> From: Amiri Baraka <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Brother, these kinds of charges need references...
> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Woodford [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Mugabe is no "Marxist" and never has been one. He is among a pack the CIA
> termed "national communists," which basically meant nationalist opportunists
> who could use some Marxist verbiage demagogically while serving the economic
> and strategic interests of the imperialists.
Comrades, I do some work (about 1/3 of my time) with the
social/labour-movement left in Zimbabwe, and in a 1998 book (Uneven
Zimbabwe: A Study of Finance, Development and Underdevelopment;
Africa World Press, Trenton, http://www.africanworld.com ) provided
some such evidence. However, it's very evident that since around
September 1997, Mugabe broke conclusively with the structural
adjustment policies imposed by imperialism, because they weren't
delivering the goods, and just this week was put in the World Bank's
doghouse along with Iraq, Yemen, DRC and others who aren't paying
loans back. However, even if he is not running the WB/IMF's most
favoured African nation (which indeed he was in 1995-96, believe it
or not), Mugabe exhibits the same old problem of exhausted,
"talk-left, act-right" African nationalism under conditions of
austerity: in relation to int'l relations (his horrific role as key
looter of the DRC); domestic democratic space (as I write, cops have
invaded the only independent radio station, having last month raided
the main opposition party's hq and copied all documentation, and this
after a reign of terror during the parliamentary campaign); relations
with the Zim working class (especially farmworkers) and urban
lumpenproletariat (whom he has intimidated in recent weeks with a
heavy army presense in the Harare high-density suburbs); and
advocates of land reform (who get jerked around incessantly as his
fat-cat cronies mainly benefit from weak redistributive
arrangements)... I could go on about the tragic state of politics in
Zim, including the problem the left faces inside the worker-led
opposition Movement for Democratic Change, as in Zambia (Chiluba came
from the trade union movement and then imposed worse structural
adjustment than Kaunda).
Ok, here's a longer rap (from Uneven Zimbabwe) that takes us from
1980 through the mid-1990s...
Cheers,
Patrick
***
Repression, class formation and socialist rhetoric
One of the first chores any commentator on Zimbabwe
faces is separating socialist rhetoric from raw
capitalist reality. During the 1970s both ZANU and ZAPU
adopted what were termed "scientific socialist"
principles, although these were distinguished for their
pragmatism. The ZAPU Revolutionary Council (1977, 4),
for example, once insisted that "profit is the mainstay
of all exchange, bargains or trade and is not per se a
contradiction to socialism." Marxists with more
integrity were to be found in the Zimbabwe People's Army
and March 11 Movement (which were both suppressed), but,
according to David Moore (1992), their "challenge did
not extend significantly beyond the intelligentsia on
the road to power, and thus did not gain hegemony within
the popular classes."
While the class character and ideological legacy of
the Zimbabwean liberation struggle are still bitterly
contested, one theme stands out: in contrast to more
romantic notions of the possibility for radical
transformation of the living conditions of peasants and
workers under a friendly nationalist government, the
connection between those directing the struggle and the
constituencies meant to benefit was ultimately tenuous.
Ian Phimister (1988b, 8) concludes that "The alliance of
rural class forces underpinning the guerilla struggle
which eventually overthrew Ian Smith's Rhodesian regime
was united in opposition to colonialism but little else.
There was no shared vision of the future beyond the
recovery of land lost to the whites."
It is in this sense that there was no durable basis
amongst existing social forces for the liberation
movement's socialist ideology. And it should not be
surprising, therefore, that from colonial days through
the post-independence period of Zimbabwean "socialism,"
capitalist relations persisted without substantial
threat of upheaval. Three years prior to independence,
an exceptionally accurate prediction was made by R.
Murapa (1977, 28):
The present alliance is not dictated by
ideological homogeneity, rather, it is one of
convenience between a politically ambitious
petty-bourgeois leadership, a dependent and
desperate proletariat and a brutally exploited
and basically uninitiated peasantry. The hope to
neutralise the real capitalist forces of
exploitation remains distant. After national
liberation, the petty-bourgeois leadership can
abandon its alliance with the workers and
peasants and emerge as the new ruling class by
gaining certain concessions from both foreign
and local capital and, in fact, forming a new
alliance with these forces which they will need
to stay in power. Of course, lip service
commitment, a la Kenya, to the masses, will be
made.
