Most left-wing critics of the land reform have failed to notice, or acknowledge, the revolutionary situation in Zimbabwe in the 1990s (Moore, 2004; Raftopoulos & Phimister, 2004; Bernstein, 2005; Cousins, 2006). We have argued elsewhere that their analyses have been subject to eurocentric and/or populist influences, whose result has been the rendering of the whole process as an instance of ‘crisis, chaos and tyranny’ – a seemingly incurable African pathology (Moyo & Yeros, 2005 and forthcoming). Under such ‘irrational’ circumstances, there has been little felt need to understand the social basis and contradictions of the situation; these have routinely been obscured and detached from politics. A further result has been to maintain a silence about, or to support explicitly, the imposition of imperialist sanctions against Zimbabwe, in the interest of ‘regime change’.
In our view, the political economy of Zimbabwe cannot be understood on the basis of an idealised model of a bourgeois democracy– one which is located in the centre of the capitalist system, which historically has resolved the national and agrarian questions, and which enjoys the capacity to export its social contradictions beyond its borders in the interest of domestic ‘social peace’. Under imperialism, peripheral capitalism, in Zimbabwe and elsewhere, has been unable to resolve the national and agrarian questions and thus exhibits recurrent economic, social, and political crises; these, in turn, have the capacity to escalate to a revolutionary situation. This has been the case in Zimbabwe in the late 1990s. And in this case, like so many others, the revolutionary situation has not resulted in a revolution. Neither did it result in a mediocre reformism or restoration. It has resulted in an interrupted revolution, marked by a radical agrarian reform and a radicalised state. The revolutionary situation has been the first on the continent since the end of the Cold War, and has resulted in the first radicalised state, which in turn has its counterparts in other parts of the world, most prominently in Venezuela and Bolivia.
We begin by clarifying the notion of crisis and distinguishing it from chaos. This is important because crisis is indeed at the heart of the matter. Crisis is of three types: economic, social, and political. Economic crisis refers to the falling rate of profit which results generally from the over-accumulation of capital. There is no dispute that, in Zimbabwe, over-accumulation characterised the transition to independence in 1980, that from 1990 structural adjustment induced a rapid deterioration of the economy, and that from 1997 this deterioration intensified. Social crisis, on the other hand, refers to the inability of the labour force to reproduce itself. Peripheral capitalism is in a chronic state of social crisis, evident in the statistics of high infant mortality, chronic malnutrition, vulnerability to preventable disease, low life expectancy, and high illiteracy. There is no dispute that under structural adjustment, social crisis intensified in Zimbabwe and has persisted up to now.
However, there is a dispute concerning political crisis. Political crisis refers to a crisis of legitimacy, and it dovetails with economic and social crisis. As we have argued, legitimacy – in the Gramscian sense of hegemony – is generally found wanting in the periphery, rendering political crisis as endemic as economic and social crisis. But it is also clear that in some cases, as in Zimbabwe in the late 1990s, an open political conflict emerged, while in others, where dissent remains unorganised, the conflict does not escalate. We may thus distinguish between ‘low intensity’ and ‘high intensity’ political crises, the latter including cases of mass mobilisation, violent clashes with the state, civil conflict, or civil war. In this light, what is specific to the case of Zimbabwe is the degree of political mobilisation that the country experienced in the late 1990s, both outside and inside the ruling party, which ultimately raised the prospect of removal of the ruling party from control of the state. What does not follow is a dichotomy between the ‘social’ and the ‘political’. Such a dichotomy is highly ideological, and in Zimbabwe it has served to divert political attention towards a superficial ‘regime change’ politics, rather than focus on the social origins of the land reform and the social transformation underway.
Our analysis of radicalisation develops three issues. The first of these is what we identify as the revolutionary situation, between 2000-03, during which the radicalisation of the state reached its climax; second, state-society relations in the countryside during this period which, contrary to chaos theories, were transformed by means of a significantly structured process; and third, the process of normalisation from 2003 onwards which remains incomplete, contradictory, polarised, and coercive, and which includes the mass urban evictions of May to July 2005.
The Revolutionary Situation
If independence bequeathed a neo-colonial state in Zimbabwe, the late nineties saw a rebellion against neo-colonialism. There was an incipient radicalisation of the state from 1997 onwards marked by its interventionist role in the economy, the suspension of structural adjustment, and the listing of 1,471 farms for expropriation. The basis of this radicalisation is to be found in the economic, social, and, ultimately, political crisis of the late 1990s, a robust crisis which was organically driven by social forces within and without the ruling party. The extent and direction of this radicalisation was unpredictable at the time and remained subject to both internal and external contradictions in the form of a hostile and subversive reaction by imperialist forces, namely Western states, the International Financial Institutions (IFIs), and their domestic allies. The state was compelled to respond and manage these contradictions without a clear plan of its own while its incremental radicalisation occurred dialectically, through these contradictions.
By 2000, the crisis had reached a political precipice. With the onset of mass land occupations on the one hand, and urban mobilisation by the opposition on the other, the bureaucracy was confronted with a situation in which violence was unavoidable: either against the land occupations, or against the opposition; either against neo-colonialism, or in its service. This predicament is poorly understood by most left-wing critics, whose analyses resort to a ‘human rights’ moralism. The respect for human rights requires a secure economic, social, and political context. Human rights cannot be detached from their context and propounded moralistically. And they certainly cannot be detached from the deeply contradictory contextof Zimbabwe in 2000 which amounted to no less than a revolutionary situation.
Let us be clear of what we mean by revolutionary situation. This is a situation in which society is highly mobilised and in conflict, both among its socio-political formations and between them and the state. Moreover, it is a situation in which bourgeois institutions come under fundamental threat, in a progressive way. In this context, property rights and formal democratic political norms and procedures (human rights) are either threatened or abrogated and basic bureaucratic structures and hierarchies are themselves threatened or suspended. This does not necessarily mean that a revolutionary rupture with the capitalist system is on the cards. The latter would require disciplined and durable working class organisation, revolutionary leadership, and not least the implosion of the state apparatus, either through war and/or through the dissent/disintegration of the armed forces – none of which occurred in Zimbabwe. However, the course of a revolutionary situation is never predetermined: it contains the potential of revolutionary rupture through the escalation of contradictions and the implementation of deep structural changes without interruption (permanent revolution); or it may stall after a first set of radical reforms, or even degenerate into a restoration of the status quo ante (Löwy, 1981; Amin, 1983).
