Reflections on the Zanu-PF Conference and the party ideology

AS YOU read this, I am in the land of Ian Khama, yes the one who has failed to respect the sovereignty and decisions of our nation as if he is the demigod of “good politics” in Africa, absurdly, he is never close to that.

Anyway let me not be rude, this man is hosting me at the University of Botswana for a Continental Youth Convention-Orate Africa.

It’s one of my many stops this festive season as a guest of states, sharing my little but important knowledge on national youth programmes as taught to me by my Zimbabwean Government which heavily invested in some of us through the widely sought for Cadetship scheme — yes, I am a product of it and I am sowing back to Africa.

The 16th Annual National People’s Conference all headline this December’s reviews and I shall join the crusade in aiding to what it means for our past and 2018. One thing I am certain of after the few travels in my other life is that Zanu-PF’s decisions seem to affect the whole world. People get glued to their media waiting for updates from Politburo meetings, cabinet reshuffles, congress and people’s conferences.

You should hear how everyone who is not Zimbabwean knows of Zanu-PF only as the only existing party in Zimbabwe, I wonder why they don’t know about the once vocal Morgan Tsvangirai, the toothless shark and the confused Joice Mujuru. Indeed some families produce baseball players, others produce terrorists as Steven Levitt says: “who am I to judge the anonymity of mosquitoes which think they are dragons?”

Today I decided to review the conference from a para-academic angle. I use political philosophy which has been the religious guideline of the longevity of the party. If you read the late Alexander Kanengoni’s 100 days with Robert Mugabe, he narrates how the man adumbrated Marxism without reference to any notes, it was like listening and watching a better version of Karl Marx.

Kanengoni is puzzled by such intelligence and so are many comrades who were privileged to be part of the audience. The oratory and intellect of President Mugabe influenced much of Zanu-PF’s ideology hence much of any conversation with a well disciplined war veteran tells you how deep entrenched they are in Marxism and some in Marxism-Leninism.

So, as a post Marxist, I am a periodical believer by the way, I thought of how the conference ought to entrench this foundational ideology in those who attended, beyond mending factionalism, ensuring discipline and waning at the past challenges of governing amid protests and ceaseless court summons which I simply coin as academic rehearsals, the conference should have tatooed ideological stagnancy.

You are wondering why I am hammering on it, wait for the homily. I think this piece will speak to those whose hobby is reading, not pacesetters and stories of war by Wilbur Smith, I refer to them as vavezi ve- discourse.

The Homily: Marxism and the idea of Zanu-PF such as “From the ‘Logic’ of Hegel to the Finland Station in Petrograd.”

When I took time to read them I saw the shock of the Socialist International’s moral and political collapse of the face of the First World War forcing Lenin to rethink his Marxism — through an engagement with Hegelian dialectics — helping reconceptualise revolutionary possibilities in 1917. Dovetailing with this are two other essays — “The First Revolution of the Twentieth Century” (reviewing an outstanding study of early twentieth-century Russia, The Roots of Otherness, by historian-sociologist Teodor Shanin) and “The Marxism of Results and Prospects” (concisely covering ground explored in his 1981 classic The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development). Both deal with the nature of the Russian Revolution, reflecting uneven and combined development and permanent revolution.

In the first of these, Zvavanhu appreciatively describes what some Marxists might see as Shanin’s “heretical” discussion of the peasantry as an anti-capitalist and truly revolutionary force, and even Trotsky (far more than Lenin) comes in here. It is from this pantry that i think the dirty rotten truth about bootlickers should be rethought along the lines of re-teaching the teachers.

While Zvavanhu’s political respect tilt more towards Gramsci, he shows that both are well worth reading for those interested in changing the world. The other discussion we had in reviewing constitute what the Professor alludes to as “small mountain roads”— byways less travelled within the Marxist tradition.

These include presumably “reactionary” romanticism, utopianism, religion, and a rejection of progress as displayed by some elements in the party who have found themselves on the crank of external disciplinary.

Here we find multiple references to figures in the heretical margins of those identifying with Marxism: Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Lucien Goldmann, most especially Walter Benjamin, as well as such decidedly non-Marxist figures as Max Weber and Hannah Arendt (intimate critics of Marxism whose insights may open new pathways of Marxist thought). Professor Zvavanhu’s Marxism involves not simply eloquent reaffirmation, but also insistence on critical renewal — pushing against certitudes, against traditional understandings, to find new ways of understanding the basics of Marxism and to apply those revitalised basics in ways enabling us to engage with more of the complexities that swirl around and within us.

Especially revealing is Zvavanhu’s shift regarding the philosophical-cultural current known as Romanticism — which he characterises in an outstanding reference“Marxism and Revolutionary Romanticism”, as the nostalgia for pre-capitalist societies and a cultural critique of capitalism (and, one might add, an emphasis on emotion rather than intellect) which successionists and secessionists in the party have displayed-at least the congress reflected on it. You see, that’s how old such behaviours are, it’s nothing new but it has to be fervently dealt with within.

I noticed something in the Professors analysis of Marxism as an underpinning in the survival of Zanu-PF after the conference; he previously viewed this backward-looking orientation as the opposite of “forward-looking” Marxism, which is grounded in the Enlightenment conceptions of reason and progress. But he came to an understanding that romantic thought was no less essential to Marx’s own orientation, and it has become crucial for him as well.

The way Marx affirms the democratic culture and polis of ancient Athens, and the cultures of “precivilised” peoples who he became aware of through the work of early anthropologists, brings an awareness that from a human viewpoint and compared with communities of the past, industrial capitalist civilisation is in some respects a decline.

The notion among Marxists of inevitable progress, shared with pro-capitalist triumphalists, must give way to the revolutionary-romantic dimension of Marxism, which means “enriching the socialist perspective of the future with the lost heritage of the past, with the previous treasure of communal, cultural, ethical, and social qualitative values, submerged since the advent of capitalism in the glacial waters of egotist calculation. This thought is taken from the Communist Manifesto, more commonly translated into English as “the icy waters of egotistical calculation.” The Homily: The diamond dimension of party

ideology Party ideology must once again become epitomous by drawing its inspiration from the “Principle of Hope” that resides in the struggles, dreams, and aspirations of millions of oppressed and exploited, “the defeated of history,” from Jan Hus and Thomas Münzer [martyred Christian-communist revolutionaries of fifteenth and sixteenth centuries] up to the soviets of 1917-19 in Europe and the 1936-37 collectives in Barcelona. On this level, it is even more indispensable to open the door of Marxist thought wide to the gamut of intuitions about the future, from the affirming socialists of yesterday to the romantic critics of industrial civilisation and from the dreams of Fourier to the libertarian ideals of anarchism.

Rule by the people can only be consistently fought for, and ultimately won, by what I choose to call the Zanu-PF class majority, which must take political power to make it so. This struggle must cross borders if it is not to be defeated, and it must triumph worldwide if ideological discipline is to become a reality.

And for any of this to be possible, revolutionary activists must be animated by the creative, criticalminded, outward-reaching, life-affirming approach infusing the behaviour pattern on Changing the World — it all comes down to negative externalities.

Micheal Mhlanga is a research and strategic communication specialist and is currently serving Leaders for Africa Network (LAN) as the Programmes and Public Liaison Officer. He also administrates multiple youth public dialogue forums in Zimbabwe including the annual Reading Pan Africanism Symposium (REPS) and Back to Pan Africanism Conference. Feedback can be sent to michealmhlanga@abakhokheli.org