Introduction

The debate surrounding the land reform in Zimbabwe has developed into an exchange of positions on a wide variety of issues that, by their nature,  are of universal relevance.1 At the crux of the Zimbabwe question are two historical questions, the national and the agrarian, which have focused the minds and actions of the Left internationally for well over a century. Both questions were conceived before modern imperialism – gradually taking shape in the  aftermath of the French and Haitian revolutions, through the European revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871 – but they were globalised in form and altered in substance from the 1870s onwards, with the onset of the new imperialism. Henceforth, the resolution of both questions became contingent on the defeat of imperialism itself. Yet, in the century that followed, imperialism remained in full force, surviving two world wars, two world economic crises,several social revolutions, and countless more national-liberation struggles.

What is more, with the crisis of the 1970s and the defeat of the anti-imperialist struggle worldwide, the two historic questions were demobilised and sent into neoliberal ‘hibernation’.

Alongside structural adjustment, a process of intellectual adjustment took place, whereby both questions were pronounced ‘resolved’. A two-fold claim was made: first, that the transition to capitalism in agriculture need no longer be articulated with comprehensive industrialisation in the periphery,or, in other words, with the creation of a national economy to consummate political independence; and second, that, in any case, decolonisation was being buttressed in the 1970s by a new round of capital export, such that the coveted ‘convergence’ between former coloniser and colonised would be realised in an evolutionary manner. The claim was doomed, of course,and in time the ice would thaw – or shatter. In Latin America, the symbolic reawakening came with the Zapatista uprising in 1994; in Africa, it came in 2000, with a radical-nationalist land occupation movement.

Posing the contemporary problematic in terms of these two historic questions remains a matter of difficulty. Th us far, not all participants in the debate accept these terms without hesitation, or without confusion about their meaning. This is reflected in recent critiques of our own  position, which we review in this essay. The difficulty in facing up to these questions, we argue, springs from two contradictions: the Eurocentric assumptions which imbue our critics and, in most cases, their persistent refusal to submit class relations to rigorous analysis. The first contradiction has to do with the age-old infiltration of the Left by the ideology of imperialism; the second is simply a case of populism.

In previous articles, we distinguished between two Lefts in Zimbabwe,one associated with urban working-class politics, conventional trade unionism, and civil-society organisations, the other inclining to the countryside,  focusing on less organised forms of working-class politics, and urging trade unionism to take note.2 Th ese two Lefts co-existed in Zimbabwe without major contest between them and without full cognisance of the depth of their differences; for, as Hegel would say, ‘the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk’. The moment of truth was the political crisis of  the late 1990s, when ‘Two Lefts’ faced off on opposite sides of the land question. Although neither Left claimed ideological purity in a crisis situation, they did spring from two distinct ideological roots: a so-called  ‘internationalist’ Left and a ‘nationalist’ Left. Th ese two Lefts have a longer historical dispute in which the ‘internationalist’ tendency has predominated, and continues to do so today in the context of the World Social Forum (WSF) – what we might call the ‘Fifth International’. It is interesting to note that the debate over the ‘Two Lefts’ has now spread to Latin America as well, following the radicalisation of nationalism in Venezuela since 2004 and Bolivia in 2006, thereby  amplifying the new wave of contradictions and possibly laying the ground for a more generalised split among the movements and intellectuals that in recent years have converged around the WSF.3

We do not intend in this article to delve into the history of  nationalism and internationalism in socialist politics. Instead, we refer the reader to two important works by Samir Amin, Class and Nation and Delinking, written in the late 1970s and early 1980s,4 just as the national question was  entering its winter slumber, and to our own recent critique of the dominant tendencies within the World Social Forum.5 Suffice it to note that, following Amin, we dispute the universalist claims of the so-called ‘internationalist’  Left. This ‘universalism’ is the expression of a particular Marxism which has analytically obscured the centre-periphery structure of imperialism, politically submerged the national question under a formal ‘equality’ of nations and proletariats,failed to recognise the validity of political questions that are specific to the periphery(especially the agrarian question), and, in its dominant socialdemocratic expression, has actively sought to disorganise progressive workingclass politics in the periphery, not least through international trade unionism.

