[Marxism] Stephen Gowans versus Patrick Bond on Zimbabwe

[Patrick Bond]

(Was cross-posted by James Daly - awed by Fred's 'brilliance' - to A-list.)

Fred Feldman wrote:
> Alan Bradley says that Gowans says that the enemy of our enemy is our
> friend.  But isn't that the same position that Bond takes, in effect, about
> those in Zimbabwe who support imperialist sanctions against their country -
> their country not just individual targets.
>   
I don't think so, but correct me if I'm wrong. Who supports sanctions 
against Zimbabwe aside from Archbishop Pius Ncube? For those in SA or 
the West wanting to engage in solidarity, the fundamental problem, 
indeed, is that Zim comrades have not yet made clear their position on 
sanctions, aside from supporting the existing minor 'smart sanctions' 
(travel/financial bans on about 100 top Zanu elites). So I've certainly 
withheld any sanctions campaigning until the people affected 
specifically request it. No one else I know on the SA left is 
campaigning for sanctions, though for the last year or so, the topic has 
been discussed somewhat more seriously - but until Zim mass movements 
make the call, I don't think there'll be support.

> Does Bond have a word to say about the intensifying sanctions regime
Intensifying? You mean the World Bank and IMF refusing to make loans? In 
spite of the Bank labeling Mugabe's work for the Washington Consensus 
'highly satisfactory' (the highest possible rating) as recently as 1995, 
those institutions aren't lending to Mugabe's government - regardless of 
US law - because starting in 1999 Zimbabwe has fallen into such deep 
arrears that they can't dig out (notwithstanding an insane effort by 
Mugabe in 2005-06 to repay $150 mn in immediate arrears so as not to be 
expelled from the IMF). I understand that these financial problems are a 
result of the systemic defaults - something that the Zimbabwe left 
(especially the Zim Coalition on Debt and Development, a Jubilee 
affiliate) has demanded for many many years. Fred, what sanctions have 
intensified? (My riff on the IMF debacle is here: 
http://www.roape.org/cgi-bin/roape/show/10609.html)

> , or the
> intervention of the NED.  
I think the books and articles I've written make it very clear that 
Zimbabwean comrades have opposed the role of neoliberal US forces, who 
merely want the kind of elite transition they helped engineer in South 
Africa. If you'd like to know where 'Bond has a word to say' about 
anything Zimbabwean, I can send you about a million penned since I moved 
there in 1989, and I'd expect you'd find lots to argue with, but not a 
failure to address anything as rudimentary as imperialist interests in 
post-Mugabe Zimbabwe.

> He pledges the independence of "left" forces but
> really says nothing that demonstrates their independence.
>   
Here's the longest recent version of this argument, if you'd care to do 
rudimentary research before making allegations: 
http://www.monthlyreview.org/1205bondsaunders.htm

> The imperialists are on a broad and varied campaign to tighten their grip in
> Africa.  How many countries are now under various forms of  occupation.
>   
You can count 'em in Chapter Six ("Militarism and Looming Subimperialism 
in Africa - Washington, London, Pretoria") here, which I'll send you 
offlist: http://www.zedbooks.co.uk/book.asp?bookdetail=3598

> The Yugoslavia example is relevant here, and I  write as someone who never
> bought into prettification of Milosevic.  But one thing I never did was go
> into neutral on what the imperialists were doing because they had chosen an
> unattractive "force of evil" as their target.
>   
Is there a possibility - since there's very little at stake in material 
terms - that the imperialists enjoy having Robert Mugabe to kick around? 
Try this, for example: 
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/economic/wolfm.htm where you read 
that "Zimbabwe proves many of [FT writer Martin] Wolf's points: Mugabe 
is doing pretty much the opposite of everything that Wolf recommends -- 
but the point is how easily Mugabe was able to do it." Or this from a 
former Clinton administration official citing The Economist, 
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/001179.html: 
"greater efficiency leads to greater wealth, and vice versa, as Zimbabwe 
so harrowingly shows. Nowhere has withdrawn so swiftly from the global 
economy, nor seen such a thorough reversal of neo-liberal policies. The 
results—an economy that has contracted by 35% in five years, and half 
the population in need of food aid—are hard to paper over." The Zim 
counter-example is, frankly, a useful one for imperialism to keep alive. 
(I have a 15 000 word debunking of this logic coming out at Safundi.org 
in a few weeks, but way below is the intro...)

