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Build Class Power Reject Imperialism

D 8 septembre 2016     H 05:52     A Raymond Sango     C 0 messages


Break With Imperialism : Workers, Students, Vendors, Youths and Rural Farmers Unite and Fight Dictatorship and Neo-liberalism. Build Class Power Reject Imperialism

If ever there is going to be any successful and progressive struggle against dictatorship in Zimbabwe it has to be through the class unity and power of the oppressed and its direct self-activity and not through the intervention of imperialism. The removal of an authoritarian system and its callous neoliberal economic paradigm which is causing untold suffering should bequeath a new society based on social justice, equality, solidarity, and freedom not a society run by elite technocrats imposed by imperialism through a military intervention like what happened in Iraq.

Imperialism in particular the United States of America and Britain have no history of intervening in any country to promote democracy but they have a rich record of looting resources under the pretext of ‘promoting democracy and good governance’ as they did in Iraq after toppling the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and installing a puppet regime which aroused the scourge of terrorism. The Chilcot Report in the UK finalised in 2016 has concluded with a damning indictment on the participation of the UK in the invasion in Iraq and the role played by Tony Blair. If the British are condemning Blair then why should we be creating allies like him in the struggle again the dictatorship ? In the Middle East absolute monarchies still exist in places like Saudi Arabia but ironically they are all ‘close and strategic’ allies of the USA.

Both Mugabe and the imperialists are representing dictatorship albeit in different forms. Mugabe is representing dictatorship at a national level of supressing dissent and opposition to his rule and protecting the interests of the emerging black bourgeois. Activists campaigning against dictatorship, austerity policies, unemployment and poverty are abducted, maimed, tortured and arrested. There is no freedom of assembly and of demonstration and petition. Imperialism on the other hand manifests itself at a global level at first through colonialism and now neo-colonialism. The United States of America has arrogated itself the role of the Headman in the ‘Global Village’ , a role advocated and supported by academics like Robert Gilpin, some civil society organizations at a national , regional, and global level. It controls multilateral financial institutions such as the IMF, and the World Bank which it uses to whip all countries straying from the logic of neoliberalism into submission and if they remain intransigent use its immense political and financial power to topple these regimes through coup de tats like in Chile when Salvador Allende was removed through a US backed Coup de tat led by General Augusto Pinochet. African Presidents such as Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba were all removed through US backed Coup de tats. In Latin America ; Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela are enduring imperialist backed political onslaughts to dismantle the left-nationalism and self-reliance economic paradigm through neoliberal movements fighting for ‘democracy and good governance’.

The society envisioned by the immense majority reeling under neoliberalism and pseudo-nationalism in Zimbabwe is incompatible with the vision of American and Western capital. The working people of the USA who were rallying behind the Democratic Party Socialist Candidate Bernie Saunders identify with the struggles of the oppressed in Zimbabwe. In terms of class and material conditions they are identical. But the bourgeois state of America and its vulture capitalists have interests antagonistic to the interests of the working people in Zimbabwe the same as it does with its own local own working class. When the French government was issuing statements and giving solidarity to the suffering working people who were protesting at Africa unity square it was ironically facing massive protests at home dubbed ‘Nuit debout’. The French working class rejected the neoliberal anti-labour El Komri laws which the government planned to promulgate through a Decree. There is no doubt that the French working class rejected the same laws which state in Zimbabwe introduced via backdoor through the Zuva Petroleum vs Don Nyamande Supreme Court ruling. Capital globally is looking for cheap labour –‘labour-market flexibility’ to freely exploit labour and natural resources and accumulate and expropriate profits privately. This is why Communists have a slogan which states, ‘Workers of the World Unite’. It is working class internationalism based on class not an alliance with imperialism which is solution.

It must always be remembered that the struggles against dictatorship in post-colonial Zimbabwe emerged as struggles against both the One party state and imperialism. The radical anti-dictatorship struggles that emerged in the 1980s especially amongst the students and labour were both against the closing in of democratic space, repression, the ending of multi-party democracy and imperialism. The anti-imperialism or the dictatorship of capital struggles reached their zenith in the aftermath of the assassination of Samora Matchel , the President of Mozambique. During his speeches, ZCTU Secretary General, Morgan Tsvangirai did not only unequivocally condemn the dictatorship of Robert Mugabe but also the dictatorship of capital, imperialism. The struggle against ESAP became the biggest protracted fight against the twin dictatorships of Mugabe and international capital through the IMF. The IMF which prescribed Structural Adjustments globally on behalf of the dictatorship of capital using the ideas of Milton Friedman as the template and Volckers monetarism as an example emerged as the global financial prefect using its unique position in international finance to strangle third world countries by ‘cracking them open’ or ‘bursting them’ through trade liberalization, liberalization of capital markets, floating of exchange rates, privatisation, deregulation , austerity- job cuts, salary cuts and recruitment freezes. The experience of the 1990s is very graphic and the poverty and suffering bequeathed by ESAP has been documented with terrible exactness for all to see and judge.

The class unity of the oppressed and its movement towards the establishment of class power is only possible if workers, vendors, youths, and the unemployed begin to identify their class demands and uniting in a common struggle for their fulfilment. Workers and vendors should not be coerced to join the struggles through burning their goods and worsening their suffering but through mobilisation and unity around specific demands. A working people’s revolution to establish class power involves the masses and is not carried out by a few inexhaustible and dedicated revolutionaries who move around burning the goods of struggling vendors. Fighting dictatorship entails challenging capital and moving towards expropriating large retail chains, mines, banks and factories built through the exploitation of the property-less workers and sheer plunder of the state. Robbing the poor is not progressive. But robbing the rich to empower the poor is progressive in the dictionary of the working people. All capitalists are the same. Dividing them into black indigenous capitalists –Mphoko (Choppies) and white capitalists- John Moxon (TM Pick n Pay) reeks of sympathy with imperialism. John Moxon the great grandson of Thomas Meikles privately owns looted property established first through primitive accumulation ; the looting of cattle and land. Mphoko owns wealth looted directly from the state. They are all looters. The only people who are not looters, the losers in this process are the working people who are unemployed and who continue to earn starvation wages. Their class unity and fightback against the few who are accumulating is the only progressive movement of the oppressed that is left. The coalition with imperialism is only but siding with one section of the exploiters, the oppressors and plunderers ! Our international allies are the global working classes, students, rural farmers and youths not their reactionary states which are also supressing and oppressing them.

Workers of the World Unite !

Shinga Mushandi ! Shinga ! Qina sisebenzi qina !

Raymond Sango

Source from https://quinamsebenziquina.wordpress.com