A revolutionary situation differs from a bourgeois dictatorship (or ‘authoritarian regime’), where democratic norms and procedures are suspended, but property rights are maintained, where bureaucratic hierarchies are bolstered, and which has no progressive potential. It also differs from a ‘failed state’, where procedures and institutions are abrogated, the central state collapses, and property rights come under threat but, again, whose social contradictions have no progressive potential. In the late 1990s, Zimbabwe made a rapid (three-year) transition from a neo-colonial situation – what we have called a ‘half-way house’ between authoritarianism and democracy – to a revolutionary situation, in which socio-political conflict escalated, formal democratic norms and procedures were partially suspended, agrarian property rights were abrogated in a fundamentally progressive way, and bureaucratic hierarchy itself was suspended in the countryside. The result has been neither revolution nor restoration, but a radical reform of agrarian relations, together with a radicalisation of nationalism – in effect, a radical populism. Politically, this process has necessarily entailed a protracted confrontation with imperialism, both internally and externally.
The revolutionary situation in Zimbabwe has given rise not to a revolutionary state but a radicalised state; this is a peripheral state which has rebelled against neocolonialism.
There is certainly much to be criticised in this process of radicalisation, as we have made clear in our own work: especially, the ‘single-issue’ nature of the land occupation movement, the ideological and strategic shortcomings of its warveteran leadership, and the fact that the rural-urban working-class divide was not bridged in the process of mobilisation (Moyo & Yeros, 2005). Ultimately, the land occupation movement was both adopted and co-opted by the ruling party, while large sections of the proletariat, including farmworkers and urban workers, were not incorporated into the movement, either ideologically or materially; the opposite in fact occurred. These excluded sections of the population that were mobilised by the opposition on an increasingly reactionary agenda in alliance with imperialist forces. In turn, this opposition has come to constitute a debilitating internal contradiction, which, together with the strategic and essentially petty-bourgeois shortcomings of the ruling party, has hampered the struggle against imperialism. To this complex contradiction is also owed the persistent coercion employed by the ruling party.
Nonetheless, we must recognise the fundamentally progressive nature of this radicalisation and persist with a critical engagement with radical nationalism. Above all, we must reject the reactionary logic of imperialist sanctions. This remains an imperative in the post-2003 period as well, the period in which the ruling party has veered towards a policy of ‘normalisation’ with international capital. Normalisation has entailed an attempt to ‘restore order’ politically and economically, a policy which culminated in the mass urban evictions of May-July 2005. We will discuss this in more detail in a later section, but suffice it to note here that normalisation has been incomplete and has remained subject to internal and external contradictions. Normalisation has not meant a full return to neocolonialism; Zimbabwe remains a radicalised state.
The government continues to reject neoliberal orthodoxy and has pursued a heterodox economic plan. This plan has emerged dialectically in conflict with imperialist sanctions, whose key conditionality has been regime change; sanctions, in this sense, have imposed the need for economic heterodoxy. The heterodox plan is a mixture of crisis management and strategic planning, whose main thrust is the following: In monetary policy, the government has controlled prices, interest rates, and foreign exchange, with the aim of supporting essential imports and exports; at the same time, it has effectively defaulted on foreign debt and only recently (in 2005)
resumed payments on arrears with the IMF in the interest of normalisation. In fiscal policy, it has subsidised commodities, such as basic foods and petrol, for the intended benefit mainly of urban areas, as well as public services, such as electricity, which also benefits agriculture. In investment policy, it has heavily regulated banks and sought to direct credit to agriculture and mining; the latter has been promoted to a strategic export sector, while the state has been moving towards acquiring a controlling stake (51%) of all foreign-owned mines. In trade policy, the government has imposed import and export controls focused on essential commodities, reinforced marketing parastatals to regulate trade, and sought to diversify trading partners to the East; moreover, it has rejected genetically modified (GMO) maize which the US government attempted to introduce into the country via ‘food aid’. In terms of intellectual property rights, it has implemented compulsory licensing of anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) in confrontation with transnational pharmaceutical firms within a generalised campaign against HIV/AIDS. In land policy, at the same time as it has ‘de-radicalised’ the urban land question in the interest of normalisation, it has moved ahead with a constitutional amendment to nationalise all agricultural land. In foreign policy, the government has actively opposed the liberalisation agenda of the WTO and the opportunistic attempts to reform the United Nations, in both cases playing a leading global role; it has single-handedly undermined NEPAD; and has repeatedly confronted US imperialism and South Africa sub-imperialism, not least in the DRC, at great cost to itself. Moreover, the government has implemented a ‘Look East’ policy in search for new alliances, especially with China, with the aim of diversifying financial and technological dependence away from the West.
Overall, the emerging strategic plan, insofar as it can be discerned, has consisted of the following elements:
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To reposition Zimbabwe, economically and politically, in what may well be an emerging ‘bi-polar’ (inter-imperialist) world order between China and the USled Western alliance, by which Zimbabwe would gain a larger measure of bargaining power;
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To restructure the export sector by giving more emphasis to energy and minerals, including platinum, uranium, coal, methane gas, gold, and diamonds;
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To revive agriculture on the basis of a broader and more rationalised structure which would re-instate the large-farm/small-farm policy bifurcation (on a relatively less inequitable land ownership basis), with a dominant emphasis on extroverted accumulation and a subordinate emphasis on production for domestic consumption;
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To increase the control of the state over the above two strategic sectors (mining and agriculture), by nationalising all agricultural land and leasing it out on a long-term basis, and by gaining a controlling stake on mines;
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To direct credit to the strategic sectors by heavily regulating the banking sector; and
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To regulate internal and external trade, so as to rationalise the allocation of resources in accordance with the requirements of the heterodox development plan.
