Last week I posted about the damage Canada is doing to tribal lands in Zimbabwe. I received a suggestion that Robert Mugabe, the corrupt leader of Zimbabwe, has to take responsibility for his country's economic & political chaos. This is an argument worth discussing, because it's raised all the time, not least by rich, western leaders themselves: African rulers are corrupt. They channel billions of aid & development money to their friends and bank accounts abroad. Entire countries are run by cronyism.

This analysis has a measure of truth. Many African leaders are corrupt, and their leadership has nothing to do with helping their desperate people. However, to focus solely on the role African political leaders play, is to miss the more important global system they are, in fact, bit players in.

Know your enemy

This system is called imperialism. The ruling classes of rich countries, through trade regulations, aid tied to neoliberal reforms, and sometimes outright military conquest, impose their capitalist agenda on poorer countries.

This does not mean poorer countries are blameless. Quite the contrary: to speak of imperialism demands a class analysis, because so-called poor countries are often rich in natural resources and people (note: people are not a 'resource' except under capitalism.) There are layers of political leaders and bureaucrats in every country who are far richer and more powerful than you or me. And, like Mugabe, they often torture and imprison their own people.

The latest in dictator chic - Robert Mugabe

But their power is relative. They exist because imperialism needs local strongmen to enforce profitability for giant corporations, centred in the west, who channel their profits out of the countries they operate in and into shareholder dividends. Whatever profits people like Mugabe make, their 'global north' overlords make far more.

(When I speak of imperialism 'needing' something, I want to stress I'm not referring to a cabal of capitalists. I'm talking about the global institutions of capitalist rule, including militaries, global lending institutions and states that together form the ruling class. Those institutions act in the interests of capital accumulation - that's what makes them a class.)

George Monbiot has written consistently good articles on Robert Mugabe's regime. Monbiot is no friend of Mugabe, but he recognizes that the latter is, in many ways, a straw man: like Saddam Hussein, Mugabe is the convenient tinpot dictator the west regularly vilifies to cover up its own crimes. For example,

Robert Mugabe, the west’s demon king, has deservedly been frozen out [of development aid] by the rich nations. But he has caused less suffering and is responsible for less corruption than Rwanda’s Paul Kagame or Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, both of whom are repeatedly cited by the G8 countries as practitioners of “good governance”. Their armies, as the UN has documented, are largely responsible for the meltdown in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which has so far claimed four million lives, and have walked off with billions of dollars’ worth of natural resources.(3) ...

The difference, of course, is that Mugabe has not confined his attacks to black people; he has also dispossessed white farmers and confiscated foreign assets. Kagame, on the other hand, has eagerly supplied us with the materials we need for our mobile phones and computers.

Let's talk about this dispossession of whites. White farmers have land because their ancestors stole it from black Africans. This isn't an historical incident; its legacy continues today. These local capitalists are using this land for export crops, not to supply Zimbabweans with food:

Though the 4,500 white farmers there own two-thirds of of the best land, many of them grow not food but tobacco. Seventy per cent of the nation's maize - its primary staple crop - is grown by black peasant farmers hacking a living from the marginal lands they were left by the whites.

The seizure of the white farms is both brutal and illegal. But it is merely one small scene in the tragedy now playing all over the world. Every year, some tens of millions of peasant farmers are forced to leave their land, with devastating consequences for food security.

For them there are no tear-stained descriptions of a last visit to the graves of their children. If they are mentioned at all, they are dismissed by most of the press as the necessary casualties of development.

Those "casualties of development" are structural adjustment programs, tied aid, the creation of lax labour & environmental standards - the whole bag of tricks imperialism uses to plunder Africa. The difference is, Mugabe is doing it for personal & political gain, not on behalf of western capitalism. The hue & cry at his crimes is selective, and Monbiot sees this as a sign of underlying racism:

the United Kingdom is funding a much bigger scheme in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Some 20 million people will be dispossessed. Again this atrocity has been ignored by most of the media.

These are dark-skinned people being expelled by whites, rather than whites being expelled by black people. They are, as such, assuming their rightful place, as invisible obstacles to the rich world's projects. Mugabe is a monster because he has usurped the natural order.

20 million poor Indians vs. 4,500 rich whites. Who's the priority here?

The names may have changed, but the giant squid with a tophat remains the same

Imperialism exists because it can channel its power through a multitude of diverse institutions and projects. The end result - starvation, misery and dispossession - can get blamed on bureaucrats, oversight, or simply 'the market'. Mugabe has the bad fortune to be doing the same thing, on a much smaller scale, without bothering to hide his agenda.

What is to be done?

That question keeps coming up. Obviously, this doesn't mean we should support Mugabe, anymore than opposing the Iraq war means supporting Saddam Hussein. Socialists should oppose every land grab, every project that means further immiseration for Zimbabweans and Africans. I shed no tears for dispossessed white farmers: they've had a good run. But we all should be concerned with how poor blacks, and whites, in Zimbabwe are faring under Mugabe's dictatorship. For a discussion of what to do, I refer people to Zimbabwe's Plunge, by Patrick Bond and Masimba Manyanya. The authors show "the limits of both neoliberalism and an authoritarian interventionist state, and raises the challenge of constructing an alternative politics."

Also check out the Zimbabwe International Socialists, who are opposed to both Mugabe and the neoliberal opposition, but still support land reforms that benefit the people. And, apparently, get beaten up and jailed for saying so.

Imperialism has to be understood as a system, not a few bad rulers. We need to lay the blame for Africa's misery on the powers funding resource extraction, wars and neoliberalism: the banking, corporate and military institutions of the global north. Our biggest enemies are not African rulers alone, but capitalism and imperialism as a whole.