The political economies of social transformation: Regimes of social reproduction and accumulation, Zimbabwe, 1980-1992.

摘要

This narrative identifies some of the theoretical and discursive practices that are shaping, in complex if not contradictory ways, the boundaries of the question of social transformation in Zimbabwe, through the conceptual model of dialectics. The narrative also synthesizes several stories and analytic arguments. At the core of the narrative, is the assumption of multifaceted structuration: the interlacing of micro-level processes (i.e., the sites, contexts, practices and/or forms through which many social processes are constituted or defined) with and embedding them in, their systemic or large-scale frameworks. The narrative engages historical and contemporaneous clusters that impact the construction of social space. In other words, the research imbeds the economies of social transformation in the process-dialectics constituted by the socio-economic, cultural, political and ideological apparatuses of norming (and these do have local or global, personal or political ramifications as in the racial or sexual division of labor). Directly or indirectly, such apparatuses regulate and define the conditions and praxeological possibilities of social transformation. I here define these apparatuses as regimes of social reproduction and accumulation (RSRAs). They are critical subtexts (if not maintexts) for mediating and situating both localizing and globalizing social practices. The assumption of RSRAs implies, thus, strategic complexes and forms of social closure, and/or class-based, racialized, politicized and gendered cleavages of social reproduction, which, ultimately, substantiate or make concrete, the specific forms and trajectories of social reality. This research argues that social reality consists of interconnected layers of meanings and practices. These layers are in-scribed on particular bodies, races, classes, and ethnicities. Thus, in contemplating the emancipatory content of economies of social transformation, perforce, one devises ways to de-scribe the exploitive parameters etched on particular bodies, races, classes, etc. The RSRAs assumption has enormous praxeological efficacy in the context of the economies of social transformation in Zimbabwe and elsewhere.