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Uneven Zimbabwe: A Study of Finance, Development and Underdevelopment by Patrick BondReview by: Paul BurkettReview of African Political Economy, Vol. 27, No. 85 (Sep., 2000), pp. 471-475Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4006669 .

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Book Reviews 471

pivotal. Also, the editors have judiciously selected a very strong field of experts within the state for the volume. Diogo's chapter on debt gives some of the most clear and revealing statistics about the state of indebtedness in Mozambique that this author has seen; Sitoe's chapter on coastal management provides dense and authoritative information that only an engaged official could provide. And, unless one is prepared to read the volume as the 'ruse' of officials who are actually solely engaged in la politique du ventre, the book is a timely antidote to the increas- ingly prevalent and pessimistic notion that all government departments and officials therein are only concerned with feathering their own nests.

There are three 'silences' in the book which - at least in this reviewer's opinion - should be centre-stage in any book on sustainable development in Mozambique: gender and participation, elaborating strategies to tackle AIDS/HIV (not men- tioned explicitly in the book), and anti corruption strategies.

As mentioned at the beginning, the book cannot be easily compared with many others on Mozambique. It is not a re- search monograph, and it has been pro- duced by a particular group of practitioners-as-writers, rather than vice versa. In comparing it with A Difficult Road, some contrasts are immediately apparent. First, this book is much more a Mozambican creation, not a progeny of engaged cooperantes. Second, the book is far less theoretically explicit than the Saul book. Erudite theorisation is explicitly rejected in the book for reasons that are justified by its focus, but perhaps a conclusion by the editors relating the chapters to some of dilemmas thrown up by more academic debate would have been useful.

The similarity that the books share is their attempt to delineate Mozambique's adoption and adaptation of an interna- tionally-produced progressive ideology

of development: socialist- or sustainable- development. However one interprets the causes, socialist development in Mo- zambique met with a sorry denouement. One hopes that sustainable development will meet with a brighter fate. The Ferraz and Munslow text is a sound first step towards this goal.

Reference Saul, J S (ed.) 1985, A Difficuilt Road: the Transition to Socialisnt in Mozambique, NewYork: Monthly Review Press.

Uneven Zimbabwe: A Study of Finance, Development and Underdevelopment by Patrick Bond, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998. pp. xxviii, 515. ISBN 0-86543- 539-1, Paperback ($24.95). Reviewed by Paul Burkett.

With unemployment, inflation, poverty rates, and interest rates all running above 50%; with its external debt crisis and severe shortages of food, fuel, water, and electricity; with an AIDs epidemic killing 2,500 per week and an estimated quarter of its adult population HIV positive; with its nominally socialist government (one run by the same party that led a success- ful liberation struggle just two decades ago) riddled by rampant corruption and paralysed by the policy conditions laid down by its IMF/World Bank patrons whom it still periodically labels 'imperi- alist'; with the same 'socialist' govern- ment bogged down in an unpopular war in the Congo while it tries to repress and co-opt worker-community struggles for democratic constitutional and economic reforms at home, contemporary Zimba- bwe seems to defy systematic analysis.

Patrick Bond shows the roots of this apparent chaos in the uneven develop- ment of capital accumulation and attend- ant class struggles and factional conflicts. His book is not only essential historical

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472 Review of African Political Economy

background for understanding current developments, it also provides powerful analytical weapons to all people strug- gling for more human and sustainable patterns of economic development in Zimbabwe and other countries on the global-capitalist periphery.