Indeed Zimbabwe perseveres long after independence as a
semi-peripheral neo-colony -- witnessed by its profound
reliance on exports of primary commodities, extreme
differentiations in domestic income and wealth (which
remained among the most skewed in the world), and
Zimbabwe's wholesale adoption of the economic and social
policies of international financiers. However, this
reality was somewhat veiled during the 1980s by the
combination of radical-populist rhetoric from government
(and especially government-controlled media) and the
steady hand of a strong and visible national capitalist
class (especially in manufacturing and agriculture). The
notion that a socialist experiment was underway in the
years after independence, all evidence to the contrary
notwithstanding, served both groups well.
To illustrate, the white capitalist class firmly
overlapped with Zimbabwe's vocal but small liberal
elite, who generally looked down upon the liberation
forces with scorn. This was a long-standing
characteristic, as thinly-veiled racist overtones often
distinguished liberal attacks on the socialist project
in Africa. In her biography, renowned writer Doris
Lessing recounted, from early adulthood (during World
War II), membership in a tiny, lily-white Southern
Rhodesian Communist Party which soon disintegrated,
apparently because of the group's total failure to tap
into the kind of organic radicalism of black workers
that generated a general strike in 1946. Bitter, Lessing
(1994, 279) had inexplicably concluded that "Communism
was too abstract and inhuman an idea to satisfy Africans
-- and in fact, when later there were Communist or
Marxist regimes, they did not last long." Lessing (1994,
367) considered post-independence Zimbabwe a "Communist
government, too extreme for the natural temper and style
of the black people."
To local white elites and their allies in
international financial institutions responsible for
development aid, blacks' alleged temper and style were,
it seemed, better geared to the inculcation of petty-
bourgeois norms and values, through a variety of well-
known methods (Chapters Four and Nine describe the key
example of housing finance). Under such pressures, the
post-independence class-forming process soon degenerated
into a situation in which not only would any residual
socialist consciousness wither but full-blown
compradorism ultimately prospered. As Arnold Sibanda
(1988, 62) explains,
The reconciliation with whites, together with
some fundamental aspects of their colonial rule
and patterns of ownership of the means of
production, constitutes nothing beyond an
institutionalisation of class alliances as a
condition for an orderly transfer of power from
a settler-colonial state to nationalist
militants without disruption of the reproduction
of capitalism. Thus the [Lancaster House]
constitution was a concrete manifestation of the
triumph of the condensed class-strivings of
monopoly allied with settler capital over the
national democratic bloc, a triumph which
successfully prevented the materialisation of a
full national democratic revolution. The new
state thus emerged with features of a classical
neo-colonial formation with the corresponding
class structures.
How, then, to explain the decade-long maintenance of
official socialist discourse in Zimbabwe under such
conditions? A brief review of the challenges to ZANU
hegemony suggests that the country's nationalist
leadership spent the 1980s maintaining left-wing
discourse apparently in order to repress protest mainly
from the Left. Workers, for example, engaged in 150
formal and wildcat strikes against private firms
immediately before and after independence (accounting
for 72% more lost days than Zimbabwe's much larger, more
proletarianised neighbour South Africa experienced in
1980). Brian Woods (1988, 286) considers the
circumstances in which newly-elected Prime Minister
Robert Mugabe found himself in May 1980:
The Prime Minister's crucial meeting with Harry
Oppenheimer, head of southern Africa's largest
transnational corporation, the Anglo American
Corporation, coincided with the start of two
large and relatively prolonged strikes at the
company's major coal mine in the northwest and
its sugar estates in the south of the country.
It was at those two strikes that the police, and
in the case of the Wankie Colliery, the army,
were sent to protect installations and those who
returned to work, as well as to arrest thirteen
miners under the provisions of the Industrial
Conciliation Act [of 1934].
Also in 1980, Mugabe declared one strike of bakery
workers "nothing short of criminal," while his Labour
Minister Kumbirai Kangai sent in police to end a strike
at a transport firm and declared: "I will crack my whip
if they do not go back to work." A second wave of
strikes, beginning in early 1989 and lasting through mid
1990, was met with police violence (for example, against
teachers in downtown Harare), and also featured the
detention without charges of Zimbabwe Congress of Trade
Unions leader Morgan Tsvangirai under the 1965 Rhodesian
State of Emergency, still in force at that stage.
Subsequent strikes were generated largely from the
public sector, in health, the postal service, airlines
and railways. Aside from the occasional minor success,
most were dealt with in authoritarian manner and ended
with the workers defeated and despondent.
