SPEAKER 2 0:00:00 Hello everyone to yet another exciting episode on Zim Left Radio. Today we have the inimitable Comrade Ian Bedders. Comrade Ian, welcome to Zim Left Radio again. SPEAKER 1 0:00:11 Welcome to you and welcome to all the listeners. Today we already agreed I was going to talk about the importance of management under socialism because there’s a sort of vague, loose idea that under socialism the workers do just what they want and, you know, everything is wrong without organized production. This is not the case. Now if we go back to Marx and Engels, they spent their lifetime showing that it’s the workers who create value. It’s the number of hours worked on making any kind of commodity that puts value into any product. And Marx spent his whole life writing Capital. When he died it wasn’t even completely finished. Most of it was done. Volume one was issued in his lifetime. Volume two was then edited by Engels from substantive notes. Volume three, Engels also edited with rather less organized, extensive notes. But they talked about the workers and management, how capitalism works, what is direct materialism, and all these other major issues. They spent a lifetime on that. But what they didn’t have to do was they didn’t have to organize a socialist economy. That didn’t happen during their lifetimes. There was no socialism during the lifetime of Marx and Engels. However, when we come to Lenin, Lenin led the first proletarian, that’s workers’ revolution, who was led by Lenin. And once they’d taken power, they had the job to organize the economy. In a chaotic situation, when they took power, Russia was still at war with Germany, and they needed peace desperately. They’d taken power. The Tsar had lost power in February 1917. In 1917, there was a period of chaos and not very strong provisionals. The Bolsheviks took power from the provisional government with the backing of the Soviets. That is the organizations of workers, soldiers, and peasants, which were set up and which became the center of the government. Now how were they going to organize the economy? What happened early in 1918, they nationalized all the industry. The whole of Russia was not industrialized, but there were major industrial centers in Petrograd, currently called St. Petersburg, and Moscow, and a few other places like Kazan and one or two other places. It was large-scale industry, foreign-owned for the most part, and then all in between it was peasant agriculture. So now what were they going to do with these enterprises? What they did was that they nationalized all the enterprises via the management. They kept the old management. The difference is that the profits went back to the state and were therefore development of the young Soviet-Russian state. The profits became then, through the government, became the property of the people. But management remained in the hands of the old bourgeois managers. And there was a group called Left Communists who said, no, we must give the management to our own comrades. And Lenin laughed at them, and he wrote a pamphlet called Left-wing Childishness and the Petty-bourgeois Mentality. By the way, for anybody who’s read Lenin or interested, do not confuse that with left-wing communism and infantile disorder, which is something he wrote later in 1920. Left-wing communism and infantile disorder talked about the newly formed communist parties across Europe, which had grown following the Russian Revolution, and their tendency to want to be as extreme as possible without understanding tactics. Lenin was a supreme understander of tactics. Above anyone, he understood tactics. He understood when to go forward, when to go back. And what I always tell people, by the way, is that if you’re playing a game of pool, you don’t smash the ball hard every time. You must know when to smash it hard, when just to touch it, when to touch it on the side. This is what you do. You must have tactics. An army which is going to win mustn’t be like the Zulus at Blood River and run into the bullets of the Boers. You can’t do that. If you’re going to win, you must know when to go forward, when to retreat, when to simply hold the ground where you stand. Because our aim as communists is not to show how militant we are. Our aim as communists is to win, is to lead the workers, the peasants, and the poor across the globe to have a better standard of living. And that must be through production. First of all, we must produce, and we have a problem in Zimbabwe that significantly there’s something which Martin Engels had looked at. What happens when a government takes over and destroys production? And that’s another phenomenon that we’ve got in Zimbabwe. What do we do when production is destroyed? And there’s another phenomenon that Marx and Engels hadn’t yet understood. They began to understand towards the end of their lives. In 1848, when they wrote the Communist Manifesto, they thought that revolution would happen in the most advanced capitalist countries, which was Britain, France, and Germany in 1848. And they had good reason to think that, because there were revolutionary movements in all three of those countries at the time. But what Lenin discovered, and Stalin formulated well, was that revolution doesn’t happen in the most advanced countries first. Under the conditions of imperialism, it happens where the link with the imperialist center is weakest. So what often happens is you get anti-imperialist revolution happen in relatively poor countries. And if it’s led by a socialist or communist party, they then have the job to develop production in that country. They’re not taking over something which is already developed. They have to develop. They have to do some of the work that capitalism has done in North America