|
In the last instalment we tried to show how hopeless it is for so-called economic reporters to analyse the current crisis of capitalism without a basic knowledge of the history of capitalism as a context. One of the lessons of that living history is that despite the attempts of such neo-liberal writers as Michael Novak in the book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, the human race, and Zimbabwe today, is constantly reminded that capitalism neither has a soul nor is it democratic. Just a little bit of attention to its history would show how we have come to be confronted today by what David Korten calls corporate cannibalism and what neo-liberals like to call globalisation. This week President Robert Mugabe took up this theme during his State of the Nation address. He was shocked by the ways in which the newly enriched African elite in Zimbabwe are threatening the survival of the very same national liberation movement which alone opened up the post-colonial space in which this group could accumulate some wealth. The President said: "The experience of the past few years has clearly emphasised the need to resolve basic distortions in the economy which have often yielded new and not always helpful personalities in the citizenry. It is quite clear to us that two-tier interest rates, two-tier exchange rates and a two-tier economy cannot take us forward. "We are one country that would be best served by one integrated (national) economy driven by clear, predictable, stable and sensible socio-economic rules." The President’s observation is a strategist’s realisation that the myth of so-called "market forces" which cannot be controlled is being used to re-institute an apartheid economy through the back door, an apartheid economy where speculative money obtained on the escalators of the parallel market is now the new passbook (chibhanzi). An apartheid economy to be policed by arbitrary price barriers and rates barriers which have now redrawn separate group (class) areas without having to enact another Group Areas Act; polarised education zones without a new Bantu Education Act or Native Education Act; and even new types of "boys’ meat" and "servants milk" without having to legislate for them. This then gives the beneficiaries of the new apartheid the audacity to claim that they are the champions of the human rights, transparency accountability and democracy since their apartheid is created and reinforced without the police or army. This new apartheid economy is being reintroduced across the globe and within Zimbabwe through what the visiting Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Cde Jose Armando Guerra Manchero a few weeks ago called "a managers’ coup d’ etat" and what Professor Michel Chosudousky calls "financial warfare". The Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister said on November 12 that, when the corporate cannibalists and their middlemen had failed to overthrow the Venezuelan government through a number of attempted military coups d’etat, they settled for "a managers’ coup d’etat" because this one has no one particular centre and it can be waged from the comfort of the executive offices and through the computer and the cellphone. After the failure of violent mass action to unseat our liberation movement in Zimbabwe, opposition forces with their neo-Rhodesian and foreign sponsors decided to go for a managers’ coup d’etat. We are still in the middle of it as the President takes his anti-corruption campaign from Parliament to the Central Committee and the Zanu-PF National Peoples Conference. For the last 25 years, the global corporate elite who cultivated our local speculators have been teaching that ideas such as those that the President expressed are both heretical and out-dated. Journalist Linda McQuaig’s book, The Cult of Impotence (1998), was an attempt to confront the deadly teachings of this new global class of speculators. Where President Mugabe was saying that the speculative behaviour of our robber baron should no longer be tolerated, the beneficiaries of the new economic apartheid have been teaching the exact opposite: that it is government intervention in the economy which should not be tolerated because market forces, including two-tier exchange rates, two-tier fuel prices, two-tier education systems, two-tier morals and so on — are so natural as to make national governments impotent. Linda McQuaig paraphrases the words of Dr Ian Angell, Professor of Information Systems at the London School of Economics, who visited Canada and was interviewed on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s radio on a Sunday morning. "First Dr Angell told his interviewer not to worry about the massive unemployment which was going to result from globalisation and structural adjustment because most of the working population had become redundant anyway. "Second, he said the regulatory institutions of the welfare state and the industrial age had to be radically changed or thrown away. "Third, he said in the face of the new information age and globalisation, "it’s not just that we can’t change things, but we can’t even think about the possibility of changing things, to do so is to engage in old-style thinking . . . So it’s not just that we are powerless to stop being pushed over the edge of the cliff in the global world order. But to even try to prevent ourselves from being pushed over the cliff is a sign of regressive thinking". (McQuaig’s paraphrase) Yet the entire crisis here, at the