To illustrate the importance of ideological
concerns, Tsvangirai's 1989 detention was specifically
motivated by his mild support for a courageous verbal
attack on the government by University of Zimbabwe
students, who remained a consistent thorn in the
government's (left) side during the late 1980s and early
1990s. The students were periodically harassed, locked
up in the course of demonstrations, and faced university
closure on several occasions. A draconian law was
introduced to control the students by effectively making
the university a parastatal institution, and ZANU
functionaries used left-wing rhetoric to paint the
students as "counter-revolutionaries." Official
political repression of a more dangerous sort was
experienced by opposition parties ZAPU (coinciding with
an estimated 5,000 murders of innocent Ndebele civilians
by government forces during the 1981-86 Matabeleland
conflicts) and the Zimbabwe Unity Movement (which
opposed ZANU from the right but which gained the support
of many urban dissenters) (Lawyers Committee for Human
Rights, 1986; Mandaza and Sachikonye, 1991).
In addition, landless urbanites faced an
unsympathetic government in the early 1980s when on two
occasions, different groups of 30,000 people were
forcibly removed from the Harare "high-density suburbs"
(ie, black townships) of Chitungwiza and Epworth. High-
profile displacement on a somewhat lesser scale occurred
in the early 1990s when the Queen of England visited
Mbare (formerly "Harari," the closest high-density
suburb to the city centre) and was protected -- through
forced removals -- from the unsightly spectacle of
squatters. Later, when opposition politician Ndabiningi
Sithole attempted to initiate a shack settlement on his
Churu Farm, the authorities clamped down rapidly and
remorselessly, "clearly motivated by political
interests," as the Catholic Commission for Justice and
Peace put it (FG, 19/5/94). More generally though,
evictions were carried out under the pretence that, in
the words of Harare's Director of Community Services,
"squatting is not an acknowledged form of shelter in
Zimbabwe" (Taylor, 1985, 27).
Women, too, both experienced sustained structural
discrimination and received severe treatment at the
hands of the authorities throughout the post-
independence period, witnessed, for example, by
instances in 1982, 1983, 1986 and 1990 in which hundreds
of single urban women were ignominiously rounded up at
night for alleged prostitution (Barnes and Win, 1992,
126). The Zimbabwean constitution prohibited
discrimination in theory, but exempted gender
discrimination based on adoption, marriage, divorce,
burial devolution of property on death, or other matters
of personal law (Kazembe, 1986; Batezat, Mwalo and
Truscott, 1988). By the early 1990s, Mugabe himself
forcefully defended women's oppression on national
television, and also displayed hints of anti-Semitism.
And in 1995, fierce bigotry against gay men and
lesbians, bordering on paranoia, became a presidential
sport worthy of international condemnation.
Putting down challenges from social forces with
potential left-wing tendencies was the only conceivable
function of ZANU's protracted socialist rhetoric. That
rhetoric was maintained religiously for the first decade
of independence, notwithstanding the fact that petty-
bourgeois party leaders repeatedly violated even their
own leadership code prohibiting excessive personal
capital accumulation. As Lloyd Sachikonye (1995b, 180)
argues, "The assumption of the petty-bourgeois leaders
of the liberation movement was that socialist cadres and
party members were largely moulded through ideological
education... The elements of choice and voluntarism
underlay this rationale for the adoption of socialism
from amongst a menu of ideologies."
The evolving words and actions of leading ZANU
politician and liberation war hero Maurice Nyagumbo are
telling, beginning in 1983: "I do not fear that some
monster called the black elite will jeopardise the
revolution, because we are educating people on socialism
and this is being accepted so that no single class of
people will or can make people follow them. We do not
believe in the elite, they must identify with the rest
of the people" (1983, 7). But by 1986, Nyagumbo was
sufficiently worried to call for "an emergency congress
(to) tell the people that we are unable to fulfil one of
our important resolutions... mainly that of scientific
socialism, because the leaders acquired property...
appear to have adopted capitalism, become property
owners and appear to be deceiving our people" (Herald,
21/7/86). In 1989, Nyagumbo, then the third-ranking
government official, committed suicide as a result of
his involvement in the Willowvale car assembly scandal.
By the late 1980s, the ruling party's decaying bona
fides became the subject of some debate amongst
Zimbabwean intellectuals who queried the status of the
ZANU's "socialist project." ... More practical than
intellectual observers of Zimbabwean "socialism,"
perhaps, even if ultimately as misleading, was Mugabe
himself, who in an interview not long after independence
spoke of delays in socialist mobilisation "until we have
managed to establish an adequate infrastructure and a
basis of human skills, and until we have proceeded to
educate our people on our principles so that by
persuasion they can see the goals as we see them"
(Herald, 10/6/81). Until then, ZANU would reign over a
state monopoly capitalist economy inherited from
Rhodesia, and would do so, ostensibly as a Marxist-
Leninist party, because state ownership could be
legitimised (in the minds of official pundits) as a
stepping stone to socialist relations of production. As
Mugabe explained, "Some people argue that ownership by
the state amounts to state capitalism. That may very
well be; it depends entirely on how state ownership
translates itself... The state, acting as custodian of
the people and the society, will ensure that capitalism
diminishes and that the area of socialism is augmented"
(Moto #6, 1984).
