Muppets (was Re: BK on Identity)

Patrick Bond pbond at wn.apc.org
Thu Mar 8 00:16:26 PST 2001



> Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2001 10:54:16 -0800
> From: Michael Pugliese <debsian at pacbell.net>
> (Patrick Bond, any comments on
> their piece on the MDC and Zimbabwe?)

Don't have internet at home. I think it's the October 2000 rave against Socialist Workers Party entryism? It struck me as well well informed (except for some bad inaccuracies on National Constitutional Assembly's origins and an incorrect allegation that 3 of top 4 MDC folk are white farmers), but also terribly formulaic. (The article I am thinking of has this URL - http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/oct2000/mdc-o07.shtml - so maybe it's an entirely different piece.)

Of course the Zim opposition will be a sell-out when (if!) Morgan Tsvangirai takes power in the next presidential election (between now and April 2002). But the modalities between now and then are crucial for the post-nationalist balance of forces. And what's been missing from lefty critiques of both ZANU and the MDC like the FI's are a) more analysis of discursive and policy orientations within different fractions of the parties; and b) a sense of how forces line up (and fight their own class struggles) in "civil society." A very good comrade, Brian Raftopoulos of University of Zim Institute of Development Studies, does analysis along these lines in some of his work, especially in a forthcoming book on the labour movement. (I make a very preliminary stab at these problems in the next issue of the Jn'l of World-Systems Research, which comes out this month at their www.colorado.edu/csf website.)



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