PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE
The demand for change from below—from the youth, workers, women, and peasants—will build up a pressure-cooker atmosphere in ZANU(PF) in the future. There are two trends taking place within the party, going in precisely opposite directions:
- the masses suffering landlessness, unemployment, poverty wages, a shortage of housing: weighed down by all the limitations of capitalism and
- the party leadership drawn into privilege, fiercely defensive of their positions, and increasingly using their political privilege to enrich themselves.
These contradictory movements are pulling Mugabe into inconsistent policies which are causing the capitalists many a headache. The perspectives for Zimbabwe are reduced by the bourgeois press to a problem of Mugabe’s psychology, as they look for the source of the future direction of the country in his mind!
The “contrasting sides of his character” despairs the Financial Times (21 August 1985), “the adoption of a mixed economy while calling for socialist transformation—have made Mr Mugabe something of an enigma”. This newspaper complains that “he seems to speak with two voices” and present “two faces”. (9 August 1985)
The phrase ‘facing both ways’ implies that Mugabe and his government are taking an even-handed approach to the interests of the capitalists and the working masses—sometimes favouring one, sometimes the other.
The Second Congress of ZANU(PF) (Thesis 4.3a) resolved to bring about the “state ownership of the means of production”. After the elections ZANU(PF) leaders announced that the task now was to wrench “both political and economic power from the hands of the bourgeoisie and to place it in the hands of the working people.”
Such statements have the enthusiastic support of the rank and file—but the whole policy of the bureaucracy shows it has no intention of carrying them out. Rather, the whole trend of government policies from the ZIMCORD conference onwards is towards the encouragement of foreign capital and the growth of capitalism in Zimbabwe.
The social measures which have been taken up have been limited to what is possible within the capitalist framework. The leadership has not hesitated to use the state forces to defend capitalist interest.
Peasants making use of fallow land, workers coming out on strike, and squatters settling on urban land have all felt the full force of the law. They have suffered imprisonment, while not a single capitalist has had this experience. The nationalist politicians take the support of the workers and peasants for granted.
They are open to the insidious and persistent pressures of the factory owners, bankers, and big farmers. The whole economic program of the government is dictated by the limits set by the bankers of the IMF (International Monetary Fund).
Orientation
The nationalist leadership is overwhelmingly pro-capitalist in orientation. MPs and top officials are now starting to accumulate directorships, businesses and farms. Undeniably they are becoming the appendage of the monopoly banks and corporations.
Originally the leadership talked of a reluctant compromise with capitalism. Now, ironically, the ‘socialist’ leadership is following in the footsteps of Thatcher’s monetarism by cutting state spending on services useful to the working people. Now we hear the regime talk of the ‘active encouragement’ of big business.
This collusion with the capitalists is not what the ZANU(PF) leadership consciously decided on after coming to power. But it is the road along which they were driven once the compromise was accepted. Once accepted, this policy has a logic of its own. It becomes the cornerstone of all social and political policies.
As Mugabe himself has said, it is important in politics to study not what politicians say but what they do. A study of the decisions of the Mugabe goverameni has shown the remorseless pressures of capitalism on the leadership:
- the use of police and troops against the 1980-81 strike movement;
- the secret deal with the IMF;
- cuts in food subsidies, which are to be removed from the budget;
- the growth of the repressive state apparatus;
- the effective shelving of the leadership code;
- the controls over workers in the Labour Relations Act;
- the delays in land reform and resettlement;
- support for the Nkomati Agreement;
- the crackdown on the Marxists in the trade unions and ZANU(PF), etc.
All these measures taken together indicate more than a ‘shift to the right’, and now demonstrate that the regime is set on a course of encouraging the development of capitalism.
Zig-zags
Yet there has not been a straight line development towards a policy of all-out support for capitalism.
At times the capitalists have felt decidedly nervous, mainly because of their close connections with the old regime, rather than because of the talk of socialism. They are fretful because they have no social base in the country—because they have to depend completely on the ability of the weak black petty bourgeois in the state to hold back the workers and peasants for their defence and survival.
Imperialism would have preferred a puppet regime and at times wishes it could turn back the clock.
The policy direction of the Mugabe government has been marked by zig-zags.
