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Title: Zimbabwe: Land Invasions, and lessons for the working class Author: Zabalaza Date: April 2001 Language: en Topics: Zimbabwe Source: Retrieved on 5th August 2021 from https://zabalaza.net/2001/04/15/zabalaza-1-april-2001/ Notes: Published in Zabalaza #1.
THE so-called “debate” over the deteriorating situation in Zimbabwe over
the past year has generated more heat than light. The main reason why
this is so is because it completely excludes the voice of the Zimbabwean
working class. The argument as presented in the media is between two
reactionary elite forces: old white money (big Zimbabwean landowners,
South African liberal-conservatives, and British imperialist interests)
and new black money (right-wing Zimbabwean peasants and ex-soldiers,
South Africa’s centre-right ANC elite, and President Robert Mugabe’s
kleptocracy). The saying goes that when the elephants fight, the grass
gets trampled, but what has been trampled here in this bourgeois
bickering is the truth about Zimbabwe, not the Zimbabwean working class
itself. It is exactly because the working class has finally flexed its
muscles after 20 years of subservience to Mugabe’s ruling Zimbabwe
African National Union — Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) regime that such
hysteria and confusion has been generated in the media over the real
issues at stake. The media have focused on land invasions (which are
tiny in comparison to the millions of hectares taken over by militant
landless peasants in Brazil, for example) and the murder of white
farmers (an insignificant figure of eight deaths over the past year
relative to the vastly higher figures for South Africa itself — although
a study has claimed that the SA incidents are largely “criminal” and not
“political” in motivation).
The South African media in particular has whipped up a frenzy of
speculation that the land invasions will generate a similar peasants’
movement in SA where land hunger remains huge and where most of the
country’s black population is still squeezed into 13% of the land. These
fears do have a basis in reality. Peasant anger is growing: rural
labourers’ networks are starting to demand radical changes and are
secretly talking about possible mass occupations to back up their
demands.
Meanwhile, the capitalist ANC government has little real commitment to
land reform: far too little money has been earmarked to compensate white
farmers for their land at market-related prices (not that we should cry
over that) and, more seriously, at the current rate of restitution, the
ANC has admitted it will take 90 years just to fulfil its moderate
policies! The SA peasantry is unlikely to wait even 20 years, as the
Zimbabweans did, to get their own back.
So, back to the Zimbabwean working class. Zimbabwe has a largely
agrarian economy, with tobacco, maize and other cash crops, plus cattle
ranching, most of it subsistence, predominating. Commercial, mostly
white-owned, agriculture accounts for at least 10% of GP, contributes
more than 35% of total exports and employs a quarter of all formal
sector workers (360,000 people). Its primary and manufacturing
industries and therefore its industrialised proletariat, along with the
base this represents for organised union-based struggle, are very
narrow. As a result, the political reality in Zimbabwe is that to
control the countryside is to control the country. This agrarian base is
the reason that Zanla and Zipra guerrillas managed to fight a moderately
successful liberation bush war against the former white Rhodesian state,
tying their struggle closely to that of the peasantry.
By comparison, in highly industrialised South Africa, armed struggle was
totally marginal and merely served to turn up the heat of urban,
union-lead civil struggle. But despite at least reaching a draw on the
ground in their Chimurenga (“people’s war”), the Zimbabwean guerrillas
lost it all at the Lancaster House agreement that secured a bourgeois
position for Mugabe and his cronies in exchange for the continuation of
mostly-British exploitation (disguised by national “independence” in
1980) and the endless postponing of genuine revolutionary demands.
The guerrillas who had fought in the bush mostly either returned to
their peasant roots or, having become accustomed to soldiering, signed
up with the new Zimbabwean Defence Force, often on 20-year contracts. In
exchange for these plum posts and a period of relatively peaceful
“transition” (“relative” because of the vicious suppression of political
dissidents and Ndebele by the notorious 5^(th) Brigade in the
Matabeleland Massacres in 1983–1987 in which about 5,000 were murdered),
the black soldiers agreed with their political leadership to put
revolutionary demands, especially for land, on hold time and time again.
But when those contracts ran out 20 years on, many remembered their old
demands and started agitating for plots of land to retire on. They were
also angered by Mugabe playing fast and loose with taxpayers’ money such
as that earmarked for the poor that went towards building another
mansion for his wife. In August 1997, Mugabe tried to forestall war
veterans’ demands by giving them an unbudgeted US$350-million in
pensions. Mugabe also continually threatened to seize white farms over
the years as an election ploy to make himself seem more radical or even
“socialist”, especially following the expiry of the twilight clause in
the Lancaster House agreement which guaranteed some white seats in
parliament, but he never seriously acted on his threats. In November
1997, Zanu-PF earmarked 1,471 white farms for compulsory acquisition by
the state, but by November 1998, the number was down to 841.
Then a deepening economic crisis that lead to food riots in the capital
Harare sent the government scurrying to the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) for aid. In exchange, the IMF ordered the government to stop its
plans to seize the farms. The financial situation worsened when Zimbabwe
got involved in the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1998,
allegedly to protect Mugabe’s own personal diamond-mining interests in
the east. Zanu-PF assured the IMF that military expenditure on the war
would be limited to US$3-million a month, but they vastly underestimated
the cost and after the lie was discovered, the IMF loans collapsed.
Aside from its economic woes and the resulting drop in living standards
for the workers, fully 25% of the country’s adult population are
believed to be HIV-positive, making it the world’s second worst-affected
country after Botswana. Against this backdrop, the initial spate of land
invasions early in 2000 could well have been genuine, launched by real
former retired soldiers/ex-guerrillas. But political machinations were
to render the issue of whether their land claims were true or not
totally irrelevant.
