Tearing the Social Fabric: Neoliberalism, Deindustrialization, and the Crisis of Governance in Zimbabwe

African Studies Review, Dec 2004 by Anthony, Connie

POLITICS

Padric Carmody. Tearing the Social Fabric: Neoliberalism, Deindustrialization, and the Crisis of Governance in Zimbabwe. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2001. Distributed by Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, Conn, xx 180 pp. Tables. Figures. Bibliography. Index. $67.95. Cloth.

The fall of the democratic state in Zimbabwe has received much attention. This book asks us to consider how the structural adjustment policies adopted by Zimbabwe in the early nineties were to blame. The blame-game concerning the relative importance of decisions made by the IMF and World Bank versus those made by African states is well developed in the contemporary literature on Africa's economic plight. Carmody's account makes the case that Mugabe's government was not responsible for the economic collapse that it confronted in 1997 and had little choice but to "seek out new sources of legitimacy" (154) when economic circumstances became especially dire.

If the reader accepts the assumption that international actors have created the African economic crisis, she will find the big-picture assessment of the policies of the IMF and the World Bank to be very strong. Carmody does a fine job of explaining why "as Africa becomes more deeply integrated into the global market, it has become more marginalized" (xvi). The book as a whole offers a comprehensive review of the literature and policy reports on African economic development over the last two decades, focusing on how international financial institutions have become hegemonic on the African continent. Analysts who are thought to have facilitated this development are identified. For example, when Robert Bates carefully assessed the urban bias of the state as a problem for agrarian reform, he was by implication encouraging international actors to take political responsibility for such change.

There is also a very strong discussion of the particulars of industrial development and decline in the textile, clothing, and footwear industries. Comparisons are drawn between local and multinational industry in Zimbabwe, as well as with the industrialization strategies so successfully pursued by the newly industrializing countries in Asia. Carmody investigates local industrialization because he thinks that the IMF/World Bank reforms did not benefit it. External finance markets and commercial agriculture won; peasant producers, local industry, and the internal capital market lost. At times, given his theoretical perspective on "the circuits of capital," Carmody seems to argue that the IMF and the Bank simply work with the wrong knowledge base. Economic reform programs were defined with little insight into how capital must be managed to prompt the growth of industry in Zimbabwe or any other part of Africa. He does not disagree with the notion that some type of economic reform needed to be undertaken in Zimbabwe, but finds that the "revisionist" literature on Asia endorses a much better direction than that adopted by the IMF and the Bank. In Asia according to some analysts, the protection of local industries, and the national sources of capital which supported it, was the key to success.

This is an ambitious book. The assessment and critique of structural adjustment policies are well enough developed to elaborate the thesis that industrialization in Zimbabwe was not well served by the World Bank and IMF approach. One can disagree with the economic assumptions, but the argument is well substantiated. However, this is not the case in respect to the collapse of the democratic state. Political factors of analysis are neglected or, when they are assessed, as in the case of Mugabe's pledge to seize white-owned farms, seem to support the notion that precipitous political decision-making caused the economic crisis. There is just not enough political material in the author's framework to connect the technics of industrial collapse with the politics of the social and institutional world of Zimbabwe's crisis of governance.

Connie Anthony

Seattle University

Seattle, Washington