The 'new Zimbabwe'? posted by Richard Seymour

Here is an instance of convoluted hypocrisy for you: the fabled "international community", many of its constituents both benefiting from and deeply involved in the genocidal mass murder in the Congo, decided to apply sanctions on Zimbabwe for its role in the war. From the US Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act, 2001, to the EU's 2002 sanctions, the justification in both cases was to a large extent Zimbabwe's participation in 'The Second Congo War'. No such sanctions were applied to Rwanda, whose rulers have been cherished local allies of the US and UK. One result of such sanctions was to intensify the economic crisis which has accelerated the decline of Zimbabwe's infrastructure and created massive suffering. The agents of those sanctions are now using their effects to further cordon off the ZANU-PF regime, and threaten intervention. Obviously, sanctions are far less important to this crisis than a) the ruling regime's mode of control and b) the strategies of accumulation that Zimbabwe's capitalist class have pursued. And the attempt by Mugabe to blame EU sanctions for the cholera outbreak is ridiculous. Nonetheless, the triple-crown hypocrisy is as apparent as it is wearily familiar.

The Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, (who at least agrees with Mugabe on the issue of homosexuality), is today demanding some unspecified kind of intervention by the "international community", echoing Gordon Brown's remarks yesterday. The vagueness of his appeal, padded out as it is with lovely pieties, can only inspire a yawn. Sentamu will have to do more than chop up his dog collar this time if he wants to have an impact. Nonetheless, one thing that Sentamu is probably right about is that any idea of power-sharing between the MDC and Zanu-PF is dead. Mugabe has taken the opportunity to delay action on the part of his opponents while they wasted their time trying to get a workable deal from the South African Development Community. Now, the army is crushing protests. But then it was always a mistake for the opportunistic Tsvangirai to try and lead a trade union based movement into coalition with what is, essentially, the party of the Zimbabwean ruling class. It would be, as Sam Kebele acidly says of the current regime, a 'government of national impunity'. But this reflects Tsvangirai's tendency to try and win the support of a powerful constituency, although he has occasionally signalled a willingness to rely on the militancy from below that brought the MDC into existence in the first place. Previously, he had tended to make concessions to Western business interests and flatter overseas politicians. Recently, he has acquiesced to those in his party who want to win over disaffected segments of the Zanu-PF, who pointed to the integration of the faction led by Gibson Sibanda and Welshman Ncube into the Senate. After Tzvangirai clearly won the popular vote in the March 2008 presidential elections (despite extensive official rigging), and boycotted the second round because of a surge of violence against MDC supporters, elements of the MDC leadership obviously decided that they had to reach a compromise with the existing structure - this despite the fact that the vote clearly reflected the resiliency of the mass movements that brought the MDC into being. Now, Tzvangirai may once more swing the other way, as Western politicians express an interest in trying to prise open the Mugabe regime and hopefully coopt any subsequent administration.

Critics rightly point out that the MDC has all too often supported the neoliberal policies that contributed to Zimbabwe's plunge in the first place. This was a tragedy, since the optimistic labour movements and agrarian struggles that arose in the 1990s were first and foremost a reaction to the effects of those policies. The MDC arose in 1999, at the apex of a period of struggle during which landless agricultural workers (who comprise a large part of the workforce in the countryside) as well as organised labour in the country's biggest cities had landed blow after blow on Mugabe. It was almost enough to win the MDC the 2000 election. The trouble was that although forces to the Left wanted the MDC to be a Labour Party, the coalition embraced middle class elements who wanted to get rid of the corrupt and increasingly ineffectual rulers while not abandoning its basic policy orientations. In February 2000, the party appointed Eddie Cross, a rich white industrialist and official in the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries, as its economic secretary. Cross threatened to privatize 'parastatals' (partially or wholly state-owned enterprises) and the education system within five years. Its response to the issue of land redistribution was to defend white commercial farmers rather than press for the interests of agrarian workers whose support it relies upon. The result has been that the MDC has habitually disappointed its supporters. It doesn't do to be overly simplistic about this, of course. There have been challenges from the left of the party, and these have sometimes borne fruit. After all, an immediate result of Cross' privatization agenda was a revolt on the left of the party that forced the leadership to accept a more social democratic agenda. It is by no means inevitable that a post-Zanu PF regime would continue or intensify its neoliberal policies - it depends on whether the transition is effected by mass resistance, or by a shoddy elite compromise.

