‘The Struggle for Democracy in Africa’ by Iyasou Alemayehu

Translation and introduction by Ian Scott Horst. Buy a copy of his new book on Ethiopia, ‘Like Ho Chi Minh! Like Che Guevara!’ here.

The following article was published by the European office of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party in Rome in 1980. It appeared in the first and only issue of the Ethiopian Marxist Review, an English-language periodical the EPRP’s foreign section hoped would engage the world left. In 1980 that left was then largely (and unfortunately) singing the praises of Mengistu Haile Mariam, the military chief of state and leader of the Derg, the military organization that had governed Ethiopia since the revolutionary year of 1974. Sadly, the Review took several years to become a reality after it was first envisioned by the Party, and by 1980 the EPRP’s resistance to the military regime was in deep retreat, having suffered massive loss of life during the period of the so-called Red Terror. The EMR received little exposure and made little impact. At its 1984 Congress held in a remote rural area of Ethiopia, EPRP would in fact largely jettison explicit Marxism-Leninism as a guiding ideology. But the contents of the Review are fascinating, well-written, and largely devoid of the stilted prose and dogmatism that marred so much leftist literature in the 1970s.

One of the most interesting and important articles from the Review is a direct challenge to the many leftists, African or otherwise, who gutted Marxist theory in order to rationalize and excuse regimes that claimed a mantle of socialism made unrecognizable to those revolutionaries who once envisioned socialism as a form of radical mass democracy. The article is credited to one “F. Gitwen”; it can now be revealed that the moniker is a pseudonym employed by Iyasou Alemayehu, one of the founders of the EPRP (and today still one of the post-Marxist party’s leaders in exile). I presented excerpts of this important piece in the concluding chapter of my new book, Like Ho Chi Minh! Like Che Guevara! The Revolutionary Left in Ethiopia, 1969–1979, being published in September 2020 by the Paris-based Foreign Languages Press. I am extremely happy to present the entire piece to today’s Cosmonaut readers. While the era of the left-talking military regime has faded and thus the immediate circumstances of this article are somewhat dated, the subject it tackles remains profoundly relevant as Africa — today a battlefield in a new cold war between the United States and China — confronts the failures of post-colonial states to empower the great masses of African people in controlling their own destinies. It is also a profound rebuttal to the apologias of those leftists who deny the agency of an African proletariat in favor of military men or bureaucrats with a taste for leftist props. Beyond its relevance to African specifics, the article’s discussion of bourgeois democracy — something now seeming to fall out of global favor in the era of neoliberalism, rising fascism, and an apocalyptic pandemic — is relevant and useful in understanding the relationship of class and class struggle to the political forms that rule our lives.

I have corrected a few typos and Americanized spelling and typographic conventions but not otherwise edited this text from the 1980 original.

In many parts of Africa where the word “socialism” has more or less become a shibboleth, Lenin’s affirmation that “proletarian democracy is a million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy” seems to have a bizarre ring to it. In fact, it is precisely in those African countries where the regimes claim adherence to “Marxism-Leninism” that one notices the virtual absence of democracy and the existence of rule by terror. In countries ruled by such regimes and actually in greater parts of Africa, the ruling classes consider “democracy” as a tainted word, “un-African and western” and, at best, as “the unrealistic demand of hyphenated or De-Africanized intellectuals.”

The negation of democracy revolves around two basic premises. The first one considers Africa’s tasks as being one of “coming out of economic backwardness” and this is assumed to be incompatible with notions of democracy which “sap discipline,” “scatter the nation’s forces” and “invite anarchy.” In such cases, democracy is counter-posed to economic development and rejected consequently as a “luxury that the African masses cannot afford.” The second premise attributes to socialism the function of negating democracy, the limitations of democracy within bourgeois society are taken to exclusively define democracy, and, consequently, a rejection of what is termed as “fake bourgeois democracy” becomes in reality a rejection of “democracy as a whole.” In such cases, the declared attempt to establish a “socialist” society is deemed incompatible with all notions of democracy, and the “need for the iron fist of the proletarian dictatorship” is invoked in order to justify the extensive repression which, as in Ethiopia, claims the proletariat as its main and favorite victim. Official socialism in Africa, whether it takes the label “African” or “scientific” to define itself, is basically authoritarian and professedly anti-democratic.

The struggle waged by African revolutionary forces for democracy, be this within the framework of a general struggle for socialism or within limited perspectives, cannot revolve around a banal defense of democracy in general. The essence of the question itself lies in posing the question in the concrete, within the framework of the class struggle and social development of the given society. Admittedly, the level of development of each country and the class struggle within each demonstrate different stages and features. However, a general look, with all the apparent drawbacks of such generalizations, discloses that Africa’s problem is not so much the existence of “limited western type of democracy”—the problem lies in the absence of even a limited variety of democracy. For, a closer look at some of the countries which claim to have adopted parliamentary forms of rule or western-type bourgeois constitutions reveals that this adoption remains virtually at the formal level, with no actual democratic guarantees and with a presidential system giving wide executive and legislative powers to the president. The existing political parties, in many cases the president’s party, being caricatures of political parties within the western bourgeois republics.

The whole situation is entwined with the level of social development, with the fact that the majority of African societies are just emerging from various degrees of pre-capitalist relations and being integrated into the fold of international capitalism. The process of integration is itself a complex one, the imperialist domination militating against the emergence of a national bourgeoisie in the classical sense, and the introduction of capitalism in this form perpetuating, in a weak and distorted form, the old relation with all the backwardness involved. The absence of an “independent” bourgeoisie and the impossibility of an independent capitalist development militates against the existence of bourgeois democracy even in its restricted form. What exists is in fact a caricature of bourgeois democracy that takes the limitations of the latter as virtual excesses and, instead, establishes an all-embracing authoritarian rule.

The struggle for democracy in Africa cannot be equated with a yearning for bourgeois democracy per se. But, at the same time it is also indisputable that, with all its limitations, bourgeois democracy represents an advance over feudalism or absolutist rule. While it is true that proletarian democracy is qualitatively higher and broader than any type of bourgeois democracy, it is also a fact that bourgeois democracy represents an advance over feudalism. Hence the argument that bourgeois democracy is “bourgeois” and “totally unimportant” for those struggling for socialism in Africa is wrong and exhibits the infantilism castigated by Lenin in his celebrated text: Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Africa doesn’t necessarily need to pass through capitalism to arrive at socialism, but Africa necessarily needs democracy to get anywhere near socialism.

