Zimbabwe’s Hidden Economic Class Struggle Dilemma

 By Takura Zhangazha*

This may appear to be a very complicated subject matter.  It is not.  And in most cases, it relates to ‘material desire’.  Or one in which you have to ask yourself , “What economic and social/lifestyle class are you in?” or alternatively, “What economic/social class do you think you are in?”, or, “What economic/social class do you want to be in?”  With the final question being, “What economic/social class are you realistically currently in, and how sustainable is it?” 

These are questions that we answer every day in our interactions and expressions of our material desires.

Whether through where we go to church, the movie we like, the cars we drive, the social company we keep.  And that is very much normal.  No one individual in our current existential challenges has any self-righteous wherewithal to judge these desires.  After all, we live in very neoliberal and unpredictable economic times.  Times in which individualism, capitalism and a false liberalism intersect in such a way that they create a very short term individual-focused consciousness in many of us.  In this, we do not have the material patience to assume that in the final analysis, we are part of a national collective whole. 

Hence on social media there are jokes and satire about how one can drive a special utility vehicle (SUV) in a potholed road and get home with pride. Or how one can have a personal borehole in a majority of our very dry urban and rural areas while others stay in long queues at the local UNICEF or WHO funded borehole for clean water. And still not understand how one was or is affected by a cholera outbreak! 

Apart from this sarcastic humour, what we have been experiencing in Zimbabwe is an attempt at the obfuscation/hiding of our economic class differences as disguised by either our material desires (hence the rise in fraud or financial crimes) or an endemic lifestyle crisis in which a greater majority of us seek to mimic that which we are told is the proverbial ‘good life’.

As seen or experienced via cultural products such as music, movies, social media content, religion (TB Joshua anyone?) as we compare ourselves to individual others who we now deem to be our personal competitors. I am however not sure what we really want to compete about with each other. But it would appear the key measures of this are about issues such as what car is driven, house lived in, which schools kids go to,  which Diaspora you relocated to and as abstract an issue as to where you wnet to for your holidays (as long it is not a rural visit). 

Again this is all fair and fine if one can afford it both in the short or long term. 

Also, this is not a new phenomenon.  It has been analyzed by Marxists and left leaning economists, historians and more seminally social anthropologists (check Comaroff and Comaroff circa 2002) that for a while now have been assiduously trying to make sense of where we are ideologically at a ‘global scale’. The have referred to our turn of the 21^st century global political economic system as “Millenial Capitalism”.   This is a transnational ideological trend where global capitalism, at least to paraphrase their views, has become more than just about the production of physical commodities and its relation to the working class.  Instead it has transcended both to become more about speculative financialised capital, religious Pentecostalism, gambling and the re-emergence of complex individual identity politics.  With a hint at the fact of a diminishing relevance of Marxian ‘class consciousness’. 

In Zimbabwe we have this primary challenge of either beginning to forget the fact that we are also a class-based society.  Both by way of our modern colonial history as well as by way of our many desires to by almost any means necessary move from one ‘lower class’ rung to the next and then shouting from the hilltop that we have made it.  Only to come tumbling down again.  Or to die trying to get up the same ladder, never mind giving a pretense at still being there.

For clarity, there are at least three almost permanent structured economic classes in Zimbabwe. And these have not changed since the first days many of us started studying high school history.  The most prevalent class remains the peasantry. It is one that is based in our rural areas and survives on agriculture as its main means of production.  It is a class that remains standing mainly based on the fact of its superior numerical presence which also links it to its political importance in elections and power dynamics in the country. It is however a class that is largely ageing while those that are born into it are increasingly desirous of transition to the next permanent one.  This being the urban working class.

The latter is one that is at the moment perhaps the most fluid.  It involves both formerly and informally employed urban,peri-urban working people in every major city and town in Zimbabwe.  It is the most fluid and most politically active class due to its proximity to emerging communications technologies and population densities. It is also the most populist and easily abusable by the next class we will consider, the middle or ‘comprador bourgeoisie’ class.  This is the most educated class as well as the most ‘mimicry of colonial and global lifestyle class’.  It re-occupies spaces left by colonial and global bourgeoisie, mimics their cultural habits in as many aspects as possible and remains essentially an ‘arrival’ or no- further ambition class.  Even if they acquire political positions on the backs of the aforementioned two lower wrung classes. 

The final class is that of the bourgeoisie.  This one is not confined to Zimbabwe.  It is global.  It determines not only the economic system in which we currently live but it also greatly influences not only our material economic desires but also our lifestyle desires.  It owns ICT companies, media, mines, banks, real estate (even after the FTLRP), financialised stocks and of course a greater number of our politicians if it is not in politics itself. 

These classes are somewhat hidden because we have sort of muted ourselves about them. We have forgotten about class struggle. And a majority of us assume we can always get to the next rung of our hidden class struggle ladder. We falsely assume that these classes in Zimbabwe are recognizable by lifestyle, when in essence they are based on a mirage of an assumption of their interchangeability or fluidity.

Whatever these desires we may have, our economic system is still as class based as it can be within a globalized neoliberal context.

*Takura Zhangazha writes here in how own personal capacity (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)