Mugabe now speaks in the lingua franca of anti-imperialist nationalism, but it is a hollow lie. The Zanu-PF movement took power on the basis of an agreement with the former colonial masters at Lancaster House, namely that white property would remain untouched outside of some very limited provisions. Even as up to twenty thousand African dissidents were slaughtered in Matabeleland, the white owners were left alone. It wasn't until Mugabe felt threatened in the run up to the June 2000 elections that there was even a hint of opposition to the grotesquely unfair distribution of land and resources, a direct legacy of colonialism, from the now supposedly anti-imperialist government. In fact, Mugabe was quite content to use the repressive apparatus left behind by the old colonial state to bash strikers and opposition movements and also to benefit from US military cooperation in the 1990s. His response to economic stagnation at the end of the 1980s was to appeal to the World Bank and IMF, and in 1991, he accepted the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme. The measures included de-regulation of trade, devaluation of the Zimbabwe dollar, the abolition of price controls, and the reduction of consumer subsidies and social spending. Such measures necessarily reduce the scope of the nation-state to act. Patrick Bond and Masimba Manyanya quote Keynes on this topic: "In my view the whole management of the domestic economy depends upon being free to have the appropriate interest rate without reference to the rates prevailing in the rest of the world. Capital controls is a corollary to this." Moreover, in order to do all this, Mugabe had to take on substantial layers of his support, namely veterans of the liberation war whose power was substantially reduced by the abolition of whole swathes of the state apparatus. Mugabe had consistently acted as an agent of reducing Zimbabwean sovereignty, not increasing it.

It was the decision to utilise the issue of land reform to preserve his control that decisively alienated Mugabe from his UK backers, and this became the basis for the reactionary press to start getting dewy-eyed about the wisened old white supremacist Ian Smith. But there should be no illusions about the nature of the land grabs. They have not been carried out in such a way as to engender substantial improvements in social justice. The process has been largely determined by local and national political agendas, and has predictably led to the enrichment of Zanu-PF loyalists. In fact, Mugabe had made a rapprochement with veterans by allowing them to lead the process of 'redistribution'. Even while doing this, Mugabe has continued to push through privatization and cuts to social expenditure, while resuming payments to the IMF. By a combination of deft dodges, realignments, the occasional vociferation of 'left' rhetoric, and the use of the repressive apparatus to attack opponents, Mugabe has consistently outwitted the MDC and thus far prevented his regime from imploding at several points where it seemed as if the end was imminent. But as traumatised as Zimbabwean society is by economic crisis, hyperinflation, the breakdown of basic social services and infrastructure, and the violent lashing out of a state on its last lease of life, the basis of any post-Zanu PF regime is still going to have to come from below. You can't just import the model of colour-coded revolutions, in which the masses congregate at rock concerts and passively spectate. Apart from anything else, Mugabe et al won't fuck around: they army will kick the shit out of anyone who tries to stage that kind of thing, while cops will drag a few hundred people off to be tortured in one of the old jailhouses left over by Smith. And the idea that troops operating under an AU or UN mandate could possibly put a stop this suffering is absurd. The most likely result of any military intervention would be to galvanise a layer of people around Mugabe who would fight to defend him. (As Mahmood Mamdani has pointed out, Mugabe hasn't stayed in power without retaining a measure of support from significant layers of the population.) That would be the basis not of liberation but of absolute social catastrophe. Yet, of course, this is exactly what is being proposed in op eds throughout the West. The Washington Post wants neighbouring states to get stuck in, and the Kenyan Prime Minister is explicitly supporting such an idea. Paddy Ashdown, the former colonial High Commissioner to Bosnia, auguring a Rwandan-style genocide, has said he wants to see Britain get involved. Irene Petras, executive director of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (whom Condi declared the winner of the first annual Freedom Defenders Award in 2007) has invoked the doctrine of a "responsibility to protect", urging some form of international intervention. At the moment, thankfully, military intervention looks unlikely. But the head of steam being built up around this idea ought to be regarded with deep suspicion, especially as it is progenerated in the main by those who are co-responsible for Zimbabwe's dire calamity.