The struggle for democracy and development must begin on the basis of the above nationalist proposal of ‘delinking’ (Amin, 1990) in confrontation with imperialism, and not on the basis of a capitulation to the international law of value – the model which the ‘opposition’ advocates. The persistence of coercion in the radicalised state should not detain us from struggling for the democratisation of nationalism: the further radicalisation of nationalism. Opting for a mere ‘human rights’ discourse in this context is inadequate: it obscures the fact that full normalisation with international capital, whether under ZANU-PF or MDC leadership, will itself be a fundamentally coercive and reactionary process.
The Suspension of Bureaucracy
The central feature of the revolutionary situation described above was the temporary suspension of bureaucratic hierarchy in the countryside. Critics of the land reform rushed to a different conclusion on the matter, depicting fast-track land reform as ‘chaotic’, and the suspension of bureaucracy as an irrational ‘destruction’ of the state (Hammar, Raftopoulos & Jensen, 2003). Our present purpose is to add to our previous and ongoing analyses by explaining the manner in which the land reform gained structure as the state moved to adopt and co-opt the land occupations movement (Moyo & Yeros, 2005; Moyo, 2005 and forthcoming). Key to this process was the establishment of ‘land committees’ at the local level, by which bureaucratic hierarchy was suspended. We will also highlight the role of traditional authorities and war veterans in and around the land committees.
Following independence, a complex system of local government evolved at provincial and district levels under the highly centralised control of policy and budgets by national government ministries and parastatals. Local staff and resources came to be coordinated at the lower tiers by the Ministry of Local Government through District Administrators, while district level structures became the pivot of rural policy implementation. The coordination process at district level included the District Administrator (an unelected officer) and various committees involving local representatives of various ministries and the security organs, plus elected councillors and an elaborate (unelected) traditional leadership structure, including chiefs, headmen and village heads. Alongside these structures, relatively well-organised ruling party structures have tended to oversee and often to influence the local administration process.
This system of local government generally experienced declining operational capacity during structural adjustment. That was due to the diminishing fiscal capacity of the state to cover administrative, logistical, and other implementation costs. The fast-track land reform gave new impetus to local structures at a relatively low direct budgetary cost. Payment for land was no longer a constraint to local authorities as only rudimentary support services and infrastructures were being provided by the state to new settlers. Furthermore, various government ‘task forces’, comprising mainly security organs, were established to monitor the land reform process as intense conflicts emerged on the ground.
These structures were transformed during fast-track land reform, mainly through district ‘land committees’, which had been introduced in 1996 but were restructured around a ‘command centre’ in 2000. Land committees came to engage almost all of the local ministry officials and traditional leaders, plus the ruling party, the security organs, and war veterans. These district land committees involved 15 to 30 people.
They reported to similarly constituted provincial land committees, coordinated by provincial governors, which in turn reported to the central government Ministryof Land. Moreover, for at least three years (2000-02), the authority of local state structures tended to be subordinated to the war veterans’ structures which influenced the identification of land for acquisition, using the list of 1,471 designated farms and a beneficiary selection process (using communal area ‘waiting lists’ and war veterans’ lists) which had been drawn up in 1997. War veterans who had established ‘base camps’ for the land occupations were also incorporated into local resettlement farms in ‘committees of seven’, which served to coordinate new settlers, war veterans and others, and to oversee farmworkers, new occupiers, and criminals. In all, the land committees, as structures representing diverse rural interests, but especially petty elites and richer peasants, were perhaps the most influential local institutions to bring structure to the implementation process.
The capacity of the land committees remained limited due to resource constraints, as well as by conflicting authority between local and central government structures, such that the reform process was prolonged from the expected four years to six years. These new structures managed the following processes, to various degrees of effectiveness: they mobilised, monitored, and regulated the land occupations; identified land to be expropriated by the state; selected beneficiaries from ‘waiting lists’ and other applicants; defined the allocation and demarcation of land to ‘social’ (A1) and ‘commercial’ (A2) schemes; negotiated the downsizing of former farm holdings; monitored land use and environmental management; resolved conflicts, preventing criminality and securing the land reform process; managed the use of infrastructure and equipment which remained on the farms; and coordinated the distribution of subsidised agricultural inputs and machinery for tillage and harvesting. In undertaking these numerous tasks, line ministries led the implementation of specific tasks under the supervision of the land committees.
Interference in land acquisition and allocations from influential central state officials and ruling party members was common, especially during the initial mid-2000 to 2002 period, as two land audits revealed (Buka Report, 2002; PLRC, 2003). These land audits were undertaken precisely because of the controversies that had emerged, and led to the restructuring of the Ministry of Land into a separate authority as well as the initiation of a land reform ‘correction’ process in late 2003. Corrections included the following, again to various degrees of effectiveness: the rationalisation of the records on acquired land and beneficiaries; the repossession of multiple and oversized (consolidated) land allocations; the reversal of fraudulent land allocations; the re-planning of land allocations and land-use requirements to cater for specialist enterprises (forestry, wildlife, dairy, and irrigation); the streamlining of the administrative procedures of land committees and central government interventions; the resolution of land boundary disputes; the building of legal and administrative capacities to complete the formal acquisition of land, including administrative court hearings and ‘compensation’ processes; and the allocation of enforceable land tenure documents (‘permits’ and long leases).
Structure and consistency in the land reform process did not emerge quickly. But by 2003, the institutions responsible for implementation appeared to have stabilised around an approach of incrementally completing given procedures. These included, for example, court confirmations of acquisition and tenure certificates offer and compensation and support services. These built on the rudimentary process of land allocations, while relegating to the longer term some of the costly implementation processes like the surveying of land subdivision and infrastructural investments.