and in Europe. So in a poor country, where you’ve got revolution, where you’ve got national liberation, you’ve got that big problem of how to organize production. And in Zimbabwe, we failed miserably. We had this very strange phenomenon in Zimbabwe when it was Rhodesia. The imperialists from the 1950s, the two major imperialists, France and Britain, had decided that it’s no use trying to fight against African nationalism. What we have to do is to contain it. And they adopted, after the war in Algeria and the Maumau uprising in Kenya, they decided to go on the neo-colonial road. Sorry to break you there, comrade. SPEAKER 2 0:09:41 There are two things that you’ve highlighted, which I think I would like us to sort of follow up on from your introductory remarks. Also there’s the issue of tactics, which I think we will need to handle in the next few minutes. But I want us to go back and think about socialism in Africa from a historical perspective. So I think this is what you started going into. After the liberation war was won in most countries or after most countries became independent, I think it became clear that the problem of managing the new state was now at the forefront. And I think you’ve referred me in the past to a letter by, if we are to look at Zimbabwe, by A.M. Babu advising an open letter to Mugabe, advising him on what he had to do in light of the lessons that were learned. We often saw in countries like Ghana and I mean the early, the countries that had changed independence early that they struggled with managing their economies. On the other hand, I’m also very uncomfortable when whenever the question of management is talked about, because you see, one of the things that the war being did, for example, in Zimbabwe, was to just blame everything on economic management. If you look at the wedding of the sanctions that were imposed on Zimbabwe, they lay the blame squarely on the ZANOPF government for failing to manage the economy. But one question I always ask at least is managing what? If you look at a commodity dependent country like Zimbabwe or many other countries in Africa, these were like set up as centers for the extraction of primary raw commodities and minerals. So the economy was not, Zimbabwe, yes, it was relatively diverse in some areas, but still you can see that the material basis of these economies were primary products. So I think I want you to also cover and say when you say we must be able to be good managers and it’s good that you’ve given us some historical perspective. But even a country like South Africa, for example, still when after the end of apartheid, we see that it was still dependent mostly on gold and several other mineral resources. So for that reason, even if they try to manage that, the economy couldn’t industrialize or at least best the frontiers of whatever was left by colonialism. So if you can also sort of talk about that as well, and how are we supposed to understand it and what are sort of the revolutionary roots of economic management? SPEAKER 1 0:12:22 Right, this is what I was trying to get onto. The neo-colonial agenda was there to make sure that Western countries had access to mostly the minerals and some agricultural produce in Africa, that the Western monopoly countries would benefit from that. And they made sure that their leaders would get their percentage, they’d get their, yeah, it’s all right, we know we put you in prison before, but now you can become president, you can have your national anthem, your national flag, and we’ll give you 10 percent of what we’re earning from mining or from large-scale agriculture, and we carry on like that. That’s basically what’s happened through most of Africa. Now, when you come down to Southern Africa, you already had, and it’s very notable in Rhodesia, you already had white colonial governments, settler governments, which were very racist, but nevertheless the settlers had the idea that they would develop their own country, their own economy. And it became very obvious that those settler governments would not survive to the major imperialists. It became obvious that those settler governments could not survive. So what they wanted, they wanted black governments, the real imperialists wanted black governments in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe of course, and in South Africa, but they wanted black governments which would do the same as the rest of Africa and would make sure that they maintained their profits. Now, the Rhodesians were not interested in giving power to any black person, and so the Rhodesians were opposed to the imperialist, neo-colonial agenda. They didn’t want it. And so for a period from 1965 to 1980, they set up an internalized economy, and it was well organized, albeit for the benefit of the white minority, but they set up an internalized economy. And by the way, the West were not that keen on the semi-independent economies. Even South Africa was less independent than that of Rhodesia, but they weren’t too keen on that. They wanted greater penetration. Now, for the first 11 years of independence, we remained with the Rhodesian economy a largely internalized economy. What you brought in Zimbabwe between around 1980 and 1991 was more or less made in Zimbabwe. By the way, Babel does mention the strength of our economy in his letter, and he told Mugabe, don’t destroy that. But what did Mugabe do and the Zarnoupief government? And this is where we go to Fanon. Fanon actually talked about, in 1961, of African leaders taking over but only having an approximate bookish idea of the economy of their own country. And having taken over, what they wanted was to take over from the whites. They claimed to be Marxist-Leninists, but that was a cover. They just wanted