Socialist Transformation in Peripheral Economies

The emergence and demise of the Grenada Revolution between 1979 and 1983, culminated into the US-led invasion in October 1993, has generated a plethora of publications. Smith's book seeks to fill a critical gap in this extensive literature, viz, the efforts of the People's Revolutionary Government (PRG) to transform the Grenadian economy within a socialist framework. The absence of such a study, coupled with the traumatic way in which the revolution ended, has led many analysts to vilify the revolution and condemn it as an outright political and economic failure. The author demonstrates that economic factors contributed in large measure to the derailment of the Revolution. Smith found that, by early 1981, the economy was engulfed in a profound crisis. The crisis resulted, fundamentally, from the contradictions in the application of the Soviet-formulated theory of non-capitalist development to the objective realities of Grenada's economy, society and geopolitics. Notwithstanding the faltering state of the economy, the author argues that the PRG's effort in social and economic reconstruction was successful in a number of respects.
Based largely on primary materials, the inescapable conclusion from Smith's carefully researched study is that the real failure of the PRG was political, rather than economic. Lessons for the Caribbean and wider Third World of the PRG's development strategy are drawn.