> The drive against the government of Zimbabwe that the US and British
> imperialists are escalating is an act of war against the independence of
> Zimbabwe. Our focus should not be on either apologizing for or demonizing
> the Mugabe regime.  Our stress has to be on the fact that our enemy is at
> home, not in Harare.
>   
And Zimbabwean progressives' enemy is in both places, plus Pretoria.

> "Mugabe is a monster," says an editorial in the current New Republic.  The
> only reason they don't says he's a Hitler (like Ahmadinejad, Saddam, and so
> many others) is that he doesn't seem to concern himself much with Israel,
> Palestine, or Jews.
>
> Isn't this kind of demonization the universal banner of imperialist
> aggression these days? Don't we recall this as the justification for two
> wars and a murderous sanctions regime against Iraq?
>   
No man, given the lack of oil in Zimbabwe and the difficulty of 
extracting platinum, imperialism seems perfectly content to let the 
place become a counterexample in rotting peace. Rhetoric aside, they've 
not done anything substantive to really pressure change in Zim.

> I have more respect for Gowans than most of those who comment on this.  He's
> the author of a useful if onesided book on the role of US monetary policy in
> the rise of neoliberalism.
>   
Again, some rudimentary research would be good, because I'm 99% sure 
Peter Gowan would not take a pro-Mugabe line.

> I think he is being one-sided in defending Mugabe.  But I think Bond is
> chronically indifferent to the problem of the complex forms of imperialist
> domination in the region, despite his studies of "capital accumulation"
> there, which I am sure are quite valuable.
>   
Kind of you to say (notwithstanding scare quotes), but given your 
orientation Fred, you'd better have a peek at our latest book before you 
decide: http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?3,28,10,2815

> Partly the views of those who basically align with Bond against Gowans (even
> if critically) is that imperialist domination consists basically of bad
> bourgeois nationalist regimes, kleptocracies and so forth.  Get rid of the
> corrupt and brutal bourgeois nationalists and the imperialists will be
> powerless.  It's not true.
>   
A fertile imagination... where do you get this drivel dear Fred? The 
imperialists powerless? Huh?
> Personally, I don't think that opposition to neoliberalism should be raised
> above the class struggle as a criterion, as I think Gowans somewhat tends to
> do in general.  The key issue in Zimbabwe is not neoliberalism but political
> independence, 
Do you not want to read some Fanon before coming to this hasty 
conclusion 
(www.marxists.org/subject/africa/fanon/pitfalls-national.htm)? You'd 
have supported Mobutu/Marcos in their last days by this logic too, right?

> and those of us in the imperialist countries have to fight on
> that central issue.  We don't have to be for anyone or anything on the
> single criteria of are they opposed to  neoliberalism.  Some countries will
> go through this, and have to learn for themselves how to respond to it as
> Venezuela did. I don't think repressive dictatorship is necessarily
> preferable to the danger of a neoliberal policy shift.
>
>
> I thought Workers World was wrong in defending Saddam, and it certainly was
> not necessary to do so in order to oppose the imperialist aggression.  
>
> But those who bent in that direction -- the enemy of my enemy is my  friend
> -- ended up in a better place than those who put opposition to Saddam,
> Milosevic, and so forth first among their priorities.
>
> Bond and his ally Mbeki insist that the opposition to the anti-Mugabe
> campaign among African states has everything to do with fear of labor
> movements taking power in their countries, and nothing to do with defendinhg
> the shreds of independence they have held on to against imperialist
> pressures.  I think his view is one-sided at best.  Is this the reason why
> the South African government has organized a campaign against the sanctions
> against Iran?  Is that why they oppose the sanctions against Cuba? 
>   
You've picked SA's only two defensible foreign policy gambits; and of 
course left out Pretoria's wholesale pandering to Western interests in 
far deeper and destructive ways.

> Also, I think the labor party perspective is too narrow today for the
> Southern Africa countries.  There seems to be an underlying assumption that
> "class" issues have now REPLACED national-liberation issues at the center of
> politics.  
You're not paying attention to any of these debates here, it seems. 
There is a concerted effort amongst SA political economists - drawing on 
work from writers like Wolpe, Luxemberg, Mhone - to understand 
'articulations of modes of production' and accumulation by dispossession 
in terms that fuse the class, race, gender and ecological 
superexploitations in this region. Lots of it is here - 
http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?5,75 (espcially the 2006 Colloquium) 
- but other stuff we haven't uploaded yet include the March 2007 special 
issue of the Review of African Political Economy on primitive 
accumulation and a forthcoming special issue of a local journal on "Two 
Economies". Before judging our underlying assumptions, comrade, do a 
spot of reading.