arms from the socialist countries, but it was a cover. It wasn’t that they understood that Marxism-Leninism, or to use the term I prefer, scientific socialism, was about understanding how an economy works, how it is at the current time, and how you transform it. They didn’t understand that. What did they do? They got this guy, Bernadu Cizero, who had been working for the World Bank for the UN, and who was a thorough neoliberal, they made him finance minister. And yes, as a finance minister in the early stages, he was quite a good accountant. He wasn’t corrupt in that sense. But at the time when the world was going towards neoliberalism, he, more than any other individual in the government, pushed Zimbabwe towards neoliberalism. We do not need a planned economy. They destroyed the planned economy, and they said, yeah, we need free trade. And by doing so, by putting the Zim dollar onto the exchange market, it weakened the economy and things started going down from there. So when Mugabe, as chair of SADC, agreed to send Zimbabwean troops to Congo to defend the very progressive president, Laurent Kabila, the IMF and the World Bank then removed all the support. That was the beginning of sanctions in 1999. It’s a mistake to believe that sanctions started in 2000 or 2001 with land reform. They started in 1999. And the IMF and the World Bank withdrew support from an already weakened economy. And by 2001, you had Zidara and thorough sanctions were put on Zimbabwe. But what did the ruling elite do? They continued to live a bling lifestyle. We know that Grace Mugabe used to go on shopping sprees across the world when there was no money in the world. And they didn’t understand how to organize the economy. And because they saw things in racial terms, they put these, especially the G40, we must take over all these white-owned industries. But they didn’t know how to manage them. And basically, they looted the industries, in some cases selling the machinery to South Africa or to companies in South Africa. So instead of building the economy, they destroyed it. Now if you go to Lenin, he’s very clear. Lenin in left-wing childishness and infantile disorder, especially Section 5, if people want to get it, left-wing childishness and infantile disorder, he says we must keep the old management. But we put a political commissar to watch the management, the workers’ committees to watch the management. As long as they do what we want, then they can help us develop. And the result was that under severe sanctions, and there were severe sanctions against Soviet Russia until the 1930s, they built the industry. They really developed the industry. We’ve got in South Africa, Zimbabwe, we’ve got load shedding. It’s improving a little bit in Zimbabwe now, even in South Africa. But why? Because they haven’t managed electricity properly. And yet in the early Soviet Union from 1920, Lenin said, we have to electrify the whole country. And he got a Soviet scientist, Krasnodzki. They made a plan. In 12 years, they did the basic electrification for a country the size of the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. They did it. And over the next nine years until the German invasion, they tripled their generation, their capacity to generate electricity because they had planning and because they used specialists. Yeah, Krasnodzki was a trained specialist, and we need trained specialists. We can’t say that everybody must become entrepreneurs, which is the neoliberal thing which has actually destroyed our economies. And we mustn’t say, what’s happening in Africa, when we’ve taken over state-owned enterprise, people say, oh, nationalization doesn’t work. We’ve taken over state-owned enterprises, often set up by colonial or white governments, and we’ve replaced experienced white managers with the nephews and cousins of politicians. SPEAKER 2 0:22:13 OK, comrade, that’s a very good point. I wanted to ask you something in addition to that. So one of the responses that will come directed to you would be something, what would you say to someone who says, well, it’s all fair and square that we maintain, for example, the anti-liberation, white managers and all the colonial infrastructure, but there are going to be no opportunities for our black comrades, most of whom were in the bushes. So you see what happened, I think, in the early independence period, there was a tendency to sort of say, oh, the first black manager of Standard Bank, like Gosana Moyo, used to say, yeah, I was the first black manager of Standard Bank and all the other elites in Zimbabwe. And they actually benefited from a sort of affirmative action policy that started to want to see either in state enterprises or in some private organizations that were benefiting the colonial regime. They started to be incorporated in those structures and really never thought about transformation, because the one thing is, yes, I mean, I can see the point that you’re trying to make, but there’s also a risk that if you say maintain the same managers, right, you actually perpetuate an existing system and you don’t transform it. And I think this is what you started to say when you said in the Soviet Union, the idea was that you maintain management. However, you also have a worker led committee that overlooks or that supervises the manager. So I want you to sort of kind of respond to your question and say, oh, if you are someone that says to you, well, if you say let’s maintain management, you are sort of you want to perpetuate injustice. How would you respond to someone who says that? SPEAKER 1 0:23:59 There always has to be a period of transformation. The most important thing is the ownership of the profits of whatever you’re producing. The ownership of the profit should be