The first 18 months of the fast-track process therefore entailed two parallel actions: the coordinated and uncoordinated land occupations on about 20 per cent of the large farmers’ land; and the state-led expropriation of 80 per cent of the large farmers’ land, comprising occupied and unoccupied land, and the formal allocation of land to selected beneficiaries. Both processes entailed elements of ‘chaos’ or ‘anarchy’ at the beginning, given the numerous incidents of confrontation and violence on the farms. These elements gradually receded, however, as the state administrative and legal structures gained greater country-wide control of the process from late 2000, in a process mediated by the district land committees and monitored through technical audits and monitoring task-forces led by security organs. Only sporadic invasions and violence on farms persisted into 2003.
It is important to take a closer scrutiny of the role of customary authorities. Customary authority is based on kinship, has various tiers going down to the village level (chiefs, headmen, and village heads), and is supported by religious leadership structures (spirit mediums). It has a pervasive influence over peasant organisation and land politics, including the control of critical levers of local power which it shares with local state structures (e.g. traditional courts), and formal and informal powers of land allocation, land use, and natural resource management. Traditional leaders had important but contradictory influence in the shaping of fast-track land policy.
First, traditional leaders tended to compete among themselves in defence of their jurisdictions during the land reform, and competed as well with local government structures and ‘outsiders’ in order to settle as many of their land-short and ‘congested’ communal area ‘subjects’ on the finite amount of redistributable land. Some traditional leaders complained that their ‘subjects’ were being excluded, that their communal lands were not being adequately ‘decongested’, and that the land committees tended to marginalise them. This displeasure, which received wide media coverage, placed various pressures on the central state and local land committees. Consequently, the land targeted for acquisition was increased to meet the demand; landholding sizes allocated to the commercial (A2) scheme were downsized; and greater powers to identify beneficiaries were provided to chiefs. Their position on land committees was strengthened, although their capacity to overcome the influence of its other members is doubtful.
At times, these influences led to equity-inducing policy responses from the state. It highlighted the importance of this local structure as a key source of ‘internal’ critique of land policy and implementation which forced the state to shift. While the external critique, especially the media, seized the opportunity to expose grievances and to buttress its own critique of the fast-track process as a whole, such agitation by traditional authorities tended to strengthen state-society interaction, including its responsiveness to peasants.
Yet many of the chiefs also sought to gain access to larger pieces of prime land and homesteads of the former landowners, as did their elite counterparts in the state bureaucracy and private sectors. They supported the larger A2 landholdings which, in turn, they justified on grounds of respecting the mambo (chief). And eventually they were also allocated or gained access to electricity, vehicles, and farming inputs, purportedly to enhance their leadership role and capacities in the agrarian reform process. But only a few of their ‘subjects’ have received such benefits so far. This pattern suggests that chiefs are a special type of lower tier ‘policy elite’ which promoted both equity and inequity within a broad context of support for the land reform.
With respect to the Matabeleland provinces, field evidence showed that a minority of chiefs, dominated politically by the MDC, tended to be sceptical about land reform and had not cooperated either in encouraging land occupations (the ‘informal’ process) or in supplying ‘waiting lists’ of potential beneficiaries in the ‘formal’ process (interview with war veterans, chiefs, and new farmers in Matabeleland North and South, October 2004). In this way, some districts gained less access to new land, while in others (e.g., Midlands, Mashonaland West), where peasants, chiefs, and war veterans were hyper-supportive of the land reform, many more people gained land, including land from beyond their provinces where chiefs and other leaders were less active. Nonetheless, three years later, some of the chiefs who at first had resisted the process submitted waiting lists for consideration, when the policy structure and political events had stabilised.
The role of customary authorities has been contradictory. On the one hand, they have often played a catalytic role in land occupations, from the colonial period to the neo-colonial, including the high profile Svosve and Hwedza land occupationsof 1998 (Moyo, 2001; Moyana, 2002; Shiku, 2002; Marongwe, 2003; Sadomba, 2006). On the other hand, customary authorities influenced land reform policy to more parochial and patriarchal ends. In the late 1990s, they opposed market-based land reform by encouraging a land acquisition approach which would extend communal boundaries to contiguous areas and also induced an allocation process in which mainly they (not district councils) would identify those in need of land within their jurisdiction. While this decentralised the beneficiary selection processes, it also enhanced local patronage activities by both chiefs and local administrators. During the fast-track process, the role of traditional leaders in beneficiary selection was often overridden by war veterans, but still chiefs did influence policy to the effect of extending their territorial control into contiguous resettlement areas. This form of influence, while logistically rational because it reduced the costs of resettling people, gave sustenance to increasing ethno-regional biases in land allocation. It also reinforced customary authority as a whole and its adverse consequences in terms of gender, age, and class relations.
The role of war veterans continues to require careful research. To date, most studies have had an in-built bias against radical nationalism, such as that of the war veterans at the end of the 1990s (Krieger, 2001; Moore, 2004). The entry of war veterans into political life crept in gradually since 1989 when it was founded as a registered welfare organisation to improve the lives of 55,000 war veterans. But the organisation took a sharp organisational and strategic turn in 1997. War veterans then held street marches, demanded state compensation for their looted pension fund, also demanded more aggressive land acquisition by the state, and a year later, coordinated a high-profile wave of land occupations in 30 sites around the country (Sadomba, 2006). From the beginning, the rebellion constituted an ‘internal’ critique of ZANU-PF and government.
The war veterans’ association (ZNLWVA) represents about 200,000 people. They are dispersed geographically across the country and conduct their affairs through national, provincial, and district-level structures. The organisation represents war veterans of varied objective class origins, some employed and others not, some with key positions in the state, the security apparatus, and the private sector, some based in the countryside, others in the cities, some who have longer war veteran service, others lesser, and so forth. They tend to be identified mainly with the visible elite of bureaucrats, political leaders, and businessmen, but in fact the majority is part of the rural and urban poor. Since independence, their ‘demobilisation’ and ‘absorption’ into social and political life has been highly differentiated, yielding a complex hierarchy. But their main power base is in the rural areas; this base was formed during the guerrilla war era and cultivated thereafter, either by social links or continued residence in the countryside.
