Maoist-Third Worldists denounce imperialist meddling in Zimbabwe

 

Maoist-Third Worldists denounce imperialist meddling in Zimbabwe

by End Imperialism

(monkeysmashesheaven.wordpress.com)

There is growing sentiment in some quarters for an imperialist intervention as an answer to Zimbabwe’s troubles. Recently, Lord Ashdown advocated imperialist military intervention to prevent an impending “genocide.” Gordon Brown has called on the International Community to reject the result of the election poll. In a recent statement, he declared that Britain would seek sanctions against Robert Mugabe, including travel restrictions and the freezing of assets. (1) Echoing Ashdown, Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu advocated imperialist intervention in Zimbabwe to stave off “bloodshed.” (2) 

The opposition party in Zimbabwe is the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). This party has some support within the urban centres of Zimbabwe and within the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). Trotskyists have a foothold in ZCTU, the main social pillar of the comprador Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), set up in 1999 by various imperialist forces inside and outside Zimbabwe (principally the white settler Commercial Farmer’s Union and the british imperialist Zimbabwe Democracy Trust). The Trotskyists are calling for mass action to oust Mugabe even as imperialism, british imperialism in particular, is beating war and invasion drums louder and louder (see the afore mentioned statement by Lord Ashdown calling for invasion to prevent impending “genocide”).

The MDC’s major international backers are the imperialist u$ and british governments, and a variety of “civil society” NGOs, trojan horses for the same. Without doubt, the ZCTU is in the pocket of its imperialist capitalist sponsors and has ties to the institutions of the organized western labor aristocracy in the shape of amerika’s AFL-CIO, denmark’s Trade Union Council (DTUC), britain’s Trade Union Congress (TUC), and germany’s social demokkkratic Friedrich Ebert Foundation. The MDC and the ZCTU are not opposed to the crippling sanctions that are destroying Zimbabwe’s ability to trade with the outside world and endangering its export “productivity” (profitability). The MDC openly calls for imperialist wrecking assistance to clear its path to political power.

The ruling party in Zimbabwe is the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF). Its main base is in the rural areas of Zimbabwe, where its quasi-Maoist strategy of guerilla warfare led to the ouster of the really genocidal and racist settler “Republic” of Rhodesia under Ian Smith. (”Rhodesia” was the name given Zimbabwe by the arch imperialist, and social-imperialist, Sir Cecil Rhodes, a british adventurer who famously “preferred land to niggers”). 

ZANU-PF signed a deal with the british government in 1981, the Lancaster House Agreement, which promised to hold off on land reform and full national independence. ZANU-PF claims that its decision to sign this agreement and halt land reform was affected by a desire not to prematurely draw the South African national liberation movement, the ANC, into a regional conflagration and ensure that negotiations between the ANC and the racist settler government of South Africa could continue apace. This would seem to have been a bad decision.

In any case, for nearly two decades thereafter, Zimbabwe became a neo-colony of imperialism. Rich white farmers continued to own and profit from the vast majority of Zimbabwe’s land whilst IMF-imposed Structural Adjustment Programs removed the social safety net for Zimbabwe’s working masses. The Zimbabwean government got wealthy and there developed the culture of cronyism and corruption common to all comprador colonial regimes. As a direct consequence, by the mid-1990s a militant working class movement had arisen in Zimbabwe challenging capitalist rule in the country. The imperialist vultures circled, as they have done in several African countries, trying to find elements of the trade union movement which could be bought off and either pushed in a reactionary syndicalist and Trostskyist direction, or completely co-opted in the service of western parasitism. Ultimately, the First World found its point-man in Morgan Tsvangirai, a man with zero connection to Zimbabwe’s hard fought national liberation struggle, but who had risen quickly through the ranks of the ZCTU.

The dire economic situation of neo-colonial Zimbabwe would and could not continue forever. In 1997, after years of stalling, the british government unilaterally scrapped the terms of the Lancaster House agreement by reneging on its promise to pay Zimbabwe $2 billion dollars to purchase the land stolen from its people by british settlers. In order to retain its position in government and the loyalty of the Zimbabwean masses whose courage and resilience had put it there, ZANU-PF led by Robert Mugabe carried out the long overdue, but completely necessary and justifiable, process of expropriating those white settler thieves and racist killers who owned more than one gigantic farm. This action was greeted by furious condemnation by the british government which felt more loyalty to its landed interests in Zimbabwe than the latter felt towards the british government. President Mugabe, after years of currying reluctant and trepidatious favour with imperialism’s running dogs, suddenly found himself to be their public enemy no. 1.

