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Zimbabwe:
A democracy of diminished expectations or toward a political economy
of renewal?
David
Moore [1]
October 18, 2007
http://www.africafiles.org/article.asp?ID=17002
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In mid October
2007 an American 'expert- on Zimbabwe told "politicians
and businessmen seeking change in Zimbabwe" gathered at the
Royal Institute of International Affairs in London that "the
USA had work to do to restore its poor image in Africa". It
could do so by "launching . . . a trust that would stimulate
debate about a future, democratic, Zimbabwe". Because "there
are so many young people in Zimbabwe, a national agenda and a youth
agenda would amount to roughly the same thing," she said.
Over 70 percent
of all Zimbabweans are under the age of 30 so any kind of lasting
reform or economic revival is going to have to take a youth agenda
as the national agenda and this means getting serious about job
creation on a massive scale, thinking through how to address the
fact that many Zimbabwean youth have now been socialised in a kind
of political violence that does not translate well to a stable democracy
down the road.[2]
Michelle
Gavin, named an 'American official- in the Zimbabwean
article-s title, but positioned in the text as an academic
in the Council on Foreign Relations,[3]
indicated inadvertently the relationship between 'thin-
liberal democracy - voting every few years on whether or not
one section of the political elite should replace another -
and a thicker sort that would enable the gainful employment of millions
of people as some sort of minimal result of a project and process
with social justice at its core. This is the main theme of this
paper. We are wondering if in the past decade of political and socio-economic
crisis there is anything left of the hopes of a renewed democracy
that were so evident at its beginning. We think hopes for either,
and both, thin and thick forms of democracy are very dim at the
present.
The long crisis
in Zimbabwe has generated fundamental changes in the perspectives
of oppositional (and even ruling party) actors and their regional
and international counterparts regarding the nature of democracy
in both its political and socio-economic senses. Compared to the
mid-1990s there is a diminished sense of what can be achieved in
either of these realms, and moreover the connections between them.
In both left and right, among both economists and capitalists, and
political scientists and actors there is an economism and a narrow
politicism. The fact that the twain between them is meeting less
and less means that there are even fewer chances of their linking
and broadening.
This process
is concomitant with international currents that are also narrow
in their 'neo-liberal- economism, less confident than
earlier in a liberal, constitutionalist, politics that is increasingly
replaced by either an apparent muscular militarism or anodyne 'governance-ism-,
but sometimes flaring out in ephemeral if enthusiastic encouragements
of 'Orange Revolutions- on the peripheries of important
regional powers. These currents mesh with those in Zimbabwe as,
inevitably, international and regional forces play in the game that
has millions of Zimbabweans caught in its moves as they are further
and further repressed and marginalised by both global and local
curbs to their democratic desires (unless one believes that joining
the global diasporas who send 'revolutionary remittances-
home to increasingly dollarized economies is something to be heralded
as 'progress- [4]).
In the interregnum,
'leftist- political economy discourse has been either
too narrowly focussed on land and mythologizing those who apparently
re-possessed it, [5] or a structuralist/welfarist
vision that either goes back to a Rhodesian type of developmental
capitalist state or a too rose-tinted view on Zimbabwe of the 1980s.
On the political side of the fence there are human-rights advocates
who leave their rights off at the first generation, with constitutions,
at the ballot-box, or with technocratic notions of 'good governance-.
How can these sides of the democratic question come back together,
to when the ZCTU
and the students seemed to see all these elements of democracy as
intextricably intertwined and ineluctably marching forward?
How can Zimbabwe
reach back to the most vibrant moments, and the analysis emanating
therefrom, of similarly revolutionary moments in history, such as
those of the French revolution, when it was clear to many that the
freedom of a nation is the product to two elements: the equality
which its laws create in the conditions and enjoyments of the citizens,
and the fullest extension of their political rights. The second
is no substitute for the first . . . ,[6]
but equally knowing that the first without the second can never
be firmly entrenched and is too often implemented by a Leninist
vanguard that quickly becomes a Stalinist or Maoist terror merging
into a Brezhnevist bureaucracy, a Deng Xiapengist market-communism
or a Putinist mafia [7] - or
which loses any sense of purpose altogether, except that of maintaining
power, as seems to be the Zimbabwean case.
This paper will
present an historical analysis of this transition, and hopes to
generate a political economy perspective that will serve to bring
back some of the links between political and socio-economic democracy
that have become severed in the past decade or more: since then,
perspectives on the economy and the polity have both become narrowed
in such a way that ideas about alternatives in the former have become
more 'liberal- than ever in terms of the market alone,
and in the latter notions of expansive participation have disappeared
into the vapour while notions of the orderly transition of power
- even within ZANU-PF alone! - have become paramount
just as, ironically, without the strong participation of the 'masses-
they become less and less possible as the spirals of conflict turn
inward to ZANU-PF and even the MDC.[8]
* David Moore
is a professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Economic History
and Development Studies & at Carleton University, (Visiting)
Institute of Political Economy.