The struggle for socialism requires and is significantly assisted by the democratization of society. The more democratic concessions the proletariat and the masses wrest from the ruling classes, the more the situation improves for the struggle towards socialism, for carrying out the fight to get rid of the limitations imposed by the bourgeoisie on democracy. This is why Lenin affirmed that the bourgeois revolution is not only highly advantageous to the proletariat but is also absolutely necessary in the interest of the proletariat. The proletariat’s attitude to the bourgeois-democratic revolution is summed up by Lenin as follows:

“…The very position the bourgeoisie holds as a class in capitalist society inevitably leads to its inconsistency in a democratic revolution. The very position the proletariat holds as a class compels it to be consistently democratic. The bourgeoisie looks backwards in fear of democratic progress which threatens to strengthen the proletariat. The proletariat has nothing to lose but its chains, but with the aid of democratism it has the whole world to win. That is why the more consistent the bourgeois revolution is in achieving its democratic transformations, the less it will limit itself to what is of advantage exclusively to the bourgeoisie. The more consistent the bourgeois revolution, the more does it guarantee the proletariat and the peasantry the benefits accruing from the democratic revolution.”

The fashionable argument amongst the apologists of existing African regimes is that the struggle in Africa for democratic rights (freedom of the press, of association, etc.) is either “bourgeois!” (in which case “reactionary”) or “elitist.” The tragedy is that this type of argument is also echoed by certain African left-wing groups in an ironic reproduction of the infantile “leftists” of Lenin’s time: “we are struggling for socialism and hence it does not interest us to struggle for democratic rights under the bourgeois system.” The argument that bourgeois democracy is limited should at least be justifiably presented within a context of existing socialist democracy. In the concrete context of Africa, bourgeois democracy is absent and thus the rejection of it by the regimes and their apologists amounts to no more than a rationalization of authoritarian rule. As for the socialist struggle, it is, as Lenin pointed out, effectively assisted by the democratization of society.

Marxists do know for sure that “bourgeois democracy and the parliamentary system are so organized that it is the mass of working people who are kept farthest away from the machinery of government.” But the Marxist criticism of bourgeois democracy is directed not at democracy per se but at its limited and restricted nature under bourgeois rule. In the criticism, there is no underlying exaltation of “pure democracy.” So long as classes exist, it is not possible to speak of “pure democracy,” says Lenin in his celebrated polemics against Kautsky. And even in ancient Greece, despite Nyerere’s assertion that pure democracy existed, what was evident was not so much the rule of the people (demos) but, as Thucydides said of Athens, the rule by “the greatest citizens.” If Marxism lays bare the fallacy of “pure democracy” and situates the question within its relations to classes and class struggle (“under communism democracy will itself wither away and will not turn into ‘pure democracy’”—Lenin), the criticism of bourgeois democracy does not fall within infantile limitations. The question is not one of rejecting the forms of bourgeois democracy (parliament and the like) but of rejecting the basis of the democracy envisaged by the bourgeoisie and of asserting in its place a qualitatively higher and different form of democracy. To the argument of Kautsky projecting parliament as “the master of government,” Lenin countered with the people as “masters of parliament” — in other words the suppression of parliament as such. But this position bases itself on a fundamental premise involving the question of power and the establishment of a new order. The suppression of parliaments and constitutions in several African countries does not fall within the category of a revolutionary action as it is not an art directed at eliminating the limitations of bourgeois democracy. On the contrary, the suppression manifests the regime’s unwillingness and incapacity even to tolerate the limited rights granted by bourgeois democracy, it is a recourse to blindly authoritarian rule. The “people as masters of parliament” means the abolition of the separation of power from the masses, it means the concrete assertion of the people as the holders of power and the end of the subordination to it. What is at issue is thus not the mere change of forms or a quantitative problem — it is the destruction of the old order and state (“the mechanisms of the bourgeois state exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy”) and the replacement of the institutions of the old order by other institutions of a fundamentally different order. Hence, a seizure of power which is accompanied by the preservation of the state and old order cannot surpass or come out of the limitations of bourgeois democracy, and, as many African cases show, will actually exhibit more retrograde and repressive institutions and rule.

The critics of the struggle for democracy in Africa sever Lenin and Marx from the above fundamental points and seek to legitimize their anti-democratic actions of criticism [of] bourgeois democracy. But a genuine criticism of bourgeois democracy cannot be viewed outside of a genuine struggle for socialism, i.e. a real effort to eliminate the limitations of bourgeois democracy establishing a fundamentally different type of democracy, proletarian democracy. A seizure of power or even a revolution that perpetuates the separation of the masses from power and their dependence on the State cannot be considered socialist or will not, at least realize the transition toward socialism.

In many countries in Africa, the struggle for democracy is being waged in a situation in which bourgeois democracy as practiced in the developed countries of Europe and America does not exist. The struggle is waged in a situation in which the winning of even limited democratic rights becomes a significant victory. The winning of bourgeois-democratic rights represents a contribution to the struggle for socialism, overcoming the existing practice of total censorship and prohibition of organization opens up broader possibilities for revolutionary struggles and helps to eliminate the limitations imposed by clandestine struggle. The struggle cannot be waged as part of a strategic belief that one can gain concessions from the ruling class and through this win over a majority in parliament and … institute fundamental changes. This is nothing but a reformist illusion. The struggle for bourgeois-democratic freedom is waged in the correct perspective only when posed as a stepping stone, as a useful and necessary step for the proletariat’s struggle for power, for the destruction of the State and the creation of a new society. Consequently, this assumes that there should be no continental or economic indexes set for prescribing broad democracy for one people and limited ones for others. For, there are those who call themselves “communist” but who do not hesitate to declare that while demanding broad democracy may be justifiable in Europe, such is not the case for Africans and others from the so-called “underdeveloped” countries.