> Hence the white landowners protected by the imperialists under
> the treaty that granted independence to Zimbabwe become merely "citizens"
> victimized by Mugabe. 
>   
You really should do some basic reading before flinging stupid 
allegations around. I'll send you a copy of this if it helps: 
http://www.ukznpress.co.za/book.php?action=displaybook&conf[bookid]=191&PHPSESSID=8df403cf99db59f77e4eb0db0f5eae9e

> Frankly, I don' think the time has come for this kind of "color-blindness"
> in Africa.  I think a labor party that takes this kind of position on the
> land question in Zimbabwe will be worse than useless.
>
> The day of the national liberation movement is not over yet anywhere in
> Africa, although the alignment of social forces is sure to change in the
> developing phases.
>
> Regardless of how the battle goes in Zimbabwe, our slogan HAS TO BE: not
> "down with Mugabe!" but
> US, BRITISH HANDS OFF ZIMBABWE. LIFT ALL SANCTIONS! NED OUT OF ZIMBABWE1!
> Fred Feldman
>
>   
Your slogan can be anything you like, but why not think about natural 
allies in Zim and their needs? If your natural ally is Mugabe not the 
masses of poor and working people, that's your choice.

***

Competing explanations of Zimbabwe’s long economic crisis

by Patrick Bond
March 2007, for publication in Safundi.org

1. Introduction: The crisis

When did Zimbabwe’s apparently endless economic downturn actually begin?

• February 2000 when Robert Mugabe began authorising land invasions? 
November 1997 when ‘Black Friday’ decimated the currency’s value (by 74% 
in four hours)?
• The prior months when war vets were given pensions and Zimbabwe put 
troops into the Democratic Republic of the Congo to back the Kabila 
regime and secure investment sites?
• September 1991 when the stock market crashed once interest rates were 
raised to high real levels at the outset of the Economic Structural 
Adjustment Programme (Esap)?
• The early 1980s, not long after Mugabe took power?
• Or around 1974, when per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) began a 
fall which has not yet reversed itself?

As an example of convential elite wisdom, consider Harvard academic and 
Pulitzer Prize-winner Samantha Power: ‘The country’s economy in 1997 was 
the fastest growing in all of Africa; now it is the fastest shrinking… 
How could the breadbasket of Africa have deteriorated so quickly into 
the continent’s basket case? The answer is Robert Mugabe.’
A somewhat deeper summary position was offered by the US State 
Department’s lead Africa official in 2001:

The current crisis in Zimbabwe has its roots in many areas. Broadly 
speaking, poor fiscal policies and rampant government spending - 
including the cost of Zimbabwe’s military involvement in the Congo - set 
the stage for the present economic meltdown. Due in large part to an 
illegal and chaotic ‘fast track’ land reform program pursued by the 
government, the agricultural sector has been badly disrupted.

Others – like local economist Rob Davies – may put the date of crisis in 
1997 but turn immediately to blame wealth accumulation – ‘a peculiarly 
rampant form of absolute extraction’ - by the ruling Zimbabwe African 
National Union (Patriotic Front) (ZanuPF), in contrast to some like Sam 
Moyo who posits the post-2000 land invasions take forward the ‘national 
democratic revolution.’ For David Moore, the Marxist notion of 
‘primitive accumulation’ better captures that particular process, 
although Davies is correct to point out that a bourgeoisie is not being 
created, rather accumulated wealth is being destroyed.
Like Power, many others simply blame Mugabe, often for his allegedly 
socialist orientation. For the US Agency for International Development, 
‘the country’s deep economic crisis is the result of the government’s 
flawed economic and public management policies.’ The most extreme logic 
of the neoliberal argument, as Eddie Cross of the Movement for 
Democratic Change put it in immediate the wake of the opposition’s early 
2000 constitutional referendum victory, is post-Mugabe liberalisation:

We believe in the free market. We do not support price control. We do 
not support government interfering in the way in which people manage 
their lives. We are in favour of reduced levels of taxation. We are in 
favour of introducing Value Added Tax and we will do so quickly, within 
six months. We are in favour of a National Revenue Authority. These 
things are things which the government has been talking about for years. 
We believe they are sound developments. We would like to cap tax levels, 
both for individuals and for companies. We would like to reduce the 
levels of border duties ... The tax burden is simply not sustainable. It 
is negative in terms of the way it impacts on our society. Now that 
means we have got to reduce the size of government and not just talk 
about it… We are going to fast track privatisation. All fifty government 
parastatals will be privatised within a two-year time frame, but we are 
going far beyond that. We are going to privatise many of the functions 
of government. We are going to privatise the Central Statistical Office. 
We are going to privatise virtually the entire school delivery system. 
And you know, we have looked at the numbers and we think we can get 
government employment down from about 300,000 at the present time to 
about 75,000 in five years.

