Zimbabwe: Imperialist Primitive Accumulation vs The Rural Poor
The following is reprinted from our comrades of the Revolutionary Workers Group of Zimbabwe (Section of the International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency-ILTT):
Today the compradore state is chasing people off the land and street vendors off the streets who can use the land, not just the decorated fighters from the Bush Wars (liberation struggle or second Chimurenga/Umvukela), but it is the international imperialists who get land at the expense of the rural and urban poor. This is an ongoing assault on the masses, extracting the price of imperialism’s crisis from their lives! The Zimbabwe case and the robbery mechanisms and ploys are a forecast and blueprint of finance capital’s plan for the masses of the global south.
Forty-five years after the defeat of the Ian Smith racist regime we are still watching national liberation go no place! Instead we witnessed the last of the 1960-61 “national independence” victories of another variety of Pan-Africanism, and like all the others this held the masses back and away from socialist revolution, from taking power in their own hands and keeping it!
Today some 70% of the population is still involved in subsistence farming. Much of this is based on communal land administration by indigenous groups. This is a reflection of the under-development of productive forces in the semi-colonies. Of course capitalism develops the productive forces but in the semi-colonies the productive forces are developed to maximise the extraction economy, mining gold, nickel, diamond and mono-cropping of raw tobacco for export. Manufacturing for local use is not developed to the extent needed to employ the population and create a vibrant economy sufficient to elevate the population economically. While official numbers of unemployment hovered between 7.3 and 9.25 from 2019-2022, levels such as these were tolerated in the imperialist centers during the covid recession, but in places like Zimbabwe these numbers belie the actual conditions of working people.
First off the GDP is $6,241 per capita. Second, most subsistence farming is hand to mouth farming centuries out of date. The crony capitalist “land reform” of 2000 did nothing like raise the material well-being level of the wider population. We recall how ZANU-PF was supposed to be a socialist party. Of course socialism is understood to be an internationalist movement and world-view, not a peaceful coexistence with imperialism, nor acquiescence in the nation-state models and the borders on the maps that are imperialism’s legacy! But then, that’s Stalinism.
The numbers tell the story
The World Bank reports that 70% derive their income from farming yet only 9% of the GDP is derived from agriculture. This is a formula for extreme poverty. A socialist regime would have raised the poor farmers up with subsidised communal farming with technological means, but after 1978 the tasks of the national-democratic revolution were deferred, and they remain deferred!
Zimbabwe agriculture is underdeveloped; consider that per arable 100 km2 of land France has 640 tractors, the USA has 271 while Zimbabwe has 64 (per arable 100 km2.) This reflects the low level of technique and corresponding output. No doubt the highest concentration of farm machinery is located at the former white owned big holdings and tobacco farms.
The imperialist EV (Electric vehicle) revolution is digging the graves of youth in artisanal mining operations!
Zimbabwe is lithium rich yet remains impoverished. Young workers are driven by poverty to artisanal mining and suffer the deadly consequences of Silicosis. The NIH study, “The Triple Burden of Tuberculosis, Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Silicosis among Artisanal and Small-Scale Miners in Zimbabwe” (2023) reported a 19% prevalence of silicosis among 3,821 ASMs (Artisanal miners.)
The NIH reported in 2022 that there are 500,000 artisanal and small mine workers in Zimbabwe. Silica dust, noise and workplace violence top the list of hazards identified in this damning report which recommends that standard industrial hygiene hierarchy of controls be implemented.
In November, 2023 Geopolitical Monitor reported that, “The People’s Republic of China has announced a massive USD 2.79 billion investment in its lithium mining operations in Zimbabwe.” Reuters reported that “Chinese firms, including Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, Sinomine Resource Group, Chengxin Lithium Group, Yahua Group and Canmax Technologies, have spent more than $1 billion over the past two years to acquire and develop lithium projects in Zimbabwe.”
The November, 2023 IPIS report ZELA Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association confirms that:
“… there are more than seven lithium exploration and mining projects at different development stages, with Chinese companies leading the race. … Local communities and villagers in lithium rich areas … are participating in lithium mining and trading activities, attracted by quick money and forced by limited (formal) job opportunities in the country.(editors bold) … reports indicated that an estimated 5,000 artisanal miners, fortune seekers and foreigners were involved in mining and trading lithium at Sandawana Mine. Additionally, ZELA identified artisanal miners in Mutoko, Chiredzi, Goromonzi, Mberengwa and parts of Buhera districts. Artisanal miners use picks, hammers and shovels to dig and break lithium ore and load it onto wheelbarrows and trucks for export by Chinese, South African or Indian buyers. … Artisanly mined lithium is being sold at a pittance to Chinese buyers with prices ranging between $100-$150 per ton. Moreover, smuggling and leakages of lithium across the border into South Africa or Mozambique were reported by various actors and media reports, raising the specter of corruption, illicit mineral and financial flows.”
Recall that this has already cost young lives in a mine collapse, robberies of miners by ZANU-PF regime players, and gunplay between competing imperialist firms! See the linked article; the details will knock your socks off!