We also reject the suggestion that the ‘nationalist’ Left, to which we belong, is deficient in universalism. On the contrary, we maintain that our own Marxism consists of a more committed internationalism, which insists on the substantive,not cosmetic, dissolution of hierarchies among nations and proletariats in the struggle against capital.

We preface this discussion with a schematic description of these two Lefts in Zimbabwe, as well as the general analytical and political posture which the ‘internationalists’ have assumed in the course of Zimbabwe’s radicalisation. The nationalist Left is characterised by its advocacy of delinking from the world economy, that is, the progressive‘nationalisation’ of the law of value. As such, it recognises that nationalism is a necessary, but not sufficient, ideological force in the periphery; that the deep social transformation entailed in delinking cannot be brought to fruition from within civil society, which is embedded in existing structures; and that rural movements in the periphery, where the agrarian question remains unresolved, remain crucial to any meaningful social transformation. This Left remains critical of the populism of such nationalist forces, whenever necessary, but also remains in constructive engagement with them, for they are the bearers of unique revolutionary potential.

The internationalist Left, on the other hand, shuns nationalism, even(or especially) in the periphery, and defends competitive insertion in the world economy – including against other peripheral states – as a means of growth and redistribution. It also commits itself to the institutions and  procedures of bourgeois democracy, to civil society organisations with external patronage, and especially to urban movements, at the neglect of their rural counterparts.

This Left continues to employ the concepts and methods of historical materialism and recognises the bourgeois nature of its platform, but  resorts to a political ‘pragmatism’, typically justified by reference to ‘adverse’ objective conditions internationally, which it exaggerates. In this sense, it is  also the case of reformist opportunism.

We might even identify a ‘third’ Left, though only tentatively, given that it is organically marginal and instinctively converges with the second Left in critical junctures. This ‘internationalism’ is characterised by its  rhetorical refusal to take sides in the polarisation for not being sufficiently  ‘democratic’ or ‘socialist’ on either side. Nonetheless, like the second Left, it  vehemently shuns peripheral nationalism, underestimates rural movements and land reform, and privileges civil-society organisations, especially the urban. Moreover, it places its hopes on an advanced form of ‘international  solidarity’, especially North-South, whose contradictions it fails to interrogate. It is, in fact, the case of ultra-leftism, which exaggerates the subjective  conditions of sociopolitical forces, especially in the imperialist centres, and lacks any viable tactical/strategic footing of its own; hence its instinctive convergence with reformist opportunism.6

In the course of Zimbabwe’s crisis, the politics of the internationalist Left as a whole have congealed in a concrete political position. First, it has celebrated bourgeois political institutions, whereby civil society, the rule of law, corporate media, and parliamentary democracy have been extolled. Second, it has propagated a human-rights moralism, by which human rights have been routinely detached from their social context and suspended in mid-air, above social rights and the right of national self-determination. Third, it  has woven a discourse of ‘crisis, chaos, and tyranny’, by which the need for  urgent external interference is evoked, in the interest of ‘régime change’. And, fourth, it has explicitly supported, denied the existence of, or remained silent about,imperialist sanctions. And, here, the chosen political strategy is not to mobilise and capacitate the working class for sustained ideological and political struggle against the state and capital. It is to rely on externally imposed sanctions as a means of undermining the land reform, the economic recovery, and thereby the ‘tyrant’. Economic recovery is their worst enemy.

