Part 2
From last week, two conclusions: one, capitalism is an artificial construct which negotiates with the existing economies to re-shape societies; and two, in T& T were at least three distinct post-independence economies. These are the UNC/Hindu; PNM/proletarian; and official state post-colonial economies. These economies (above) are models. Reality is complicated, and the characteristics of each economy are not restrictive; each economy displays qualities of the rest.
In his study of Felicity in the 50s, Morton Klass identified a stratified Hindu community which had its own internal structure, and most importantly, distrusted the “official” formal society and political economy, and looked at it as something to be resisted and worked around. Its traditional hierarchy, based on Hindu traditions, denoted and conferred authority and status, if not wealth.
Klass studied Felicity, but this culture/economy generally extended south of the Caroni. It traded on informal relationships and trust and knowledge not known, or cared about, by the wider society. It was connected to the formal economy, but was a partially autonomous cultural-economic space, undergirded by the Hindu religious and social structures, and a sense of exclusion from the mainstream.