For those who instead would seek a more just Zimbabwe, the introduction 
of Esap is often the preferred starting point of critique. To be sure, 
such analysis also emanates from the ruling party. Information officer 
and former minister Nathan Shamuyarira once remarked of Esap, ‘I’m glad 
that it failed... it was a capitalist project’. At the same time, vice 
president Simon Muzenda and then state information minister Jonathan 
Moyo strongly condemned Esap, and Mugabe vowed never to return to 
structural adjustment in October 2001. The Zimbabwe government typically 
blames the crisis upon Western states and institutions angry about land 
reform, or mythical ‘sanctions’ (there are only minor smart sanctions 
against a few dozen individuals in operation), or ‘the country’s 
detractors’ for causing shortages ‘every time the country comes out of 
elections’, or even the US and UK governments for allegedly controlling 
weather patterns to cause droughts.
The regime’s self-serving analysis aside, it is true that Zimbabwe’s 
major advances in education and health of the early 1980s were in part 
reversed by Esap user fees, and the solid growth rates of the 
mid/late-1980s under a more controlled economic regime look excellent in 
retrospect. As articulated by Keynesian economists such as Godfrey 
Kinyenze in the major civil society analysis of the Zimbabwe economy, 
the Structural Adjustment Participatory Review Initiative,

The Zimbabwean economy is in crisis. Economic growth remains erratic and 
below targets. The balance-of-payments problems that have plagued the 
economy since the last quarter of 1997 persist. The failure of Esap to 
redress the inequalities inherent in the Zimbabwean economy means the 
majority of the people cannot take advantage of the opportunities that 
are offered. This is a major impediment to the success of reforms. Forum 
participants said that the highly dualistic nature of Zimbabwe’s economy 
(in which the white minority dominates formal-sector economic activity 
and owns two-thirds of high-potential land and the black majority is 
concentrated in rural, communal areas and urban informal sectors) was 
never adequately addressed when planning economic reform. By focusing 
exclusively on the formal sector for economic growth, Esap neglected the 
sectors with the greatest potential for employment creation: the 
informal, small and medium-sized enterprises.

Indeed in recent years there has been a tremendous outpouring of 
oppositional analyses about what ails Zimababwe, especially from 
independent intellectuals. These are primarily and overtly contemporary 
political analyses of the problems, which are certainly welcomed. But 
might political-economic arguments originating several decades ago 
matter to contemporary strategy and discourses?
I think so, in no small part because while the specific form of the 
current crisis is obviously very much based upon President Robert 
Mugabe’s desperation to hold onto power at all costs, there is also a 
much deeper problem that transcends the rise of the new Zimbabwe elite. 
For Jonathan Moyo, who during the early 2000s acted as Mugabe’s main 
spindoctor, that rise could be captured in a presidential election 
slogan: ‘the land is the economy and the economy is the land’. Trivial 
at one level and substantively incorrect, still, the slogan calls forth 
what Terence Ranger terms ‘patriotic history’:

This condensed resistance history could be communicated at various 
levels, from the relatively sophisticated to the crudely racist. The 
essential message was spelt out by Godfrey Chikowore in an article in 
the Herald of 16 February 2002 entitled ‘Defending our Heritage. Armed 
Struggle should serve as Guiding Spirit’. Each presidential candidate, 
said Chikowore, ‘should produce manifestos which spell out clearly that 
they are going to uphold Zimbabwean values and heritage and restore a 
sense of patriotism among Zimbabweans’.

Party manifestos and advertisements for subsequent elections, especially 
the parliamentary campaign of 2005, were far less based upon 
interpretations of political and historical processes than earlier 
(perhaps because of Moyo’s departure from ZanuPF ), and far more upon 
economics: whether there was a genuine recovery thanks to Reserve Bank 
governor Gideon Gono’s temporary accessing of foreign exchange and 
proto-Keynesian monetary stimulation; whether improved access to 
international markets and finance – in turn contingent upon removing 
Mugabe - would save Zimbabwe; and whether ordinary people would gain 
access to market mechanisms which were often beyond the constraints of 
affordability.
Today, in the wake of Gono’s failed August 2006 ‘zero to hero’ 
anti-inflation gimmickry aimed at rejigging the currency, as Gono 
himself comes under fire for corruption from disgruntled elements in the 
ruling party, it may be useful to revive an historical perspective on 
the economy. There are several reasons to do so, including the 
historian’s search for insights about the present. In his own recent 
revival of structuralist history, Colin Bundy quoted John Iliffe on the 
long-term effects of economic conquest:

As each colony became a specialised producer for the world market, it 
acquired an economic structure which often survived throughout the 
twentieth century … most colonies retained throughout their history the 
economic trajectory acquired before the First World War.