Admittedly, the path to be traversed by each country towards socialism will differ, however, it is incongruous to assert that there can be any transition to socialism without the existence of broad democracy for the people. Santiago Carrillo, the leader of the Spanish Communist Party, states in his book, Euro-communism and the State, that to demand pluralism in countries like Vietnam is like braying at the moon. This is not because Carrillo considers the demand unrealizable, but it is because he considers such a demand is not relevant for the masses of these countries due to their level of development. Carrillo’s position has also been echoed by others who justify the anti-democratic actions of the juntas in Africa by asserting that though these acts may be considered undemocratic and paternalistic in Europe they are not so in Africa. It is a vicious argument that victimizes the African masses — their economic level of development, which is itself linked to the existing state of oppression and exploitation, is invoked to deny them the right to demand broad democratic rights. While it is true that the level of democracy existing in a given country is determined by a combination of factors (level of development, class struggle, etc.), there is absolutely no justification for severing democracy from socialism when the latter is applied to Third World countries. In fact, the demand for advanced or broad democracy is as legitimate in Gambia as it is in Spain and as relevant in Ethiopia as it is in Europe, despite the existing differences in the degree of development on the socio-economic level. If freedom and democracy are not to be viewed through racially-tinted glasses, the struggle for democracy waged in Africa, the opposition to unique parties, the rejection of despotic and paternalistic rule, etc. … are more than justified. As to economic development, while it is true that men are the products of circumstances, it is all the more true, as Marx explained, that circumstances are changed by men. The way out of economic backwardness is via a revolution assuring the masses power and a qualitatively different kind of democracy. In other words, democracy is not only necessary for the transition towards socialism, it is also indispensable for the success of the struggle of the proletariat to assume power. This is why the struggle for democracy assumes its importance, this is why in waging the revolutionary struggle it is repeatedly emphasized that the revolutionary forces must themselves have democratic structures, working-methods and the alternative organization of the masses (in clandestinity, in the liberated areas, etc.) must manifest the existence and practice of democracy and the exercise of power by the masses themselves. Viewed from this angle, many of the movements waging armed struggle in Africa are found lacking — their opposition to the antidemocratic regimes is not expressed by an alternative different democratic practice and, in fact, in some so-called “liberated areas” the only change for the masses is the change in the identity of the oppressors. Like the regimes, the movements also invoke “revolution” and “socialism” to stifle democracy and the militarist bent is assisted by the dominant form of the struggle being waged.

The struggle for democracy in Africa is also an affirmation of the existence of classes and class struggle in Africa. In this way, it is a clear rejection of the views which project pre-colonial or traditional Africa as essentially being devoid of class differences and antagonisms. Though the 1960s’ brand of “Africanists” who denied the existence of classes in Africa has become more or less extinct, the recognition of the class divisions pertaining in Africa has not been accompanied by a consistent admission of the reality of class struggle. The link between the denial of the reality of class struggle and democracy is highlighted by the position of many African regimes and their apologists vis a vis the organization of political parties and the right of dissent and assembly/association. In the rationale presented to defend the unique party and to reject pluralism or the right to freely organize, there appears a firm rejection of class struggle.

Many years back, one of the fervent defenders of the unique party system, Madeira Keita, put it as follows:

“We think that there are forms of democracy without political parties. We also state that if a political party is the political expression of a class and the class itself represents interests, we cannot affirm that the African society is without classes. But we state that the differentiation of classes in Africa does not imply diversification of interests let alone opposition of interests.”

Thus, the unique party, whether identified as a mass party or a patron one, becomes an identification or actualization of the “oneness of the community” and the mesmerism of the name of the people and the ‘oneness of the community’ is invoked to oppose all attempts to form other parties. And, as Sekou Touré stated in 1963, the unique party is identified with the people and the regime has the virtue of being the expression of the people within a party. The arguments of the advocates of the unique party, ranging from M. Keita to Sekou Touré, Nyerere, and Kaunda, revolve grosso mondo around the denial of class antagonisms, an invocation of a non-existent ‘oneness’ of the people as a whole, and the need for “unity” to overcome “backwardness and other enemies.” The denial of the right to organize parties is only an aspect of the absence of democracy but it emphasizes the problem. While for those like Madeira Keita, democracy does not imply the plurality of parties (the issue is actually as to whether the denial of the right to organize implies a restriction of the right of the people, a negation of democracy), for Nyerere, and others like him, the foundations of democracy are more firm if there is one party (“identified with the nation as a whole”) rather than many (“which represent only a section of the community”). For the latter, the existence of several parties in a country, as in the Congo of the 1960s, leads to division and anarchy. Nyerere’s argument not only mixes up cause and effect — parties are the political expression of existing class struggles not vice versa — but is not supported by empirical observation: the one-party states are, if not more, at least as trouble-prone and as problem-ridden as the ones with several parties.

The identification of the unique party with the whole nation automatically makes all attempts to exercise the right to association “subversive.” It also opens wide the door for apologetic positions vis a vis the repression unleashed by the regimes in such countries against the opposition which is ipso facto considered “anti-national” and “divisive.” Writing about the one-party government in Ivory Coast, Zolberg put forward a striking apology of the repressive actions of the state in the following manner:

“Sanctions (of coercion), however severe, are usually temporary; and coercion is not used methodically to induce a climate of terror. Relationships between rulers and dissenters retain the air of a family quarrel, followed by grand reconciliations when the crisis is over.”

A “family quarrel” resulting in massacres, a “grand reconciliation” that is consumed with corpses or presumed from the absence of opposition due to repression — it is bizarre to say the least, and very characteristic of the apologists of the repressive African regimes.

The resort to sanctified arguments about the unity of the community, the absence of diverse, let alone antagonistic, interests is a practice of both the exponents of “African socialism” and of the declared adherents of “scientific socialism.” The basic approach in both cases is “productionist”: dissent or opposition is ostracized under the guise of the need for unity to combat backwardness and t come out of the mire of underdevelopment. Thus, the whole people, from the president downwards will for one regiment of disciplined citizens (Nkrumah) and the unique party “assures discipline by molding the amorphous collection of people into an organic and dedicated body of men and women sharing an identical view of human society.” The party accomplishes this task by “curbing those social groups struggling for influence” and by impeding them from “unleashing class warfare inimical to the collective interests of the nation.” And this collective interest is expressed, as Senghor maintains, by the State, which means that obedience to the State and loyalty to its policies is the “necessary duty of the responsible citizen.”