Debate has tended to conflate the ZNLWVA membership, which is organically born from ZANU-PF membership, with ZANU-PF organs and strategies as a party. This has neglected the changing social and political relations of the two organisations, and the nuanced shifts in their alliance. At the national and provincial levels, i.e. the apex, the relationship has been in constant motion, oscillating between autonomy on the part of ZNLWVA and its co-optation by ZANU-PF and the state, but gravitating to the latter. This process has entailed a multiplicity of local independent actions, mostly by the middle class and poor war veterans who have confronted ZANU-PF structures and the local and central state. Contrary to the claims of critics, their confrontations have been real. It is they who have initiated key processes such as land expropriation, land and agrarian corruption exposure, and policies to enable agrarian equipment procurement and subsidies. This activism is combined with general loyalty towards ZANU-PF, as well as the tendency to be subordinated by ZANU-PF and the state shortly after ‘rebelling’. While opportunistic, corrupt, and pugilistic elements also exist amongst them, as in most segments of society, such elements have served to undermine the fairness and consistency of the land reform. It is also true that war veteran activism has served to garner renewed rural electoral support for ZANU-PF. But the key point is that war veterans maintained unique organic links to the countryside which other ‘civil society’ organisations failed to develop after independence, and which enabled the war veterans to garner this support and to mobilise land demands into a national land occupation movement.
The ZNLWVA-ZANU-PF alliance exhibited significant disputes in terms of material objectives, tactics, and ideology. The process of land occupation and state expropriation was riddled by numerous internal conflicts and contradictions. Some sought the total restitution of all land and displacement of all white (‘settler’) farmers, while others sought negotiation and accommodation with them on downsized farms. Some promoted physical confrontation in the invasions but most did not, and sought instead the more effective use of the legal instrument of land expropriation. Some engaged in corrupt land-grabbing of large and multiple farms and equipment, but the majority did not, preferring to be formally allocated land and subsidised credit, according to policy. These competing currents took three years to harmonise, and in turn have been reflected to a certain extent in the political succession battles within ZANU-PF.
Finally, it is important to emphasise that the grounds for the possible suspension of bureaucracy in the 2000-03 period had been laid in the late 1990s with the mobilisation of the war veterans, the repudiation of structural adjustment, and the beginning of sanctions. Although the internal re-organisation of the liberation movement was not pre-determined, it was at this time that the leadership of the ruling party was incrementally forced to abandon the mentality of technocracy and the rule of law, and by 2000, to move radical legislation on land acquisition rapidly through parliament. The suspension of bureaucracy in the rural areas was the climax of the revolutionary situation.
It is also important to note that the suspension of bureaucracy has been followed by the re-centralisation and enlargement of bureaucracy – a common feature of previous revolutionary situations (Amin, 1981; Skocpol, 1979; Halliday, 1999). The emergence of a heterodox development plan under sanctions has obliged the state to extend its direct control over monetary, fiscal, pricing, trade, investment, and land policy, and to resurrect planning agencies and parastatals. This centralisation of power has both enabled the state to maintain its confrontational stance against sanctions and widened the gulf between state and society.
Normalisation & Coercion
A turning point in 2003 was marked by an incipient policy of ‘normalisation’ with capital. That policy has been contradictory and accompanied by ongoing coercion against the opposition (which has continued to seek ‘regime change’), and has involved the passing of several repressive bills through parliament, which inter alia led to shutting down of the private daily newspaper, The Daily News. Ongoing coercion culminated in the mass evictions of irregular urban settlements in May-July 2005, in an operation codenamed ‘Operation Restore Order/Murambatsvina’. Some degree of political concession was also evident in amendments to the electoral laws in the context of SADC norms-making; while levels of electoral violence were notably lower during the 2005 parliamentary election.
Recent analyses of this period have sought to understand normalisation through the lense of formal party politics, and particularly as a function of intra-ZANU-PF politics (LeBas, 2004; Kagwanja, 2005; Maroleng, 2005). Earlier analysis of radicalisation denied the existence of intra-ZANU-PF cleavages, especially class cleavages, and depicted fast-track land reform as a mere political response to the external MDC challenge. Recent analyses, however, have discovered intra-ZANUPF politics but deny their class content. Intra-ZANU-PF politics are now understood as formally constituted, class-free, and mainly ethnic factions. The same analyses depict intra-MDC cleavages as mainly ‘tactical’ or procedural, effectively cleansing them of both their ethnic and class content (see also Raftopoulos, 2006).
Yet closer analysis reveals that the organic basis of normalisation was found in the consolidation of a new black agrarian bourgeoisie, linked to the ruling party, but sharing with other capitals the need for ‘order’ as a prerequisite for accumulation.
The capitalist class as a whole may not have achieved organisational and strategic homogeneity in the post-fast-track period – some are committed liberals, others remain nationalist – but they do share the need for political and economic stability. For its part, the working class demands ‘order’ as well – most immediately against the rapid economic decline – but remains disunited, (re)subordinated to capital and the state, and incapable of projecting its own vision of ‘order’. This array of sociopolitical demands is expressed through formally constituted lobbies, associations, and factions, as well as through less visible forms of politics, both within and without political parties. In this context, ethnic mobilisation and fragmentation is invariably a bourgeois/petty-bourgeois accumulation strategy: the expression of an advanced degeneration of inter-capitalist relations and of working class organisation and leadership. This is not a ‘natural’ phenomenon of African political parties – or of ‘certain’ political parties – and must always be explained rather than assumed.
The type and pace of normalisation has unfolded through the above contradictions and in conflict with the sanctions regime. The ruling party and its leadership, contrary to the ultimate sacrifice demanded of it, has remained in a position to influence and implement normalisation, which in turn has had two basic dimensions, one political and one economic.
