Trade Unions in Zimbabwe: For Democracy, Against Neo-Liberalism

In: Capital & class, Band 22, Heft 3, S. 85-117

Abstract

The author examines the impact of organised labour on the process of democratisation in Zimbabwe. However, the extent to which democratisation and economic reform has been achieved has been strongly conditioned, on the one hand, by the weaknesses and divisions within the opposition, and by strength and skills of the incumbent regime, on the other. The outcome is the current situation of stalemate in which the formations of working-class organisation have proved powerful enough to defend and win limited political rights, but too weak to topple the formidable edifice of the de facto one-party State in favour of a bourgeois democratic regime. This raises questions of strategy which are touched on at the end of this paper.