Now, imperialism uses every effort to demonize President Mugabe it can, from crying crocodile tears at the government’s slum clearances (a very common and often necessary practice in many Third World countries not subject to similar imperialist vilification) to alleging the rigging of elections in favour of the one major Zimbabwean party *not* sponsored by hostile and predatory foreign powers, to hysterically predicting “genocide” occurring in Zimbabwe. 

President Mugabe’s real crime is that he is advancing land reform in Zimbabwe against imperialist ambitions for total neocolonisation and pursuing an internationalist line in world politics and in African affairs. Imperialists are irate that President Mugabe would dare to combat the proxy imperialist armies from Rwanda and Uganda in the Democratic Republic of Congo and defend the government of that country under President Kabila. They are up in arms against Zimbabwe’s refusal to subject its social relations to IMF diktat. 

The government of Zimbabwe, meanwhile, has scarcely a friend anywhere outside Africa. The social-chauvinist left openly signs up to imperialism’s plans for coups and recolonization. Maoist-Third Worldists should resolutely oppose imperialist meddling in Zimbabwe’s affairs and recognize that support for the overthrow of ZANU-PF at this time is definitely acting in the interests of monopoly capital to recolonise and plunder the Zimbabwean people. Maoist-Third Worldists denounce any forces that seek to come to power through imperialist meddling as comprador, lackeys of imperialism. Even though ZANU-PF is not Maoist-Third Worldist, we must support the continuation of the revolutionary process of land redistribution and national independence that ZANU-PF has belatedly begun to reembark upon. Without the active collective politicization and enrichment of Zimbabwe’s rural majority, defence of Zimbabean independence will tragically crumble. 

Comrade Stalin had this reminder for those “left-wing” purists who need to see a trade union waving a hammer and sickle banner leading the fight against imperialism before a beleaguered nation becomes worthy of their solidarity. (3)

Let’s be clear that Mugabe and ZANU-PF are not Maoist-Third Worldist. Regardless, Maoist-Third Worldists stand with Zimbabwe and all patriotic national bourgeois, proletarian and peasant forces there against imperialist meddling of any kind. Maoist-Third Worldists encourage the Zimbabwean proletariat to make a total break with any party or organizations allying themselves with imperialism. Chimurenga!

Notes.

1. HYPERLINKhttp://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/uk_national_news/3176747.Ashdown_warns_of_Zimbabwe_genocide/

2. HYPERLINKhttp://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/africa/06/25/tutu.mugabe/

3. “The revolutionary character of a national movement under the conditions of imperialist oppression does not necessarily presuppose the existence of proletarian elements in the movement, the existence of a revolutionary or a republican programme of the movement, the existence of a democratic basis of the movement. The struggle that the Emir of Afghanistan is waging for the independence of Afghanistan is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the monarchist views of the Emir and his associates, for it weakens, disintegrates and undermines imperialism; whereas the struggle waged by such ‘desperate’ democrats and ’socialists’, ‘revolutionaries’ and republicans as, for example, Kerensky and Tsereteli, Renaudel and Scheidemann, Chernov and Dan, Henderson and Clynes, during the imperialist war was a reactionary struggle, for its result was the embellishment, the strengthening, the victory, of imperialism. For the same reasons, the struggle that the Egyptian merchants and bourgeois intellectuals are waging for the independence of Egypt is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the bourgeois origin and bourgeois title of the leaders of the Egyptian national movement, despite the fact that they are opposed to socialism; whereas the struggle that the British ‘Labour’ government is waging to preserve Egypt’s dependent position is for the same reasons a reactionary struggle, despite the proletarian origin and the proletarian title of the members of that government, despite the fact that they are ‘for’ socialism.” HYPERLINKhttp://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/foundations-leninism/ch06.htm

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Read this in Czech, translated by Communism Can’t Be Killed!