In this spirit, the most charitable statement of
Zimbabwe's 1980s doctrine -- in the words of the
Government of Zimbabwe Transitional National Development
Plan (1982, i) -- was that ZANU "recognises the existing
phenomenon of capitalism as an historical reality,
which, because it cannot be avoided, has to be
purposefully harnessed, regulated and transformed as a
partner in the overall national endeavour to achieve set
national Plan goals. Accordingly, whilst the main thrust
of the Plan is socialist... ample room has been reserved
for performance by private enterprise." Even if
completely implausible as a description of the Plan
itself, this was a coherent ideological call for ever-
elusive capitalist development in some "national
interest," and coincided with other rhetorical
statements usually -- as in the following example by
leading state ideologue Cain Mathema (1988, 9,10) �
aimed at establishing popular-front politics:
Our local capitalists, regardless of race and
nationality (Shona, Ndebele, Khalanga, Tonga,
English, etc.) have to be mobilised against neo-
colonialism, they have to be allowed to operate
in those areas of the economy which at any
particular time are found to be operated best by
the local capitalist class... Also, our
capitalists have to be educated to see that as
long as the multinationals remain in control of
the commanding heights of our economy, they (our
bourgeoisie) will always play a peripheral role.
It is in their interests therefore to work hand
in hand with the government because their role
will be clearly defined and their interests
better protected.
Rhetoric of this sort suggests that multinational
corporations would not get red carpet treatment in
Zimbabwe during the 1980s (although individual tycoons
such as Tiny Rowland of Lonrho, Tony O'Reilly of US-
based Heinz and British mining tycoon Algy Cluff were
fast friends of the socialist rulers, and the influence
of Oppenheimer, the continent's greatest magnate, was
remarked upon earlier). But in reality, ZANU's
corporatist approach presented no great threat to
capitalist interests, even those headquartered in London
and Johannesburg. On the contrary, foreign investors
were periodically wooed with much more frank admissions
about the state of socialism in Zimbabwe, in this case
by Finance Minister Bernard Chidzero speaking at a 1982
investment conference in New York:
Does the government of Zimbabwe have something
up its sleeves? We are socialists, are we
encouraging you to come so that tomorrow we can
grab you? If that's what you think, I can assure
you that we have nothing up our sleeves, we are
simple pragmatists... Let us not fight the
battle on ideological grounds. Life is more
serious than to be controlled by ideologies.
Life is very down-to-earth, let us just look at
the realities of life. And I believe that good
businessmen enter into riskier areas than areas
where we talk about ideologies without doing
much about it.
The cowering presentation by the normally urbane
Chidzero was immediately followed by the more calculated
view of the US State Department's Chester Crocker:
The US believes that Zimbabwe can become a
showcase of economic growth and political
moderation in southern Africa, a region of
substantial strategic importance to us. That
belief rests on facts, not illusions... As part
of the Reagan administration's worldwide policy
of support for economic development, we have
embarked upon several new approaches in our
assistance programs. We believe these will
strengthen the role of indigenous private
sectors and facilitate US private investment to
stimulate developing economies.
Providing the icing on the cake, the head of the
Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI) quite
prophetically
concurred with the view expressed by Dr.
Chidzero that it is time to put away "isms" and
that over time, more emphasis is likely to be
placed on private enterprise development than on
the public sector... What is needed in Zimbabwe
is export-led growth, and over time, the
spectrum of opinion between far right and far
left will converge, causing "isms" to disappear
(African-American Institute/American Bar
Association, 1982, 4-12).
The result was an operating environment termed "business
friendly" by a United States Agency for International
Development (US AID) industrial consultant (Oakeshott,
1987, xv). At the time of independence Stoneman (1982,
290) had warned, presciently, that
Piecemeal or pragmatic state action (seeking
accommodations, guidelines, joint ventures,
minority holdings, some nationalization with
generous compensation and management contracts,
and so forth), that is, the type of policy often
erroneously described as "socialist" or "African
socialist," will in the face of such an economic
power bloc be no more successful in reducing
inequality, tackling rural poverty, establishing
economic independence or producing rapid
economic growth than in many other African
states.