It started out with big spending programs in health and education which have greatly benefitted the people. It tried to keep up this spending until it surrendered to the IMF.
Also, undoubtedly there have been fierce battles within the bureaucracy over the open corruption of whole layers of the leadership and over the future direction of the government.
These struggles appeared to come to a head at the Independence Day speech in April 1983 when Mugabe denounced the “bourgeois tendencies that are affecting our leadership” and attacked Cabinet ministers who acquired commercial farms and businesses.
This speech was greeted by a student demonstration and later a women’s march. It appeared to herald the intervention of the Zimbabwean masses in politics in struggle against the corrupt elements.
These early developments, however, petered out rapidly when Mugabe refused to endorse even this measure of public support against corruption at the top. When Mugabe realised that he could not act against sections of the bureaucracy unless he involved the masses, he retreated.
From that point on he has done nothing to criticise bourgeois trends or corruption, and has moved to the right. He has even protected officials and leaders known to be corrupt.
The students who had announced “there is no halfway house between capitalism and socialism” lapsed into apathy, and the workers realised that their struggles were unlikely to gain support from above.
This turn had an important effect on the possibilities of struggle against pro-capitalist and corrupt leaders in the unions. The workers, and masses generally, became extremely cautious about involving themselves in politics except through ‘official’ channels—that is ZANU(PF).
There will have to be a qualitative change in the relation between workers and the government before the movement of the working class into political opposition takes place. Only the earliest hints of this development can be seen at present.
But the regime is forced to bring this working class opposition into being through the unpopular measures it has to take to defend capitalism in crisis.
Despite the steady rightwards drift, issues such as the wage increase for agro-industrial workers have at times wiped the smiles off the face of the capitalists, and continue to raise questions about the future direction of policy.
The government’s decision to raise agro-industrial wages in 1985 was opposed by the capitalists, who were in turn denounced by ZANU(PF) leaders. Such shouting matches can create the illusion of a turn to the left at the top. But the workers and youth must be clear that the ZANU(PF) leaders were concerned only with their power and authority. Good or bad, they want their decisions to be accepted.
Contradictions in policy
In reality, after months of contradictory statements, the government was forced to make a humiliating retreat on the agro-industrial wage question. Obviously a factor in Mugabe’s thinking must have been the threats of the employers to do everything possible to sabotage the increased wage.
What this decision shows is that any significant reforms will be hysterically resisted by the capitalists, who will use the coming downturn and any weaknesses among the workers to claw back any gains.
Through determined struggle the workers can win reforms against the capitalists. But capitalism cannot allow any significant reforms on a lasting basis.
In the struggle for reforms the workers and the government claiming to represent the workers’ interests soon face the organised hostility of the capitalists.
Increasingly, the workers will have to take action even to secure the most modest of reforms made by the government, as the capitalists feel they successfully resisted Mugabe himself on the wage question.
Despite the occasional dispute between the government and particular employers, the compromise and defence of capitalism is well cemented at all levels of the state.
Gestures on wages and, at times, on land occupation are the exceptions which prove the rule. In the five years after independence the lava of the revolution has been cooling and the one-time revolutionaries are now the well-paid bureaucrats. The huge privileges of the whites are now opened up to the bureaucracy, and there is a yawning gap between them and the workers in the townships.
Bureaucratic conservatism
The growing conservatism of the bureaucracy is reinforced by a variety of factors.
Unlike the rest of Africa, Zimbabwe is a country with a significant industrial base which can, for example, manufacture its own textiles or irrigation piping. Harare is a city in which the African delegates to international conferences come to shop.
The bureaucrats are well aware that even with the limitations of capitalism (which do not seriously affect them) the country has not yet slipped into the same sea of misery and starvation as the rest of Africa.
The conservatism of the bureaucracy is vastly deepened by the catastrophic conditions in ‘socialist’ Mozambique—in contrast to the earlier period when FRELIMO was a guiding light to the young guerillas.
The bureaucracy does not understand the contradictions of a regime which has run into all the problems of attempting to build a state-controlled economy within the confines of a single desperately impoverished country which has suffered the full force of sabotage by South Africa. Instead it prides itself on having taken the ‘better’ road of compromise and stabilisation of the state on a capitalist basis.
