17.05.2000

Mugabe's bloody diversions

The invasions of white-owned farms in Zimbabwe over the last couple of months by self-proclaimed 'war veterans', loyal to the ruling Zanu-PF party of president Robert Mugabe, are presented by the regime as long-overdue attacks on the privileges of the white elite that dominated the country under British colonial rule, and then under the renegade 'independent' white-supremacist Smith regime. Yet in reality, the occupations of white farms are a cynical ploy by Mugabe, part of a campaign by a deeply discredited regime to outmanoeuvre the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which by all indications is likely to win the upcoming parliamentary elections, which are now scheduled to take place on June 25-26.

Though Mugabe's own position as president is not at stake, his regime has already been shocked by the loss of a referendum that was supposed to authorise the seizure of white-owned farms. A further defeat for Zanu-PF in the parliamentary elections could easily cripple Mugabe and force him to leave office. It is this possibility that Mugabe is trying to head off, and the current demagogic campaign against white farmers is part of Mugabe's strategy to stay in power. Indeed, Mugabe's bloody diversions are not only intended to whip up a general pogrom against the opposition, but also to provide an excuse for either cancelling the elections or ignoring the results and ruling by force if that fails.

In terms of any real mobilisation of the population against the opposition, it is doomed to failure. Mugabe's actions are a sign of his weakness. The popularity of the MDC, a disparate popular front coalition of the Zimbabwean trade unions and various dissident bourgeois politicians, is a reflection of a real upsurge of discontent among the urban and rural masses against a regime that has enforced IMF/World Bank-imposed structural adjustment programmes, impoverishing the ordinary people of Zimbabwe in the interest of the 'free market'.

The bourgeois press in Britain is of course howling with outrage at the treatment of the white farmers. Extensive coverage has been given to the pain of the families of those farmers who have been killed, or whose farms have been ransacked by the invaders.

In some areas the occupations of farms have been called off when white farmers have undertaken not to support the MDC. In addition, black farmworkers have been attacked and their homes destroyed, for the 'crime' of defending their livelihoods and supporting the opposition. In fact, considerably more black supporters of the MDC have been butchered by Mugabe's supporters than white farmers. But of course, the gutter press in Britain is not very interested in that.

A war of words has meanwhile erupted between the British foreign office and the Mugabe regime. The self-righteous B-52 imperialist liberals, Cook and Hain, revelling in their so-called 'ethical foreign policy', have succeeded by their ham-fisted bellicosity in allowing him to present his actions as resisting bullying from British colonialism. So much so that the MDC leadership has repeatedly told Hain and Cook to lay off, and to stop playing into Mugabe's hands. The sale of spare parts for Zimbabwe's Hawk jets - manufactured by Britain - has now been stopped, while as retaliation Mugabe has ordered 40,000 dual British-Zimbabwean nationals (mainly whites) to surrender their Zimbabwean passports and thus lose citizenship rights.

For socialists, whether in Britain or Zimbabwe, it should be pretty clear that, though the privileged position of the white elite needs to be ended, and the land placed under the control of the rural proletariat and peasantry, nevertheless the campaign of Mugabe has no progressive content and cannot be supported. The attacks on black farmworkers by Mugabe's thugs only underline the fact that Mugabe is an enemy of the urban and rural working class and poor whose benefactor he hypocritically claims to be in inciting the seizure of the farms. Indeed, the particular way in which the land seizures are taking place, with the burning, looting, and destruction of a number of these farms, is directly harmful to the economic interests of the country, and raises the likelihood that if it continues Zimbabwe, despite its relative wealth and fertility, could undergo the same kind of economic regression that occurred in Uganda - also highly fertile - under the irrational and bloody regime of Idi Amin.

As Marxists, we seek the expropriation of privileged elites such as the white Zimbabwean farmers, but this is in the context of preserving the productive forces that these farms represent. We do not seek to effectively destroy them by dividing them up into tiny parcels of land allocated to impoverished peasant households on an individual basis: rather we seek to keep their productive capacity intact and use them to benefit the whole population. Just as the Russian Bolsheviks made use of the technical skills of officers from the tsarist army, and former capitalist managers, in seeking to salvage as much as possible of the productive and military capacity of the previous ruling classes while destroying their structures of class oppression, so the technical capacity and knowledge of the white population would be invaluable to workers in Zimbabwe when our class takes power. In any case, socialism can certainly not be built in Zimbabwe alone, but must be spread on an international scale, and in this regard any reversion to primitivism must be fought against.

In fact the pre-revolutionary situation in Zimbabwe, with the growth of discontent at the base of society and the pitting of the masses against the crisis-ridden bourgeois-bureaucratic-nationalist regime, could easily erupt into the open with a struggle for democratic rights and against the austerity/structural adjustment programme. Democratic demands, such as for genuinely free elections, could lead to an uprising aimed at overthrowing the Mugabe regime and forcing onto the agenda the whole question of fighting the neo-liberal starvation programmes, and of course the question of the need for the socialisation of the land.

Many people understand that, however 'left' many nationalist politicians may talk under pressure from the masses, like Mugabe himself, who was once one of Africa's most renowned 'Marxist' politicians, ultimately such nationalists, though they might seek some kind of African socialism, have no perspective of how to actually combat the enormous poverty and economic backwardness that is the scourge of Africa. Such regimes inevitably become corrupt, and so opposition politicians in Africa often justifiably invite cynicism about their intentions, no matter how honest they were originally.

All this points to the necessity and possibility of the growth of a revolutionary alternative, based on a perspective of fighting for international socialism, where the productive forces of more advanced nations (in this context, particularly South Africa) can be employed and expanded to systematically improve the living standards and lives of the peoples of countries such as Zimbabwe.

