Zimbabwe - July 2018

On a scandalous statement of ISO leadership and their call to fight for democracy together with MDC, one of the fundamental supports of the military government and its electoral fraud

 

Down with the infamous regime of the military dictatorship and its two parties ZANU-PF and MDC!

For a provisional revolutionary workers and peasants government!

The democratic freedoms are defended with the method of the class struggle and the proletarian revolution.

Free and sovereign Constituent Assembly!

ISO, which claims to be “socialist”, calls for a “defense of democracy and to fight against the dictatorship” together with MDC. But MDC accepts, promotes and supports the elections called by the military junta. IT DOESN’T CALL TO DEFEAT THE DICTATORSHIP. It just wants to improve the working of its electoral board, as if it could be such thing as a free election with the repressor military there, who have ruled Zimbabwe with Mugabe for decades defending their business deals and those of the transnational companies.
MDC just wants to put pressure on the dictatorship to have more spaces in the regime for their capitalists and business deals and call for demonstrations of their followers, which is a way of performing electoral campaign to get more votes, guised as “democrats”.
MDC, if it wins this elections, will rule bent on the military junta just as they did together with Mugabe. They will settle their government on the Armed Forces. And they won’t move an inch from the plans of imperialism of paying the fraudulent foreign debt to IMF. To recover the land for it to go to the hands of the workers and popular organizations, for the people to eat, is not in MDC’s programs or plans.
Anyone who claims to fight for democratic freedoms, for free and truly democratic elections, and not calling the working class to unite their ranks, to kick out the trade union bureaucrats, accomplices and servants of the military dictatorship, the transnational companies and the bosses, is not really fighting for more democracy but for more subjugation of the workers to this anti-democratic trap of fraudulent elections, guaranteed by the military dictatorship, this time, sweetened by MDC and their lying chatterbox politicians, as well as by those who claim to be “socialiss” but end up subordinating the working class to its executioners.

The military dictatorship has to parties: ZANU-PF and another one that guises it as “democratic” which is MDC, in order to continue deceiving and attacking the people.
The last call of ISO to “fight” together with MDC for “free and fair elections” without denouncing that this is impossible without defeating the dictatorship is pointing out that the dictatorship has two parties and an appendix which has grown out of MDC: ISO, a left supporter.

ISO and its leaders talk about the experience of Egypt, where they supported April 6th movement, a party of capitalists that asked the military to fight together for “more democracy”. This scam ended up with the “democrats” of April 6th movement taking a ferocious military dictatorship to power in the year 2013, crushing with blood and fire the revolution that had started in Tahrir Square in 2011. After such a sellout in this country, today ISO regrets “not doing the same we did in Egypt”. These “socialists”, turned into vulgar opportunists, also need to be exposed. They didn’t learned anything from the tragedies that they have caused to the workers movement internationally. What they are saying in Zimbabwe today is the same they said in Egypt, but camouflaged. They think that MDC, that is to say “the democrats”, can “democratize” the military junta, imposing “free elections”. This is equivalent to the intent of turning a lion into vegetarian, when the need is to hunt the lion down, encage it or kill it… The institutions of this military dictatorship, even the electoral board and the treacherous elections, cannot be democratized. Every serious democratic struggle must have as a central point, as a minimum immediate task, the overthrowing of the dictatorship.

We insist, MDC doesn’t call to make any action to defeat the military dictatorship. It just wants to give a “democratic” varnish to these fraudulent elections to deceive the people better.
ISO, supporting MDC, even renegades from the most minimum elementary democratic demands to fight for free elections. For example, the workers and socialist parties cannot run for elections because the requisites can only be met by the parties of the rich and millionaire from Zimbabwe. There is no media, whether radio or television, at disposition of the socialist parties or the workers organizations in this electoral fraud. This electoral fraud is organized by the military dictatorship and imperialism ends up upholding ISO in order to subordinate the working class to MDC. We are before a true class collaboration policy.

The revolutionary socialists affirm that the democratic freedoms, which are at each step overrun by the capitalists and imperialism, are conquered and defended with the working class struggle methods: strikes, picket lines, general strikes, fighting in the streets and revolution itself. We affirm that the bourgeois “democrats” of MDC and the dictatorship come out of the same sewer that this capitalist system with their starvationist enslaver bosses, and imperialism plundering the subjugated people.
That’s why ISO lies. We have to tell the truth to the workers. As we said, if MDC wins the elections, it will ruled relying on the military junta and the repressive forces, just as Mugabe did for decades, because they have to apply the same plans of attack on the workers and of selling out the nation to imperialism. It has nothing different to offer. To hide this is to subordinate the working class to imperialism and to the bourgeoisie guised as “democratic”.