Labels: colonialism, ian smith, mdc, neoliberalism, rhodesia, tsvangirai, US imperialism, working class, zimbabwe

Arguments for slavery. posted by Richard Seymour

In light of the recent refulgence of arguments for white supremacy, it is worth taking a look at precedents. No sooner were the British ruling class strategically terminating their own colossal role in the enslavement of millions of Africans than they bitterly regretted it. Such is the contemporary understanding of historians of that institution, at any rate. In a somewhat analogous fashion, as soon as Southern white slaveholders were defeated, they started to experience a "Negro problem" that made them regret their defeat all the more. This "problem" was experienced variously as economic competition, displacement in political institutions, the spread of education among those who had previously been strictly banned from learning the first letter of the alphabet, the resistance to continued subordination - in short, a transformation in the status of African Americans so great as to constitute a state of emergency for white elites. Their response was to revisit the 'peculiar institution' and to give rise to a flood of historical revisionism about slavery whose core doctrines would impress themselves upon leading political figures of the Progressive era, up to and including Woodrow Wilson.

The cardinal belief among the pro-slavery revisionists was that the institution was a sort of school through which all 'races' had to proceed in order to attain civilization. For example, Matthew Este's post-bellum text 'A Defence of Slavery, as it is practised in the United States' made a very particular argument about slavery: it could be a barbarous practise, he admitted, when the overseer was a brute, but Americans stood in the Anglo-Saxon and Christian tradition and could be entrusted with the administering of such a sacred duty. Biblical references were crucial here: Abraham held slaves, Moses too, all the old Semites in fact, even the priests. The practise was an ancient passage of rites, as venerable as wife-beating and child-rape. Since many of the foremost opponents of slavery were Christians who believed fervently in the literal truth of the monogenism and - to purloin a prase - 'moral equivalence' established in the tale of man's descent from Eden, it was obviously important to pay particular attention to scriptural support. "No institution," Este writes, "clearly sanctioned by Divine authority, contains within itself the principles of its own destruction. Slavery is clearly established in the Old Testament - it met the Divine Sanction - we cannot therefore suppose it is wrong". At any rate, slavery is not the product or foe of Christianity, according to Este - the province of religion is to abolish evils arising out of social relations, not to create or abolish social relations (which advert to a 'human nature', an essence put into manufacture by the Creator in the same way that the blueprint for a watch is put to practise by the watchmaker).

The slave benefited, of course. This was the ultimate moral mandate for slavery. In a moral/religious sense, in that he gains systems of virtue that were otherwise denied him; in a political sense, supposing he gains a level of freedom hitherto denied him (yes, it may be tyranny, but the other kind of tyranny was worse); in the economic sense (the most important of all), since the slave has learned the customs of industry, the arts of civilization, the means of self-government. Self-government is the crucial point: Americans were constantly faced with the question of who was fit for self-government. Since their ruling elites were perpetually having to give way to unpropertied classes (extension of the franchise), to enslaved peoples (ending slavery), to women (letting them out of the house), it was a decisive question. In this sense, democracy and independence are not political-economic states, but cultural ones. Can you handle your money, can you save, are you morally virtuous, is your wife obedient, do your children maintain cleanliness, are you industrious? Etc etc. Este cites the example of Rome where, he maintains, at its most virtuous and vigorous it was ready for self-government - but then it degenerated and so, Providentially, the necessary despotism arrived to save its olive-toned skin. Similarly, the procession through historical examples yields an absence of deities among Africans (a lack of religious wisdom); only a brief acquaintance with reason among Indians and Chinese (a lack of secular wisdom); and of course a total lack of written history among the indigenous - they have only oral histories. Egypt had its heiroglyphs, true, but never the remainder of Africa. (Derrida's attack on logocentrism becomes more comprehensible when you study the history of racist doctrine).

At any rate, the whole system at the late 19th and early 20th Century seemed ripe for re-examination. It was bursting with potentia. Democracy would soon mean the rise of the labouring classes. Abolitionism would soon overthrow peonage and wage-slavery. The woman would soon be out on the streets, cavorting with men of all hues. Children would no longer learn to obey, or expect a harsh competition over resources ordered along lines of race, class and gender to be natural. It was predictable that white capitalist elites would seek to invent a history that would legitimise their violent restorationism. John David Smith has shown that African American historians challenged this - often in contradictory ways, ways that accepted some part of racist doctrine, or worried over how much to accept, but the challenge was usually radical. It attacked the foundations of racism, the implicit or explicit acceptance of the white purview as natural, the Providential arguments - many of these writers had enough experience of slavery themselves to know how to unsentimetally dispose of such trash. However, it bears reflecting on the fact that their outlook would almost certainly have been seen as 'biased' by their experiences, as immature, insufficiently appreciative of what the cold, unsentimental facts of the matter would tell them. That seems to me to be the automatic point of view of those considering southern or Third World writers today, however liberal or 'moderate' they in fact are.

