The Radicalised State: Zimbabwe's Interrupted Revolution.

This article conceptualises the revolutionary situation that gripped Zimbabwe from the late 1990s. That was the moment in which the two political questions that historically have galvanized peripheral capitalism - the agrarian and the national - were returned to the forefront of political life. We argue that the revolutionary situation resulted neither in a revolution, nor in mediocre reformism, nor in restoration. It resulted in an interrupted revolution, marked by a radical agrarian reform and a radicalised state - the first on the continent since the end of the Cold War. Most left-wing critics of the land reform have failed to notice, or acknowledge, the revolutionary situation in Zimbabwe in the 1990s (Moore, 2004; Raftopoulos & Phimister, 2004; Bernstein, 2005; Cousins, 2006). We have argued elsewhere that their analyses have been subject to eurocentric and/or populist influences, whose result has been the rendering of the whole process as an instance of 'crisis, chaos and tyranny' - a seemingly incurable African pathology (Moyo & Yeros, 2005 and forthcoming). Under such 'irrational' circumstances, there has been little felt need to understand the social basis and contradictions of the situation; these have routinely been obscured and detached from politics. A further result has been to maintain a silence about, or to support explicitly, the imposition of imperialist sanctions against Zimbabwe, in the interest of 'regime change'. In our view, the political economy of Zimbabwe cannot be understood on the basis of an idealised model of a bourgeois democracy - one which is located in the centre of the capitalist system, which historically has resolved the national and agrarian questions, and which enjoys the capacity to export its social contradictions beyond its borders in the interest of domestic 'social peace'. Under imperialism, peripheral capitalism, in Zimbabwe and elsewhere, has been unable to resolve the national and agrarian questions and thus exhibits recurrent economic, social, and political crises; these, in turn, have the capacity to escalate to a revolutionary situation. This has been the case in Zimbabwe in the late 1990s. And in this case, like so many others, the revolutionary situation has not resulted in a revolution. Neither did it result in a mediocre reformism or restoration. It has resulted in an interrupted revolution, marked by a radical agrarian reform and a radicalised state. The revolutionary situation has been the first on the continent since the end of the Cold War, and has resulted in the first radicalised stare, which in turn has its counterparts in other parts of the world, most prominently in Venezuela and Bolivia.