Politically, there has been an ongoing attempt by the leadership of the ruling party to reign in radical elements within its ranks, and especially among lower-echelon war veterans. If, by 2003, co-optation of war veterans was more or less complete in the countryside, it remained an outstanding threat in the urban areas where war veterans had also spearheaded occupations of urban residential land during 2000-01. During this time urban land occupations had been tolerated by the government, not least due to its concern for its faltering urban vote, yet a formal policy framework on the urban land question had not been forthcoming. Thus, the radicalisation of the state against property rights was by and large a rural affair. Yet, urban land occupations proceeded to consolidate themselves into housing cooperatives and other associations, often under militant war veteran leadership; moreover, they proceeded to build residential sites and other small business structures outside the official urban planning framework. The organisational structure and militancy of these associations continued to pose a political challenge to the ruling party in the post-2003 period; this was as much an internal party affair as an external one, given that it raised the spectre of a broad-based urban social movement which could be coopted by the MDC. Indeed, elements in the ruling party have admitted in hindsight that they feared an ‘Orange’ type revolution. At the same time, the expansion of residential sites placed new objective demands on public utilities (water, electricity, sewage), increasing the pressure on already strained urban authorities and resources. The stage was thus set for an urban showdown, either to re-radicalise the urban question or to restore political and municipal ‘order’.
The economic dimension of normalisation has been no less critical. While all sectors of capital have demanded order in terms of security of property rights and the reduction/stabilisation of inflation, all capitals across sectors have also engaged in speculative activity and short-term profiteering through the informalisation of business activity and the creation of parallel markets (as opposed to black markets). A key development in this process has been the emergence of systematic linkages between large, formal businesses with the small, informal enterprises whose epicentre has been irregular urban growth points. Thus, banks ‘externalised’ their business activities both outside the country and outside the formal economy inside the country and by conducting foreign exchange transactions in parallel markets; the mining sector externalised trade through illegal exports and informal local trade; the export and import sectors (manufacturing, agriculture, and services) similarly engaged in the externalisation/informalisation of trade and especially foreign exchange while the same pattern occurred within the construction sector, which profited by irregular building activities, and within the state sector as well.
These activities have hampered the ability of the government to implement a coherent heterodox plan and undermined its key policy instruments: control of foreign exchange, imports, and exports, the regulation of interest rates, the targeting of credit to essential industries, and the subsidising of basic commodities and utilities. The informalisation of the economy thus created severe economic leakages which counteracted efforts to bring hyperinflation under control and undermined heterodox economic and political survival as a whole. It is important to note that the creation of parallel markets has been pursued as much by black capital linked to ZANU-PF, as by other capitals. In sum, the political challenges of normalisation described above were compounded by severe economic leakages – mostly based in the urban areas. The National Economic Development Priorities Programme (NEDPP) of 2006 has suffered similar constraints.
The project of restoring political and economic order under the siege of sanctions culminated in mid-2005 in Operation Restore Order/Murambatsvina. This involved the surprise, military-style assault on irregular urban settlements, the destruction of residential and business structures, and mass evictions. By any standard, restoring order has been a humanitarian tragedy, with greatest impact on the well-being of the urban-based working class, and with adverse consequences for their rural kin as well. It has also severely compromised the image of the ruling party as an antiimperialist and pan-Africanist movement.
At the same time, imperialist forces have not idly stood by. They have exploited the tragedy and renewed pressure on the ruling party and its leadership to step down. Specifically, they have magnified the tragedy, claiming, in a UN report, that some 700,000 persons were displaced (UNO, 2005). A more rigorous analysis would have placed the number of displaced at a much lower number, possibly between one-half and one-third the UN estimate. The UN team that conducted the inquiry employed a shoddy methodology, relying largely on the ‘evidence’ of unaccountable civil society organisations, rather than doing the more demanding research that was required. It is worth noting that early UN estimates, before the official inquiry, had placed the number at 350,000 (or 70,000 families); these numbers were also questionable. There was no differentiation between residential and small-business structures allowing for double-counting families with residential and smallbusiness structures. Moreover, both the early estimates and the later report assumed that every family evicted consisted of five members. That ignored the fact that these settlements in all likelihood did not consist of entire families. They were temporary structures which typically reproduce the rural-urban, dual-home strategyof Zimbabwe's semi-proletarianised peasantry. In the event, instead of correcting the early estimates, the UN team simply doubled them, without explanation. Needless to say, this numbers game has masked the real economic and political contradictions and struggles facing Zimbabwe, and served to sustain superficial perspectives on its polarisation and ‘governance’ deficit.
The human costs of normalisation have been accompanied by formally constituted power struggles within the ruling party and the MDC. Within ZANU-PF, there has been a shift from a radical nationalist political unity, associated with the fast-track period, in which war veterans effectively challenged the class project of the elite, to the re-emergence of internal factionalism associated with the successionof President Mugabe. There have been three broad factions vying for succession, two comprising of the ‘old guard’ and the third of the so-called ‘Young Turks’. The old guard has been split between the camps led by party stalwarts, Solomon Mujuru and Emmerson Mnangagwa who have generally, but not exclusively, mobilised around Zezuru and Karanga identities, respectively (both being ethnic Shona sub-groups), while the Mujuru camp specifically has also been in alliance with Ndebele/ZAPU stalwarts, John Nkomo and Dumiso Dabengwa. On the other hand, the ‘Young Turks’, whose most prominent figure was (until late-2004) Information and Publicity Minister Jonathan Moyo, opened a new fissure in the power politics of the party by mobilising around ‘generational renewal’. President Mugabe has generally remained aloof of factional politics, maintaining relations with all, intervening in crucial junctures to maintain inter-ethnic balance within the party.
