Jamaica is at the tipping point of parallel governance systems: one legal and the other illegal, one elected and the other self-selected, one constitutional and the other constituted.

There is a conflict between the two systems, with the illegal system acting increasingly as a predator on the legal Government of Jamaica. Democracy and civil society are seriously threatened by a cancer of criminal organisations that is rapidly metastasising with terminal results if not expunged.

The populace is in an orgy of speculation over what to do about violent crime. Some believe that the State has failed to carry out its security function because the police force is not large enough and too corrupt.

We do not think that we have a failed State, but that the role of the State is now contested terrain. We survive in a partially captured state in which, to varying degrees, the functions of government are usurped by an illegal system of organised crime.

In parts of Jamaica, the role of the State in keeping law and order, supplying the utilities of water and electricity, punishing wrongdoers and providing a social safety net for the poor, has been partly captured and administered by criminal warlords, known locally as ‘dons’.

This is akin to feudalism, a situation in which the most powerful group or lord (don) in the use of force keeps peace among contending warlords. The State emerges if the use of force is monopolised by a government whose legitimacy is based on hereditary selection or elective democracy. For most of our history we have not had democracy, but circumstances in which the use of force has been monopolised and used against the people. Democracy has only existed for a brief historical interlude.

Columbus used force to decimate the pristine simplicity of the Tainos, imposing a fledgling enslavement of encomienda. British colonialism established the slave plantation system and democracy based on Universal Adult Suffrage was only permitted after nearly 300 years.

Less than 20 years after Universal Adult Suffrage, the British relinquished the right to use force to locals. After less than 50 years of failed capitalism and stressed democracy the legitimacy to use force has been severely eroded by the abysmal record of human rights abuse by the security forces. In this milieu, Jamaica is now on the threshold of feudalism.

Whether feudalism becomes an eventuality depends on the struggle to free democracy from criminality. The tentacles multiply each day, growing faster than they can be severed. We are witnessing a titanic struggle between the legal and democratically elected government and the illegal and criminally selected government which has captured some of the functions of the State, particularly in depressed communities.

If we are to understand the actions of the Bruce Golding Government we must locate the analysis in the conjunction of the contested role of the State. The situation is far more complex and dangerous than the vast majority of us realise. It is not about individuals and not just about politics, it is about the conflict between parallel governance systems over the role and functions of the State, between democracy and feudalism, and between capitalism and “criminalism”.

Jamaica is at the tipping point of the struggle between the two opposing systems of governance. To rebalance the parallel governance systems in favour of legitimate democratically elected government, we must eliminate organised crime and violence.