Commonwealth meeting in Abuja and in Iraq and Afghanistan, is about people refusing to be pushed over the capitalist cliff! In Zimbabwe, a coalition of the new rich robber barons and former Rhodesian interests has taken the view that all the regulatory powers and institutions which are intended to protect the citizens but do not benefit the speculation must be ruled unconstitutional as one way of ‘rolling back’ the police power of the state from the economy. For example, The Zimbabwe Independent on October 16, 2003 reported in its top page story: "Price control in court test", that the lawyers for the companies suing the state were going to argue that the Control of Goods (Price Control) Regulations 2001 are ultra vires Section 16 of the Constitution and the Companies Act. This has been the approach in all cases challenging the regulatory powers of the state in Zimbabwe, the most notorious being the ten or more lawsuits against the power of the state to regulate mass media here. Yet the power of the state is highly cherished in Europe and America. The Northern elite hate the state’s role only when that role is not directly supporting the objective of corporate cannibalism. What else do we see in Iraq except the massive powers of the North America state mobilising the entire military industrial complex from as far away as South Korea, Japan and Spain for the benefit of the new global capitalism? The Northern state is on an aggressive expansionist drive especially since September 11, 2001. Second Shrewd capitalists have always recognised the potential brutality, barbarism and anarchy of the system by which they obtain their loot. That is why they have carefully developed the state and the police power of the state, so that they do not have to fight cut-throat battles with one another every day. For instance, the judiciary is highly valued as one function of that state because it turns those cut-throat battles among capitalists into abstract points of litigation in a subdued court. Third, the neo-liberal rhetoric of change is reactionary and counter-revolutionary because it has turned "globalisation" into a monolithic and self-propelling force outside history and outside society. Linda McQuaig’s interpretation of Dr Angell is revealing because it shows why President Mugabe is able to lash out at the newly rich and derivative robber baron here and they cannot answer back. It also reveals why the opposition MDC’s campaigns based on the slogan "chinja" have also failed dismally. The neo-liberal "change", which Dr Angell preached on his visit to Canada actually means "surrender" and "be changed" by external unipolar forces that are so overwhelming that you become irrelevant. The people who shout the most about "change" therefore do not understand historical change. The results are everywhere to see. First there is massive resistance to neoliberal unipolarism. Second, that resistance is producing the real substantial historical changes which we witness in the land reform in Zimbabwe, Brazil and Venezuela; the real changes we see in the ACP countries questioning and challenging the European Union and the Commonwealth, with the latter actually facing the possibility of extinction. In terms of communication and who really communicates, one needs only compare President Mugabe’s performance against Colin Powell and Tony Blair at the World Summit on Sustainable Development or at the UN in New York: change in terms of real ideas and vision is coming from the South and from South-to-South initiatives. The North is trying to re-invent early Nineteenth Century imperial glory in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Abuja. That is not change. As for our "Chinja" in Zimbabwe, he is still counting and recounting votes from the 2000 and 2002 elections. That is not change. Our derivative elite are sponsored by Europeans and North Americans but they do not understand even those who sponsor them to play their middlemen role. For instance, the false universalism of the new globalists was trashed by a French director of the School of Social Sciences in a piece called "Democracy without Nations?" He wrote, among many other things, that: "Man as a free and rational being cannot fulfil himself except in a political community . . . It is in the political body, and only in the political body, that we seriously put things in common. And we are obliged to put things in common in order to realise our membership in the same species. . . The political community is thus irreplaceable as a framework for deliberation over justice . . . Modern democracy, which is founded on will, wants to be self-sufficient, but it cannot do without a body . . . first of all, politics is about (common) action; and second, the motive of action is the future or a view of the future." And as Africans we can add, together with President Mugabe, that if democracy needs a political body, the body needs a real place, real space, land. Identity can only be based on identification. We identify with one another within the space of Zimbabwe and Africa. Some of the newly rich Africans among us have become a threat because they have adopted a neo-liberal identity as speculators but they lack the proper identification with the liberation movement, which created the space in the post-colonial economy which they have used to get rich. The
Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy" Groupe de communication Mulindwas "avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans l'anarchie" |
