Maravi

(TALKZIMBABWE) No political rights without economic rights

No political rights without economic rights
By: Governor NCG Mathema
Posted: Saturday, June 19, 2010 12:14 am

GENERALLY, democracy is defined as the rule of the majority, by the majority, for the majority. This is what the liberation struggle in Zimbabwe from 1890 to 1980 was all about. As we all know, this struggle was against the colonisation of Zimbabwe by the British ruling class (those who owned the British economy, and still do, and created a political system that protected and promoted their economy in Britain and everywhere else in the world).

Locally, the interests of the British ruling class were by the white settlers imported from the United Kingdom, the rest of Europe, colonised South Africa and the multinational corporations. These whites were educated and trained to be cruel racist slave owners who were paid in large tracts of land, huge numbers of cattle they looted by force of arms, torture and genocide, as well as by mining claims that the real colonisers (led by the British South African Company of Cecil John Rhodes and other British business moguls) allowed them to be granted.

To all intents and purposes therefore, the pioneer columnists and the rest of the Rhodies were nothing but mercenaries (many of whom were really from the ranks of the lumpen protectorate and poor children forcibly taken away from their families, as designed by people like Fairbridge, in the slums of British cities; let us remember too that Australia was turned into a British colony of British convicts and children of poor British families who were working essentially for the multi-national companies and the British ruling class).

The churches played their part, a crucial part, in the colonisation of Zimbabwe and the entrenchment of racism in the country. That is why, the churches even had different services for different races in the country, and that is why some of the priests working among the Ndebeles in the 1880s eagerly joined the Pioneer Column and became some of its leading commissars or political officers. After the colonisation of the country, the new economic, political, judicial, cultural and religious systems tried to do their best to make sure that blacks mentally and religiously forget themselves and their glorious past which was all based on the fact that before colonisation and white racism they were proud owners of the country's economy and politics. The church played its role to try and make black people forget this past; the church was one of the estates of colonial power in the country.

Blacks were forced to forsake their religions, heroes and heroines, languages and cultures as they had been forced to lose their economic power — they were forced to believe in a religion which today is only just over 2000 years old, yet human beings have been in existence for more than four million years; and blacks have been living in Zimbabwe for millions of years. The church made sure that all religious images on church walls and in the form of stained glass were white — all in an effort to make blacks forget themselves and their past, this to the point where even the blacks who were supposed to have enslaved the Biblical Moses' Jews are not even known who they really were, nobody was supposed to know how advanced they were in politics, economics, mathematics, architecture, science and in agriculture and in the belief in one God. The church in Zimbabwe truly has to apologise to the blacks for the sin it committed against the black people of this country. The apology should be part of the national healing exercise as agreed upon in the Global Political Agreement (GPA) amongst Zanu-PF, MDC and MDC-T.

But as we all know the word "democracy" is said by European whites to have been invented in ancient Greeks (it is possible that it was in fact invented in Africa by the blacks). The definition of this word then is the same as we have today. Yet we also know that the ancient Greece we are talking about was a slave socio-economic system based on the ownership of the economy by a very few families who were slave owners, the slaves were personal property of the rich families, the slaves had no rights whatsoever, even their children were property of the slave masters.

The political system and the debates that took place in theatres and elsewhere therefore did not involve the slaves. Only the slave owners ruled and voted among themselves. Therefore the majority we are talking about at the time, was majority of the slave owners, and the people were the same slave owners as slaves were not classified as people but as property that produced wealth for the owners of the economy and slaves, the minority rich. In other words, in ancient Greece only the slave owners would vote, only the slave owners were “the people”, if you did not own means of production, you were not a person, therefore you could not vote just like a cow is not allowed to vote. In ancient Greece, rulers remained in power only because the majority of 'the people' wanted them to remain in power.

This was the case even during the feudal days of Europe, the so-called Middle Ages, where the economy was owned by the feudal lords, the landlords, who voted among themselves to choose who would be their queen or king. The peasantry had no vote, but the peasantry were not slaves, yet they had no land of their own, they rented the land of the feudal lords, and many peasantry families were former slave families whose ancestors had revolted against the slave system. Even then, the peasants had no right to vote, they were not part of 'the people' because they still worked for the landlords. The feudal system had a culture that made the peasantry accept the lordship and ruler ship of the landlords, and one of the biggest land owners became the king or queen because the majority of the land owners agreed for it to be so. If there were disputes then, they were settled by the vote or by wars which resulted in the creation of many states and countries in Europe if no side accepted defeat either way.