national. What happened in Africa is the ownership of the nationalized industries has gone to the black elite. The white elite has been replaced by a black elite. Now what about how do we replace that white elite? We send our young men and women to understudy the experienced managers. If there’s an experienced manager who is reactionary, we remove him. It doesn’t mean to say just because he’s white and he’s been there a long time, we’re going to keep him. No. But if the guy works with us, we retain him until he retires. We train our youngsters not to become entrepreneurs but to become managers. We have this problem now with neoliberalism being linked to black exceptionalism. What we see now is our young people are told to become entrepreneurs. They’re not being trained in practical jobs. In South Africa we’re seeing it a lot. You must become an entrepreneur to actually close down the training school, teaching people to be like my trade, bricklayers, carpenters, electricians, welders. People must understand that if you’ve got a basic trade, especially in socialist industry or industry which is developing towards socialism, you need those basic skills. But at a later stage, if you’re any good, you can become a manager having got those industrial skills. At the same time, even at university level, we don’t want our young men and young women to be only accountants and human resource managers. We want them to be engineers and mechanics and agriculturalists. We need those practical skills. We need production-based skills, whether the lower level or the higher level. That’s how we produce management, which is based on the black majority. But who takes someone from university who’s got a first degree, has no experience in management, and because he’s related to someone higher, we now put him in charge of a company, especially a state-owned company, and they start looting. This is what we’ve seen in most of Africa. We’re ruled by looters who are there on the pretext of black empowerment, but it’s not the empowerment of the black majority. The empowerment of the black majority must come through skills training, education, and through state ownership as far as possible of the means of production. So we need more nationalization, not less. One very strange headline I saw in the Zarno-BF newspaper a few years ago, I’m trying to think of the name of it, was it said, I’m just trying to think of the name, it says, indigenization through privatization. Indigenization through privatization. A state-owned company was not already indigenously owned. It meant privatization for the black minority, not for the black majority. This is what we have to understand. If you read Babel, now it’s very interesting you mention Babel, because Babel was a real communist, came from Zanzibar. When Zanzibar and Tanganyika were united under the United Republic of Tanzania, he became a minister in the government of Nyerere. But he disagreed with Nyerere, because Nyerere, and you mentioned this before, was an advocate of so-called African socialism. No, they didn’t want this scientific socialism. Let’s go back to our roots, and let’s just have village socialism. It doesn’t work. Babel wanted rapid industrialization. In fact, he was put in prison for, I think, six years by Nyerere. Eventually, he was released. He was imprisoned under false charges. It was Babel who, in 1980, wrote a letter to Mugabe. Babel in his letter says, you must be careful about agriculture. Don’t just take it over straightaway. Find those white farmers who are willing to work with the new regime. Yes, those who don’t want, they can go. But those who are willing to work with the regime, use them with your new government, use them to train our black farmers into better agricultural methods. So we have to manage the transition. This is the point. So management doesn’t necessarily have to be whited. We do have some good young Africans at this stage. But management does not have to be government appointees. SPEAKER 2 0:30:25 Which brings me to the next point, Comrade, which I understood to cut you short on that one. But I want you to link it to this idea. Because you see, earlier on when you said to me, well, Francis, we must talk about economic management. I was very hesitant because my initial reaction was just like the World Bank version of management. How is the management that you’re advocating for different to the World Bank version where we are supposed to manage our economies in a particular way? Can you just differentiate those two a little bit? SPEAKER 1 0:30:57 That’s an important one because the World Bank and the IMF has really messed the world up. The management I’m talking about, and funnily enough, the management the Rhodesians had, the management the Chinese have got, what they have in common is production. The World Bank and the IMF were concentrating on money and putting money before production. And where is the center of their ideas? United States. The United States has farmed out its productive companies to where there’s cheap labor. The elites make money by buying and selling money. And that has been copied in Africa, particularly in Zimbabwe. So whereas China has concentrated on production, the major banks are state-owned and they give low interest loans to private companies, lots of private companies and lots of state-owned companies in China. So the IMF and the World Bank idea of management is only about money. And we’ve seen this problem repeatedly in Zimbabwe, that we’ve had all these changes in the currency, the adoption of US dollar and then the frequent reissuing of the Zimbabwe dollar. And we, as the Communist Party, have said you can change the currency as many times as you like. Without production, money is worthless. Money