Zimbabwe Talks Bid to Prop up

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The constitutional talks on Zimbabwe being held in London this week represent a crucial attempt by imperialism to bring to a head its efforts to secure neocolonial solution.

The rapid decline of any support that Muzorewa once had, and the continued. escalation of the war, indicate clearly that the 'internal settlement' as it stands is unable to provide the political stability for which imperialism is desperate.

In a move orchestrated through the recent Commonwealth Conference, and relying on the imperialist-dependent Frontline states to put pressure on the Patriotic Front leadership (itself already enmeshed in secret dealings with imperialism) Thatcher is now looking for some major breakthrough-by discrediting the PF leadership or drawing at least sections of it into a more extended neocolonial solution.

As the leader of the senior party of British imperialism, Thatcher is hardly concerned with the basic needs of the Zimbabwean people.

Indeed, one of the problems facing Thatcher the reactionary position adopted by some whites in the face of any imperialist attempt to modify the system of racial privilege which has developed through the imposition of British colonial rule.

Like all imperialists, however, Thatcher is much conconcerned by the political instability in Zimbabwe-which, as Socialist Press has pointed out, adds to the challenges-to capitalist rule already occuring throughout • Central and Southern Africa.

Neo-colonial

gering 30% of the cattle have died this year from vi irious epidemics. Per capita pr tion of maize, the staple diet, declined from 350 Ibs in 1962 to 231 Ibs in 1977.

This is not purely the result of disruption caused by the Patriotic Front guerrillas, as the bourgeois press makes out.

The Smith/Muzorewa regime have herded 750,000 people in so-called "protected villages' , subjected the villagers to curfews and pursued a scorched earth policy in the areas where the guerrillas are most active.

While starvation spreads the black rural areas, prodi tion on white capitalist farı has reached record levels- mu of it subsequently exported.

Enterprises

However, only the larger agricultural enterprises remain profitable. Only 60% of whiteowned farms paid income tax in 1976, 52% of the tax being paid by only 271 of a total of 6682 farms.

Because of the political as well as economic importance of the white farmers to the regime I naiener they receive large subsidiesamounting to £49m last year.

Also crucial to the government is the mining industry. Although it accounts for the 8% of the GDP; 90% of its product is exported, providing, along with the agricultural exports, foreign exchange with which to buy military hardware.

The real cost of the war, though, is paid by the increased rate of exploitation of the urban and rural workers, often to the point of their starvation.

Bourgeois

Much energy has been expended by bourgeois propagandists propounding the myth that the appalling conditions of the Zimbabwean people are simply the outcome of war conditions, economic sanctions and intransigent racısm.

In reality, racism and war are the direct result of the development of capitalist relations in Zimbabwe, not some irrational aberration.

Even before the present acute phase of international Muzorewa capitalist crisis and the escalation of the war, the absolute gap between black and white wages in Zimbabwe was rising.

In 1974, when the country was at its most 'prosperous' white wages averaged £4500 per annum, black urban wages £572 and black rural wages less Surveys accepted even by the Rhodesian Ministry of Labour concluded that poverty in 1974 was "at least as widespread as it was in 1957' The comparatively extensive and diversified capitalist development that has taken place in Zimbabwe has been achieved through a system of labour reserves, ultra-exploltation and vicious racist repression which shows most features of capitalist-apartheid state of South Africa.

While the urban and rural workers of Zimbabwe are forced to depend on selling their labour power and engaging in subsubsistence farming for survival, and are there to be drawn upon and exploited; while they can be rendered redundant and forced whether its rhetoric is openly reactionary or toothlessly radical.

Mobilisation

It is only through their mobilisation, under the leadership of the working class, around a programme expressing the independent class interests of the proletariat that the mass of oppressed can build a solution.

In the struggle to do this they will come up against not merely Smith and their erstwhile radical leaders Sithole and Muzorewa, but all those bureaucrats within the Patriotic Front who are tied to the interests of Stalinism and imperialism.

As the conflict intensifies the need is ever more clearly posed for the formation of a Trotskyist Party which alone can provide principled leadership in the struggle to defeat Smith, expose reformism and destroy once and for all the capitalist relations of production in Southern Africa. Nkomo