Fashioned after Communist Movements in Cuba and the USSR, Zimbabwe’s Government Retained Its Revolutionary Flavor

Ideological governments tend to fight what is beyond their control, in particular the free market. Once policies are implemented that interfere with these forces, the market will continue to react. More often than not, the forces of the free market do not simply cease their existence, but rather find different ways to manifest themselves.

Zimbabwe’s government had sprung from guerrilla roots and its ideology still retained its revolutionary flavor. Fashioned after the communist movements in Cuba and the Soviet Union, the military influence in politics was huge. Communist ideas were behind the attempt to restore a “balance” of power and economic wealth, away from the white colonial minority, and toward the indigenous majority. 

The forceful dispossession of the landowners followed a similar logic as so many dispossession waves before. The move toward indigenization is similar to the Communist nationalization in the Soviet Union. In mid-1918, the Communists nationalized all large factories, banned private trade and appropriated goods and resources from the rich and the middle-class (Fischer, 1994). The dispossession was depicted as a necessary act to achieve a greater good in society. Yet, it was also the beginning of the Soviet Union’s hyperinflation. . . . 

High inflation can also be used as a tool to speed up the achievement of a perceived equality of the “classes.” Lenin is said to have looked to the debauching of a country’s currency as the best way to the overthrow capitalism (Keynes, 1920). Through a prolonged period of inflation, a government can confiscate the wealth of its citizens. This potential to use money creation to enforce a communist ideology was seen in the Soviet Union hyperinflation. “The new regime had a clear desire for rapid inflation to wipe out the middle classes and speed the revolutionary cause” (Capie, 1986, p. 128). The drastic depreciation of the rouble was justified by the Soviets as a method of expropriating the bourgeoisie (Maier, 1978). A similar event happened in Hungary, when the Soviets overruled the Hungarian Central Bank’s objection to the vast numbers of Treasury Bills being issued (Capie, 1986).

—Jayson Coomer and Thomas Gstraunthaler, “The Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe,” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 14, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 333-334.