Bourgeois Thuggery

The single linked report below includes text and pictures received by e-mail. The message that brought the images was simply headed “Pictures of Trudy, Linos Mushonga and Simangele Manyere”. Some background: The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) was formed to fight elections against the Zanu-PF party in Zimbabwe. Although its original leader Morgan Tsvangirai is always described as an “ex-trade-unionist”, the MDC as a whole is a party which solicits working-class support, but is actually bourgeois in nature. The Zimbabwean working class has no political instrument in its hands that could impose minimum standards upon the country’s political life. Hence the rivalries between bourgeois factions within the MDC have degenerated into thuggishness to the point where even women are ruthlessly attacked. So, in the absence of a dedicated party of the working class in Zimbabwe, whatever attempts at restraint there may have been over the rival bourgeois gangs (by liberal pacifists, for example) have proved insufficient. Only class-alliance politics, and especially the organised force of the working class, both mass and vanguard, are capable of defending peace and the rule of law under democracy. The same is true in South Africa. The most destructive political force here at present is the tendency of rival bourgeois factions to attack each other in complete disregard of morality and due process of law, not stopping at character assassination or even murder. Potentially this can go towards the kind of random terroristic violence that we have seen in the past. Hence the maintenance of class-alliance politics can be said to be a matter of public safety in both countries. “Over-arching” political pretences of class neutrality are no more than a whited sepulchre covering up dangerous and even lethal bourgeois rivalries which threaten democracy itself. Click on this link: MP Trudy Stevenson and others attacked by Tsvangirai thugs (660 words, plus pictures)