The regimes that claim adherence to “socialism” of the Moscow variety have other justifications in their arsenal. They resort to the fallacious Soviet conception of “the party of the whole people” (that dissent in the USSR is considered a schizophrenic sickness is quite indicative of the consequences of this conception) and conjure up the name of the proletariat, whose name and power they have actually usurped, in order to raise the spectre of proletarian dictatorship. The problem is not solely the fact that the dictatorship being exercised is not that of the proletariat (be it in Ethiopia, Angola or Mozambique, for example) but that the conception of the proletarian dictatorship itself is wrong. The proletarian dictatorship, at least as conceived by Marx and Lenin, basically assumes the possession of power by the proletariat itself, its organization and self-administration in the concrete and the prevalence of broad democracy for the workers and broad masses. The suppression of the bourgeoisie is linked to this basic conception and thus contradicts any premise which bases itself on the use of power in the name of the proletariat and against the proletariat by a party or any other body. If the pro-Moscow African regimes make repeated reference to the Soviet experience, especially during the Stalin period, the critical evaluation of this experience itself lays bare the weakness of the arguments. The fact is that the particular features of Bolshevism in practice and especially the limitations and aberrations imposed, and adopted as temporary measures, during the period of the Civil War and War Communism, cannot be equated with the basic tenets of socialism even if these were affirmed as dogma in the 1930s. The issue raises the problematic of the role and nature of the proletarian party, but identification of proletarian dictatorship with the exclusion of the workers from the exercise of power and the impositions of restrictions on the democratic rights of the masses cannot trace its rationale/justification to Marxism or socialism.

The struggle for democracy in Africa gives politics its rightful place of dominance over mere economics, it asserts that there can be no deliverance from the grip of underdevelopment unless political power is captured by the masses and an economic endeavor that claims as its purpose their emancipation is undertaken. Official socialism, of all varieties, upheld by the regimes in Africa does not take such emancipation as its motive force: democracy is thus considered as an “obstacle” on the path of economic development. If Kaunda says that the “whole idea of opposition is alien to Africans” he reflects more the desire of the African ruling classes to stamp out all opposition as “un-African.” The idolization of a president as a “father figure” or the substitution of an omnipotent and unique “Vanguard party” for the oppressed masses is all directed at strengthening the authoritarian rule of the classes in power and the perpetuation of the subordination of the people to the State. Therefore, the struggle for democracy in Africa embodies a rejection of the paternalist and elitist conception and affirms the right of the masses to appropriate power and to govern themselves, to organize themselves, etc….

In this respect, then, the struggle for democracy in Africa is not an elitist struggle, as some so-called “Africanists” from the metropoles seem to suggest. For example, a certain Marina Ottoway writing about the Ethiopian Revolution declares that workers in countries like Ethiopia (“with dual economy”) are members of the “modern system and as such a very privileged group”; she bases herself on this argument to label the Ethiopian workers’ demand for democracy as “elitist demands.” Another writer, Santarelli, argues in the same vein and characterizes the EPRP as “westernized” and “representative of the intelligentsia emanating from the most privileged classes.” Such arguments, and to some extent the extended “labor aristocracy” analysis of Arrighi, lead up to or are directed at favorably counter-posing the ruling juntas — “representative of the rural population”! — to the “privileged” urban masses: workers and intellectuals. Behind the seemingly-populist arguments of this genre, it is possible to discern a basically distorted premise: the rural population and way life, at least till the colonial period, represent the “ideal” while the urban masses and way of life, “connected with imperialism,” represent what should be extirpated. Consequently, anti-worker and anti-intellectual juntas are generously called “progressive” and the “representatives of the rural people” by such writers. Connected with this is the recurring theme which asserts that the “bread question” (economic development) is more important than the “freedom question” (democratic rights).

The arguments, which in some cases demonstrate prejudices outside the scope of theoretical/empirical analysis, are fallacious. Colonialism did not bring bourgeois democracy to Africa but neither did it put end to an African “Golden Age of democracy and classless society.” Nyerere’s argument about the existence of a communal classless and idyllic African traditional society is very well known but it is known for its baselessness. A correct presentation of the question indicates that Africa’s problem does not lie in the existence of what some call “the modern system” but rather then in the limitation of “the modern system,” the preponderance of an isolated rural populace, and, above all, the existence of a system of exploitation and oppression which subjugates the masses. The exaltation of the rural areas or the peasantry can satisfy the populist and complexridden conscience of western writers but cannot respond to the exigencies of Africa for coming out of the system of oppression. The democratic forces in Africa approach the question of imperialism not by counter-posing it with some idyllic and illusory rendition of a classless traditional society but by attacking imperialism’s domination and exploitation. The spread of factories and industries, the breakup of the rural state of isolation, etc. … are not by themselves reactionary; in fact, the break-up of feudal relations and ideology and its replacement by bourgeois ones is an advance when evaluated per se. Thus, to label the forces struggling for democratic rights in Africa as “western” and “elites” while exalting repressive and retrograde juntas (such as the one in Ethiopia) and leaders (Amin and Bokassa not excepted) as the “true representatives of Africa’s majority” or as the “mirrors of the souls of Africa untouched by the west” is to manifest crass ignorance and prejudices.

Socialism is a step towards complete human emancipation which will be realized, in the words of Marx, “when the real individual man has absorbed in himself the abstract citizen, when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, he has become a social being and when he has recognized and organized his own powers as social powers, and consequently no longer separates this social power from himself as political power.” The existence of “bourgeois right” (to each according to his labor rather than according to his needs) under socialism does indicate that actual inequality persists and that the stage is but the first phase of communism. But the criterion for evaluating the level of development of socialism is none other than the level of development of democracy. The more power the masses have and the more extensive their self-administration, the more it can be said that the level of development of democracy is higher, and so also the progress in the transition from socialism to communism. In a country where power is monopolized by a bureaucratic elite, where centralism stands against the self-administration of the masses, where the State/party apparatus converge to marginalize or eliminate the rights of the workers and the masses in the field of organization and administration, etc., in other words where political power is separated from the masses and where this separation continues to deepen, what is in place is not socialism. Socialism is not identified by the existence of a ruling party claiming adherence to Marxism-Leninism, it is not derived from external alliances, or as a consequence of nationalization measures or adoption of the Plan in the economic sphere. The political transition period in which the dictatorship of the proletariat is deemed necessary is also a period which should realize the development of the level of democracy existing in the society, the use of the state in suppressing the bourgeoisie or defending the proletarian power cannot be extended to the suppression of the masses and their exclusion from power. The self-administration of the masses and the free expression of this at the organizational level must be extended, the masses as the holders of power, armed and organized, must be the main defenders of their own power from bourgeois assaults.