This Left in Zimbabwe has found ready allies among the European Left. This was generally to be expected, given the historic (post-1920, post-1968) degeneration of political organisation and consciousness on the continent.7 But what was not expected was that its posture would gain allies even among segments that have generally remained astute in their analysis of International affairs. Yet, in relation to the Zimbabwe question, they abandoned the land occupations early, absorbing international media reports uncritically, and allowing themselves to be swept away by liberal critique and banal prejudice against black nationalism. They remain silent on imperialist sanctions. Our response to our critics is organised around two themes: imperialism, including the instrument of sanctions; and the neocolonial state.8

Imperialism

The theory of imperialism has enjoyed a revival in the last decade, and, of late,it has come to focus on Africa. However, the debate has lacked the  analytical rigour necessary for an effective anti-imperialist politics: economic  questions are routinely divorced from political questions, in the familiar economism charged by Lenin.9 More specifically, current analyses abstract the  fundamental contradiction of the capital-labour relation from the principal  contradiction of the centre-periphery relation, in which the fundamental contradiction manifests itself concretely.10 As such, current analyses lose sight of  the key political questions that pertain to the neocolonial situation.

Obscuring imperialism

Two authors in particular, Patrick Bond and Henry Bernstein, have sought to understand the political economy of Africa from a ‘world-historical’ perspective, one that, purportedly, takes into account the location of the continent in the world economy and its transformation over time. They are eminent scholars,‘internationalists’ and prime examples of ultra-leftism.

Bond has written extensively on Zimbabwe and South Africa.11 His basic argument, which draws from classical-Marxist thought, is that financial power is the essence of imperialism. As such, it is the source of domination  of centre over periphery, and the source of recurrent authoritarianism in the latter. However, financial power also has vulnerabilities, which inevitably lead capitalism to crisis. Bond argues that resistance to imperialism must develop tactics to ‘trip up’, as it were, the financial circuit. But, according to Bond, resistance cannot come from nationalism in the periphery, which is either comprador (as in contemporary South Africa) or exhausted-comprador(contemporary Zimbabwe), and which typically ‘talks left and walks right’.Resistance must come from ‘mass-based social movements and radical NGOs’ and their global allies, not least in the North, who are involved in the struggle against debt, the International Financial Institutions (IFIs), and corporate malfeasance.12 Nonetheless, Bond tells us, social movements must also focus their energies on the nation-state in the interest of scaling back financial power at the national level.13

What is wrong with this formulation? At the heart of the problem is the failure to recognise the depth of the principal contradiction. Despite his prolific writing on financial power, Bond neglects that imperialism is  built on working-class alliances within imperialist states, historic alliances  founded on chauvinist/racial ideology; he also neglects the real conflicts between financial power and nationalist movements in the periphery.

We must recognise, first, that the Western labour aristocracy – that stratum of the working class, identified by Lenin a century ago, that is both  powerful in the international working-class movement and co-opted by imperialist bourgeoisies – is today structurally incorporated into the financial  circuit by means of its savings, as Peter Gowan has shown, such that the pension funds to which they subscribe have an objective interest in global and deregulated financial markets.14 In Bond’s analysis, such an objective contradiction among the workers of the world does not seem to be worthy of analysis. He seems to suggest the contrary: that this contradiction may be overcome by ‘ethical’ arguments, such as by the campaign against World-Bank bonds, which has led to the withdrawal of a major pension fund from the Bank (but not from the global financial circuit).15 While transnational alliances such as this are surely needed, such campaigns and victories cannot be taken out of their context, or exaggerated in the interest of ‘internationalism’. Second,  we must also recognise that nationalism is not comprador by ‘nature’. Pace Bond, previous nationalist movements have not had negligible impact on the financial circuit. Arrighi has convincingly shown that the crisis of the 1970s,  and the end of the Bretton-Woods system, was owed to a number of factors, including economic competition among imperialist states and revived class struggle in the centre, but, above all, the national-liberation struggle in Vietnam.16

There is, in Bond’s analysis, a recurring underestimation of certain  forces in the periphery (the nationalist) and overestimation of forces based in imperialist countries (the ‘internationalist’), compounded with an inability to identify the racialised hierarchy between the working classes from which they spring. Of course, it is true that capital exploits workers everywhere, in the  centre and the periphery, but, in fact, it exploits workers in the periphery more  brutally, in alliance with Northern labour. This is a political-historical fact.  The same problem of racialised hierarchy is also not taken seriously within the states to which Bond devotes so much attention, treating race merely as a ‘deviation’ from class politics, not a constitutive feature of class politics. This explains Bond’s disdain for nationalism generally – which, we should add, is by no means compensated for by his repeated, and highly problematic,references to Frantz Fanon.