For Bundy, this raised the question of whether ‘scholars pay as much 
attention as they might to the persistence of structures, or the 
constraints of the longue durée… [by indentifying] patterns of 
accumulation and dispossession over the decades, and the economic 
structures and social relations that these generated and reproduced’.
There are indeed scholars working on these issues in Zimbabwe, including 
Brian Raftopoulos and Ian Phimister:

Broadly speaking, the crisis has three overlapping dimensions: that of 
Pan-African and Third World solidarity in the face of renewed 
imperialist aggression; the break-down of the liberation struggle 
consensus; and the limitations of post-colonial development in the 
context of globalization.

Because those three dimensions are so well analysed by Raftopoulos and 
Phimister, I will use the pages below to revisit a different explanation 
of Zimbabwe’s long-term economic crisis, which really set in around 1974 
(when imperialism, globalization and post-colonial politics were not 
factors operating with the same intensity as they are today). I argue 
that Zimbabwe – like South Africa and indeed the entire world – faced a 
durable problem that can best be termed the ‘overaccumulation of 
capital’. This refers, simply, to a situation in which excessive 
investment has occurred and hence goods cannot be brought to market 
profitably, leaving capital to pile up in sectoral bottlenecks or 
speculative outlets without being put back into new productive investment.
Overaccumulation is based upon the continual drive in capitalist firms 
towards the introduction of state-of-the-art production processes, 
especially labor-saving machinery, at the risk of overproducing. 
Intercapitalist competition intensifies within increasingly tight 
markets, as fewer workers can buy the results of their increased 
production. In turn this results in a still greater need for individual 
capitalists to cut costs. It is true that there are countervailing 
tendencies to this process, such as an increase in the turnover time of 
capital, automation, and work speed-up, as well as expansion of the 
credit system. But these rarely overwhelm the underlying dynamic for 
long. Symptoms of overaccumulation include unused plant and equipment; 
huge gluts of unsold commodities; an unusually large number of 
unemployed workers; and, as discussed below, the inordinate rise of 
financial markets. When an economy reaches a decisive stage of 
overaccumulation, then it becomes difficult to bring together all these 
resources in a profitable way to meet social needs.
Historian Robert Brenner finds contemporary evidence of this problem 
insofar as ‘costs grow as fast or faster in non-manufacturing than in 
manufacturing, but the rate of profit falls in the latter rather than 
the former, because the price increase is much slower in manufacturing 
than non-manufacturing.’ This is not an easy matter for measurement, 
because of the jerky (not smooth, incremental) manner in which firms add 
or subtract capacity (e.g. temporarily mothballing factories and 
equipment). Moreover, there are many ways in which overaccumulation 
problems can be shifted/stalled into other sectors of the economy, 
geographically and temporally. In different ways, other leading 
political economists - Simon Clarke, Ernest Mandel, Harry Shutt, Robert 
Biel, David Harvey - have argued that the roots of the 1970s-90s global 
capitalist slow-down lie in the classical problem of overaccumulation, 
even if the displacement of overaccumulation does not make the crisis as 
evident as it was in, say, October 1929.
Is there any basis for using this framework in a highly-regulated siege 
economy on the periphery of the world economy, especially during a time 
of intensifying war? I think so, and would further posit that by 
avoiding the problem of the organic nature of overaccumulation processes 
and associated class structure in Zimbabwe, virtually all strategists of 
social change have missed an opportunity to weaken the Mugabe dictatorship.
The rest of this paper asks how overaccumulation appeared in what was 
then termed Rhodesia, during the 1970s. As shown in more detail below, 
the manufacturing sector witnessed immense increases in accumulated 
stocks and inventories, and then an extraordinary decline in capacity 
utilization. By all accounts, the resulting drought of industrial 
investment has remained the single major constraint on the economy’s 
growth. Efforts to displace the economic problems in various ways have 
come to naught, in part because the diagnosis of the underlying problem 
is incorrect.

(Full paper available if you write offlist to pbond at mail.ngo.za )