About

LANDS is an emerging political movement. It was created as an effort to build a left-wing political platform in Jamaica, where we believe that the national political scene has had a steady right-wing shift since the 1980s. We have been inspired by both ideas and actions from a wide range of Leftists all over the Third World.

LANDS is continuously developing and redefining itself in response to the desires of the base and the conditions in the national political landscape. While our movement is political in nature, we have no current intentions to compete in general elections. We may find ourselves endorsing candidates or political parties who best emulate our ideals and values, until we are ready to step into national representational politics ourselves. We intend to be a voice for the people and the ideas that we represent, and we believe that we can do this without participating in electoral politics for now. We will instead focus on issues and policies, while developing our ideology in the background.

The dominant aspect of LANDS is a decentralised network of several groups of people who freely associate themselves with each other based on shared political values and principles; this is what we call “the movement” for the most part. A subset of persons in the movement volunteer to take on specific tasks in the interests of the movement, and together make up what we refer to as “the organisation” aspect which is more centralised.

Any voice can be powerful, especially with strong organisation behind it. We encourage youth and workers to set up their own organisations and get themselves heard as well, or consider joining either us or another organisation that accommodates their viewpoints. We are willing to engage with other political organisations, social movements, community organisations, and labour unions.