Big player investments
The Zida Investment 2023 (Zimbabwe Investment Development Agency) report stated:
“We recognize the importance of sustainable developments through responsible investments, hence a renewed emphasis to attract socially responsible investors in line with regional and global trends.”
The report displays the extent of economic dependency with a graph showing that Foreign Direct investment vs Domestic investment is in the ratio of approximately $490.66mn/$1mn, which tells it all. (pg 22)
New Investment licenses by country are indicative of the new alignment of world powers. Australia 4, Britain 4, Canada 1, China 81, India 15, Mauritius 6, South Africa 7, USA 1 (anomalously), Zimbabwe 7. The largest number of investors and the largest number projected value of projects is China. (see pg. 27.)
Imperialist parasitism eats the forests and calls it ecology! (The Carbon Credits Gag)
The Carbon Credit offsets in Zimbabwe are a scandal that expose the nature of the entire global scheme! One might presume carbon offset credits are issued for projects such as the allocation of forest land to national parks, the replanting of deforested lands, restoration of wetlands, planting fast growing CO2 sinks, but this is not the case. Rather across the global south credits are being issued on the ‘spread’ not unlike an options trader selling calls and buying puts to cover!
The Kariba REDD+ project, one of the largest ‘eco-projects’ in the world and considered a “major conservation project” in Zimbabwe is based on the Verra VM0009 methodology, which ultimately exposes capitalism as having no intention to “save the planet” let alone this forest. Get this! Bloomberg, reporting on how the South Pole carbon offset dealer speculates on deforestation:
“Simply put: When the project is planned, it predicts a deforestation rate (based on 10 year historic deforestation data) and uses this to calculate the issuance of credits. This predicted deforestation rate – or ‘baseline’ as it is called – is re-evaluated (or ‘validated’) after 10 years. Should the real deforestation rate prove to be lower or higher than initially modeled, the methodology demands that fewer or more credits will be issued in the following 10 year crediting period. This ensures that over the full lifecycle of a project, the volume of issued credits corresponds to actual emissions reduced.”
Reuters reported that South Pole, the Swiss carbon offset dealer, backed out of the project last October stating, “…it was not confident the Kariba REDD+ project – owned and developed by Carbon Green Investments (CGI) – met the standards it expected from its partners.”
Just as South Pole was running from the failing project the ZANU-PF comprador regime sweetened the pot for the speculators as reported last September at Carbon Credits .com, “… Zimbabwe amended its new carbon law governing carbon credit projects, dropping the initial plan to give 25% of the revenue to local communities to allow developers to keep a greater share of the profits.” The state will take 50% of the profits, 30% to the outside contractors and only 20% to the host communities. Considering the level of corruption of the ZANU-PF the shift of profit flow is a boon to the comprador bourgeoisie and its cronies.
How did we get here?
The semi-colonial world, that part of the world historically exploited by imperialist capital, never achieved economic independence. The masses of Zimbabwe, like those of other semi-colonies revolted during the post WWII period against the colonial settler state. Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was then known, named for Cecil Rhodes, whose British South Africa Company chartered by the British monarch in 1898 in the wake of the defeat of the Dutch in the Boer war was an herrenvolk democracy (democracy for the minority white population-disenfranchisement for the majority Black population.) From 1964-1978 the masses conducted an anti-colonial war and the ethno-British were militarily and politically defeated by a coalition of resistance forces which all self-identified as socialist. The settler-colonial regime attempted to keep power in 1977, conceding to elections, the result of which was a Black-led government. But it was merely a puppet administering over a colonialist state apparatus, the military and police and state bureaucracy were still loyal to the Crown.
During the course of the revolutionary wars of southern Africa and by no small coincidence in time with the defeat of US imperialism in Vietnam, the defeat of the Gaetano dictatorship in Portugal, the post WWII economic boom ended. Imperialism could no longer afford to rule in the old way. The ‘decolonised’ states gained power at the start of a major global recessionary downturn, consequence of the combined effects of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the national democratic revolutions sapping the super-profits colonisation afforded to offset the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF). In other words, in Zimbabwe and across the decolonising south, new regimes got power as the colonial economic ship was already under water.
Either workers and small farmers would push their revolutions through to socialism by defeating imperialism, not just militarily on the home front but by expropriating its foreign investment stock and productive facilities and realigning production according to the workers own planning, OR the imperialists would contain the permanent revolution and limit the national democratic revolutions from going over to socialist revolution, even so far as to prevent any carrying out of national-democratic revolutionary tasks! Though in retreat and licking wounds on the home front, the major imperialist powers still had economic and military power to squeeze every nation it had investments in. And do they ever!
