KINGSTON, Jamaica – Ronald Mason is entitled to his personal opinions, but he's not entitled to pick and choose facts to reinforce his ideological views on why Jamaica must leave CARICOM. The capitalist organisation of the global economy is inherently uneven. The European Union (EU) and NAFTA reflect in the most concrete ways the spatial unevenness that capitalism reproduces. Let us start by clearing the air about who was responsible for the collapse of the Federation of the West Indies. Before World War II ended, Britain recognised that it could not maintain its far-flung empire, and began steps for an 'orderly' dissolution of the British Empire, mindful of US interests in the Caribbean. Beginning in 1947-48, two visions for federating British West Indies (BWI) colonies emerged. One came out of the 1945 gathering of the Caribbean Labour Congress (CLC) in Barbados, where the labour delegates declared that only a united socialist Caribbean Commonwealth could rescue the BWI from the conditions that had triggered the 1937 working-class rebellion. The delegates met at Montego Bay in 1947 under British colonial supervision expecting to plan for a labour and working class-based federation.