Bond's historical analysis demarcates five periods during which the Rhodesia/ Zimbabwe economy went through sig- nificant geographic, sectoral, and finan- cial restructurings: (1) 1890s - full economic colonisation with the capitali- sation of mining and agriculture and initial proletarianisation of the labour force, based largely on speculative in- flows of British financial capital; (2) 1930s - adjustment to global depression, partly via the development of domestic manu- facturing 'in the context of diminished international trade and investment' (p.426); (3) 1950s and 1960s - a new speculative boom and bust driven by excessive capital inflows and their rapid withdrawal, culminating in the Unilat- eral Declaration of Independence (UDI) and much tighter government control over finance and trade; (4) 1970s - in- creasing problems of overaccumulation in manufacturing, partly due to the UDI regime's financial controls but more fun- damentally reflecting the class limits on production and investment built into the racist/white settler regime; (5) late 1980s and early 1990s - another explosion and implosion of financial speculation, with international financial institutions increas- ing their power over Zimbabwe's economy (as reflected in the liberalisation of trade and finance) in objective alliance with a rising minority class of domestic speculators and rentiers who often used state connections to gain their initial accumulations of land and financial wealth.

Zimbabwe has yet to recover from the economic depression, growing poverty, and crisis of human-social reproduction produced by this last period of restruc- turing. By incorporating the role not only

of external imperialist institutions (Brit- ish finance capital, the IMF, the World Bank), but also of internal inequalities and struggles based on race and class (including factional conflicts among the white-settler population), Bond's narra- tive provides a broad-based introduction to the political economy of Zimbabwe past and present. While uncompromis- ingly marxist in that he insists on the central roles of class and the circuits of productive and financial capital, Bond's approach is far from dogmatic. In ex- plaining the main contradictions and crisis tendencies of accumulation during each of its key periods, he critically draws upon the writings of numerous main- stream economists, journalists, and po- litical figures in Zimbabwe - exhibiting full command of a broad range of rel- evant sources ranging from academic journals and books, to working papers produced by various think tanks, to trade- and professional-association maga- zines and newsletters, to the popular press. Where appropriate, Bond gives detailed personal biographies of certain individuals playing key roles during the period under discussion. This makes the narrative even more lively and readable.

Another vibrant feature of Uneven Zimba- bwe is Bond's insistence on the possibility of a socialist development strategy centered on a convergence of domestic resource use, domestic demand, and do- mestic needs - above all the basic needs of workers and communities. In consider- ing each period of accumulation, crisis, and restructuring, Bond points out how the limits of production, investment, and state economic policy are traceable to the system's failure to adequately empower and address the basic needs of, workers and their communities (both urban and rural). He does this not only in general programmatic terms but also in terms of specific sectors and the class-based effec- tive demand constraints they faced (for example, the unrealised growth potential of certain forms of energy and textile production). At the same time, he indi-

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Book Reviews 473

cates how the new sectors of expanded production in each period often de- pended on appropriate use of state con- trols over trade, finance, and productive investments (as well as repressed labour forces) and on the extension of need satisfaction to include either additional needs for previously empowered groups, or the partial co-optation of dis-empow- ered groups into the system of produc- tion and effective demand.

In this way, Bond finds in Zimbabwe's history of uneven, crisis-ridden develop- ment (even in the history of the UDI regime) a hidden potential for a new system of more democratic development led by basic needs satisfaction, with human development as the primary means and end. This dialectical intuition helps explain Bond's ability to combine a resilient revolutionary optimism with a caustic, razor-edged critique of the yawn- ing gap between the 'marxist-leninist' rhetoric and the comprador, petty bour- geois and bureaucratic rent-seeking real- ity of Mugabe's ZANU-PF regime. At the same time, Bond is not blind to the difficult political roadblocks standing in the way of the full envisionment and implementation of a democratic-socialist development. These barriers basically boil down to the difficulties with build- ing a broad worker-community, urban- rural coalition in the context of uneven development, extreme poverty, and state repression and state control over the dominant mass media.

