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Ian Smith's anti-union laws still remain in Zimbabwe. Despite the gains of the revolu remains to be fought for. Jennifer Jackson

CHONE VOTE Free unions and the right to strike have not yet been won OF SOLIDARIN • New pamphlet from the socialist rorum jor sournern Ajnica Solidarity. 90p plus 20p postage: available via Socialist Organiser, 28 Middle Lane, London N8 8PL.

NEARLY three years ago the democratic revolution in Zimbabwe successfully overthrew a white, racist dictatorship.

The leadership of this revolution was from the beginning in the hands of the African petty bourgeoisie. Its forms of struggle - guerrilla fighting in the countryside and appeals to imperialism -were successful within their own limitations, but at the expense of working class organisation.

Urban and agricultural workers had been left defenceless. They were never organised or mobilised to any serious extent by the nationalist forces, chiefly because their specific economic interests did not concern the leadership, although some sections of ZAPU did articulate these interests.

Alien As a result Mugabe's new regime confronted the African working class as an alien force. Seeing working class militancy only as a threat, it was compelled to make use of the old apparatus to crack down on its new enemies.

Zimbabwe suffered the fate of every democratic revolution led by the petty bourgeoisie: it remained hopelessly incomplete. This incompleteness not Mugabe • Advertisement • The Socialist Workers' Party of the USA, an old-established Trotskyist group, has recently and suddenly announced that Trotsky's theory of 'permanent revotution' was wrong after all. This new pamphlet - 40p plus postage from PO Box 135, London .N/ ODD - looks at the arguments simply, as most apologists claim, the result of governmental inexperience or caution, nor of external destabilising pressures. It is the direct result of the class forces at work in Zimbabwe.

Clear

Nevertheless there have been clear • democratic gains resulting from the revolution. The most obvious is the granting of the vote to all citizens, black and white, male and female, over 18, and the strengthening of mass representation in parliament.

Less well known gains include the growth of free primary education for all, improvements in health care with an emphasis on preventive medicine and rural clinics and an end to enforced birth control. African women are soon to be, for the first time, recognised as legal subjects, with the right to own property, sign contracts, sue and be sued in court and so forth.

Gains Such gains are important. They demonstrate the folly of saying that nothing has changed in Zimbabwe, simply because one capitalist regime has supplanted another.

On the other hand, reliance on the old repressive state apparatus, and other limits to democracy, are very marked. For instance, the old laws on trade unions - the Industrial Conciliation Act (ICA) - are still in force, with their bans on strike action and constraints on union formation.

Numerous striking. and demonstrating workers have been arrested and sacked from their jobs, including nurses, teachers, railwaymen .and bus of the of the Dofitin..r evolution of the Amera ar Sir, p drivers.

The General Secretary of the new ZANU-backed trade union federation -ine LIU - sala in a recent visit to the UK that the ICA is soon to be replaced, but he said nothing concrete about the changes or what his federation wants, and it was apparent that this union body had made no public statement on the issue. His support for recent arrests of strikers bodes ill not only for state entrenchment of workers right to strike, but also for the ZCTU demanding such a right.

It also seems that trade lunionists not within the ZCTU, as well as workers on strike, have been subjected to harassment by the state, often on the grounds of insufficient political commitment to the revolution! Criticism is denounced by member: of the government, for instance the Minister of Constitutional Affaris, as "counter-revolutionary"

Overdue It is likely that the long overdue repeal of the ICA will lead to new legislation scarcely less restrictive.

In even more sinister vein. the security forces made exempt from prosecution, white farmers in Matabeleland have been armed as a militia against dissidents there (who have no effective legitimate channel for their grievances), and at least 400 Africans, including ZAPU military leaders, are in gaol without trial, many without even being charged.

Racist

These significant depredations on the democratic rights of Africans have gone largely unremarked by the racist media in this country, while the detention, harassment and torture of whites, dramatically publicised by Smith's televised visit, have received considerable attention. The hypocrisy of Smith's mouthings on the democratic rule of law in his country is breathtaking, but nevertheless the current government's record demands, very critical examination.

There are other: less dramatic, but highly important, instances of the incompleteness of democracy in Zimbabwe. The political content of all television, radio and newspaper output is directly and indirectly controlled ฿ LANU(PT), leading to the arrest and/or demotion of recalcitrant reporters and the daily censoring of copy by the Ministry of Information.

The granting of legal rights to African women will benefit mainly the middle class, those women who can take advantage of their new right to sign cheques and own houses and businesses in their own name. Rural women can now hold land but little has been done to weaken patriarchal control over them.

Nothing has been done to alleviate the long hours of drudgery of the mass of the rural and urban women. As most of this labour is unpaid, its value is expropriated in one way or another by their husbands, fathers, capital or the state.

The new government has as little desire to tamper with controls, over the unpaid labour of women, including the form that marriage takes in Zimbabwe, as it has to reduce the controls on wage More immediate political limitations on democracy include the constant postponement of the 'ZANU party congress. There has only been one congress in its history (in 1973), and Mugabe now seems to be waiting until the party machinery has been brought firmly under con..*+ -ire trol and critical factions silenced or weakened. ZANU(PF) is not a party in which debate and democracy are allowed to flourish.

Moreover, the commitment of Mugabe and the Cabinet to the formation of a one-party state is unequivocal. This intention is supported by the British Foreign Office and by the majority of whites inside the country (who now support Mugabe and have joined ZANU(PF) in significant numbers). They believe that a one-party system is the best way of keeping this "pragmatic" politician in power.

Such are the narrowing limits of democracy in Zimbabwe. They are justified by the government in terms of the struggle against the remnants of the old order in Zimbabwe, South Africa's interventionist imperialism, and against the ''tribalist" 'bandit" forces operating in Matabeleland Illusory These justifications are largely illusory. For instance, while the fight against South African incursions is desperately real (and Zimbabwean troops are now defending the crucial railway and oil pipeline in Mozambique from the constant attacks of South African backed Mozambican rebels), the state repression of the Ndebele, far from strengthening resistance to South Africa, creates precisely the undirected dissent which the South Africans can use, and probably are using, for their own purposes.

The real source of the limits of democracy lies neither in external peril nor in the remains of the ol order, but in the fact tha "socialism" among the Zimbabwe elite is in larg measure a mask behin which lies the eager pursui of bourgeois privilege.

Opposition to the regime is at present weak and scattered. The urban work ing class have engaged in i number significan actions, but during the civi war their organisation: were either smashed or ten ded to be incorporated by the ever-active agencies o the CIA, the AFL/CIO anc the ICFTU.

To this day the Afro. American Labour Bureau and the notorious Irving Brown - a roving American agent on the trade union front - are very active. The combination of repression and incorporation through the ZTU has left black workers without much of an independent voice.

In this country, the least that socialists can do is expose the incomplete ness of democracy in Zim. babwe, and support une quivocally the fight for basic democratic rights that have not been granter (the right to tree unions, t strike, to an accountable security force, tr the end of all the old "security laws" to civil liberties for detain. ees, to the end of female dependence on their husbands), and the defence of those rights that have beer ers, especially the work. beleaguered multi-party state, and free public education which is under attack from the IMF.

In our next article we shall look at the economic base of Zimbabwe's current democratic struggles.

90p Bob Fine Lawrence Welch

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Socialist Organiser no.11.7 January 27 1983 Page 5

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