To win full legal national independence the old colonial settler state had to be smashed. The opposition by the armed resistance to the legacy puppet regime forced a second election and the ZANU victory created a new state based on the victorious military resistance. A formally independent Zimbabwe was born. The nation was, by bourgeoisie standards, liberated, but the workers and poor farmers did not have power. The shackles of legacy imperialist capital and colonial setter capital remained to be administered by the popular front regime. This is the scenario, which in the most general terms, was repeated in every nation which gained its liberation in the post WWII wave of decolonisation, with the exception of the countries which carried out social revolutions smashing the capitalist state and implemented transitional tasks towards socialism, including the nationalisation of foreign capitalist holdings, nationalisation of the land, the renunciation of foreign debt, the nationalisation of big national capital and the institution of a central economic plan including the monopoly of foreign trade. Those countries, such as China, DPRK, Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos incurred the wrath of the west with sanctions, boycotts, blockades, military and covert incursions and invasions to make counter-revolutions, restore capitalism and make the countries safe for imperialist investment.
The revolutionary forces that defeated the British did so under the banner of socialism; Maoists, Stalinists, Pan Africanists and social democrats made the revolution. Yet, despite the socialist rhetoric of the revolutionary movement, once in power the ZANU(PF) never carried out a socialist program. Unprepared for the tasks of permanent revolution and ideologically under the sway of international Stalinism, the revolution stagnated for the following reasons: It did not mobilise the working class for the tasks of self-management, nationalisations, land reform, central planning and remaking the Pan-Africanist movement explicitly socialist internationalist in word and deed. In short, trained by the Stalinists and social democrats the revolutionary forces could not provide the necessary working class leadership to carry the revolution across the borders and turn the ‘Bush Wars’ into a region-wide socialist revolution. Rather, the Pan-Africanist ideology was the back door for the comprador bourgeoisie to disarm the workers and poor farmers revolution under the banner of National Unity and Pan-Africanism.
The Stalinist and Menshevik Popular Front was victorious at arresting the masses’ drive toward socialism. Their stagist method argues that semi-colonies cannot ‘go over’ to socialism without first traversing capitalism in order to develop their forces of production. This is the historic aberration of Stalin’s theory of “Socialism in One Country”. The theory developed to assuage imperialism and cement the power of the bureaucratic caste developing in the young USSR over the working class, against the program of the first four congresses of the Third International’s perspective of world revolution, the transitional method of revolutionary Bolshevism united in Lenin’s April Theses and Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution.
The RWG of Zimbabwe brings this transitional program to the masses and hones it for every developing struggle:
LAND FOR THE LANDLESS! & JOBS FOR ALL! EMPLOY THE UNEMPLOYED!
Stop all the evictions, demolitions, persecution of poor peasants and the landless urban poor! Land must be distributed to all poor peasants and landless urban poor!
SMASH DEBT PEONAGE! For state bank fair credits to provide inputs for small farmers!
STOP central and local government attacks on street vendors!
STOP government theft and confiscation of artisanal miners’ work products!
WE DEMAND: Billions for public works projects NOW! Fund essential state projects that employ the unemployed!
WE DEMAND: free and quality health care and Education for All!
Build quality housing, schools, hospitals, modern infrastructure and provide free public transportation at union wages!
State funding for workers compensation for workplace injury and illness!
END SILICOSIS, TB AND WORKPLACE VIOLENCE!
OPEN THE BOOKS! NO CRONYISM NO SKIMMING! For workers’ oversight of state projects, land distribution, banking and credit!
FOR CLASS STRUGGLE UNIONS! ORGANISE THE UNORGANISED!
Bring the unemployed, the street vendors, artisanal miners and landless farmers into the unions!
SHARE THE WORK: Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to ensure employment for all who can work!
TO DEFEAT INFLATION: We fight for a sliding scale of wages and prices enforced by worker/community price and wage committees!
Build workers’ health and safety committees to enforce safe and healthy worksites for all formal and informal workers!
Workers form action committees to lead the resistance to the growing attacks on the wages and working conditions of workers and the livelihood of the majority poor!
We call on workers and oppressed groups to convene a congress of delegates from the working people, peasants, urban poor, youth and soldiers to come up with a constitution that guarantees a good life for all!
Workers break with the CCC and ZANU (PF) and form a worker’s party that truly champions the interests of workers and poor masses!
Workers form rank and file bodies to lead action in all unions and break with the reformist and compromised trade union leadership!
Build workers self defense guards for all workers and oppressed in the struggle!
TO WIN: To provide jobs and a decent life for all, big native capitalist and imperialist assets must be nationalised and put under workers control and worker’s self-management!
For a workers state that defends workers and peasants against the local and foreign capitalists!
No to US and Chinese imperialisms fronted by mainstream bourgeoisie parties!
No to reformism and Stalinism, build a fighting socialist party!
For a workers and peasants’ government on the basis of the armed people to implement decisions that benefit workers and the poor!
For a socialist federation of Southern African workers states!
For an African socialist revolution as part of the international revolution that alone can guarantee a better life for all!
For a new WORLD PARTY of socialist revolution based on the method of the TRANSITIONAL PROGRAM of 1938 to lead the revolution to end capitalism and open the road to socialism!
For further reading:
BRICS IN AFRICA AND TASKS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY LEFT
ZIMBABWE: ECONOMIC CRISIS, STATE OF THE WORKING CLASS, FORTHCOMING ELECTIONS AND URGENT TASKS
