rootsandculture

Many of our regional commentators, intellectuals and politicians have correctly placed the struggle strangling West Indies cricket within the global economic battlefield. We have recognized that our players are selling their skills in a global marketplace. Usain Bolt flies to Europe and the IAAF World Championship to make a living, and Chris Gayle flies to India and the Indian Professional league. It is not of their creation. They bear no responsibility for capitalism and its excesses. It is the legacy they inherited from us. Noted commentator, Trevor Campbell correctly placed sport in the context of the information revolution and globalization. He effectively identified the sources of the forces that pushed and pulled our people across the globe and continue with even greater force today. Yes, we seek to follow capital and the means of maximizing our ability to earn. Yet, I sense a kind of dissatisfaction with the examples our sportsmen and women represent. They are described as s...

The stalemate between the WICB and the nucleus of the West Indies Team is a labor dispute. There are many other issues like performance and profits that come to the fore in a labor dispute. But it’s only in this context, labor as a commodity, that we find a real solution: abolition. Labor disputes and the struggles of working people form an essential part of the Caribbean history: Its culture, its creed, its cricket. It is a region the ancestors of whose inhabitants, in the overwhelming majority, were brought to the region for their labor. Moreover, as noted Caribbean economist, Dr. Clive Thomas, opined, “I don’t think that we can easily forget that this was the cradle of capitalism. We really forged in many ways through the plantation, and through slavery, through all those experiences, the prototypical capitalistic institutions” [1] . Slavery and indenture paid for the machines that powered the age of industrialization and its excesses continue today in the advance of technology a...