "the more humane tradition of Marx and Engels," is
based on the "sympathetic understanding and informed
support of the masses" and, as the Rosa Luxemburg
critique indicates, insists that "democracy and socialism
go hand in hand."