It is no surprise that Bond has instinctively attached himself to Zimbabwe’s political ‘opposition’ clamouring for ‘régime change’. Of course, to his credit, he has pointed out the bourgeois nature of the MDC, even its dependence on white agrarian and industrial capital and foreign donors. But, ultimately, the political solution to Zimbabwe’s crisis, according to Bond, ‘will necessarily require a change of ruling party’, on the presumption that a bourgeois MDC would be ‘more tolerant of dissent and diversity’.17 Somehow, Bond has continued to put his faith on class and race reversals within the MDC,given its alliance with ‘mass social movements and radical NGOs’. But nowhere has Bond ever undertaken a serious class analysis of civil society in Zimbabwe, whose severe limitations include its membership (largely urban, in a largely agrarian country), its leadership (largely middle-class professionals),Its autonomy (heavy donor dependence, even among trade unions), and ideology (petty-bourgeois, bourgeois, neocolonial). It is not clear to us why Bond has failed so stunningly in this task.

It is perhaps easier to explain why Bond has failed to analyse rigorously the ruling party, the war veterans’ association, and the land-occupation movement, given that they all have espoused black nationalism. Indeed, the land-occupation movement has appeared as a conspiracy (more on this later), the war veterans as mere ‘shock troops’, and ZANU-PF as an intrinsically violent political phenomenon, almost atavistically so. Indeed, in Bond’s hands, ‘authoritarianism’ in Zimbabwe becomes detached from its political-economic substance, such that Zimbabweans can be compared generically to ‘other oppressed people’ in the world, such as in Palestine, Burma, and apartheid South Africa!18 Thus, not only is the distinction between colonialism and neocolonialism  obliterated, but also an anti-imperialist nationalism is equated to Zionism.

So blinding is Bond’s disdain for black nationalism that he fails to give the radicalised ZANU-PF government any credit for standing so courageously – and often single-handedly in Africa – for nearly all the progressive  foreignpolicy causes that Bond holds so dear: Zimbabwe effectively defaulted on foreign debt and has imposed heavy controls on its capital account and  banks; Zimbabwe has been a leading player in the global alliances that stalled WTO negotiations in Seattle, spoke truth to power at Doha, and rejected opportunistic reform of the United Nations; and Zimbabwe has single-handedly undermined NEPAD and repeatedly confronted South-African sub-imperialism and US imperialism, including in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), at great cost to itself. So blinding is Bond’s disdain for black nationalism that he cannot even see a substantive class difference between  comprador/subimperialist nationalism in South Africa and radical/anti-imperialist nationalism in Zimbabwe.

Bond, finally, calls for a particular ‘internationalism’, one which is in vogue among reformist, single-issue NGOs with a human-rights ideology; its strategic priority, he tells us, should be on external, stateless enemies, namely the Bretton-Woods institutions.19 To this, Bond adds a complementary national project focused on capital controls, and his formula thus becomes ‘internationalism plus the nation state’.20 But algebraic equations of  this kind do not add up in politics. And its contradictions are clearly evident in Zimbabwe, where Bond has suggested the imposition of imperialist sanctions in the interest of ‘political’ but not ‘economic’ liberalisation,
without explaining to us how a neoliberal civil society and political opposition, once in power, would confront economic liberalisation.21

A second critic of left nationalism has been Henry Bernstein, who for three decades has devoted his work to the agrarian question – and has also had significant influence on our own understanding of agrarian change. Moreover, unlike most of the recent critics, he has never abandoned class analysis and has even shown some sympathy for the nationalist position. However, this has been ambivalent, for in Bernstein’s work there is no systematic theory of centre-periphery relations and no systematic link between the agrarian and national questions.