should represent production. And if it doesn’t, it’s worthless. And they haven’t listened. And we’ve just seen recently another spate of inflation, because they’ve been fiddling about with the currency and not concentrating on production. Which even, I’m sorry to say, the white racist predecessors or auditions understood that production comes first. China understands production comes first. But most of our African leaders have not understood that, because they’ve been comprador capitalists most of the time. In other words, if someone else does the job, they will take their percentage. But they haven’t organized production. So the organization of production is central. And for the organization of production at every level, you need good management. That good management should be experienced in the particular industry where it comes from. You can’t just take someone from university with no industrial experience and make them a manager. We do need people who’ve come up through any industry, bright guys who’ve come from the shop floor and have seen understood management, and then we promote them into more senior management. This is what we need. And this is not what has been happening in Africa. SPEAKER 2 0:34:33 Another thing that I wanted you to highlight. One of the things that happened, for example, in Zimbabwe when we took over the farms, the land reform program, was that at least the wing of the war veterans that was leading it, they said this was a revolutionary act. In my research, I do a lot of studies on tobacco farming. And as far as I could see, the old relation somehow persists. In fact, they have even worse because now production is concentrated. It is still dominated by a few multinational corporations. So there is a tendency that whenever maybe there was, I should say, after liberation, there is a tendency of thinking that as soon as you go into a business which is white owned, by merely removing the white manager or the white owner, you have undertaken a revolutionary act. Now, I was reading one of the vanguards that you produced sometime, I think it’s volume two, issue number seven, where you really wrote an interesting piece about rebellion, where you differentiated rebellion and revolution. I wanted you to just speak because you are saying management is important, but I’m thinking sometimes when we take over power, we just feel like we are involved in a revolutionary act. Maybe it is not necessarily a different revolutionary act, it’s perhaps just an organized rebellion, which results in countries being decimated and the all productive infrastructure destroyed. So can you please tell us a little bit about rebellion or revolution? SPEAKER 1 0:36:19 Right. A rebel is someone who reacts against the existing order and fights against the existing order. He doesn’t necessarily change it or seek to change it, he’s just angry and fights against it. A revolutionary is someone who, because it relates to the word revolve, a revolutionary is someone who wants to change the whole way that society works. And sometimes a rebel can seem more militant than a revolutionary because sometimes a revolutionary in changing society, and as I’ve already mentioned, we need to harness, as Lenin told us, the skills of the old management in order to build our economies. So we don’t always take the most extreme measures. Also, when we have a revolution, we need to bring the population with us, the masses with us. And sometimes two extreme policies or two extreme actions can actually alienate the majority. So a real revolutionary has to bring the people with them in order to transform the society, and we have to understand how the transformation works. When Marx and Engels and Lenin talk about the dictatorship of the proletariat, what do they mean? You see, at present we have the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, because the bourgeoisie is mostly done through the media, especially in the West. People vote according to what they’re told, and the information which is tightly controlled, which they receive. Now, if we have the dictatorship of the proletariat, it means that the proletariat, the working class, is ruling during the transformation. So in the early days, after we take over a country as a Communist Party leading the masses, for the immediate future we still have to, by necessity, to administer capitalism. Some of the Trotskyists and the anarchists and the extremists say, oh, you’re only working with capitalism. But Lenin was very clear. State monopoly capitalism is the last stage before socialism. State monopoly capitalism is still capitalist, but things are state-owned and directed by the state. So you have to go through that process, but in the meantime the state is owned by the workers. So the transformation comes during the stage of workers’ power. And you’ll see, like I said, in the early stages you keep your old managers. You might even recruit managers from overseas. By the way, in the 1930s, during the Great Depression in the United States, the Soviet Union actually recruited American mine engineers because they had the experience and they worked in the Soviet Union. About three of them, to my knowledge, actually wrote books about their experience in working in the Soviet Union. These were not communists. They were mine engineers who were out of work in the United States, and the Soviets used them to develop their mining industry. So we must distinguish between management and the capitalists. Now again, when Marx and Engels were writing, often the capitalist was also the manager. But as we go further and further into developing capitalism, the capitalists themselves are mostly divorced from actual management. They just buy and sell money and have got the casino