ZIMBABWE AND THE THEORY OF THE PERAMANENT REVOLUTION.
In 1906 Trotsky came with the theory of the permanent revolution that explains that the tasks of the democratic bourgeois revolution in this epoch in backward country like Russia that has not gone trough the democratic revolution are falling on the shoulders of the working class that once take power will continue with the socialist tasks. The tempo depends on the world revolution. After the experience of China in 1925-7 he expend tis theory to include all countries that have not gone trough the democratic revolution. History has shown the need for modification. I certain countries the petiti bourgeois ca carry out partly this revolution on condition that the working class was first defeated. This is the key to understand the bourgeois revolution of China.
In countries where the petit bourgeois has to rely on the power of the working class subordinated to this class by the bureaucracy of the trade unions and the reformist bourgeois workers parties, the petit bourgeois can win only formal independence as happened for example in Africa This is the key to understand Zimbwabe.. .
These days the South African police are out in force trying to quell the attacks on foreign workers immigrants many of them from Zimbabwe.. Clashes in the poor suburbs of Johannesburg led to at least 22 deaths. Behind the violence against guest workers is the growing economic crisis in Africa in general and in Zimbabwe and South Africa in particular. The pro Western imperialist movement the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) led by the ex trade union bureaucrat "Morgan Tsvangirai visiting Jacob Zuma, who survived rape and corruption charges to become the president-in-waiting of South Africa blames the government of Robert Mugabe for the misery of the people in Zimbabwe and consequently for the killing. While it is unclear for the moment whether these clashes are organized , it will not be a big surprise to find out that behind them far right organizations using the crisis to topple the ANC bourgeois government.
Lenin in his book on imperialism wrote: VI. DIVISION OF THE WORLD AMONG THE GREAT POWERS
In his book, on “the territorial development of the European colonies”, A.Supan, [1] the geographer, gives the following brief summary of this development at the end of the nineteenth century:
PERCENTAGE OF TERRITORY BELONGING TO THE EUROPEANCOLONIAL POWERS
(Including the United States)
1876 / 1900 / Increase or
decrease
Africa...... / 10.8 / 90.4 / +79.6
Polynesia.... / 56.8 / 98.9 / +42.1
Asia...... / 51.5 / 56.6 / +5.1
Australia..... / 100.0 / 100.0 / —
America...... / 27.5 / 27.2 / -0.3
“The characteristic feature of this period,” he concludes, “is, therefore, the division of Africa and Polynesia.” As there are no unoccupied territories—that is, territories that do not belong to any state in Asia and America, it is necessary to amplify Supan’s conclusion and say that the characteristic feature of the period under review is the final partitioning of the globe—final, not in the sense that repartition is impossible; on the contrary, repartitions are possible and inevitable—but in the sense that the colonial policy of the capitalist countries has completed the seizure of the unoccupied territories on our planet. For the first time the world is completely divided up, so that in the future only redivision is possible, i.e., territories can only pass from one “owner” to another, instead of passing as ownerless territory to an owner
Hence, we are living in a peculiar epoch of world colonial policy, which is most closely connected with the “latest stage in the development of capitalism”, with finance capital. For this reason, it is essential first of all to deal in greater detail with the facts, in order to ascertain as exactly as possible what distinguishes this epoch from those preceding it, and what the present situation is."
The pressures on the populist demagogue Robert Mugabe, the bonapartist leader of Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) government is growing daily. Mugabe, is the historical leader of the guerrilla war against Ian Smith’s white racist regime. He came to power in 1980
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Like Saddam Hussein for years Mugabe was the darling of the Western imperialists, and was praised for respecting . the 1979 “Lancaster House Agreement” with Ian Smith’s regime. The same kind of an agreement the ANC signed with the former president De Klerk In 1993. . An agreement on a Government of National Unity which would allow a partnership of the old regime and the new.
In South Africa the negotiations were shattered by the assassination of Chris Hani, the secretary general of the Communist Party: only an appeal to the masses by Mandela averted a massive up rising At the end of the year an interim constitution was agreed to by 21 political parties. South Africa's first democratic election was held on 26, 27 and 28 April 1994. This was a counter revolution in a democratic form.
Similarly the 1979 agreement in Zimbabwe included safeguarding the lives and property of the white settlers. In simple words like the ANC-SACP, ZANU was an instrument of a counter revolution covered up with "socialist" phrases
How did it happen?