While publicly the leadership announces its undying solidarity with Mozambique, the bureaucracy has drawn the conclusion that nationalisation of the economy would be a disaster. After the Russian bureaucracy abandoned Mozambique they concluded that the ‘socialist world’ (Stalinism) is not to be trusted. They are also careful to have regular ‘security’ discussions in secrecy with the South African regime to attempt to avoid the international humiliation of a Nkomati-style accord with the apartheid giant.
This negative example of ‘socialism’ on Zimbabwe’s doorstep weighs heavily on the minds of the bureaucracy. Completely wrong conclusions are drawn that capitalism is a better alternative.
In its national narrow-mindedness, the bureaucracy does not grasp the perspective of the Southern African revolution – that no country can have freedom and development with capitalist reaction entrenched in South Africa.
It does not see that there is no way forward on the basis of private ownership, yet that state ownership of the means of production can only provide a way forward if the revolution spreads to the heartland of reaction: South Africa.
They are rather more concerned to consolidate their privileges and make unspoken agreements not to tweak the tail of the apartheid tiger.
The pressures on the bureaucracy from the peasantry are local and diffuse. The pressures from the workers are not as yet channelled through democratic trade unions and consistent workers’ leadership in the party cells.
The domestic worker who has had his wage more than doubled since independence, and for the first time can educate his children, prefers to defend the leadership and hope for the best.
The pressures from below are either steered into tribal violence, diverted into disputes among local leaders, or suppressed.
The pressures from capitalism, on the other hand, are relentless and thorough: the secret arm-twisting from the IMF along with the promise of further loans, calls for a better climate for capitalist investment, and the bribes of cars and easy access to palatial housing.
If ‘influence’ is to be measured in the number of Ministers visiting and staying to listen at their respective conferences, then the capitalists win hands down over the trade unions.
Described as the ‘inherited infrastructure’ by the leadership, the stronger development of capitalism in Zimbabwe compared with the rest of black-ruled Africa is the best argument to leave things as they are so far as the bureaucracy is concerned.
But as has been explained, the road of collaboration is not always a smooth one. Mugabe, who stands head and shoulders above his colleagues, realises quite clearly that an open identification with the capitalists would be disastrous to the bureaucracy he leads.
The art of politics for the bonapartist leadership is to maintain the illusion of keeping an even balance between the interests of the capitalists and the working masses.
Disputes
Disputes with the capitalists, such as the storm over agro-industrial wages, are probable in the future as the world downturn looms.
The nationalist leadership will inevitably be drawn to completing a one-party dictatorship because of the rising opposition from below. While a massive attack has been launched against ZAPU (which is continuing even now), ‘one-party towns’, ‘one-party districts’, and ‘one-party provinces’ are being enforced in areas outside of Matabeleland.
If the deal with ZAPU succeeds, as is most likely, the constitutional changes necessary will follow on without difficulty. This will entail the removal of even the existing limited democratic rights, particularly the freedom to organise and express ideas opposed to those of the leadership.
Everything is also pointing in the direction of white politicians being included in discussions about enforcing a one-party state. Smith has said he is available for such calls. Already spokesmen for ZANU(PF) are talking of white candidates representing the ruling party in the next elections.
When the threat to the white seats becomes a reality Smith’s Conservative Alliance (CAZ) will want to fight. But they will realise that defeat is inevitable on the basis of maintaining their formal privileges.
If possible the ZANU(PF) leadership will try to avoid becoming embroiled in slanging matches over the political privileges of the whites.
The election victory of the CAZ in the white elections has made negotiations more difficult. But it cannot be excluded that sections of CAZ would be ‘won over’ to the one-party state if there were firm guarantees for the representation of the capitalists and whites in the party and state. Smith’s retirement could form part of this ‘deal’.
These prospects show that such a one-party regime would have nothing in common with socialism!
Although this is the most probable course, it cannot be excluded that such negotiations could fail as the result of racist outbursts from the whites (such as those regularly made by Smith) and an angry response from the nationalist leaders.