Succession politics heated up in October 2003, after the death of Shona Vice-President Simon Muzenda, which raised once again the issue of ethnic balance. The matter was settled only in December 2004, when the Mnangagwa camp, which had previously sought clandestine dialogue with the MDC, forged a new alliance with the Moyo camp in a meeting in Tsholotsho. The aim of the meeting was not only to fill the Shona vacancy, but also to demand the retirement of the second (Ndebele) Vice-President Joseph Msika (from the older ZAPU). Besides constituting a new challenge to the President, they also jeopardised the 1987 Unity Agreement which had established balance within the party by the creation of two vice-presidents, one for each former liberation party. In the event, the Tsholotsho meeting was uncovered by ZANU-PF and its members reprimanded and dismissed from top government and party posts. The result has been to maintain ethnic balance by the appointment of respected cabinet minister and moderate Joyce Mujuru to the Shona vice-presidency, albeit on a gender card; and to reinforce the Zezuru camp by a disproportionate allocation of top jobs.
It is important to note that in this power struggle, ideological differences have been either non-existent or superficial and opportunistic (e.g., the ‘radicalism’ of some of those dismissed by ZANU-PF). All factions represent bourgeois interests, although ZANU-PF in general seeks to retain the peasantry as its main base, through partially supportive agrarian policies. Yet, it is also the case that, despite the ever-present ethnic factor, power politics have not degenerated into an ethno-chauvinist spiral; national unity has prevailed over the Shona-Ndebele cleavage. In this sense, the post-Tsholotsho period has seen the restoration of order within the ruling party as well. Moreover, given that moderate John Nkomo will be the likely (but contested) successor of Msika in the Ndebele vice-presidency, the stage is now set for two moderate nationalists (Nkomo and J. Mujuru) to succeed President Mugabe. Yet, this outcome could still be challenged by others within ZANU-PF.
Meanwhile, factionalism has indeed degenerated along ethnic lines within the MDC. While ethnic balance had been adhered to since the foundation of the party in late 1999, ethnicity has increasingly gained significance. This is revealed by the fact that the stronghold of the party became the urban areas of Mashonaland, plus Matabeleland as a whole. However, by late 2004, the ruling party had managed to make significant inroads into the urban strongholds of the MDC, thus shifting the balance within the MDC to its Matabeleland constituency. In this context, two factions emerged, one led by Morgan Tsvangirai (Shona) and the other by Welshman Ncube (Ndebele), the former camp having failed to gain parliamentary seats and advocating extra-parliamentary mass action, the latter maintaining its parliamentary position against ZANU-PF and advocating engagement with the electoral process. Thus, the two camps have not differed merely over tactics; tactical differences have acquired ethnic meaning. Intra-party factional differences escalated in the run-up to the Senate elections in late 2005 when Tsvangirai overruled the decision of the national executive council of the party to participate in the elections, thus seriously prejudicing the parliamentary position of the Matabaleland constituency. In the event, ZANU-PF swept the elections (albeit on a low turn-out) while the MDC could not avert its ethnic disintegration.
Ideological differences have been absent in this factional struggle as well. Both factions represent bourgeois interests, linked directly to imperialist forces, while also retaining an alliance with the urban-based trade union movement (ZCTU). In this context, ethnic disintegration is not merely ‘tactical’ or procedural, but has its roots in the failure of the MDC to mobilise its constituency on a working-class platform (despite its trade-union origins), and in its rapid material and ideological co-optation by the West – to which its two wings remain accountable. It is notable that the Ncube wing of the MDC has more recently sought to overcome its status as an ethnic-minority party by appointing Arthur Mutambara, a former student leader and ethnic Shona, to its leadership. It is also notable that in his acceptance speech in February 2006, Mutambara sought to differentiate himself from the West and the puppet trajectory of the MDC. He admitted that ‘there was need for a land revolution in Zimbabwe’, called for a foreign policy that is ‘informed by Pan-Africanist ideals’ and proclaimed ‘[w]e are anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist’ (Mutambara, 2006). Although this new rhetoric seems to vindicate the nationalist position, it is doubtful that the MDC, in its factions, can extricate itself from its imperialist patrons without radically transforming its relations with its social base, organisationally and ideologically.
Conclusion: Towards a ‘New Left’
If the sources of nationalist re-radicalisation have been fundamentally social, these same sources continue to require a political force which would carry forward Zimbabwe's radical nationalist inheritance. A new political force must sink new roots in the working class; it must unify the proletariat and semi-proletariat across the rural-urban divide; and it must wrest itself from political parties, the state, and external interference. It must also obtain a new level of ideological clarity which never obtained in the liberation struggle, the land occupation movement, or the political opposition. The objective of this ‘New Left’ is to establish the organisational means to engage in sustained ideological confrontation with imperialism, both internally and externally, and to recommence an uninterrupted process of social transformation in Zimbabwe.
The political facts have been in transition since fast-tracking begun. On the one hand, the future of the nationalist alliance is by no means guaranteed, especially as the post-fast-track period is being won over by an extroverted accumulation strategy and as the chronic democratic deficit of the ruling party inhibits the emergence of a working class counter-strategy. On the other hand, the post-national alliance is itself in crisis, unable to reconcile its own contradictions, its naïve/opportunistic devotion to parliamentary politics, dependence on external aid and neglect of socioeconomic issues. As the isolation and economic decline of the country persist, a likely scenario continues to be the realignment of all factions of the bourgeoisie, across party lines, behind a common extroverted policy stance, in effect a return to the principles of structural adjustment. Succession battles within the ruling party itself will continue to reflect these wider class struggles and alliances.
Whatever reconfiguration occurs within the capitalist class, it is imperative now that the working class, in all its fragments, withdraws from its fast-track alliances and establishes a united working-class platform. Some promising steps in this direction are being taken by some civic organisations, for example within the context of the Zimbabwe Social Forum. These organisations seek to create a new network whose intention is to remobilise various existing and potential social movements into a more radical alliance. Although this initiative includes the ZCTU, as well as other civics that have been embedded within the more purely ‘political’ movements led by the MDC and ZANU-PF, the leading agents of this initiative (e.g. Munyaradzi Gwisayi and others) are explicitly seeking an alternative left course. To their credit, they appear to be seeking a new strategy and tactics for the working class that will transcend the narrow electoral politics which have been dominating Zimbabwe and are demanding both the reopening of civil space and the pursuit of a left strategy. In this sense, they also seem to be drawing on the positive elements, the strengths, of the ‘Two Lefts’.