Mugabe's diversionary campaign certainly poses some important questions for the left. In particular, his attempt to deflect mass discontent from himself into a demagogic crusade against the white population must be exposed and defeated. Racial conflict in post-colonial Africa is invariably a bad thing even when there are democratic and social questions involved in the existence of privileges, such as those held by whites in Zimbabwe in terms of land ownership. Insofar as such issues become transformed into a racial conflict, the main losers are the least privileged, as scarce economic resources are destroyed and human resources often with crucial technical skills are driven abroad. Those leftists who work and engage in political activity in such countries sometimes have a more realistic view of these distinctions than others commenting from afar.

Apparently this is the case within the International Socialists, the tendency founded by the late Tony Cliff. Coverage of recent events in Zimbabwe in the British Socialist Worker has been rather ambiguous, and has concentrated on denouncing the hypocrisy and racism of much of the British Tory press over Zimbabwe. At times, Socialist Worker has in fact put forward quite reasonable analyses of the crisis of the Mugabe regime, of its bowing before the IMF and destroying its own initial base of support by implementing structural adjustment programmes. But it has also been prone to echoing the rhetoric of Mugabe, for instance in its April 15 issue, with an article entitled, 'How dare whites say the land is theirs?' Attacking the gleeful cries of 'ethnic cleansing' by unabashed colonial apologists, the SWP condemns "papers like The Daily Telegraph and Tory foreign affairs spokesman Francis Maude, who accuse black people in Zimbabwe of 'ethnic cleansing' of whites."

The problem with this line of argument is that, while such an event would indeed provide grist to the mill of racists, it is quite within the realms of possibility that a tottering despot such as Mugabe could engage in wholesale 'ethnic cleansing' of the white population, as a means to change the political axis of conflict in Zimbabwe and stay in power against his rivals. Thus all the SWP's historically correct enumeration of how the white population originally acquired their land - ie, through colonisation, war and outright theft and murder - would appear as an apologia.

Massive 'ethnic cleansing', and indeed even the murder of whole populations, is not exactly unknown in Africa - from the mass expulsion of Asians from Kenya and then Uganda in the 1960s and 1970s, to the bloody massacre of the Tutsi people in Rwanda in 1994. Mugabe's casting of the white population as 'enemies' of Zimbabwe makes it quite possible that such an expulsion, accompanied by more killings, could come about, as the last throw of a bankrupt and hated regime. In such an eventuality, it would be the duty of socialists to unambiguously oppose and denounce such an act: there would be nothing 'progressive' about it.

It seems there is a dispute within the IS tendency over this - between the leadership of the British SWP on the one hand, and their Zimbabwean and United States co-thinkers on the other - with the Zimbabwean and American groups being critical of some aspects of the SWP's propaganda. Perhaps this is over the SWP's apparent softness on the demagogic land invasions? The Zimbabwean International Socialist Organisation (ISO), which is active within the MDC, is calling for a general strike against Mugabe's regime, while standing in the elections. The ISO correctly warns of the possibility of a 'velvet' coup by Mugabe if he looks like losing the elections, and equally correctly calls for the formation of workers' militias to fight against this deadly threat to the working class.

All this is somewhat at odds with the practice of the IS tendency in recent decades, where raising similar demands in crucial class struggles in the imperialist countries at least has been rejected as being 'ultra-left'. Yet at the same time, the ISO itself seems soft on the land invasions, attacking Zanu-PF as being "not serious" on land reform and pointing out that Mugabe has betrayed peasant land seizures in the past: "Of course Zanu-PF are leading this current invasion for cheap electioneering purposes. But we must remember that land invasions were not started by the war vets, but by landless peasants in 1997 in places like Svosve, Denda, Mazowe, Chinhamora, and Nyamandlovu. Indeed, those invasions only ended when the peasants were duped by Mugabe working in alliance with the commercial farmers, who told them to move off pending resettlement, which never occurred" (Zimbabwe Socialist Worker May).

But all the ISO's examples show is that the Mugabe regime will defuse and dupe, or logically crush, any independent movement of the poor and landless masses. There is obviously a sharp distinction to be drawn between those movements of the oppressed on the one hand, and the current land invasions on the other, which are simply bloody diversions initiated for cynical reasons, and have nothing in common with any movement of the oppressed.

The ISO in fact expresses nationalist illusions when it writes: "Don't accept the lies that we will starve if the farms are taken. Seventy percent of the maize eaten in Zimbabwe today is produced by peasants, as the white commercial farmers prefer to farm flowers and tobacco. Don't accept the racist nonsense that white farmers are better farmers - throughout Africa and Asia small-scale farmers are the mainstay of agriculture" (ibid).

One could easily retort that, yes, small scale subsistence farming is the "mainstay" of the poverty and backwardness, and often starvation and ruin, of many hundreds of millions of people throughout Africa and Asia. What is needed is not the breaking up of the more productive large capitalist farms, currently controlled by the white elite, but the socialisation of these farms, their productive forces being placed under the control of the working class so that they will benefit the whole population.

Whatever the nature of the disagreements within the International Socialist tendency over Zimbabwe, they concern what is becoming a major question of the international class struggle, and should therefore be the property of the entire workers' movement internationally. Yet, typically of much of the left, the documents have not been openly published, but are rather being kept an internal secret of the International Socialists.

The Weekly Worker and the CPGB believe that such questions should be discussed and if necessary fought out publicly, in front of the working class. We call upon the respective sides in this important dispute to ensure that the relevant documents are published. The Weekly Worker would be more than willing to play a role in this respect.