Zimbabwe masses face leadership crisis

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Not pleased: South African premie Botha The petty bourgeois leadership of ZANU(PF) has swept into parliament on the back of the mass determination of the workers and rural poor of Zimbabwe for fundamental change.

But they have spent their time ever since seeking out representatives of all sections of the bourgeoisie in order to broaden their regime into a government of 'national unity'.

For the restless and expectant working class, the crisis of revolutionary leadership confronting them is ever more starkly posed.

Throughout the seventies, the working class and rural poor have borne the brunt of the international capitalist recession and the vicious political repression exacerbated by the intensification of the war.

The already pitiful standard of living of the Zimbabwean masses has come under a sustained and concerted attack from every conceivable angle.

"Protected"

In the rural areas, with over 70% of Zimbabwe's food requirements being produced by large capitalist farms, the subsistence sector now barely operates at all.

The great mass of the rural poor, constantly harrassed and intimidated by the Rhodesian security forces were herded into "protected villages' dotted around the countryside.

What paltry crops and cattle they might have had access to were largely destroyed in the battle to starve out the guerrillas.

With the steady elimination of what social services and administration that had existed, subjected to reprișals and murder at the hands of the police and army, and facing imminent starvation, many were forced to the cities in a desperate bid to survive.

The declining material conditions of the workers have been equally severe.

Unemployment has risen so drastically in the past five years that the black labour force has shrunk by over a fifth of its former size.

At the height of the war over a hundred workers a day were being made redundant, while four hundred people a day were flooding into Salisbury alone in search of a livelihood that capitalism could not provide.

Squatter The already acute housing shortage was accentuated by this influx, and large sprawling squatter camps with no amenities whatsoever sprang up on the outskirts of the main industrial centres.

Massive inflation and the effects of sanctions sent the prices of even the most basic commodities rocketing.

At the same time real wage were reduced to the extent thai in the past four years black workers' incomes have fallen by more than 40%.

As in the rural areas the limited health and educational facilities were rapidly eroded.

When the workers voted for Muzorewa in the elections arising from the "internal settlement" ", they hoped they were voting for jobs, for higher wages, for controls over inflationary prices, for housing, for education for their children and for real participation in the decisions affecting their day-to-day lives.

Only option It was the same total committment of the worker to these demands that led the m to throw Muzorewa out SO décisively and give an overwhelming victory to Mugabe in last week's elections.

In placing a cross against the candidates of ZANU(PF), the Zimbabwean masses were not voting for Mugabe per se, but for the only option available which appeared to them capable of meeting their most elementary needs.

But neither Muzorewa or Mugabe, nor anyone presiding over the capitalist state and seeking to preserve it, will be capable of meeting these elemental aspirations.

The maintenance of a system based on profit not need, under conditions of a world recession, and facing • a crisis ot political control which would be a threat to capitalist stability in the whole of Southern and Central Africa, is contingent upon not only the intensification of the oppression and exploitation of the workers and landiess masses, but ultimately on their physical defeat.

The threat of the working class moving into open struggle Inemnloved hlacks in Salisbury. "TIL VIRT alongside the guerrillas in Zimbabwe posed just such a threat to imperialism's political control in the region.

With South Africa's approval and with the collusion of the Front Line states (enforced by their dependence on imperialism) the Thatcher government as imperialism's representative engineered the Lancaster House conference. The objective was to promote the emergence of a capitalist regime with sufficient stability to contain the developing crisis of political control in At the same time Lancaster House gave the opportunity to Lancaster House agreement.

From the beginning of the armed struggle, the strategy of guerrilla warfare was aimed at speeding up the process of political reform inside Zimbabwe without ever threatening the fundamental social relations of capitalism itself.

The interests of the petty-bourgeois leadership, highlighted in recent months because of the shedding of their former socialist rhetoric, have unwaveringly guided their actions from the outset.

