Wear Clean Draws  (’coz there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

Weakness of the Movement for Democratic Change (race and history)

By shag carpet bomb • Jul 2nd, 2008 • Category: Imperialism, Racialization

http://www.raceandhistory.com/historicalviews/2008/1006.html

The Movement for Democratic Change: The Continuity of its Theoretical and Practical Weaknesses By Sehlare Makgetlaneng* June 10, 2008

“The fight against Zimbabwe is a fight against us all. Today it is Zimbabwe, tomorrow it will be South Africa, it will be Mozambique, it will be Angola, it will be any other African country. Any government that is perceived to be strong, and to be resistant to imperialists, would be made a target and be undermined. So let us not allow any point of weakness in the solidarity of the SADC, because that weakness will also be transferred to the rest of Africa.” -Thabo Mbekii(1)

The Movement for Democratic Change is characterised by unique and frightening theoretical and practical weaknesses. It is as if it is not an opposition political party in the former settler colonial society in the region which was the victim of settler colonial rule. It has no position on imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, globalisation and north-south relations. Despite acute problems confronted by the masses of the Zimbabwean people on a daily basis, its strategy and tactics have been failing to meet their demands and needs. The consequence has been that they do not recognise them as expressions of their own experience. Its remaining alternative to defeat the Zimbabwean African National Union - Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) to be in power in Zimbabwe is the ballot box. The purpose of this work is to demonstrate that the MDC’s profound theoretical and practical weaknesses have continued increasing. In its achievement in the March 2008 presidential and parliamentary elections, the MDC have exposed the continuity of its theoretical and practical weaknesses. It is as if it does not have serious organic intellectuals capable of articulating appropriate strategy and tactics, nationally, regionally, continentally and internationally. Who are its leading intellectuals and strategists?

more at link http://www.raceandhistory.com/historicalviews/2008/1006.html

One Response »

  1. ilestre on July 21st, 2008 at 4:59 am:

    Some interesting analysis here :

    A taster :

    The MDC has long been a curious paradox. As the election results proved, the party maintained, and has even increased, mass support among poor and working class Zimbabweans in conditions of astonishing hardship. But the MDC has also flirted with the organisations of imperialism and has been avowedly neoliberal in its policies. The party is advised by the International Republican Institute and Cato Institute. In April international media reported that an MDC government would immediately access $2 billion each year in “aid and development”, which Patrick Bond describes as “top-heavy with foreign debt and chock-full of conditions”.35

    The party emerged out of the great upheavals that shook the country in the late 1990s. These protests were themselves a product of the failures of independence and the government’s implementation of two structural adjustment programmes.

    But these protest movements took place in the aftermath of the collapse of the regimes in Eastern Europe and Russia, and with them the ideological moorings for a generation of trade union bureaucrats and activists. To many it seemed that the set of ideas that championed economic adjustment and so-called democratisation—the Washington Consensus—had triumphed.

    Nice to see you take an interest in life outside of the USA (ouch ! not that hard ! that was not meant as a nasty dig ! I just thought you’d enjoy the reprieve from despair at Obama).

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