The key question of South Africa
Since independence, there have been some illusions that Zimbabwe could enjoy national sovereignty without antagonising its dominant neighbour. But the cauldron of mass struggle against apartheid, and military attacks by South Africa constantly threaten to pull the Zimbabwean leadership into a showdown it wants to avoid.
Any South African intervention or humiliation for Zimbabwe could have unpredictable consequences, despite both sides wanting to maintain the present diplomatically correct but cold relations.
Both countries recognise the enormous South African investment in Zimbabwe and the desperate need for guaranteed transport links for Zimbabwe to the south.
Besides the fact that a quarter of Zimbabwe’s foreign trade is with South Africa, more than 85% of Zimbabwe’s imports and exports pass through South African ports because of the continued disruption of traffic through Mozambique.
Both sides would have a lot to lose if the present relationship broke down.
But the pressures are building up for an open confrontation.
The heavy involvement of Zimbabwean troops in Mozambique against the MNR bandits is an attempt to find a way out (at great expense) from the present deadlock. The Mugabe government desperately needs a trading outlet through Beira to have some alternative to the South African railway system.
The government is able to get aid from major capitalist countries to re-establish the Beira route. To protect this route Mugabe has had to order a major military intervention which is requiring ever higher military spending.
A quick victory against the MNR is ruled out because FRELIMO forces are unable to consolidate the advances which are being made by the Zimbabwean troops. Unless decisive economic and military aid is provided to FRELIMO, the present intervention threatens to draw the Zimbabwean troops into sinking sands.
Nevertheless, the government has to continue to try to build transport routes independent of South Africa. Also, as a counter-weight to South Africa’s pressure on it, the Zimbabwe government needs as much international pressure on South Africa as possible.
For this reason Mugabe has to be an avowed supporter of sanctions despite the fact that any attempt by Zimbabwe to impose sanctions itself would rapidly encounter severe retaliation from South Africa. For these reasons, more than token measures are unlikely in practice, whatever may be said.
Because Mugabe is obliged publicly to take a defiant stand against South Africa, he cannot afford to allow the CZI capitalists to openly point to Zimbabwe’s weakness. This is why the argument between Mugabe and the CZI over sanctions is one of shadow and not of substance.
Equally, a strict economic calculation of its interests alone does not determine South Africa’s relations with its weak neighbours. On the basis of economic logic – widening markets and opportunities for investment – the Botha regime would want peace.
But the growing desperation of the South African regime, lashing out wildly as it tries to crush revolution at home, will make peaceful relations between the two countries impossible. This will provoke the youth, workers, and peasants, and deepen their hatred for apartheid and capitalism.
The ZANU(PF) leadership will undoubtedly play on this mood to distract the masses from local issues such as rising youth unemployment, and make strong verbal denunciations of apartheid, coupled with rhetoric about ‘action’.
These verbal battles have the potential of developing into a confrontation with South Africa in the field of trade and transport, which the leadership would desperately want to avoid. But even these ‘sanctions’ and ‘counter-sanctions’ would not necessarily open the way for emergency measures to be taken against the huge South African and other foreign-owned monopolies.
The history of the colonial revolution has shown—in the experience of Syria, Burma, and Ethiopia—that colossal struggles of the workers and peasants, and huge splits and convulsions in the old regime, are needed before bonapartist rulers (resting on capitalism at the outset) are driven to take over the commanding heights of the economy. Then the state apparatus is reconsolidated on a new social footing.
In other countries where capitalism has been over-thrown in the colonial world—such as China, Cuba, Vietnam, Mozambique, and Angola— in contrast to Zimbabwe a completely new state was built around the nucleus of the guerilla army.
These revolutions occurred where imperialism was too weak to intervene militarily at the outset, or else (as in the case of Vietnam) where imperialist intervention spurred the resistance, driving it forward to the abolition of capitalism.
In no country where the old state machine has survived has a social transformation taken place as a cold, deliberate, action of the leadership, especially as they did not set as their aim the tasks of the state taking over production.
In none of these countries was capitalism anything like as developed as in Zimbabwe. There would have to be both a devastating decline in the economy and huge struggles by the masses to force the hand of the leadership to expropriate the capitalists.
The historic task of the working class, however, is not to pressurise a bonapartist regime into expropriating the capitalists, but to rise to the conscious task of taking power into its own hands.
