New party is 'a half-way house'
Patrick Bond spoke with MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai in Johannesburg.
Question: How can the MDC's industrial worker and urban community activists persuade the rural folk to abandon Mugabe's "nationalism".
We're making sure the leadership constantly gets out to the rural areas, ensuring that we build policy forums with the rural problems in mind.
The working people provide the MDC base but the linkages to rural people are crucial. You must remember that 40% of wages used to end up in rural areas, through remittances and migration. With the economic crisis, those resources are no longer there. Rural people have come to realise this, and now demand change.
Question: Are rural conditions so desperate as to undermine liberation movement-era loyalties?
In many ways, we are moving from the nationalist paradigm to a politics grounded in civic society and social movements. It's like the role and influence the labour movement and civil society organisations in South Africa had over the African National Congress in the early 1990s.
MDC politics are not nationalist inspired, because they focus more on empowerment and participation of the people. ZANU-PF's nationalist thinking has always been top-down, centralised, always trapped in a time warp. Nationalism was an end in itself instead of a means to an end ... It's become a nationalism based on patronage and cronyism.
Question: What is the MDC's ideology?
We are social democrats. The MDC can never be pure ideologically because of our broad orientation. Social democracy is a half-way house, a spaghetti mix. In our case, the main characteristic is that we are driven by working-class interests, with the poor having more space to play a role than they do now. But one of the components is participation by business, which is just not able to develop under present conditions.
Question: Is this reflected in a particular development strategy?
Development must be genuine, defined by people themselves. We know that export-led growth is not a panacea. We place a high priority on meeting basic needs. How could we not, when 75% of the population live below the poverty line? So our development strategy will highlight land, health, education and the like.
Question: How do you answer the concern that such a multi-class project might end up like the Zambian Movement for Multiparty Democracy?
Chiluba did not come on board with any ideology at all. The main lesson is that if the workers are not careful, they may give up their initiative over the party. That means that even though we need to build coalitions, the structure of MDC has to be, and is, participatory, with far more control from the base than normal parties.
Question: Does Zimbabwe need a financial lifeline from the IMF and World Bank?
They have put Zimbabwe into a serious debt trap. We may have to negotiate with the IMF to get out of that. What is important, down the line, is for Zimbabwe to work itself out of the IMF and World Bank's grip. In the short term, we have to distinguish between financial support that serves Mugabe, versus that which serves the country.