When the feudal system crumbled at the emergence of the capitalist system (which, as we have seen, is not the first economic system based on private ownership of the means of production the world has ever seen) because of peasant revolts and the coming into being of property owners who used wage workers (that is, people who were not owners of the means of production but could sell their labour power at a wage that made the capitalist class richer), both economic and political power shifted into the hands of the capitalist class with the support of the feudal lords many of whom had become capitalists in their own right.

The worker (the working class) did not have any rights to vote, they were not part of 'the people', not part of 'the majority' as they owned no means of production either as land, factory, mine, shop or bank owners.

Indeed, as the years went by the landlords' influence in society was reduced to a point where in Britain for instance compromises were made to the point where two houses of parliament were created, the House of Lords as that of the landlords (but with reduced authority), and the House of Commons, which for a long time did not have any common people other than the capitalist class. As time went by, workers all over Europe and the United States of America revolted against their being exploited (that is, they were creating more wealth and riches for the ruling capitalist class).

It is at this time in the nineteenth century that trade unions were formed to protect the rights of the workers, first at work places, but eventually the workers realised that the laws that made sure that they remained employees of other people were passed by the parliament of the rich classes. So the workers fought for political representation in parliament. It is at this time that labour political parties were formed all over Europe to extend political and economic democracy to include the working class as well.

The workers used the strike weapon. That is how the Labour Party of Britain and communist parties were formed all over Europe — these were parties that workers wanted to use to gain political power in order to do away with capitalist exploitation, the working class wanted economic and political power to belong to everybody so that everybody benefited from the natural resources in each country. It is the workers' struggles that forced the ruling class to pass laws that extended the voting political rights to the workers, it is these rights that eventually brought to political power in Europe to labour parties and forced the nationalisation of some of the industries and companies in Europe. In Russia, the workers there, led by the communist party if VI Lenin, took over power and established the first truly socialist country in the world in 1917.

In terms of voting, the working class (the majority in society) gained the right to vote after many centuries of being denied, even cruelly denied, to vote. But this right to vote was only to have the political right to vote, it had nothing to do with the ownership of the means of production. The socialist parties like the Labour Party of the UK became a tool used by the capitalist class, the colonialist and racists, to pacify the workers — in other words, the trade union movement was taken over by the ruling class to castrate the working class.

This is what happened in Zimbabwe when the Rhodies took over the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), to use the workers organization to try and stop the economic empowerment of the very same workers whose history in the struggle for the liberation of Zimbabwe made it possible for the formation of the countrywide liberation movement as led by Southern African National Congress (SRANC), the National Democratic Party (NDP), the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and the Patriotic Front ZAPU) and ZANU that eventually became the new Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) party led by Cde Robert G. Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe, the Head of Government and the Commander-in-chief of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces. The ZCTU was used to form the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party led by Morgan Tsvangirai. The ZCTU was used by various whites and the British ruling class to prevent black empowerment in Zimbabwe.

The ZCTU must not forget that illustrious past of the workers' movement of this country, the movement that was part and parcel of the wider movement to bring about genuine democracy to the indigenous people of Zimbabwe through political power that leads to the economic empowerment of the indigenous people, the former slaves of colonialism in this country who are now political free, but do not as yet own and control the economy though they have gone a long way towards that objective through the land revolution that has given land back to the indigenous people and the Indigenisation law.

In Zimbabwe, the BSAP allowed political power to go to Rhodesian white settlers most of whom had come from Britain like Cecil John Rhodes himself and his BSAP and other multinational companies like Standard Chartered Bank. That is why in the whole history of Zimbabwe as a colony, there was only one Rhodesian Prime Minister born in the country and that was the fascist racist Ian Douglas Smith, followed by Bishop Abel Muzorewa who was a black face for British colonialism and white settler racism.

In Zimbabwe under colonialism, only whites were allowed to vote until the ill-fated Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland which lasted for only ten years. Even in that Federation very few blacks were allowed to have a limited vote. During the colonial days, therefore, blacks (or Africans as the laws defined the indigenous people, the whites were defined as Europeans) were not regarded as 'the people', they were just slaves.

