In October, the United Nations News Agency, published in Harare, reported that 2.5 million people in four southern provinces--about a fifth of the country's 12.5 million people--had registered with the government for food aid. Eighty percent of the population lives below the poverty line, and inflation in September hit 86 percent. Between 600 and 700 companies have closed shop and laid off workers in the past year, bringing official unemployment close to 60 percent.

On October 11 the Zimbabwean government imposed price controls on basic commodities such as bread, cooking oil, maize meal, sugar, milk, soap, and some generic drugs. The prices of these goods has put them beyond the reach of many working people over the last two years.

The international big-business press only picked up on the story after October 14, when Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe said at a public rally that businesses opposed to the price controls should pack up and go, and threatened to take over any that closed. "After all," Mugabe said, "the assets belong to the people of this country. At last that socialism we wanted can start again."

Mugabe, facing a presidential election in 2002 amidst growing disaffection with his government among urban workers especially, has increased his radical demagogy over the past year. He has pushed a number of top-down measures, including seizures of land from capitalist farmers by thuggish supporters of his regime under the banner of land reform, to bolster his increasingly shaky hold on power.  
 
Imperialist demands
A decade ago the Mugabe government abruptly abandoned its socialist rhetoric and subscribed to an economic "structural adjustment" plan administered by the International Monetary Fund. The measure committed the government to instituting belt-tightening measures that had a wide impact on the population, in return for loans.

Modest social gains registered after independence were eroded as the imperialist powers, through the IMF, tied the economy ever more deeply into the prevailing trade imbalances and anarchy of the world capitalist market. In 1999, the IMF pulled out of Zimbabwe and has suspended loans to Harare. The government, meanwhile, has stopped paying the loans, and is now $53 million in arrears.

Until 1980, a white-minority regime ruled what was then known as Rhodesia. A guerrilla struggle succeeded in defeating the white-minority regime and winning independence from Britain. The new government, headed by Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU, now ZANU-Patriotic Front), instituted some measures, such as free universal education, that benefited the working class and peasantry.

But the British government, which was a signer to the independence agreement, demanded that any new government be prohibited from touching for at least a decade the holdings of 4,000 white capitalist farmers who controlled nearly all the productive agricultural land in the country. The measure was written into the constitution of Zimbabwe. In the accord, London promised it would help the new government purchase farm land on which to settle peasants, a pledge it has failed to keep.

In a country where 6 million of the 12.5 million inhabitants are landless peasants, this measure imposed by the wealthy farmers and their imperialist backers posed a serious problem. Today, 21 years after independence, no agrarian reform has been carried out to bring productive land into the hands of those who work it, making land reform a central political question in the country. As well, manufacturing remains largely in the hands of a few monopolies; mining in particular is dominated by foreign capital.

Local newspapers and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change interpreted the price-control move as a ploy by ZANU-PF to win support leading up to a presidential election next year.

"Mugabe has cunningly reintroduced price controls in a last-ditch effort to split and throw into disarray the opposition's urban stronghold ahead of next year's presidential ballot," wrote Abel Mutsakani in the October 18 Financial Gazette.

The capitalist landholders in Zimbabwe, mining bosses in South Africa, and the imperialist powers in London and Washington are concerned about the capacity of the government to keep working people in check as the crisis deepens, posing a problem for their continued exploitation of the country and provoking unanticipated consequences in the region.

One immediate effect of the price controls has been the sudden disappearance of goods from store shelves. Bakers say the new price of bread is below their production costs, and have already put staffs on reduced hours, said an October 18 dispatch from AFP. Bread, sugar, cooking oil, and other basic foodstuffs immediately became rarities at grocers, as consumers stocked up and suppliers warned they may not be able to replenish supplies at the stores.  
 
 
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