From the point of view of imperialism, the participation of the guerrilla leaders in the election was sufficient to secure their immediate objectives-the organisational disarming and neutralisation of the guerrilla armies and the establishment of the objective conditions extend the social base of the incoming regime.

The demobilisation and confusion resulting from the participation of ZANU and ZAPU in the elections, has allowed the leadership to be drawn into the administration of the capitalist state with its repressive apparatus remaining substantially intact-even to the extent of retaining General Walls to lead the incorporation of the guerrilla forces into one army under his command.

Unresolved

While Mugabe balances between the real power of the capitalist state and the assertiveness of the Zimbabwean proletariat, the balance of class forces remains completely unresolved.

The crisis of political control posed by the forward movement of the Zimbabwean working class remains still to be fought out.

The front line of the struggle unfolding in Zimbabwe has now moved from the rural areaswhere the principal actors were the liberation armies and the Rhodesian security forces.

The process of organisationally and in some cases physically disarming the guerrillas is to a large extent complete.

Isolated and vulnerable in the assembly camps, under the control of commanders loyal to the unified army of the capitalist state, the potential threat constituted by the guerrillas has largely been removed.

It is now in the towns and cities where the greatest expectations, needs and demands have built up amongst the workers, forged by decades of an increas ingly bitter struggle for survival, that Mugabe and General Walls must out of political necessity seek to firmiy establish the repressive capacity of the capitalist state.

At the same time Mugabe will have to posture as the genuine leader of the black masses, and to do so will have to find avenues for symbolically radical action.

Defence

In this critical phase of the struggle, the immediate task facing. Trotskyists, militant workers and guerrillas is the defence of the working class against the manoeuvres of the treacherous alliance of imperialism and the petty bourgeois nationalist leadership of ZANU and ZAPU..

This means arming the workers practically:

*Cadres with military training to build workers militias in the towns and rural areas under the control of independent organisations of workers; and arming them programmatically by calling for:

*The nationalisation of all land, factories, mines and banks without compensation.

*For workers management of industry and large scale agriculture.

*For a sliding scale of wages determined by elected price committees of workers and housewives; and by arming them politically by fighting for the creation of:

WUIKCIs guerrillas.

*A constituent assembly of democratically elected delegates of workers and peasants, linked to the dissolution of the capitalist state apparatus;

*A revolutionary party as part of a reconstructed Fourth The bewildering negotiations on the fate of the US embassy hostages in Tehran have still reached no firm conclusion.

As orders fail, agreements falter and deadlines pass, the US spies and their colleagues remain in the hands of the occupying Islamic students. The Revolutionary Council has been unable to impose demands that the hostages be handed over to its national on sion of inquerhas been unable to interview any of them as yet.

Of little importance in themselves, these wrangles highlight the problems which Bani-Sadr is struggling to overcome in creating one powerful central state authority.

With the first round of the assembly elections nearly upon him, the president's situation is an ironic parallel of Carter's: he needs to prove the credibility of his authority.

This means reaching a solution that will assert presidential power over 'alternative centres government' without compromising the revolutionary anti-imperialist credentials of the Islamic Republic.

For all its prominence, the embassy affair is far from BaniSadr's only headache.

The regime's proposals on land reform have now reached the stage of definition on paper, and the elections themselves loom on Friday 14th.

A delegation from the Kürdish Democratic Party of Iran recently visited the President to demand the lifting of the ban on their organisation so that it could stand candidates.

The continued oppression of the national minorities brought more dramatic developments in the Azerbaijan city of Tabriz.

After the killing of four Turkmeni militants in Gonbade Kabus, the Fedayeen organised a demonstration of protest in Tabriz, where there have already been many outbreaks of fighting between left wing forces and the reactionary body of the Islamic militia, the Pasderan.

On this occasion, the 20,000 or so demonstrators were attacked again by the Pasderan in a fresh example of the bloody zeal with which the Islamic bigots pursue their revolution' against the oppressed and exploited masses of Iran.

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