There is more to Uneven Zimbabwe than just a lively and politically charged his- tory, however. The book makes several important methodological contributions to the analysis of development and un- derdevelopment - starting with its con- ception of uneven development itself. For Bond, uneven development is not just a general slogan referring to the crises and spatial inequalities inherent in capital accumulation. Synthesising prior work by the late marxian crisis theorist Henryk Grossman and contemporary marxist eco-

nomic geographers David Harvey and Neil Smith, Bond rigorously theorises uneven development in four dimensions: temporal, spatial, sectoral, and scale. He shows how the overaccumulation and failing profitability of capital instigates restructurings of capital in each of these four dimensions which are mutually con- stituted in complex ways. Often these reconfigurations of capital counteract overaccumulation by providing new op- portunities for productive investment and/or new markets for capital and consumption goods. However, these 'fixes' or 'counteracting tendencies to crisis', by extending the operation of the class-based contradictions of accumula- tion in all four dimensions, ultimately accentuate the problem of overaccumu- lation itself (p.17).

Bond places special emphasis on the financial mediation of accumulation fixes, crises, and capital restructurings. Briefly, overaccumulated industrial (including agricultural and mining) capital finds its way into financial circuits (for example, banks, real estate and stock market specu- lation), and this enhances the power of finance over the reconfiguration of the overall system of accumulation during both the temporary 'fixes' stage (often associated with speculative booms in commercial real estate) and the following crisis and restructuring period (during which both financial and industrial capi- tal are normally subjected to massive devaluations). As alluded to above, specu- lative inflows and outflows of core- country financial capital fit naturally into this schema which then becomes capable of handling the interaction of overaccumu- lation cycles in core and periphery - with the dominant impacts of course exerted on the latter by the former. Bond's con- ception of uneven development thus assigns a key role to the economics and politics of finance domestically and glo- bally. Indeed, one of his central argu- ments is that 'the operations of financial markets have exacerbated the scope, de- gree, and socioeconomic costs of uneven

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474 Review of African Political Economy

development in Zimbabwe' (p.425). Ac- cordingly, one of Bond's main methodo- logical tasks is a rigorous conception of finance capital.

Critically surveying the relevant litera- ture from Lenin and Hilferding to Sweezy and other recent contributions, Bond corrects two shortcomings in prior theo- risations: (1) their focus on one or another singular function of finance capital vis-a- vis the accumulation process: specula- tion, control, or facilitation of productive accumulation - whereas in Bond's analy- sis these three functions are 'integrated into a holistic argument' (p.111); (2) their one-sided emphasis on the institutional structures of financial capital (for exam- ple, ownership and other interlocks be- tween banks and industrial enterprises) to the neglect of the dynamics of the circuits of financial accumulation. As Bond notes, financial accumulation must ultimately be validated by the creation and realisation of value in the economy's productive sector - a sector with power- ful class-based tendencies toward overaccumulation and failing profitabil- ity. Prior conceptions of finance capital 'emphasise institutional power bloc charac- teristics, at the expense of drawing atten- tion to [this] vulnerability implicit in financial relations' (p. 12). This may explain why they have tended to overes- timate the permanence of particular struc- tures of financial power that - being contingent on specific configurations of industrial accumulation are - actually quite transitory.

While recognising the basis of financial power in the circuits of capital, Bond's analysis of finance and uneven develop- ment is neither one-sidedly structuralist nor economic reductionist. He incorpo- rates the role of worker-community re- sistance in shaping the social limits to financial accumulation. These historically specific limits are defined not only by struggles over wages and work condi- tions but also by 'civil society' move- ments oriented toward basic need

satisfaction - by any struggle that con- tests the reduction of wealth production (and the human, material, and social conditions of production) to a mere precondition of capital accumulation. Bond also recognises that less progres- sive forms of 'personal agency' (for exam- ple, those involving racism and corruption) have 'a material effect on the exercise of financial power' (p. 199). For example, he shows (and without getting preachy) how the personal shortcomings and cultural-political biases of ZANU-PF state personnel shaped important finan- cial policy outcomes within the set of options presented by predetermined eco- nomic and political arrangements. This ability to make structurally informed ethical evaluations of policy decisions is, to this reviewer, one of the strongest features of Bond's development method- ology.

