Episode 250 - Socialist Grenada

We begin in 15,000 B.C. We begin at the beginning

of the last ice age.

The final iguanodon is gasping for breath.

All right.

Ah, Granada, a land of contradictions.

I'm sure a lot of our U.S. audience isn't very familiar with Granada, or at the very most they'll have heard some of the stuff Hakeem and Hugo are going to cover in a bit.

But as usual, as Hakeem was saying, I've been tasked with giving you piggies the socialist wall of text, which I am always glad to do.

Before we get into, you know, the new jewel movement, the revolution, the invasion, everything that happened in 1983, we need to go back very, very, very, very, very far.

Because to understand why Granada produced one of the most interesting revolutionary governments of the 20th century, you have to understand the society that existed there before capitalism, the plantation system that colonialism imposed on it, and of course the class structure that survived even after slavery was formally abolished.

Granada is a very small island.

It's about 133 square miles.

Today it has a population of a little over 100,000 people, but its history is wildly disproportionate to that small size, and it's a shame that more people don't know about it.

The island was known to the Kalinago, that was one of the dominant indigenous populations of the region, as Kamerhagni, and that was long before the Europeans showed up.

It had already been settled by a line of successive indigenous peoples way before the whites set foot on the island.

Archaeological evidence points to human settlements thousands of years ago with later Arawakan speaking populations.

And then the people Europeans would come to call the Caribs or the Kalinago.

Now, a point of clarification that's worth noting before we go any further, the Granada National Museum cautions against treating that history as like a straightforward story of one group violently replacing the previous one.

The archaeological record is considerably more complicated than the old colonial version of, you know, Caribs invaded and conquered the Arawaks.

This is important because when we talk about the history of Granada, we're going back a long way, and the first economic system we're talking about is not capitalism.

There wasn't private ownership of the island's land in the European sense, there wasn't a class of landlords hiring wage laborers, and there wasn't a state apparatus organizing production for profit.

The Kalinago economy was organized around subsistence and communal production.

People fished, hunted, cultivated crops like cassava, which is an edible root.

If you live in the U.S., you may be familiar with yuca, which is the same thing.

And they generally produced what they needed to sustain their communities.

Obviously, we need to be careful about projecting our modern Marxist economic vocabulary backwards onto a society that existed centuries before Marx.

We begin in 15,000 B.C. We begin at the beginning

of the last ice age.

The final iguanodon is gasping for breath.

All right.

Ah, Granada, a land of contradictions.

I'm sure a lot of our U.S. audience isn't very familiar with Granada, or at the very most they'll have heard some of the stuff Hakeem and Hugo are going to cover in a bit.

But as usual, as Hakeem was saying, I've been tasked with giving you piggies the socialist wall of text, which I am always glad to do.

Before we get into, you know, the new jewel movement, the revolution, the invasion, everything that happened in 1983, we need to go back very, very, very, very, very far.

Because to understand why Granada produced one of the most interesting revolutionary governments of the 20th century, you have to understand the society that existed there before capitalism, the plantation system that colonialism imposed on it, and of course the class structure that survived even after slavery was formally abolished.

Granada is a very small island.

It's about 133 square miles.

Today it has a population of a little over 100,000 people, but its history is wildly disproportionate to that small size, and it's a shame that more people don't know about it.

The island was known to the Kalinago, that was one of the dominant indigenous populations of the region, as Kamerhagni, and that was long before the Europeans showed up.

It had already been settled by a line of successive indigenous peoples way before the whites set foot on the island.

Archaeological evidence points to human settlements thousands of years ago with later Arawakan speaking populations.

And then the people Europeans would come to call the Caribs or the Kalinago.

Now, a point of clarification that's worth noting before we go any further, the Granada National Museum cautions against treating that history as like a straightforward story of one group violently replacing the previous one.

The archaeological record is considerably more complicated than the old colonial version of, you know, Caribs invaded and conquered the Arawaks.

This is important because when we talk about the history of Granada, we're going back a long way, and the first economic system we're talking about is not capitalism.

There wasn't private ownership of the island's land in the European sense, there wasn't a class of landlords hiring wage laborers, and there wasn't a state apparatus organizing production for profit.

The Kalinago economy was organized around subsistence and communal production.

People fished, hunted, cultivated crops like cassava, which is an edible root.

If you live in the U.S., you may be familiar with yuca, which is the same thing.

And they generally produced what they needed to sustain their communities.

Obviously, we need to be careful about projecting our modern Marxist economic vocabulary backwards onto a society that existed centuries before Marx.