Grace-Edward Galabuzi (York University), "Beyond Class compromise: Zambian Copper Miners and New Radicalism in the Neo-liberal era"

The paper discusses the role of Zambian miners in the resistance against the corporate take over of the Zambian copper industry following the flawed process of denationalization imposed on the Zambia people by global capital embodied in the International financial institutions and the transnational mining corporations.

Zambian miners hold a vaunted place in the political economic history of Zambia and they are well positioned to be a base for a counter movement in Zambia. No social force has had as decisive an impact on socio-political and economic developments in Zambia as have the mineworkers. Beginning with the anti-colonial struggle, which was marked by sustained and sometimes violent strike action by mineworkers as they asserted their class interests, to the overthrow of the second republic, time and again they have provided the foundation for the Zambian political formations through which the masses have been mobilized to overthrow oppressive rule.

Today, as Zambia stands at a crossroads, in the midst of a socio-economic crisis on the Zambian Copperbelt that has thrown over 80% of the countryıs population into poverty and diminished the ranks of miners to a fraction of their historic numbers, Zambian miners, while at the mercy of the forces of global neo-liberal capitalism, are turning to a new radicalism in search of the leadership necessary to recapture their glory as the vanguard of the peopleıs struggle against predatory global capitalism.

The paper considers the extent to which the political decision by the Mineworkers Union of Zambia (MUZ) to embrace the MMDıs neo-liberal agenda of privatization, deregulation and liberalization in search of new capital investments for the mining industry in the early1990s contributed to the present day socio-economic crisis. Did this class compromise represent a convergence of class interests between a privileged mineworkers group and the Zambian elite or was it over-determined by the structural power of global capital? The paper concludes that this compromise undermined the power of the Zambian working class and allowed the alliance between global capital and its allies in the Zambian business and elites to become ascendant.

The paper then considers the subsequent attempts to re-assert class-based modes of struggle against the entrenchment of the neo-liberal capitalist hegemonic project, as evidenced through the attempts by some radical affiliates of the Mineworkers Union of Zambia to disaffiliate from the national union and their key role in the numerous anti-government strikes and riots in Luanshya over the last two years.