A good example of Bond's synthesis of structure and agency is his analysis of what mainstream economists term 'finan- cial repression', that is, the use of state controls over interest rates and credit allocation to promote investments in priority sectors and/or to channel subsi- dies to politically favoured groups. He shows how, in Zimbabwe, the develop- mental potential of financial controls has been constrained by the limited opportu- nities for productive accumulation avail- able given the country's racially polarised class structure and its subordinate posi- tion in the international division of la- bour. At the same time, Bond ascribes great importance to class and factional struggles over the distribution of finan- cial subsidies, with the distributional outcomes in turn shaping the patterns of productive and financial accumulation and future financial policy 'choices'. He details successive governments' use of cheap loans as patronage for white farm- ers or to co-opt a minority of black farmers, and the struggles over the distri- bution of the costs of unviable debts given overaccumulation problems. In short, Bond demonstrates that politics

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Book Reviews 475

did indeed matter for Zimbabwe's un- even financial and economic develop- ment.

Bond's analysis reveals the utter bank- ruptcy of mainstream approaches to fi- nancial repression and liberalisation. With their non-class perspective and their equi- librium biases, the mainstream ap- proaches fail to recognise: (1) the role of financial subsidies in cementing together ruling-class coalitions and thereby pro- viding an essential political backdrop for capital accumulation; (2) the connections between overaccumulation, speculation, uneven development, capital restructur- ing, and opportunities (or lack thereof) for productive investment of money capi- tal; (3) the unequal devaluations of capi- tal built into core-periphery relations, with the lion's share of capital devalua- tion borne by the periphery - and how this structural inequality limits the possi- bilities for stable and productive accumu- lation (and for viable systems of socio-material reproduction) in the pe- riphery relative to the core countries. Compare, for example, the relatively benign effects of the massive US trade deficit with the socio-economic disaster of Zimbabwe's external debt crisis.

Bond concludes his book with an analysis of the limits and contradictions of IMF/ World Bank adjustment policies as ap- plied under the 'Economic and Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP)' in Zim- babwe. Summarising his critique, Bond suggests that:

ESAP was misguided from the start, serving bankers' needs above all others, destroying local productive capacity and setting real standards of living (and 'human capital investment') back dec- ades, and focusing on exporting to an increasingly hostile international economy which was mired in recession, at a tinme international competition was tougher than ever and commodity prices at their lowest in history (p.416).

This balance sheet is drawn only after a detailed documentation of IMF/World Bank 'loan pushing' (and 'consultant pushing') and the attendant growth of external control over the government's economic and financial policies. Bond does not blame Zimbabwe's troubles on an imperialist plot, however. He de- scribes how certain elite groups in and close to ZANU-PF and the government found liberalised trade and finance, grow- ing external debt, and IMF/World Bank 'policy conditionality' to be a congenial setting for speculation and corruption- based enrichment. Indeed, the story of how ESAP gained crucial elite support within Zimbabwe is a central element in Bond's narrative. Bond also carefully avoids ascribing too much rationality to the ESAP process even in elite-capitalist terms, as he details the haphazardness, technocratic disagreements, empirically uninformed decisions, and method- ogically tenuous economic forecasts that often riddled IMF/World Bank policy operations vis-'a-vis Zimbabwe.

With Zimbabwe still mired in the eco- nomic, social, and political crisis pro- duced by ESAP, it is clear that any hope for a more progressive form of develop- ment in the near future resides in the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and its ability to forge a coalition of urban and rural working people and commu- nity groups without being co-opted by capitalist forces. Whatever the outcome of the forthcoming parliamentary elec- tions (in which the MDC was a strong contestant), those seeking to contribute to and learn from Zimbabwe's regeneration will find important historical, analytical, and strategic guidance in this book.

Paul Burkett, Department of Economics, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN 47809, email: ecburke@scifac.indstate.edu

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