The struggle for democracy in Africa justified itself not merely by a general reference to the tenets and ideals of socialism even though this by itself is a heavy indictment against the antidemocratic regimes in the continent who claim to be “socialist.” There is also the question of practical experience, of historical lessons. The experience of the USSR and its satellites as well as that of African “socialist” regimes show that without democracy, without power fully evolving into the hands of the masses, it is not possible to realize even mere economic ambitions let alone socialism. If socialism or the transition towards it is to have any meaning in Africa it must be posed in such terms with firm emphasis on the question of power and democracy. The revolutionary forces presently struggling in Africa must, thus, address themselves to the question in a Marxist manner. The struggle for democracy is not an end in itself and is truly subservient to the struggle for socialism but the latter cannot be realized without political democracy for the masses. This is made especially clear in the countries like Ethiopia where regimes allied to the USSR and following in its repressive conceptions are ruling. As Marx said, “freedom consists in transforming the State from an organ dominating society into one completely subordinate to it, and even at the present time the forms of State are more free or less free to the extent that they restrict the ‘freedom of the State.’”

What Lenin called a truism, the fact that bourgeois democracy is progressive as compared to medievalism, cannot be termed as such in many places in Africa. Distortion of the nature of pre-colonial societies, illusory attempts to “return to the source” and popular mystification by so-called “Africanists” have militated against a correct appraisal of the whole question. If we insist that bourgeois-democratic freedom can assist the struggle for socialism, it implies no “liberal twaddle to fool the workers” or to present this as the aim of the struggle. Our emphasis is that “the proletariat and the revolutionary forces must unfailingly utilize it in the struggle against the bourgeoisie.” At the same time, it falls on the revolutionary forces themselves to evaluate the concrete situation so as to avoid tactical and strategic blunders. By firmly struggling for democracy and by linking this to the struggle for socialism, it is possible to assert the proletariat’s dominant role as the fervent and vanguard fighter of the rights of the masses. Any advance made or victory gained in the democratic struggle will be advantageous for the socialist struggle.

If so-called “Africanists” inclined towards apologetic positions vis a vis existing regimes tend to negate the importance of democracy and to champion “firm rule,” “discipline” and “an all-out drive to combat economic backwardness,” there are also others of the same brand who hail to the sky every national liberation movement or organization which claims to be waging armed or political struggle against the existing regimes. The movements are labelled “revolutionary,” “democratic” and their radical rhetoric is identified with a commitment to socialism. In this way, another mystification and distortion is let loose. A closer observation indicates, however, a different reality.

To be sure, the struggle waged against national oppression has a democratic content in so far as it is directed at the practice of national domination and affirms the right to self-determination of the people. Struggles waged by movements with mere bourgeois-democratic demands have also their progressive content in so far as they stand against absolutist rule and authoritarian domination. However, these struggles are fundamentally different from the struggle for socialism waged by revolutionary forces for whom the struggle for democracy is directed not only at overcoming the limitations imposed on democracy by the bourgeoisie but also for realizing the transition towards socialism and communism, i.e. towards the withering away of democracy itself. Aside from this fundamental difference, there is also the question of the actual feature of the so-called national liberation movements themselves. If these movements in the objective and limited sense assume a progressive function, it is also to be borne in mind that they present no socialist alternative in the concrete. Their method of work, of organization, their relations with the masses, and their conception of the future organization of the society manifest no substantial difference from that of the regimes they are combatting. Thus, underneath their radical rhetorics, in some cases itself an eclectic mixture of nationalism and socialism, and the catchword of anti-imperialism, there stands a basically elitist, anti-democratic, and authoritarian position. The leadership of these movements is in most cases in the hands of the petty-bourgeoisie, populist, and radical in words but repressive and hegemonist once it appropriates power.

The struggle for democracy in Africa manifests, therefore, various features. The one upholding the perspectives of the proletariat is radically different from the others; the latter cannot be called socialist and fall within the framework of the system of exploitation and domination itself. The African petty bourgeoisie, in general, be it as the leader of nationalist movements or declared “democratic organizations,” cannot break out of the limitations of the bourgeois conceptions of society. By coming to power, it can and does reorganize the society in accord with interests; however, its general weakness and class optics account for extremely repressive actions once it comes to power. Contrary to this, the revolutionary forces struggle for democracy having in mind an objective that will asset the workers and masses as the rulers of society. For such forces, the question of the struggle is not “to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another” but to smash the whole state apparatus and set-up new, fundamentally different institutions which reflect and make possible the self-government of the masses and their rising to the level “of taking an independent part not only in voting and elections, but also in the everyday administration of affairs.” For, as Lenin added, “under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing.”

The struggle for democracy waged to realize this objective needs no other raison d’etre; its commitment to the emancipation of the people from domination and subjugation is its primary and strongest rationale. This commitment and this aspiration overcomes all artificial barriers, be they continental, racial or economic, and it is thus that the struggle for democracy in Africa assumes its importance and forms an integral part of the world-wide struggle for socialism, for communism.

2019.11.072020.09.09

Which Side Are You On?: The Challenge of the 1974 Ethiopian Revolution

The Ethiopian Revolution teaches modern leftists an important lesson about international solidarity, argues Ian Scott Horst.