The current breed of apologists for Ian Smith are disgusting, of course, not least because of their resemblance to their forebears. They are, however, a breed almost as extinct as Smith himself (one hopes). Far more insidious, perhaps, are those who repeat the gestures of pro-slavery doctrine in bad faith, who accept its basic contours without the discredited racial mythologies. They still hold that systems of white supremacy can be an education in democracy, that populations can be fit for self-government only when an Anglo-Saxon Christian man named George takes them through it step-by-step (with a limitless willingness to use violence, and be enthralled by violence). They still hold that tyranny is a benign 'civilization' academy. They maintain, in such a way that it does not seem fit to question on CNN, that capitalist habits of practise are the surest road to freedom (Arbeit Macht Frei, in other words). They cleave to the cultural supremacy of the West. The only doctrine that isn't completely fashionable in liberal imperialist circles is the doctrine of biological racial superiority. The meme of 'totalitarianism', really a prophylactic against communism in their hands, has the unintended consequence of prohibiting their natural racism, forcing them to find inventive ways of commuting it through new discourses. The neocons of the Cold War found that racism was okay if it was seen as a meritocratic reflection of cultural hard-headedness, a proportionate reward for the will or lack of will to pull oneself up by the boot-straps - what could be more democratic and all-American than that? In a similar sense, today's racists find themselves on good standing when they speak of cultural distinction rather than a biological one. The culturalist aspect of racism, which was actually prevalent during the post-bellum pro-slavery revision, has not been successfully assailed, so that it remains the last refuge of the vicious supremacist. And so the arguments for imperialism that we hear today are arguments for slavery - how unsurprising that each imperial adventure seems to end in the long-term violent bondage of a whole country.

Labels: america, rhodesia, slavery, white supremacy

An Empire-Builder Dies posted by Richard Seymour

Ian Smith has snuffed his lid, about 88 years too late. I suspect that many of the obituaries will seek to obscure his malevolent influence or smother it with platitudes and inane descriptions like "controversial", "unpopular with many", "respected by colleagues" and so on. You can't talk about someone like Ian Smith without talking about the epoch and political circumstances that made him. His father had been a butcher, and arrived in the colony eighteen years after Cecil Rhodes and gang had first set foot there with mining rights. In other words, the family's fortunes were made by the growing British control of the Cape colonial system. By the time the British were in the ascendancy, the frontiers in southern Africa had been closed as colonial authorities sought to exert their authority over all territories and regulate the labour system - a network of nebulous borders marked by combat over resources and more or less free movement was untenable for an emerging capitalist regime. Partially for that reason, the territory that became Southern Rhodesia and then Rhodesia was politically separate from, but locked in an intricate economic nexus with, the three southern African republics and the German colony to the south-west in what is now known as Namibia. As in much of southern Africa, poor Europeans moved there to become rich agriculturalists, often with comparatively little government oversight. For them, as for so many other colonists, the demand of self-determination and liberty was usually co-extensive with the insistence on racial supremacy. So it was with the Smith family.

Ian Smith first entered politics during the 1948 election, at the same time that apartheid was being formalised in South Africa with the victory of the Nationalists. Smith was a supporter of the Liberal Party, who were a right-wing racist organisation opposed to trade unions and state intervention in the economy because they saw these as the basis for the organisation and advancemet of majority African interests, potentially leading to self-rule. The Liberals lost the election to the ruling United Party, and Smith moved through a succession of organisations committed to white minority rule before being elected as a Rhodesian Front candidate in the 1962 elections. The front was a successor to the Dominion Party, another organisation formed by whites to defend white minority rule, and formed a slight majority in government. It was desperate to force the British government to grant independence on the basis of white supremacy, and as the leadership of Winston Field failed to secure this, Ian Smith was made the new Prime Minister in 1964. Smith was ideal for their purposes because he viscerally hated the idea of majority rule, and insisted that it wouldn't be seen in his or his children's lifetime - a point on which Robert Mugabe in a better phase of his life helped prove him wrong.