At the same time, the obstacles to this re-alignment of forces continue to be precisely the weaknesses of the ‘Two Lefts’; namely, the contradictions of the existing civic organisations and the absence of a viable, democratic rural movement to succeed the land occupation movement. Ultimately, any ‘New Left’ political force will stand or fall on its ability to transcend the class contradictions of the civics and breath new life into the countryside which will require collaboration with the war veterans’ association, or elements within it.
We can now provide our own answers to some of the recurrent political questions that a ‘New Left’ would have to confront.
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What political strategy and tactics are relevant to normalisation/neocolonialism?
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What should be the relationship between social movements and political parties?
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What is a progressive politics for Africa's semi-proletarianised peasantry?
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What kind of nationalism is required? What kind of internationalism?
These goals require social movements that are democratic, accountable and autonomous. The immediate task is the organisation of a mass base and creation of operational structures that are both decentralised and unified. The empowerment of the membership for leadership roles on a wide basis (on the principle of ‘every member an organiser’) is crucial to this decentralisation, which in turn can persevere against persistent intimidation and repression. The political tasks are those of defending the economic interests of the working class, the building of alliances in society, and the articulation of a political strategy. In the past, it has been the role of political parties to coordinate such alliances at a national level, and while this remains important today, it can be destructive of social movements if the latter are not mature enough to defend their integrity, or capable enough to withdraw from such alliances when they no longer serve their interests. It is also the case, however, that social movements are better able today to develop political alliances and articulate progressive strategies on their own behalf, both nationally and internationally, such that alliances with political parties do not have the urgency of the past. In the case of Zimbabwe, it is imperative now that social movements withdraw from political parties in order to begin anew the process of organisation and mobilisation on an autonomous basis. The assumption of power, whether constitutionally or not, is an empty accomplishment if power is not wielded by the working class, for the working class.
The role of the rural proletariat and semi-proletariat is fundamental in any postfast-track reconfiguration of social forces. The countryside has for long been the matrix of militant politics in Zimbabwe yet politics has never obtained ideological clarity. The reasons for this contradiction have been many: the absence of autonomous rural movements; the obstacles of customary authority; the failure of trade unionism to commit to the countryside; the dominance of petty-bourgeois interests within peasant organisations; the subordination of rural organisations to political parties, etc. Consequently, whatever historical progress has been made, from independence to fast-track, has not set the organisational foundations for an uninterrupted process of social transformation. This legacy must now be broken. The post-fast-track situation requires new thinking on how to organise the countryside in a manner in which economic and political organisation is mutually reinforcing.
The central objective in the countryside must once again become the organisation of production cooperatives or producer associations. There is much to be learned from the past experiences and failures of cooperativism in Africa and elsewhere. There is much also to be learned from contemporary cooperativist experiments by land occupation movements, most importantly by the MST in Brazil (see Yeros, 2006) which has come to view cooperativism – including voluntary collectivisation – as the only way to safeguard the gains of land reform and to keep alive the flame of social transformation. Such cooperativism ‘from below’ has both economic and political goals. In economic terms, it not only unifies smallholders against a monopolistic market, but it also prepares the way for cooperation in production in the form of collective investments, division and specialisation of labour, development of agro-industrial enterprises, and worker self-management. In political terms, it establishes permanent structures from which to produce leaders on a perpetual basis, to cultivate working-class consciousness, promote youth and gender equity, and engage in systematic political activity, both nationally and internationally. Grassroots cooperativism, in this sense, becomes the ‘rearguard’ of class struggle.
The problem of customary authority, including the problem of social organisation on the basis of kinship rather than economic interest, continues to be an obstacle to this type of social movement. But the converse is also true; namely, that this type of co-operativist movement is the only means by which to erode customary authority from below and prepare the social basis for its eventual de-institutionalisation from above. We argue that a progressive politics for Zimbabwe and Africa's semiproletarianised peasantry today is the dual objective of land and agrarian reform and grassroots cooperativism.
The new social facts in rural Zimbabwe also lend themselves to a new nationalism that is more clearly proletarian, free of bourgeois patronage and distortions. While in the past the aspiring black bourgeoisie could dress its own nationalism with a universal cloak, the expansion of black ownership in the countryside may now clarify the capital-labour contradiction among black Zimbabweans. The opportunity must therefore be seized by the working class to confront bourgeois nationalism and to claim the national liberation project for itself. A more popular nationalism must seek to construct a national economy in an incremental way by de-linking and where agriculture assumes the leading role and industry an auxiliary role in the modernisation of agriculture (Amin, 1983). This development contrasts the ‘nationbuilding’ of the 1980s, in which the reverse relationship held.
Finally, it must be understood that proletarian nationalism is not, in principle, antithetical to proletarian internationalism. We have argued that peripheral nationalism is not morally equivalent to imperialist ‘nationalism’ (i.e. chauvinism/ racism); in fact, it is the corner-stone of proletarian internationalism. This type of anti-imperialist internationalism is sorely missing among contemporary internationals, including the World Social Forum (WSF) and especially the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), a labour-imperialist institution par excellence. Nonetheless, working-class organisations in the periphery do not have the luxury to choose the ideal international arena in which to participate. But what they can do is to establish anti-imperialist principles of foreign policy and international solidarity and demand that ‘comrades’ recognise and respect them. This is something that the ZCTU never established in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the result of allowing itself to be severely co-opted. For its part, the World Social Forum (WSF) in Zimbabwe and elsewhere is subject to the same ‘civilising’ pressures, the dominant currents within it being ‘post-national’ and ‘social democratic’. Nonetheless, the WSF is also not to be easily written off. By virtue of its non-bureaucratic nature, it continues to provide the opportunity for alternative alliances among both rural and urban movements, towards the building of a ‘New Left’. For this reason, the Zimbabwe Social Forum also emerges as a key forum for reengagement and re-alignment of social forces at a crucial national and international juncture.