Way back in 1848, the young Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels admonished in their Manifesto of the Communist Party, “Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.” This basic prescription for political solidarity flows obviously and organically from the understanding of global political economy that they (and their ideological heirs) spent decades investigating, defining, and fighting for on street barricades. Marx and Engels diagnosed that the vast majority of the world’s population shared a mutual interest by virtue of its exploitation and oppression at the hands of a global class system, here in corrupt decay, there in bloody infancy. They suggested a liberatory class struggle as a path of resistance that was conveniently locked inside that global political and economic system and enabled by its own contradictions. To reject, indeed to overturn, that global system of exploitation and oppression of the vast majority of humanity by a tiny controlling minority of kings, political elites, and captains of industry, Marx and Engels prescribed not only moral outrage, but an understanding they called “scientific” of how those oppressed and exploited people could employ their vast majority in numbers and their strategic social relationship to the means of production to win the class struggle, and with it a better future for humankind based on cooperation and the communal good.

The phrase “Solidarity Forever” may have originated in radical trade unionism, but it was a damned effective compass for orienting one’s place in a combative world divided into potential comrades and bloodthirsty enemies. As leftist watchwords, the phrase reinforces an intuitive impulse growing out of the human experience of living and working together in a class-divided world, and neatly reinforces the deeper ideological explorations of theoreticians in the Marxist tradition. As a concept it rightfully suggests a deep connection between the daily struggles to survive, as experienced by the unpropertied classes and the political prescriptions of communist ideology. So why does it seem that so many of today’s heirs to Marxist tradition have discarded this time-proven compass when it comes to orienting themselves in today’s world of struggle? How did it happen that the first impulse of wide swathes of the Marxist left is to oppose the masses turning out into the world’s streets and avenues?

Leftists in the belly of the beast are morally (not to mention strategically) obligated to oppose the actions of our “own” imperialism. The dividing line this commitment creates is pretty easy to see in the separation of a “hard” left from a social-democratic one, even though the numbers of people identifying with either is much reduced in this post-Soviet century. But dialectical thinking should enable us to see that rejecting “our” government is actually not an automatic reason to express political support to every regime in conflict with the one we live under, and this is where much of today’s left seems to have stumbled away from the basic starting place located by Marx and Engels back in 1848.

It would be naive to suggest there are no differences in the mass popular mobilizations that have rocked the world’s streets in the last decade: The so-called Arab Spring and its stepchildren in Syria and Libya. Occupy Wall Street. Iran. Thailand. Zimbabwe. Venezuela. Nicaragua. The yellow vests of France. Hong Kong. But what unites these popular struggles is that, by degrees, much of the left reflexively rejected them out of hand, in some cases siding with the brutal police or military repression that would follow. Solidarity was discarded. In truth, some of these movements have had intensely reactionary elements, and in several cases that reactionary element is certainly at their core; but much of the left’s response was predictable, sudden, and utterly lacking in nuance, or importantly, any willingness to investigate the contradictory natures of these mass revolts or suffer any mild interest in the causes of mass grievance. The left has repeatedly rushed to identify the American CIA as the unquestionable locus of all global discontent. In several of these instances, the pretensions of the targets of mass resistance to some mantle of social progress were given greater credibility than the cries coming from the street. In many cases, the relationship of each country to the imperialist hegemon is factored larger than the class relationships within them. Let us not be naive: certainly, the CIA is engaged in subversion as a matter of routine. But what does it say about the possibilities for human liberation (and perhaps more importantly, about our abilities as professed revolutionaries to evangelize a universal message of revolt) that every spark of rebellion is reflexively dismissed? Put in another way, do “Black Lives Matter” only in the United States?

This phenomenon didn’t begin in the last decade. It really goes back to the halcyon days of left-talking military revolutionaries who dominated large swaths of the global South in the period between post-war decolonization and the fall of the Soviet bloc. With socialist revolution seemingly more distant than ever in the so-called liberal democracies of the global North, the left came to embrace many of these military figures with minimal critique or challenge, seemingly forgetting that printing up posters of Lenin isn’t quite the same thing as following his prescriptions for waging proletarian revolution or building socialism.

One of the clearer cases of this phenomenon — indeed one of the most tragic cases — was the embrace by much of the left of Lt. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam and the military regime which ruled Ethiopia from 1974 to 1991.

Mass demonstrations in 1974 began the revolution

In February of 1974, a wave of labor strikes and mass protests swept the empire of Ethiopia. Tightly ruled by an aging Emperor Haile Selassie since the early decades of the century, now confronted with an increasingly harsh and vivid contrast between the haves and have-nots, the Ethiopian population stayed in the streets for weeks. They were soon joined by elements of the military which threatened a full-on mutiny. Taxi drivers, teachers, Ethiopia’s small industrial workforce led by what had been presumed to be a docile and captive trade union confederation in the pocket of the AFL-CIA, and most importantly, many thousands of dissatisfied high school and college students made economic and political demands, including that of popular democracy in the form of a people’s provisional government. There were mass demonstrations of priests and prostitutes, of minority Muslims; and the country’s vast peasantry began eyeing the land they worked in a variety of exploitative feudal land tenancy schemes. A country without political parties or press freedoms soon engendered a vibrant political culture in which underground publications written by communists soon dominated the national discourse.

In what has been described as a slow-motion coup, a committee of junior military officers known as the Derg began edging its way into the seat of power, forcing the autocrat to readjust his government repeatedly. They claimed that the spontaneous popular revolt needed direction and that the military was the only organized force in the country that could offer it. In September of 1974, the Derg pushed the emperor from power and shortly afterward proclaimed Ethiopia a state guided by “Ethiopian Socialism,” defined very loosely and not yet implying an imitation of, or connection to, the avowedly socialist countries of the Soviet bloc.

The new regime was ruled by a provisional military government, a triumvirate junta in which Mengistu was a junior partner. Mengistu had been trained in Fort Benning, Georgia, and displayed no apparent ideological sympathies. But ominously, in a year marked by remarkably little bloodshed, the Derg promptly executed sixty people, mostly prominent officials of the former regime and members of the nobility, but including a small number of leftists. In what was to set a pattern for government personnel changes in the Derg era, also killed was the head of the Derg himself, a liberal general named Aman Andom. While Mengistu remained a junior partner in the Derg, he was widely recognized as the agent of these executions. The military junta was now to be headed by another non-ideological figure, a brigadier general named Teferi Bente.