economy, and they employ skilled managers who are there just to make money. And in the early stage of socialism, or of national democratic economy, yes, we need to have the best managers, regardless of their political affiliations, their nationality, their color, their religious affiliations. All we need is that they’re capable, first of all, of doing their job, and secondly, we have to just make sure they’re not going to try and destabilize us, but they work properly as they’re employed to do. That’s what we need to do. And we need planning. We need planning. We need large-scale planning, which involves the whole people. We need professional planners at the top, but we also need to involve the people at a low level in their provinces, in their districts, to say, what can we do in this district towards the national plan? What can we do in this province towards the national plan? What’s possible? What is not possible according to our local conditions? If we do that, if we bring the whole people into planning, we will go further. But we need professional planners, which may or may not be our party members, but we don’t need automatically to put someone in power just because he’s a party member or he’s a relative of a party member. That has destroyed African economies extensively. Yeah. SPEAKER 2 0:42:24 Let’s talk about tactics again. How did we get it wrong? Because you see, why didn’t we implement such a tactical approach that you’re suggesting after independence? I mean, I’ve read lots of articles that show that, at least in the early periods of independence in Zimbabwe, for example, there was a commitment of building a sort of a socialist economy We could see through cooperative agriculture was heavily promoted in the early years of independence only to be reversed by the IMF when it said all the small scale revolution was a joke and all those things. SPEAKER 1 0:43:00 I would actually dispute from friends of mine who are involved in those early stages, I dispute that there was any real commitment to socialism and to any understanding of socialism. In my view, Marxism-Leninism was something which our African leadership had to learn in order to get arms to fight the whites. That was the majority of them in both Zanu and Zappo. In my view, Zappo was a bit better, but they were not fully committed. Not all the leadership were committed to socialism. One friend of mine, a guy called Paul Brickle, a white guy, him and his brother Jeremy were well known Zappo members. Paul Brickle brought in grassroots books, which you can find in Harare and Bulawayo. He’s late now. They brought in communists and national liberation books. He always used to tell the story that when he came back into the country after exile in Britain, he worked for Central Books in London, which is a communist party bookshop, by the way. He went to see various ministers and he tells the story of how one minister fell asleep when he was talking to him. Then he said that the honest one was Nathan Shamir-Yarira, who said to him, Now we have Andrew Nyati. Andrew Nyati set up Simulkai Cooperative in, I think, Mashon and Central, something like that, not far from Harare anyway, and they had to fight the government in order to set up that cooperative. Once it was established, the government tried to claim it as theirs, but they had all kinds of problems to do it. The other person who was really involved in trying to set up a cooperative movement was Judith Todd, the daughter of Garfield Todd. Because she was born in New Zealand, she had a citizenship revoked at one stage. They tried to make out that they were doing more than they did. The economy was based on the Rhodesian economy, which had a very large state sector, which was enforced on them by the conditions of sanctions by Britain, but which they managed rather well. It was unfortunately, I hate to say it, but it was our black government in 1991 which relinquished economic independence by taking on the ESAP program. It was disastrous, because before that we had, as I said, a largely internalized economy. What you bought in Zimbabwe was made in Zimbabwe. It was a bit old-fashioned, but this is what we had. It was far from perfect, but it was much better than anything that we had later. Since then, there’s been no economic planning at all. There was some semblance of economic planning even in the 1980s. There was some semblance of economic planning, of import substitution, for example. But after 1991, it was planning. And at present, for instance, the Hwangi power station is finally being refurbished by the Chinese. So, they’re still looking to China, maybe to Russia to some extent, because they can see a new world order already coming into place, but they still want to behave the same. They don’t want to plan. They want their percentage while someone else does the work. This is what’s happening. So we have to change that. As communists, we have to say, we want—and we’ve said it in our program—we want all those industries which were privatized, we want them back under national control. They must be renationalized. And we want effective management. We don’t care if the management is Shona and the Bele, white-colored, Russian, Chinese, even American or British. We don’t care. What we want is effective management, but management under our control as a government. We don’t care where the managers come from, what party they belong to. We will, of course, put one or two political appointees onto each board of managers to make sure that those guys do what we want and they stick to our basic program. But if they’re doing their work as managers well enough, it’s fine. That’s what we want to restore the economy. And in some cases, we may have to do 50-50 agreements with foreign companies