In contrast to the socialist promises, ZANU's
corporatism allowed large local companies to ultimately
exercise considerable influence over state regulatory
policies. A former president of the CZI, David Long,
exhorted other executives:
Our role is to change the overall picture, to
look at the overall environment and seek to
change that for the good of our members through
bringing constructive pressure to bear on
government in bringing about policy changes and
creating an environment conducive to free
enterprise and the efficient operation within
that environment. And this we have done most
successfully during the past decade. Government
makes the rules. We hope, at most, to play on
the same team and to have some opportunity to
influence policy decisions. Compare this to the
situation in which we were in 1980, across the
table, daggers drawn (Industrialist, July
1991).
But regardless of radical rhetoric � and it remained
fiery and occasionally anti-imperialist even into the
1990s � not long after independence ZANU effectively
jettisoned any socialist baggage it may have carried
from the liberation struggle. US AID (1982, 15) soon
expressed satisfaction that "The Government of Zimbabwe
has adopted a generally pragmatic, free-market
approach... and this approach has the full support of
the US AID." The view from inside a large US bank in
1982 was also one of reassurance:
The management of the more sophisticated large
companies, ie, TA Holdings, Lonrho, and Anglo
American, seem to be impressed by and satisfied
with Mugabe's management and the increased level
of understanding in government of commercial
considerations... I feel it is a political
pattern that Mugabe give radical, anti-business
speeches before government makes major pro-
business decisions or announcements (cited in
Hanlon, 1988, 35).
A decade after Lancaster House, a ZANU leftist, Lazarus
Nzareybani, Member of Parliament from Mutare, agreed:
The socialist agenda has been adjourned
indefinitely. You don't talk about socialism in
a party that is led by people who own large
tracts of land and employ a lot of cheap labour.
When the freedom fighters were fighting in the
bush they were fighting not to disturb the
system but to dismantle it. And what are we
seeing now? Leaders are busy implementing those
things which we were fighting against (Sunday
Mail, 10/12/89).
Such commentary merely illustrates the persistent
surface-level search for explanations of what were
actually much deeper-rooted commitments to the existing
economic order. For as the 1980s witnessed a dramatic
backpeddling from the socialist vision, ZANU's main
goals were reduced to Africanising the colonial state
and forcing some limited inroads into white capitalist
old-boy networks. Sibanda (1988, 275) concludes,
correctly it seems, "We cannot therefore justifiably
measure the actions of the present Zimbabwean state on
the basis of a scientific socialist yardstick, for the
socialist project was not seriously on the agenda and
could not have been, without the working class either
being organised, or represented, or acting as a
combatant class on the stage" (original emphasis).
In this context, the incongruous persistence of
left-wing official rhetoric has done great damage to
more organic left prospects -- as in Prague where
socialism "is a really awful word, for ordinary people
it has been destroyed completely" (according to a
leading young activist who inspired Wainwright's [1994]
Arguments for a New Left). Actually, when as late as
September 1991 ZANU reaffirmed its commitment to
Marxism-Leninism, Senior Minister of Political Affairs
Didymus Mutasa responded in an interesting (apparently
Trotskyist?) way to the general global collapse of the
"communist" movement: "The political system in eastern
Europe could be best described as state capitalism and
therefore not different from that in Western Europe,
except that there it is carried out by individuals" (FG,
19/9/91).
Ironically it was at precisely this point that the
failures of Zimbabwe's Economic Structural Adjustment
Programme (ESAP) -- which was supported by the party in
no uncertain terms -- made it virtually impossible to
sustain the idea of socialism. This was aptly remarked
upon by Nkosana Moyo (1991, 4), managing director of
Standard Chartered Bank: "What is rather forlorn about
the continuing ZANU debate on socialism is that it is
basically a sinister manoeuvre of deliberately flogging
a dead horse to hoodwink and confuse the nation in order
to win sympathy among the weak minded." And as for ESAP,
"How can it succeed when it is being spearheaded by
political sharks who, devoid of business values, are
using political clout accumulated over the last eleven
years to invade the private sector under the assumption
that business is politics and politics is business?"
...
***
Patrick Bond ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
home: 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094 South Africa
phone: (2711) 614-8088
work: University of the Witwatersrand
Graduate School of Public and Development Management
PO Box 601, Wits 2050, South Africa
work email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
work phone: (2711) 717-3917
work fax: (2711) 484-2729
cellphone: (27) 83-633-5548
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