Michael Manley

If I'm not mistaken, the...

Because I know Michael Manley was the guy in like the late during the Cold War.

He was from the PNP, kind of a social democratic leaning guy, didn't totally want to kill the Soviet Union.

And he was, I think, in charge and was popular and was going to get reelected.

The latter, PNP would seize upon this and make it their campaign slogan for their electoral campaign.

And there's so much to say about, you know, um, Manley and political marketing and, you know, that PNP campaign becoming the first time that we saw reggae music, you know, um, became, you know, centered in a political marketing campaign.

Like, that's the first time.

But that is for another ep- another episode, Unless You Forget, specifically Unless You Forget.

All right.

Now, in fact, one of the most popular reggae musicians at the time, Peter Tosh, had a number of his songs being censored on airwaves, right, including one of his most popular, Legalize It.

Now, in the aftermath of this song being censored, Michael Manley, in his capacity as prime minister, wrote to Peter Tosh to let him know that he did not favored the ban.

However, Peter Tosh was not moved.

yes

and how do we have a government that puts the people first michael manley spoke of that you must be a government that can walk with the people you must be able to talk with the people yes if you can put the people first and even um pablo escobar drug lord who was from from from um colombia that died He made a public statement.

If you take care of the people, the people will take care of you.

My job is to take care of my people.

Yes.

You know, Michael Manley in his heyday, he had a saying, the word is love.

And Jay Mitchell had a song called Love is the Key.

Yes.

I think it reflects a reordering of this multipolar world.

But I think beyond simply looking at the rhetoric of things like BRICS, I would look at older imaginings of what a kind of Global South alliance might look like, looking at the histories of the Non-Aligned Movement that emerged, you know, in places through, through figures in places like Michael Manley in Jamaica, figures like Kwame Nkrumah within Ghana.

There is a longer history of countries across the Global South thinking about how can we imagine a new world.

In fact, even the very idea of Third Worldism wasn't initially presented as a negative, um, moniker.

And it's by the time he's removed from government that he realizes when he writes, um, you know, um, Neocolonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism, he realizes that actually state, state statecraft and the instruments of state power are essentially useless unless you have that economic power.

You know, if you are allowed to wave a flag and name your national anthem, but your gold fields are still controlled by the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation, you're going to not be able to have the type of transformative politics that you actually espouse.

And so I think that early era actually changes by the time we get the kind of Michael Manley era of the new international economic order, and we look at the actual document that they got passed through the United Nations.

And you look at it today, this could be a model for having a more equitable and more environmentally even, um, sustainable economy across the world, you know, if it was passed yesterday.