because it’s been run down so much. So if the foreign company has got the expertise in some particular skill, yes, we can say, yeah, 50-50 agreement, half or preferably 51 percent government-owned and 49 percent owned by the foreign company in terms of profits and so on. So we can work on those kinds of agreements and variations on those kinds of agreements. But we don’t need private ownership of minerals in particular. And it doesn’t matter if the private ownership is foreign or if it’s a so-called indigenous entrepreneur. The minerals underground in Zimbabwe are the property of the Zimbabwean people as a whole. And we should also recognize the interests, having said that, of the workers working in the industry, of the people of that district and the people of that province when looking at their apportionment of profit from that industry. But basically, the profits from that industry, even if some have to go to a foreign country, at least half of those profits must come back into Zimbabwe and be used for further production. SPEAKER 2 0:51:03 Yeah, I think you’ve nailed it. And thank you so much. I was going to, as a final point or question, now, why have socialist ideas not really been popular in Africa? You know, I’m trying to organize care workers here in the UK. And I think people, whenever I try to say, look, we need to do something collective, we need to empower workers, we need to do this. You know, someone frequently says, one or two people would come frequently say, oh, what? We want to start businesses. We want to, you know, do hustling. You know, they just want to do. They never really kind of, some people think of themselves as workers in the in the sacred sense. They are seeing themselves as kind of on their way to trying to establish a business of sort. So this to me, as you said, African leaders also weren’t very serious about the socialist program. And I’m just wondering, I just wanted to find out from you, why do you think that’s been the case? You know, you would expect that, you know, these ideas would have been popular and would have been a program of action that sort of moves us forward historically, because as far as I’m concerned, history has not yet moved in Africa. As yet, we really need to get to a point where we can really move history. Since we were conquered by colonialism, we are still just going around in circles. We can’t really best out of that boundary and start thinking about a better society, about building our societies, about industrializing our economies. And I’m just wondering, why are these ideas not being taken up by younger people and by other people and make and popularized? In fact, if you look opposition politics in Africa, most of them are just like, oh, we will manage the economy better. But managing what? You know, just making sure there’s less corruption. They never talk about economic transformation, about the sort of things that you’re suggesting that, yeah, we need to take over industries. We need to make sure that minerals are nationalized. And I was wondering whether you might have some thoughts on why, you know, we seem not to be moving forward. SPEAKER 1 0:53:04 Well, I think there’s a couple of reasons for that. The early, the beginning of the OAU, the Pan-African Congress of 1945 was led by people with communist leading, W.E.B. Du Bois by Kwame Nkrumah. And the West was very careful. Kwame Nkrumah had genuine ideas on scientific socialism. They removed him. Thomas Sankara, they killed him. Muammar Gaddafi, they killed him. And even some guys who maybe not in South Africa, Chris Harney, they killed him. They killed him. Chris Harney was killed. Chris Harney would have been the next president after Mandela, and he was the General Secretary of the Communist Party, but he was killed. SPEAKER 2 0:54:13 And Patris Lumumba as well, maybe? SPEAKER 1 0:54:17 Patris Lumumba. Patris Lumumba was maybe not quite so clear, if you read his stuff, but he was looking for economic independence. In Zimbabwe, Joshua Gomo, although he was more like Mandela in his ideas, was nevertheless, he was aligned to the, Zak was aligned to the Soviet bloc, and many of the, especially of Zebra, were communists. Not all of them, but many were communists. And again, the West made sure that Joshua Gomo was sidelined, that Zak was sidelined especially after they received help from the Soviets. So Zana was supported by the West initially. Whatever else they say, this is a recorded historical fact, because they didn’t want socialism. They didn’t want a challenge to their economic dominance. And it’s very interesting, by the way, that those blacks-only liberation movements, PAC, UNITA, ZANU, those anti-white liberation movements are in fact the ones supported by the CIA. Because once you get what they’re saying, we want blacks only to rule, we don’t want whites, which falls in the interest of the black elite. So once you’ve got a black president and a black capitalist, that’s enough as far as that ideology is concerned. Rather than having cooperation and bringing in the interests of the workers. So the creation of a black elite is part of that agenda, of that ideology. And we have to understand that. And it’s again, you often see this being pushed by black Americans. As long as we’ve got a rich black man, we’re okay. But it’s not, because who are the majority? The majority are also black, they’re poor, and in many cases they’re no better off under a rich black man than they were under a rich white man. This is a problem. So now what we’re looking at, and I’m not quite as pessimistic as you are, in Zimbabwe as a communist party we are recruiting young workers. There are a few, but they’re there, the younger generation. And by the way, young intellectuals like yourself, we