Only the working class, together with the peasantry, fighting an enormous struggle against the whole class-collaborationist strategy of the Mugabe government and the party bureaucracy, can bring genuine democracy, solve the land problem, unite Shona and Ndebele, and end capitalism.
Already Zimbabwean workers are enthusiastically following the militant struggles of the workers in South Africa who have built democratic trade unions through enormous sacrifice. Here the working class has all the self-confidence of being in the forefront of the struggle against capitalism.
This revolutionary struggle will give added confidence to the Zimbabwean workers’ movement. This will open a way forward for the present stalemate to be broken. The working class faces the task of linking the struggles of the workers and peasants, of the youth and the women, of Shona and Ndebele, into a single stream.
This struggle in turn has to be joined to the revolutionary mass struggles against apartheid and capitalism in South Africa which is the bastion of reaction in Africa.
In the coming years we will see the consolidation of the bureaucracy of the ruling party in Zimbabwe, and an increased tendency for it to degenerate into an open defender of capitalism and privilege.
But eventually a mass movement of socialist opposition, led by the workers and youth, will develop in Zimbabwe and challenge the compromised leadership.
Socialist programme
The gulf between the policies of the leaders and the aspirations of the masses will create the conditions in which youth and workers will give a ready ear to the ideas of Marxism. A conscious struggle will have to be waged for a socialist program and leadership against all the confused ideas of the petty bourgeois.
It is necessary to prepare in the next period for these future developments by making a disciplined study of theory and perspectives. This is particularly important for the youth who will provide the fresh cadres of Marxism in Zimbabwe.
Marxists will have to take an active role in the struggles of the workers’ committees. Only then will the ground be prepared for the difficult task of removing the corrupt union leadership which is supported by the state.
Marxists will also have to play their part in clarifying the way forward in the cells and branches of ZANU(PF) arid ZAPU for as long as they remain the parties of the masses, or in any new mass party of fusion.
Through participating in the workers’ committees, unions, and party cells and branches, through discussing the way forward and explaining the tasks, activists armed with Marxist ideas can lay the basis for a socialist program to transform Zimbabwe.
If genuine socialists do not rise to the task of building the mass socialist opposition in the workers’ committees, trade unions, and youth organisations, the people of Zimbabwe will face a future of worsening mass poverty and national conflict.
Eventually, as we have explained, any ‘deal’ between the ZANU(PF) and ZAPU leaders will be seen by the masses as having solved nothing. All the old hatred will revive, even within the framework of a single ruling party, if there is no socialist alternative to the bureaucracy.
The workers and peasants in Zimbabwe face a stark alternative: workers’ power or an acceleration towards disintegration, chaos, and tribal fighting. Without the workers coming to power there is always the terrifying prospect of a complete tribal-national split and civil war.
Under the impact of a world slump which would push commodity prices to the floor and destroy the productive base of the economy, sections of the bureaucracy – if under overwhelming pressures from below – could be driven to take over the banks and monopolies dominating the economy, though the SA capitalists would resist this with whatever means lay at their disposal.
But the cost of the ending of capitalism on this basis would be the rule of a privileged bureaucracy totally hostile to workers’ democracy. Moreover, the economic gains of a state-controlled, planned economy on this basis would be undercut and sabotaged by the monster of South African imperialism—as is presently the case in Mozambique.
The best and most secure way forward for workers, youth, and peasants in Zimbabwe lies in the struggle to replace capitalism by workers’ democratic rule. The Zimbabwean working-class can lead this struggle to victory—but it will be impossible to sustain this victory and take it forward along the road to socialism without a workers’ revolution in South Africa itself.
The enormous growth and strengthening of the workers’ movement in South Africa in the years ahead, which is preparing the way for the revolution in South Africa, will also weaken the reactionary forces of intervention and provide a giant magnet to the working class of Southern Africa as a whole.
The Zimbabwean revolution has opened and can be carried forward on Zimbabwean soil, but will only be completed with the revolution being carried out throughout Southern Africa.
In this setting alone, with Zimbabwean workers linking up with their South African comrades, can the Zimbabwean revolution be successful in completing the democratic tasks and starting on the road to a Socialist Federation of Southern African States.