Over the next two years, the Derg government engaged in a number of revolutionary reforms, greeted with degrees of enthusiasm and skepticism by the revolutionary population. Some businesses were nationalized, but foreign and private investment was guaranteed. Feudal land tenancy was ended, but the land was turned over to the state, not the tiller. Students were sent to the countryside to evangelize Ethiopian socialism, but they, and the peasants they instructed, were punished for taking things too literally. The government tried to disband the independent labor movement and replace it with a captive state-run union that would focus on production and class peace. And all the while the regime continued the imperial wars against restive national minority populations, most notably the rebellious Eritreans in the country’s northern Red Sea region. The regime posed as anti-imperialist, but relied on U.S. aid, including all that military hardware being used against Eritrean peasants.

By the end of 1976, elements within the Derg lost patience with the quickly growing Ethiopian left which had continued its agitation for popular democracy and began to wage a brutal campaign of repression. This repression was met with violent resistance from the civilian left, which began its own urban guerrilla campaign against government officials guilty of acts of repression.

In February of 1977, Mengistu resolved some serious internal contradictions inside the regime with a preemptive coup d’etat, killing Teferi Bente and a handful of other officers of questionable loyalty. He immediately moved to make an alliance with the Soviet Union. He also unleashed what he would eventually christen as the “Red Terror,” a series of death squad campaigns against any and all civil opposition. While totals remain the subject of debate, the body count has been compared to that of the 1994 genocide in nearby Rwanda. By the time of the terror, the U.S.-trained Mengistu had become proficient at employing Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, and he claimed, invoking early Soviet history, that his purges were directed against counter-revolutionary “white terrorists,” which he defined variously as anarchists and Maoists as well as agents of imperialism and the former nobility.

Captured EPRP members and flags during the “red terror”

When the quixotic and also avowedly Marxist-Leninist military leader of neighboring Somalia, Jaale Maxamed Siyaad Barre, invaded eastern Ethiopia and renounced his own Soviet sponsorship in favor of U.S. aid, Mengistu pleaded to Cuban leader Fidel Castro for assistance, and soon massive numbers of Cuban troops and Soviet bloc weapons flooded the country. Mengistu, with Soviet and Cuban aid, attempted to rally progressive global opinion against the Somali invasion, now marked as a proxy for imperialist meddling. Soon, Somali troops were driven out, and with massive donations of police surveillance technology from East Germany, the “Red Terror” found success by the end of 1978, wiping out all traces of opposition in the country’s urban areas.

A generation of political exiles fled the country, leaving behind a variety of guerrilla struggles polka-dotting the country’s rural expanses, one of which eventually snowballed into the rebellion that swept the regime from power in 1991. That rebellion also allowed the Eritrean rebels to consolidate their own victory and secede from Ethiopia. But in 1978 the future looked bright for Mengistu. He eventually built a captive state communist party (which he headed, of course), called the Workers Party of Ethiopia. Posters of himself, and Marx and Lenin were soon ubiquitous. Despite famine, economic disaster, and the occasional coup attempt, the regime lasted until about the same time as the Soviet bloc faltered. That global dust-plume of Soviet collapse undercut the stability of Soviet clients across the globe from Afghanistan to Benin, from Madagascar to South Yemen, from Kampuchea and Vietnam to Cuba; only the strongest survived and that did not include the Mengistu regime.

The great majority of the global left lauded Mengistu’s Ethiopia, accepting official government narrative as gospel. Socialist groups like the U.S. Workers World Party accepted state press junkets, interviewing regime members by day while nighttime neighborhood roundups left piles of bloody children’s bodies on street corners for the morning trash. Most Maoists and Trotskyists expressed degrees of critique, especially as regards the controlling influence of the USSR, and the global national liberation support movement anguished over the idea of the Cuban revolution suddenly in contradiction with the Eritrean national liberation struggle; but lasting orthodoxy seeping into 21st century leftist discourse holds that the Mengistu regime may have had its flaws, but it was another experience of Marxism-Leninism squelched by imperialism.

Most of the barebones narrative I have repeated above is not unlike the way much of the left recalls the Ethiopian Revolution in its totality, though perhaps I’ve been a bit more critical. They focus on the claims of the Mengistu and the Derg. They write off the dissent from the left. They are embarrassed by the violence, but since it was probably unreasonable infantile ultraleftists consciously or unconsciously acting in the interests of imperialism, it’s all well and good. As a model for socialism, well, it was a revolution from above, but it works that way sometimes.

As a verdict of history, let us be clear: an interpretation of Derg-era Ethiopia as actually socialist is completely shameful, and reflects miserably on the compass of solidarity used by the left. Nostalgia for Mengistu (still alive in a villa in Zimbabwe, by the way) is deeply and intensely misplaced. The global left embraced yet another left-talking military strongman, accepted his rhetorical claims at face value, and turned its back on what was one of the largest mass, civilian communist movements in African history. It’s worth remembering here one of the most useful axioms of Maoist praxis, “no investigation, no right to speak.” So let’s take a second look.

To really understand the Ethiopian revolution, one has to go back to at least 1960. While on one of his many foreign excursions, the emperor was briefly overthrown by military officers led by the Neway brothers. The rebellion was crushed and the Neways were executed, but it was a critical crack in the absolute rule of the emperor in a volatile period of continental decolonization. By 1965, a radical student movement formed the first of many clandestine organizations, the Crocodile Society, which organized demonstrations calling for “Land to the Tiller” and other democratic reforms. Against the backdrop of a growing world radicalization, resistance to the American aggression in Vietnam, the selfless albeit tragic guerrilla exploits of Che Guevara, the labor and student explosions of 1968, and the rise of a younger, more vibrant, New Left detached from Soviet orthodoxy, the Ethiopian student movement became the arena for revolutionary debate and discussion that was otherwise banned. Student publications were filled with nothing but theoretical articles debating the application of Marxism-Leninism to Ethiopia. This revolutionary student movement dominated academic culture in Ethiopia as well as among the many diaspora Ethiopians who were seeking higher education abroad.