are starting to recruit them. And it’s going to take a long time, because especially from 1991, before 1991, the whole atmosphere in Zimbabwe was different. There was some feeling for working together to build the country. But what we were told in 1991, you’ve heard me say this before, the killer slogan was making money make sense. And that penetrated not only the leadership but everybody. Well, blow everybody else, we have to make money. It doesn’t matter how we make money. And I was a member of Zardubieff at one stage, and we had a genuine problem of drought, around about 2002 I think it was. We had a genuine problem of drought, and I was assisting with making sure that, together with some of the war veterans, of making sure that everybody got something to eat in terms of meal-a-meal in particular. And there was a genuine meal-a-meal shortage. And then after that there was a sugar shortage. And how was the sugar shortage created? It wasn’t created by the government, it wasn’t created by the opposition, it was created by ordinary people who realized that by hoarding sugar they could put up the price. And it was a result of this idea, making money makes sense. So people created artificial shortages in order to make a short-term profit. This really happened, I saw this with my own eyes. Also, by the way, going back to land reform, there’s a misconception that this was created by Rob Mugabe and Zardubieff. It wasn’t. It was created by the war veterans themselves, who went on the land after waiting for 20 years for the government to do nothing. This has happened in 2020. And after the rejection of a very good draft constitution, of which part of it was land reform, and that was misrepresented to people, especially by the NDC at the time, whereas some people in Zardubieff, including our current president, Emerson Munnengagwa, actually told people to vote no, because he realized that new constitution would weaken the powers of the president. So anyway, I don’t want to go too much into that. But the point is that the war veterans went on the land. And I worked personally with Chen Zhai Hoonzhui, and especially war veterans in Matabeleland, and they did not say we must take all the land from the white farmers. They said we’ve come to share the land, and I can remember Hoonzhui coming on television saying that. So if, as commonly happened, a white farmer had three or four farms, they would say, Mr. Smith, choose your best farm, we’re going to take the rest of it and give it to the people, because there’s multiple farm ownership. Chen Zhai Hoonzhui and Borde Gezi, who from the civilian side had led farm occupations—I won’t call them invasions, because you can’t invade your own land—they were saying, one family, one farm. They never said we must get rid of the white farmers. But Chen Zhai Hoonzhui and Borde Gezi died in the middle of 2001, within six weeks of each other. And what do we say? We don’t say they’ve been killed, we just say that inconvenient politicians died at convenient times. And after they died, the black elite took over more and more farms. We said, and in some cases, I don’t know if you realize, the war veterans even took over farms allocated to ministers, and they really tried to make it a national thing not to throw off the white farmers. Some were later assisted by white farmers to produce—I know some cases of that. It was later that the black elite said, we must take all the white farms. And the other thing that’s very noticeable is that generally, the peasant farms, and those taken over by the more serious of the war veterans, were relatively productive. The commercial farms taken over by the indigenous entrepreneurs are the ones who were living in Harare or Bulawayo. Those are the ones which were failed to produce, because it was cell phone farming. The late Joseph Maseka, who was the outspoken vice president until his death, was against cell phone farming. He says, yeah, if you take a farm, you must live on the farm. So there’s a lot of misunderstanding of what really happened down below. And Hoonshui, because I worked with him—let me tell you myself, at one stage, Hoonshui wanted me to lead war veterans’ projects for farming in Matabeleland North, and the guy called Alec Moyo, who I was close to, to lead in Matabeleland South. I don’t know about the rest of the country, but he actually said that, and then a couple months later he died. So it never happened. SPEAKER 2 1:04:33 I think I’d like us, I think in the next episode as well, Comrade, to really talk about the land reform program and debunk some of the myths that have been propagated. And I think, you know, for fear of having this one too long, I would like to propose that we stop here. We’ve covered quite a lot of ground, and thank you so much for enlightening our comrades. We definitely need to do another episode to cover all these extensive issues. SPEAKER 1 1:05:03 Of course. And just because he’s human, a man would like a little bite to eat. He wants noble and a lot of talk that gives no bread and meat. So left to three, so left to three, to the work that we must do. March on in the Workers United front, for you are a worker too. And just because he’s human, he doesn’t like a pistol to his head. He wants no servant under him and no boss overhead. So left to three, so left to three, to the work that we must do. March on in the Workers United front, for you are a worker too. And just because he’s a worker, his job is all his own. The liberation of the working class is the job for the worker alone. So left to three, so left to three, to the work that we must do. March on in the Workers United front, for you are a worker too. For you are a worker too. March on in the Workers United front, for you are a worker too.