BY DAVE RENTON
HARARE — The failure of the June's mass stayaway, called by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), has hardly made life easier for activists. The government of President Robert Mugabe has unleashed gangs of young people from the countryside to act as its ears and fists. Radicals must meet away from the factories, the campuses or other known centres.
I spend much of my time camped on a concrete floor in the offices of the International Socialist Organisation (ISOZ), the only Marxist party in Zimbabwe. I have learned much of its history from the comrades and try to see the conflict through their eyes.
The ISOZ was established in the early 1990s by a number of student activists prominent in the struggle against Mugabe's authoritarian capitalist regime. One key figure was Riyad Desai, a young tearaway, whose father was a leading figure in the South African Pan Africanist Congress. Desai joined the Socialist Workers Party in London, and now lives in South Africa.
Comrades from his youth tell of the scrapes in which he took part: while in his teens, he stayed with some elderly comrades, neighbours complained of his unruly ways and his adopted parents grew anxious. Desai determined to make life better for them, by going down to the nearest supermarket and filling two trolleys with the most expensive stolen groceries he could find.
In the past dozen years, former ISOZ members have included Tendai Biti, a brilliant labour lawyer and public speaker, who is now a member of the MDC frontbench, and Lovemore Madhuku, now leader of the National Constitutional Association, an ally and main challenger to the MDC on the Zimbabwean left.
At university, Morgan Tsvangirai was taught by current ISO leader Munyaradzi Gwisai, who was until recently the MDC's MP for the working-class Harare constituency of Highfield. Other ISOZ leaders have included Briggs Chopa Zano, a sober working-class intellectual who died tragically of AIDS. In a small country with a new elite, the ISOZ has played an extraordinary part. Even right-wing figures in the opposition tend to boast of having "graduated" from the party.
The organisation has always been affiliated to the International Socialist Tendency, and has been influenced by the best parts of that movement: its hostility to the bureaucratic Soviet state, and its insistence on a tradition of change from below. Unlike other formations on the left, it has regarded the trade union bureaucracy as a partial ally, at best. Yet the influences on the ISOZ are many, as befits a party with firm roots in Southern Africa.
The ISOZ began as a study circle in the University of Zimbabwe, before making a turn to mass work. In 1995, it was part of a student movement revival and called huge protests against police brutality. Together with its closest allies in the universities, the ISOZ involved students in solidarity work with striking Harare workers. Large numbers of students began to view themselves as "the voice of the voiceless".
It was from this agitation, and from the rebirth of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), that the current leadership of the MDC gained the confidence to challenge Mugabe for power.
The MDC was launched as a workers' party in 1999, sponsored by the ZCTU, but it has moved to the right since then as its leadership has come under pressure from the government and been courted by the Western powers. It has embraced neoliberalism. Its representatives include the only three whites in parliament, including the MDC's economic spokesperson Eddie Cross, an arch-privatiser who is perhaps the clearest representative of neocolonial interests in Zimbabwean politics.
The situation today in Zimbabwe is complex. Between spring 2002 and spring 2003 the MDC failed to call any mass actions at all, but then decided in early June to relaunch itself through protests. They called their protests "by remote control", placing ads in the national press rather than rebuilding the structures that had previously linked the MDC to the working-class townships and the trade unions.
The strike action lasted five days, from June 2 to June 6. It began optimistically, with large contingents of students joining the protests, and with both employers and workers respecting the MDC's call for factories to close. However, there were no picket lines, and the absence of workers mobilised in the city centre enabled the state to bus in troops and take back control. On June 6, demonstrations were supposed to be held. The MDC declared it would be the "final push" to topple the Mugabe regime. Instead, by the end of the week, it was the government that controlled the streets.
Meanwhile, Mugabe has been more willing than his opponents to rhetorically swing to the left. Articles in the pro-government Daily Herald condemn US and British foreign policy. The MDC allows itself to be presented as having a more moderate program than the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF). Through all these twists and turns, one fact remains constant. In the words of John Bomba, an ISOZ comrade and a leading activist in the Zimbabwean National Student Union, "The masses see Mugabe as the biggest enemy".
This could be seen in the March 30 Highfield by-election. Having been forced out of the MDC because of his opposition to the MDC leadership's right-wing course, Munyaradzi Gwisai was also expelled from parliament. The ISOZ stood Gwisai in the by-election against both the ZANU-PF and the MDC candidates. He was widely liked by local workers. Harare's newspapers gave his campaign a good coverage. Some papers even talked of him as a potential future president of the country. Yet, Gwisai achieved just 73 votes; the MDC candidate won the seat easily, with 8759 votes to ZANU-PF's 4844.
The challenge facing the ISOZ is to re-engage with the desire of workers for change. A fierce debate is taking place within the organisation. Can the ISO ally with the activists of the MDC? Would it be better to relate to other formations such as the NCA, which share the MDC's opposition role, but (for both principled and bureaucratic reasons) have a more critical line towards Western neoliberalism? Behind these questions, lies another: has the movement been checked, or is the potential there to rebuild the trade union and civic opposition that in 1997-9 challenged the power of the ZANU-PF regime?
Different ISOZ comrades have come up with various formulations to explain the current crisis. Some have compared the MDC stayaways to the movement of the Venezuelan rich to topple Chavez. Some have spoken of the masses' growing disenchantment with the MDC, as if it was Tsvangirai and not Mugabe who was presiding over the current economic malaise. Some have spoken of the need to establish a "third force" against both neoliberalism and dictatorship. Yet if formulations such as these tend to point a tactic of distancing the ISOZ from the politics of Tsvangirai and Cross, it is also true that ISOZ cadres continue to play a prominent part in the local and regional structures of all the opposition groups — including the MDC.
Some of what I saw in the ISOZ surprised me. In their publications, the comrades of ISOZ seem to write off the MDC too quickly. Yet most of the grassroots MDC activists I met were cut from the same cloth as the global anti-war and anti-capitalist left. They have the same enemies as us. One South African friend put it well when he said that ISO is brilliant at judging the mood of a minority that already belongs to the hard left, and its weakness still stands in engaging with a wider working-class constituency. These points may be true. But I want to end by remembering the strengths of a young party which debates freely, and has a proud future ahead.
[Dave Renton is a British journalist. Visit .]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, July 30, 2003.
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