Notes
[1] This paper
was presented at African Studies Association meeting October 18
2007. There, it was presented as a paper co-authored by Moore and
Brian Raftopoulos, now Research Director for the Solidarity
Peace Trust. This paper is the result of three meetings, two
long telephone calls and may email messages of the two of us, but
the actual written document is Moore-s (Raftopoulos was in
the midst of putting together a report for the SPT when this draft
was written). This paper is meant to be a first draft of a paper
in preparation for a special edition of the Journal of Contemporary
African Studies, so should be considered very tentative and not
necessarily as endorsed by Raftopoulos.
[2] Trevor Grundy,
US
officials warn against 'anyone but Mugabe- approach:
His rule cannot persist indefinitely, The Zimbabwean, Oct 11,
2007.
[3] Thus the
close relationship between 'think-tanks- and the American
state is known intuitively by reporters on Zimbabwean affairs.
[4] John S.
Saul, 'Of Revolutions and Remittances: Paul Nugent-s
Africa Since Independence,- forthcoming in Review of African
Political Economy. Saul-s encapsulation of the state of class
formation at the decolonization moment in Africa, elaborating on
Nugent-s, is not much different now, it would seem. This would
not encourage much hope for social democracy in the present.
so weak was
the internal articulation of any class forces likely to be "progressive"
(read: developmental) in either socialist or capitalist terms
that the continent-s unhappy fate, to the present, was sealed:
not so much "socialism or capitalism" as "neither
socialism nor capitalism," in any meaningfully transformative
sense . . .
[5] See Sam
Moyo and Paris Yeros-s introduction and chapter on Zimbabwe
in their Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements
in Africa, Asia and Latin America, London: Zed Books, pp. 67-101,
wherein they condemn their 'opponents- on the left such
as Raftopoulos for their post-modernist and bourgeois flirtation
with questions of identity and liberal democracy. For critiques
and, then their responses, see David Moore, "Marxism and Marxist
Intellectuals in Schizophrenic Zimbabwe: How Many Rights for Zimbabwe-s
Left? A Comment," Historical Materialism, 12, 4, December
2004, pp. 405-425; Brian Raftopoulos, 'The Zimbabwean Crisis
and the Challenges for the Left-, Journal of Southern African
Studies, 32, 2, June 2006, pp. 203-219; David Moore, "'Intellectuals"
Interpreting Zimbabwe-s Primitive Accumulation: Progress to
Market Civilisation?- Safundi, 8, 2, April 2007, pp. 199-222;
Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, 'The Radicalised State: Zimbabwe-s
Interrupted Revolution,- Review of African Political Economy,
March 2007; Moyo and Yeros, 'The Zimbabwe Question and the
Two Lefts-, Historical Materialism, forthcoming, 15, 4, December
2007, wherein they attempt to take on Bond, Moore and Raftopoulos
for being less than enthusiastic for the recent Zimbabwean 'revolution-
and too friendly towards the opposition.
[6] Filippo
Buonarroti, Conspiration pour l-égalité, dite
de Babeuf (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1957), p. 33, paraphrased
in John Dunn, Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy, London:
Atlantic Books, 2005, p. 125.
[7] Dunn spends
much of the rest of Setting the People Free explaining how and why
American style 'egoism- won out over the Babeufian ideas
of 'equality-, and how in the context of growth extreme
economic inequalities can be allowed and even celebrated (especially
in the USA) but in the end seems to conclude that the market is
'not simply equality-s enemy, as Babeuf and Buonarroti
confidently supposed-. Rather, it has 'settled with
growing resolution on a single political form and a particular image
of society- grounded on 'the claim to recognize the
ways in which humans are equal and to protect them equally in living
as they choose- (p. 137). Much of his book is a lament for
the loss of the impetus for equality yet simultaneously a celebration
of the 'hegemony of the order of egoism- (p. 155) and
a certainty that those with egalitarian bents are more likely to
push for democracy than egoists. The point would seem to be, in
places such as Zimbabwe as people struggle, through a 'stumbling,
myopic blend of quarrelling and shared exploration of the inescapable
issue of how to sustain everyday lives together as agreeably as
possible . . . in the space that history and their enemies leave
open to them- towards democracy - and where the 'enemy-
is within, in the form of the ruling party - how to create
the political forms that combine democracy and forms of economic
development that do not benefit only one class, or go out of the
country altogether.
[8] On the MDC
split, see Brian Raftopoulos, 'Reflections on Opposition Politics
in Zimbabwe: The Politics of the Movement for Democratic Change
(MDC)-, Raftopoulos and Karin Alexander, eds., Reflections
on Democratic Politics in Zimbabwe, Cape Town: Institute of
Justice and Reconciliation, 2006, pp. 7-29.
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