When the second world war, the largest slaughter house was over,. A revolutionary working class wave was felt like an earth quake in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. African workers responded with a mass revolutionary struggle It began in South Africa in 1946 when 75,000 mineworkers struck for higher wages. Even though the strike was broken by a police assault, it was an inspiration throughout all colonial Africa. Within months strikes erupted in Tunisia, Zambia, Kenya, Tanzania, Sierra Leone and Guinea . This wave cold be developed into a workers revolution but it remained on the level of a limited struggle for higher wages and improved safety conditions.. A strike by railway workers in French West Africa forced France to abolish forced labor in 1946 - the first such major victory by African trade unions. The enemies of the working class in all forms and shapes acted to destroy and paralyze the revolutionary tide. The union bureaucracy and the Stalinists did whatever they could to limit the struggle to wage demands and subordinate the working class to the nationalist movement with the cover up of the old reformist line of two stage revolution. This was the same program of the Russian Mensheviks that was adopted later on by the Stalinists. The energy of the working class was used to bring to power the nationalist petite bourgeois who have acted as the guardian angles of capital local and international.
. On January 8, 1950 the trade unions in Ghana launched a general strike to in support of the nationalists. By the time the strike ended, Britain had granted autonomy and promised full independence—realized seven years later. This independnent was a form that in actuality subordinated the working class and the peasants to the super exploitation by the imperialists. The same happened in Sierra Leone where the Trades Union Congress, under the leadership of Siaka Stevens, supported the nationalists and formal independence was granted in 1961. The same thing happened in Gambia in 1965 and in Ghana in 1957. Many of the bureaucrats were leading figures of the Stalinists parties .Following the formal independence the exploitation of the working class was presented as the first steps of building socialism. In spite of this phraseology, Africa not only continues to be subjected to imperialism but the same reformists who in the 1950s claimed that Africa is taking the first steps to Socialism now explain that: "Despite formal independence, Africa's fight for liberation continues today. Subjected to neocolonialism and trapped into the old colonial economic relations, many African countries are still fighting for real independence"[1].
But even formal independent that Marxists defend against direct colonial rule, was hard to win in Rhodesia and South Africa, because of the resistance of the white settlers including the privileged white workers. In 1965 the local white settlers under the ruthless leadership of Ian Smith declared Rhodesia an independent white republic. At that time the Prime Minister of Britain Baron James Harold Wilson a left wing laborite declared:
" I repeat that the British Government
condemn the purported declaration of Independence by the former Government of Rhodesia as an illegal act and one which is ineffective in law. It is an act of rebellion against the Crown and against the Constitution as by law established, and actions taken to give effect to it will be treasonable. The Governor, in pursuance of the authority vested in him by Her Majesty The Queen, has today informed the Prime Minister and other Ministers of the Rhodesian Government that they cease to hold office. They are now private persons and can exercise no legal authority in Rhodesia."
However, this denunciation did not include the support for black republic..
On January 1, 1964, the Federation of Rhodesia was dissolved upon the independence of Malawi and Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia). Southern Rhodesia remained a British colony and became known as Rhodesia. On March 2, 1970, the white minority Rhodesian Front government, led by Ian Smith, severed ties with the British crown; Smith declared Rhodesia an independent republic. An armed campaign was initiated by ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union) and ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s Union) against the Smith government.. On April 18, 1980, the country became the independent Republic of Zimbabwe. The former capital, Salisbury was renamed Harare
To understand what is going on now it is necessary to outline the history of Zimbabwe up to the rise to power of Robert and since then.
In 1890, the British colonialist Cecil Rhodes and his 700 white settlers and armed mercenaries invaded what is now Zimbabwe conquering the Ndebele people who fought back but were defeated. Ndebele leader Lobengula was forced to signed an agreement with Rhodes in 1889. Lobengula believed it only granted Rhodes' British South Africa Company mining rights. Rhodes however declared that the entire Ndebele land belongs to Great Britain . In 1896, the Ndebele joined forces with the majority Shona people in the first anti colonialist war but were defeated in 1897.
In 1898, the British government passed a law that established the native reserves, on the most unproductive land, into which the African people were pushed by force. Today 1 million families struggle to make a living on this poor land..
By 1914, white settlers -- 3% of the population—controlled 75% of the most fertile land, while 97% of the population was restricted to the native reserves. Southern Rhodesia became an official British settler-colony in 1923..
The Rhodesian Bush War, also known as the Second Chimurenga or the Liberation Struggle, was a guerrilla war which lasted from July 1964 to 1979.
By 1979 the Guerrilla won and the new government was formed by the Guerrilla's leadership led by Robert Mugabi
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At the Lancaster House Conference in 1979, the rebels and the British government agreed that the constitution would remain inviolate for at least ten years, and that the property rights of commercial farmers would be protected. After 1980, the new government, anxious to attract foreign investment, underlined its "reconciliation" theme by declaring that white farmers were not the enemy and were in fact a valuable asset to the new Zimbabwe.