In recent years, Bernstein has published several articles of historical and theoretical import.22 His main arguments may be summarised as follows. The agrarian question ‘ended’ in the 1970s without having been ‘resolved’; this means that agriculture completed its historic transition to capitalism  worldwide but without a comprehensive transition to industrial society in the  periphery. What has ended, therefore, has been the agrarian question ‘of capital’, industrial capital specifically, while what remains is an unspecified agrarian  question ‘of labour’. At the same time,redistributive agrarian reform has also ‘ended’ due to the dismantling of the ‘developmental’ state, and has been followed by a new period of market based land reforms whose objectives are unrelated to the classical agrarian question. He goes further to claim that whatever redistributive land reforms may take place in the current period (as in Zimbabwe),they are exceptional and are not part of a wider phenomenon. Meanwhile, the agrarian question ‘of labour’ may not have yet expressed itself in clear
political terms, but it does have a common social basis, which is the post-1970s fragmentation of labour and the deepening crisis of social reproduction under structural adjustment; its specific expression, Bernstein tells us, will depend on ‘local features’ within the ‘complex variations in time and place’ which characterise African polities.23 With respect to the land question in Zimbabwe specifically, he has taken the ambivalent position that land reform has contained progressive potential, given that the national-democratic revolution has been compromised in the transition to black majority rule, as in South Africa, but he has lamented the dismantling of ‘well-established and  successful capitalist farms’, and has complained there have been too many losers, especially among farmworkers, and too many winners among the ‘state class and (black) bourgeois elements’.24

Bernstein has maintained his silence on imperialist sanctions and their effects on agrarian change,25 while his ambivalence over black nationalism seems to have hardened over time to assume a clear oppositional stance. More recently, the Journal of Agrarian Change (which Bernstein co-edits) has published a critique of our work by Ben Cousins, which was more vigilant in its defence of white agrarian capital on similar ‘productivity’ grounds.26 Ostensibly, both analysts prefer nationalised or socialised agriculture on a large-scale basis, but their ‘dialectical’ understanding of social change permits of only one (‘productive’ and ‘non-racial’) path to rural social transformation, which rules out nationalist mobilisation, the re-division of land, and new forms of co-operativism/collectivism among smallholders (i.e. the attainment of new economies of scale). And so, when the reality of mass land  occupations and radical nationalism clashed with their economistic blueprints, these internationalists closed ranks with reaction and sanctions.


The classical agrarian question has not been resolved, but it is also unjustifiable to declare it dead. Bernstein’s conclusion derives from two assessments regarding,first, the relationship between the state and rural social movements, and second, an atrophic link between the agrarian and national questions. With respect to the first, Bernstein argues that postwar redistributive  reforms derived from the historical coincidence of ‘the developmental state’ and ‘local tensions’, of which the former has now been ‘rolled back’, while the latter have  remained diverse and undefined. We have argued against this position elsewhere:27 postwar land reforms, while deriving from local contradictions in the first instance, were contingent upon the larger international contradictions and class balances of the Cold War. In this context, the state was not ‘developmental’but fulfilled a specifically neocolonial function, streamlining or suppressing demands for land reform. In this light, credit for land reforms is due to the political agency of rural movements against the neocolonial state,while the ebb in land reforms under structural adjustment has been a function of the strengthening of the neocolonial state against progressive social  forces. It follows then that the resurgence of rural movements under neoliberalism is neither exceptional nor a dead letter.

Second, the new agrarian question ‘of labour’ to which Bernstein refers may indeed lack political definition on the part of the new rural movements. However, it is the purpose of social theory to provide such definition. We must ask, therefore, what is the purpose of an agrarian reform ‘of labour’? Is it not the resolution of the national question? Is it not the defeat of  imperialism? Th ese remain burning political questions and are essential to the  formulation of anti-imperialist politics. And what exactly is the international context of the ‘complex variations’ from which local contradictions spring? Is it not the centre-periphery structure of the international system? Is it not the world economic crisis and the imperialist methods of crisis management? Again, anti-imperialist Marxism cannot fail to connect the local and the global, or obscure it under so-called ‘complex variations’.