The socialists won’t hesitate for a second in promoting this or that concrete point in action with any current, even a bourgeois one, that wants to fight for democratic freedoms or to confront even in one point the plundering of a nation by imperialism. We insist, MDC doesn’t say or do any of this. It just calls to perfect and MAKE THE ELECTORAL FRAUD MORE BELIEVABLE. Otherwise they would call for a generalized struggle of the people to overthrow the military dictatorship and the electoral fraud. This is the most minimum democratic demand that is posed in Zimbabwe today. Everything else is to put the masses in the swamp of this electoral trap of the dictatorship.

To fight for democratic freedoms in Zimbabwe is to fight for the defeat of the dictatorship to impose a free sovereign Constituent Assembly.
This will actually mean to fight for formal democracy all the way, for a broad and generous democracy, which can only be conquered with the working class defeating the dictatorship, with weapons in hand and with a provisional revolutionary government of workers and poor peasants. Everything else is a vile lie.
The “democrats” are no longer democrats because, to fight for democracy all the way, they would have to mobilize and arm the workers to defeat the repressive state forces and their murderer generals. For a long time now the capitalists and their parties are more afraid of mobilizing and arming the masses than of the military dictatorship and imperialism, of which they are partners in every business deal. The bosses know very well that with the working class on the streets, with their struggle methods, with the picket lines and general strike (as it happens in our black class brothers and sisters struggle in Haiti) there won’t be a trace of military dictatorship, neither their partners, the capitalists of MDC.
ISO retakes the old Stalinist policy. It says that they will conquer broad democratic freedoms in an alliance with the “democrats” who all these years have supported the murderous military, the repressive forces and ruled with them for imperialism against the people.

The socialists fight for a workers and peasants Republic and we affirm that it will be more democratic than even the most democratic of the bourgeois republics, because it will be the government of the broad majority of the nation that will rise against a handful of parasites that exploits it. We think that in it, recovering the big mines, factories, banks and the land from the hands of the capitalist parasites and imperialism, the people can eat and live decently.
We fight for the victory of socialism in Zimbabwe, in the entire Southern Africa and internationally. In this world, pounded by the brutality of the capitalist crash and the war of the imperialist gangs for the wealth and the plundering of the planet, the working class cannot raise its living standers without overthrowing the capitalist system. It does and cannot do in USA, in the imperialist Europe, in the semi-colonial world, let alone in one of the poorest and most plundered countries of the world as Zimbabwe and other countries in the tormented Africa.
We fight for a provisional revolutionary government of workers and poor peasants, supported in the self-organized armed masses. Imperialism is reaction all along the line. The transnational companies and IMF seek to have the most dictatorial government they can have to impose their plans of starvation and plundering the nation. In this elections, with their parties, they just want to guise as “democratic” a military dictatorship, where they settled their true power.
That’s why we socialists affirm that only a revolutionary provisional government of workers and poor peasants is the one that can even guarantee a democracy up to the end and the freedom that the exploited desire so much to fight for their rights and demands and to end with this ferocious military dictatorship. This cannot be done by ZANU-PF or those swindlers of MDC.
We affirm that only by disarming the coup generals and their murderer police, dissolving the judge caste and expelling imperialism, it can be imposed a National Constituent Assembly, truly free and sovereign, which imposes the no payment of the foreign debt to the IMF and recovers the land for the poor peasants and the workers for the people to eat.
This free sovereign National Constituent Assembly can only be democratic of the working class and the mobilized armed people put an end to all the repressive forces of the bourgeois state.
This National Constituent Assembly can only be truly free and sovereign if it puts an end on this infamous regime of the generals lackeys of imperialism and imposes a single chamber, with representatives elected 1 each 20,000 inhabitants, recallable at any moment by their voters, that receive no more of an average workers wage and concentrates the executive, legislative and judicial power.
MDC, those lackeys of imperialism, pseudo-democratic servants of the coup generals and swindlers of the exploited, won’t be the ones that can guarantee the democratic freedoms up to the end for the workers and the people in Zimbabwe. Only a provisional revolutionary government, with the people in arms, can conquer brad, work, land, national independence and freedom.
On July 30th, let’s not go to vote. The ones on the top come to get everything that’s ours! Those on the below, let’s vote to go against all of them!
Enough of deceiving the people! Socialism is only one and it is that of the victory of the workers and soldiers councils, the victory of the socialist revolution. Socialism does not kneel before the oppressors and exploiters of the workers and does not call to trust on “good”, “progressive” or “democratic” bosses.
The MDC bosses are partners of the bosses of ZANU-PF and the military in thousands of business deals in Zimbabwe. They come to rule for them and for that reason they need to deceive the people. The socialists cannot be for it. ISO militants cannot let their leadership to put them at the feet of MDC that does not fight for bread, work, dignity or against imperialism, and not even for democracy and freedom consequently.
Enough is enough! Down with the military dictatorship! Out with Mnangagwa!
National Congress of delegates of the employed and unemployed workers, of poor peasants and students!
Let’s unite those in struggle! Let’s prepare a revolutionary general strike for everyone to get out and no one remain!