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However, since the 1990s and in particular since 2000 when the war veterans against the racist regime were granted lands take from the white settlers colonialists Mugabe has lost his great virtues in the eyes of the imperialists who do not trust him to keep the lid over the working class and the landless black peasants.. .
Few people remember the ZANU proclaimed itself for years as a Marxist-Leninist party and a supporter of the Maoist version of Stalinism. However unlike the Maoists in China ZANU did not lead a bourgeois revolution but preserved the power of the local white capitalist class. In 1991 ZANU accepted an IMF Economic Structural Adjustment Program, that involved privatization of state-owned enterprises, lowering corporate and luxury taxes, while slashing social spending and at the same time removing tariff protection for local manufacturers to allow high level of importing goods from the US and Britain..
A decade of the ESAP plunged the country into a severe social economic crisis; a ballooning debt, rising inflation, depreciating currency, de-industrialization, thousands of job loses, crumbling health care and a generally crippled social service delivery system
The working class and the masses in general have been paying the price of this corrupted regime by very high unemployment over 50% and an annual inflation rate that now exceeds one million per cent . While the working class has no reason what so ever to give this government any political support the immediate alternative to ZANU nationalists is not a workers revolution but the MDC alliance of black trade union bureaucrats and white capitalists openly backed by Britain and the U.S imperialists..
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In the late nineties, faced with mass uprisings, directly responding to the ever escalating cost of living, Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe in a classic move of a bonapartist made a partial withdrawal from the IMF policies; among other protective measures, he imposed price controls on basic commodities and slapped a huge tariff on luxury goods. These two particularly made him the great enemy of freedom and democracy in the eyes of the imperialists.
“…"we want the government to reduce tariffs slapped on luxury goods …and second, we want the government to give us a clear timetable as to when and how they will remove price controls…” (Financial Gazette, 12 March 1999)).
Immediately afterwards, the World Bank and the African Development Bank followed imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe.
Up until 1999 President Mugabe had religiously paid his foreign debts. For instance, in 1997 he spent seven times more servicing debt than on health and education. In 1998, in the midst of an intensifying economic crisis, he spent a whooping 38% of export earnings servicing foreign loans.
In spite of consistent payments the debt had continued to balloon due to compound interest. In 2001, President Mugabe, told the IMF to ‘go and hang’ and he unilaterally stopped paying the debts.
In early 2003 the IMF suspended Zimbabwe’s voting rights. Capitulating to the robbers in September 2005 Mugabe made a sudden $135 million down payment to the institution and promised to clear the arrears within six months.
True to his word by February 2006 Mugabe had cleared all the arrears which stood at $295 million the previous year. Zimbabwe demanded the reinstatement of its voting right and resumption to balance of payment support. In spite of the payment, the IMF only stopped the compulsory withdrawal procedure but maintained sanctions against Zimbabwe.
The austerity programs of the 1990s led to many strikes the sharpest one was five day "stay away" in 1998 rather than a general strike organized by the bureaucrats of the powerful Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). This particular form of protest was to ensure that the union bosses would not loose control.
At the same time the regime faced a growing opposition of the peasants and in particular the war veterans. To understand the agrarian question in Zimbabwe it is necessary to know the history of this country.
[2]In 1888 Cecil Rhodes representing the British South African Company (BSAC),at the head of 196 settler colonialists accompanied by 500 police arrived to what is known today as Zimbabwe and until 1980 as Rhodesia. Rhodes came to acquire mineral rights for large areas of land from King Lobengula and named the land after himself. At that time, there were approximately 700 000 Africans, mainly Shona and Ndebele speakers, in the territory (Rolin, 1978). The Pioneers so they were called like in the case of the Zionists had come to the country in the belief that the land contained vast deposits of gold. (McGhee, 1978). This however was not the case and the white miners who came with Rhodes were compensated by large farms. So were the policeman and other white settlers were granted 2,500 hectares each under the Victoria agreement. 6. Unlike the Zionists and the Africaners wo occupied South Africa they did not claim that this was God's promised land but only the land flowing with milk and honey. The indigenous Shona and Ndebele fought back in 1896 in the first Chimurenga-anti colonialist war, of 1896 – 1897 but were defeated. During the First Chimurenga, the colonialist killed 8 000 people and the , colonial soldiers and police seized rebel crops and livestock ( (Ranger, 1967).
. According to the 1899 Order in Council, "the Council shall assign to the natives land sufficient for their occupation, whether as tribes or portions of tribes, and suitable for agriculture and pastoral requirement" (Palmer, 1977). This was a euphemism for the policy of forcibly resettling the defeated Africans in Reserves. This was done before in the USA and Canada.