So where was the organised working class in all this? And why, if the
land invasions initially represented the potentially radical aspirations
of the (at one time revolutionary) war veterans, did poor black workers
finally wind up backing reactionary white farmers against the invaders?
The sad answer was that the working class was in a bit of political
disarray, despite finding new confidence in itself. The crushing
economic poverty foisted on the industrial workers (with some
1,5-million unemployed and over 1-million casualised) by the Zanu-PF
regime’s dancing to the tune of international capital plus the IMF and
World Bank while pretending to be a “people’s state” had finally given
the Zimbabwean Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) the muscle to start
moving into the political arena. The 1997 war veterans’ pay-off had lead
to a tax hike and the ZCTU called nationwide stayaways in protest.
Mugabe was to continue to exploit this gap between the war vets and the
workers. After decades wedded to the Zanu-PF vanguardist version of
politics, the ZCTU had little experience of true worker power. As a
result, the unions immediately plunged into the error of creating a
multi-class political party as its vehicle. So, in late 1999, the ZCTU
created the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), a “united front of
Zimbabweans representing various interests and constituent
organisations”.
It is though the structure of this front-style organisation, similar to
the multi-class, but far more progressive and experienced grassroots
United Democratic Front (UDF) in apartheid SA, that middle-class and
even bourgeois elements came to dominate the opposition.
Initially, there was little support for the MDC from these elements
because of its working-class base. But that soon changed as this
union-led alliance opened its doors to all sorts of shady church groups,
opportunistic businessmen and petit-bourgeois non-governmental
organisations. The MDC crucially failed to do the admittedly hard
footwork of agitating and recruiting among the peasantry and among farm
labourers, the real core of the Zimbabwean electorate. Instead, it
allowed leaders from rural NGOs to “represent” these people in the
party. As a result, the MDC quickly developed a middle-class leadership
layer whose interests were at odds with its worker base. The party’s
reformist land policy involved setting up an SA-styled land commission
to consolidate unused land, instituting a land tax on under-utilised
land to support the commission, and acquiring freehold title for small
farmers. When the farm invasions actually began in the months before the
June 2000 elections, the MDC had become a staunchly liberal-conservative
party with a rogue leadership that was openly flirting with the class
enemies of its worker base. Revolutionary workers in the country at this
time warned of a repeat of Zambia’s experience, where the Zambian trade
union federation swept the bankrupt post-independence Kenneth Kaunda
regime out of power only to have former labour leader Frederick Chiluba
sell them out to multinational capitalist interests (including SA’s
Anglo American mining group). The MDC should arguably have backed the
initial farm invasions, even if conducted by Zanu-PF agent provocateurs,
as a tactical measure to divide the loyalties of the war veterans who,
as ex-soldiers, still had many friends in powerful positions in the
all-important military. By seizing the initiative on farm invasions, the
MDC would have scared off the white farmers and other bourgeois and
middle-class opportunists, but could have driven a wedge between Mugabe
and the army, already disillusioned by their 300-plus dead in the DRC
war and the fact that Mugabe failed to attend their funerals. By
maintaining a clear revolutionary class line, organising strictly among
the industrial proletariat, the unemployed and the peasantry, winning
over the real war veterans and, by association, a significant section of
the rank-and-file armed forces, the MDC could have become a radical
grassroots organisation to shake the foundations of the Zimbabwean
capitalist state. But the party, which terms itself “social democratic”
was too compromised and had lost its way, so despite the MDC winning 57
out of the 150 seats in the June 2000 election (with strongholds in
Harare, Bulawayo and Matabeleland), Zanu-PF carried the day for the mere
cost of getting wealthy air force chief Perence Shiri, the North
Korean-trained former commander of the murderous 5^(th) Brigade and a
cousin of Mugabe, to get goon squads run by a thug called “Hitler’
Hunzvi to occupy 1,600 farms. Hunzvi, who was paid Z$20-million for his
“election campaign” reportedly never carried a gun in his life, so he
hardly qualifies as a war vet, and the 7,000-plus invaders are believed
to include 1,500 former 5^(th) Brigade men dressed in civilian gear, as
well as spooks from the Central Intelligence Organisation. The cost to
the Zimbabwean economy and the workers who will be hit hardest by the
continuing economic recession is clearly not of interest to Mugabe, and
will not be of much interest to the new fat-cat parliamentarians of the
MDC either, except as ballot-box fodder for the 2002 presidential
election.
For revolutionaries in South Africa and elsewhere to support Mugabe
because of some delusion that he is in any way a “socialist”, or simply
because his MDC opponents are clearly pro-capitalist, ignores the class
nature of the ruling Zanu-PF elite and is just as dismissive of the real
issues that Zimbabwean workers are trying to grapple with as the
capitalist media have been. Cross-class alliances always sell out the
working class in favour of bourgeois and would-be bourgeois forces who
manipulate leadership positions to their personal advantage. The only
option is a class war fought (not necessarily in open combat) by the
united class of workers, peasantry and poor against all usurpers and
parasites, under the aegis of their own directly-democratic fighting
organisations, free of any party leadership class. This is anarchy in
action and it is the only thing that will save the Zimbabwean working
class from another 20 years of misery. The key question — which is of
crucial importance to revolutionaries in Africa and elsewhere — is,
however, not so much “should the MDC have kept itself a pure workerist
party?”, but rather “should the ZCTU have formed a cross-class political
party to contest bourgeois elections, at all?” The obvious answer, for
true revolutionaries, is that the ZCTU should have rejected all
bourgeois forums and cross-class alliances in favour of building the
self-emancipatory capacity of the Zimbabwean productive base, the
working class. As the Nicaraguan anarchist trade unionist Augusto
Sandino rightly said: “Only the workers and the peasants will go all the
way to the end!”