It is obviously not coincidental that this era saw the emergence of a sustained anti-colonial struggle in the country. The anti-colonial movement in Britain had pressured Harold Wilson into adopting the position that independence should come with African rule and universal suffrage - Newsinger has argued that Wilson was unusually dependent on the Left for support, in part because of the low esteem in which he was held among the party's higher echelons. The two main African liberation groups (ZANU and ZAPU) were Marxist, and so like most white supremacists, Smith pretended that he was actually only opposed to communism - a fiction he continued to maintain in his Autobiography. This anti-communist discourse was used most promiscuously in the southern United States and in South Africa during the same period. The neoconservatives who opposed self-rule in Zimbabwe said they did so because of the communist peril. The ease with which racism was commuted through Cold War ideology is striking, but it does speak to the way in which anti-communist doctrine decouples insurgency from the social conditions which produce it - it is, instead, a manifestation of the totalitarian allure. At any rate, given the anticolonial insurgency, which was winning in most of the colonies, the white elite acted decisively to conserve its authority, declaring its independence from London on 11 November 1965. Ian Smith was the Prime Minister of this state and led the elite in a vicious civil war against the population.

Here comes an intriguing shift, then: an apparently 'postcolonial' regime is set up in order precisely to conserve the colonial nature of the regime. In some senses this is structurally analogous to those who confuse violent international political transformation with radicalism today, forgetting that such change is often motivated by acute conservatism. The Smith regime was not only an immediate problem for London. As historian Gerald Horne has shown, it was the beginning of a lengthy engagement from Washington. The Johnson administration was terrified of the growing impression of a global racial conflict, particularly given the insurgency in inner cities and in the US south. There were substantial interests in America that were corresponding with Ian Smith to shift the country to an overtly sympathetic relationship with what had become a pariah state on account of it being one of the few racist dictatorships the West didn't consistently support. Barry Goldwater had openly praised Smith in 1967. And perhaps Smith expected a bit of racial solidarity from the American elite, despite the fact that it was in the process of making strategic concessions to African Americans. The general policy toward the Rhodesian regime from the US was one of tolerance. When the British government organised UN sanctions along with the OAU, the US participated in them but didn't enforce them very rigorously. Wilson may have considered military action to reassert British command of Rhodesia, but was restrained in part because the army, along with many ruling sectors of British society, would sympathise with the 'settlers' as many Tories were already doing. The Rhodesian elite was for its own part like many Loyalists one could mention, in that it was loyal to the crown and not to the parliament - at least until 1970 when it simply declared itself a republic. Both the Wilson government and the subsequent Heath one tried to negotiate with Smith, and offer terms for eventual African rule as a distant prospect - so eager were they to appear to resolve the problem on behalf of their worried America counterparts.

Yet, the only effective compulsion for Smith was the Portugese Revolution of 1974. A classic workers revolt against a right-wing dictatorship rapidly released two countries from colonial rule - Mozambique and Angola - which became bases for insurgency into Rhodesia. Despite hundreds, possibly thousands, of US mercenaries fighting for Smith's regime, the battle was destabilising the local system of white domination. The South Africa ruling class was particularly concerned about the implications for their own system, and pressed Smith into making some sort of compromise. Through a lengthy period of negotiations, he eventually accepted an 'Internal Settlement' in 1978, which saw the inclusion of one wing of the African nationalist movement in government and gave the impression of broad popular support. In fact, the goverment was still fighting on all sides against a well organised guerilla army - the Zanu PF led by Mugabe, who had spent a decaded in Rhodesia's prisons. It became clear that the goose was cooked - the rulers of the country were facing a comprehensive military defeat which would have ended their power, their privilege, and in some cases their lives. Smith accepted a deal negotiated with the Zanu PF at Lancaster House in the UK, which resulted in elections and a massive victory for Mugabe. The corrupting element of the deal was, of course, the commitment to defend the fundamental existing property relations, particularly the rights of white owners.

Smith tried to operate in parliament with a tiny minority for a few years before retiring to his farm and his privilege. His party, the much reduced Rhodesian Front, continued to advocate on behalf of white landowners and eventually formed a small component of the Movement for Democratic Change. Smith wrote a couple of self-glorifying books about his regime, explaining that the difficulties facing Zimbabwe and other African states prove that he was right in trying to prevent black people from trying to rule themselves. In truth, the same limits of the revolt which left Smith with his privilege, wealth and media access were those that contributed to the present dilemma for Zimbabwe. (Three words for you: Deflected permanent revolution.) The pernicious colonial legacy that Smith defended will only finally be dealt with by precisely the transformation in property relations that the British opposed. And when that happens, there will be no end of fucking whining on behalf of white farmers.

Labels: ian smith, obituary, rhodesia, white supremacy, zimbabwe