As we have seen above, it is clear that democracy is a dictatorship of the majority of the ruling class against the rest of society.

As long as the majority of this class agrees on anything, it is that thing that will be done in the country of origin of this class .Therefore even amongst thieves, the one who becomes leader is the one accepted by the majority of the thieves. Democracy in any country therefore is in itself a dictatorship.

Therefore in all the European countries and in the USA (that is, the so-called most democratic countries of the world) it is the dictatorship of the majority of those who own the means of production that prevails, anything against them is suppressed and castigated one way or the other. In other words, these countries may have parliamentary elections every now and then, in which all adults vote, but at the end of the day, the vote does not remove from power the ruling class, the vote protects and furthers the interests of the few families who really own these countries economies. That is to say, what is in these countries is nothing but sham democracy for the majority in society, the majority that is educated and trained from birth to death to believe they are in charge, when in fact they are nothing but slaves who are made to believe that they are not slaves. The revolution led by George Washington that brought about the birth of the United States of America, was nothing but an act of some members of the British ruling class against their fellow class members so that they could make more money for themselves than allow their cousins back home in the UK make more money out of them, hence the so-called Boston Tea Party. This ruling class in the US even has the arrogance to refer to their 'America" when America is made up of South and North America.

That revolution led by Washington in 1776 is heralded by the West as a democratic revolution yet the same revolution did not free the black slaves captured in Africa, slavery remained a legal practice until a hundred years later. That is why even when a black man (Barack Obama) is the President of the USA today, racism against blacks in that country is still rife — may be being a USA president is no longer good enough for a white person, as train driving and nursing in the UK are no longer good enough jobs for white Britons; in fact it is not even good enough for a white person to be a priest in Europe these days, Europe these days, imports its priests from Africa and Asia.

Let it be remembered as well that women in Europe and North America were not allowed to vote until a hundred years ago inspite of the fact that Queen Victoria’s reign in Britain lasted from 1850-1910. Even the heroes on bank notes and elsewhere in these countries are not workers, and blacks have just been recognised as heroes in the likes of Dr Martin Luther King — some say the woman who should be recognised as the heroine of nursing was a black woman, not Florence Nightingale.

So when Zimbabwe gained its independence in 1980, the former colonial slaves were supposed to sing and dance after electing their black political leaders to dominate Parliament. They, at the same time, were not supposed to move on and bring about democracy in the ownership of the means of production so that they ended up owning and controlling the economy. The economy of the country was supposed to remain in the same old hands, the hands of the British ruling class assisted by the local racist whites and racist whites of South Africa (in any case, the South African economy was dominated by British companies, and it still is); the land was not supposed to be touched at all (hence the so-called willing-seller-willing-buyer principle), so that a small minority of whites and British companies remained the land owners to continue dominating agriculture and the mineral wealth of the country.

That is why they imposed illegal economic sanctions on Zimbabwe today, sanctions that are meant to make the non-owning indigenous population remove Zanu-PF and its leader from power; and that is why the same foreign owners are against the Indigenisation Act and its accompanying regulations.

Therefore, any Zimbaweans or Zimbabwe’s political party that is against the indigenisation of the economy (or say they want it but after this and that has been done first) is nothing but a stooge of the British ruling class. He or she is a stooge and a British agent who wants his or her own people not to be genuinely independent by refusing political democracy to be accompanied by economic democracy. As independence, blacks (ninety percent of the population in Zimbabwe) were supposed to remain labourers, employees of British and white-owned businesses; whilst whites were supposed to take the back seat, a behind the scenes role, in political activity working with black professionals as directors and chief executives of foreign owned companies, these directors and executives are supposed to masquerade as “non-political”. There is no “non-political” person in the world, that is why everybody of voting age votes. After all, as we have seen, the essence of politics is economic power.
All we are saying here is that the liberation struggle as led by Zanu-PF is not yet over until the majority of our people practise economic democracy too. They must end up being the real owners of the political system that protects and promotes the economic system they own and control.

There can be no genuine political rights, human rights and the rights of women if there are no genuine economic rights.

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N C G Mathema is Governor and Resident Minister of Bulawayo Metropolitan Province.

Labels: COLONIALISM, CORPORATIONS, ZCTU

posted by MrK @ 5:27 PM