The first Ethiopian left organization was formed secretly in France in 1968. Called Meison, the Amharic abbreviation for the All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement, it was the brainchild of an Ethiopian linguist named Haile Fida, who would become a notorious figure in the revolutionary era. The group had distinct views it argued for in the student diaspora, but as an organization, it remained completely clandestine until after the events of 1974. In 1969, a group of radical students led by Crocodile Society veteran Berhane Meskel Redda hijacked an airplane from Ethiopia to Sudan. They soon found themselves in revolutionary Algiers, were given a vacated pied noir villa by the Algerian government, and set up a base from which to coordinate revolutionary activities while they hobnobbed with Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers and representatives of dozens of other global national liberation movements.

Things at home took a dark turn with the assassination at the end of the year of a popular student leader, Tilahun Gizaw, in what was presumed to be a government hit. A wave of repression killed many students, imprisoned more, and sent thousands of others abroad. Ethiopian student discourse took a serious turn: they knew a crisis was coming and with it the promise of a popular explosion, and they began to make plans to transform themselves from radical students to professional revolutionaries; they knew they needed a revolutionary party and started to plan how to build one. In 1972, they founded a second radical organization at a congress held in West Berlin, again in total secrecy. Calling itself the Ethiopian People’s Liberation Organization, its supporters were based everywhere there were Ethiopian students, from New York to Moscow, from Rome to Addis Ababa. It approached the most radical Palestinian organizations for military training, which it received. It competed for covert leadership of the movement with Meison, whose politics were not dissimilar but which had quite a different perspective. EPLO felt revolution was imminent, Meison prepared itself for a long march lasting many years.

It is true that the embryonic Ethiopian left did not lead the February 1974 uprising, though the ranks of people rising up included many young people who had spent their school years learning about revolution in the campus crucibles. Both Meison and EPLO immediately understood the importance of the moment, and most of their cadre who were based abroad returned home, where they began to publish and distribute regular underground newspapers and flyers. The most important of these was Democracia, published by EPLO, although that was, for the moment, left unsaid. They understood students couldn’t do it alone and they began to expand their social base. The revolutionary movement started to take off. It greeted the military coup with concern and suspicion; the welcome exit of the emperor tempered by the expectations about the predictable trajectory of a military regime. This was when the call for a people’s provisional government was formulated, at first supported by all factions on the left.

The left did not ignore the military. In Bolshevik fashion, they reached out to the military rank and file. EPLO even formed caucuses of revolutionary soldiers. Some oriented to various officers within the ruling military committee. Meison’s Haile Fida and one Senay Likke, a veteran of the diaspora student movement who had repeatedly clashed politically with partisans of EPLO, wound up becoming confidants of key Derg figures, including most importantly Mengistu, who was a veritable political tabula rasa packed with personal ambition. Shortly after some of the dramatic reforms announced by the regime, Meison dropped its calls for democracy in favor of cooperation with the military. Haile Fida and Senay Likke were soon referred to as the Derg’s politburo, and they and many of their followers were given portfolios in government ministries and charged with applying a socialist varnish to military rule.

In 1975, EPLO transformed itself into Ethiopia’s first political party, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party or EPRP. It had an elaborate nationwide network of clandestine cells and semi-open mass organizations. They established the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Youth League which attracted tens of thousands of eager revolutionary youth. They had a mass organization for women and their cadre kicked the CIA out of the Ethiopian labor movement. After that was suppressed, they formed their own red labor movement. They attempted, though ultimately unsuccessfully, to build an alliance with Eritrean rebels. At one point they were even accused of seizing control of national distribution of red chili pepper. At their height in 1976, they had thousands of members and tens of thousands more supporters and sympathizers. A rural base area in the north of the country was home to the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Army, which hoped to replicate the Chinese successes of waging people’s war and building peasant support in the countryside. EPRP has been called one of the largest communist parties ever seen on the African continent. It showed up to mass demonstrations with huge contingents carrying red flags, warning of the dangers of fascism from the regime and calling for the people to take power.

The politics of both EPRP and Meison started where one might expect for groups originating in the late 1960s: heavily influenced by Maoism, holding Che Guevara and the US Black Panthers in high regard. Meison tended more toward a kind of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, but EPRP was ideologically quite iconoclastic. Its surviving propaganda materials reveal a commitment to revolutionary democracy and popular empowerment unparalleled in other left movements of the day. Surviving veterans of the movement talk of study groups where the reading lists may have started with Lenin and Mao, but ended with Frantz Fanon, new leftist economists like Huberman and Sweezy, and even Isaac Deutscher. Its ground-breaking 1975 program includes planks for workplace daycare to enable women to work and participate fully in society; it called for the recognition of the right to strike and laid forth a vision of a democratic society on a path to socialism. The EPRP’s formation threw off course the Derg’s own plans to form a political party; that didn’t fully materialize until 1984.

A comparison of how the EPRP organized for socialism with the way the Derg tried to impose it is stark. Again and again, Derg initiatives were clearly exercises in population control painted in red Marxist-Leninist language, devoid of popular empowerment but stressing obedience to “the revolution” and production. EPRP appeals called for the people to take what is theirs.

As Meison integrated into the state apparatus, simmering sectarian differences between the two groups became exacerbated. The EPRP accused Meison of compiling lists of its members to turn over to government agencies of repression, which were stocked with Meison supporters. The first person EPRP assassinated in reprisal for the government’s repression in late 1976 was a Meison cadre, a popular college professor, but one who was accused of having overseen a roundup of EPRP sympathizers.

1977 was a complicated year. Senay Likke lost his life collaterally during Mengistu’s coup. Meison eagerly participated in the first waves of “Red Terror” directed at the EPRP, but pulled back from supporting the government when Mengistu invited the Soviets in. Shortly before May Day, EPRYL youth preparing for celebrations were set upon by death squads and thousands were killed. During this period in general, the EPRP leadership was decimated. Its most important leaders were gunned down in the street; internal factionalism split the party, forcing Berhane Meskel off to the countryside to regroup and turning other factionalists into snitching enemies. Horrifying torture by the Derg including rape and genital mutilation was widespread. Parents were made to pay for the bullets used to execute their children.

When Meison broke from the regime, Haile Fida and its other leaders went underground. Meison lost its seat at the edge of power and joined the other victims of the terror. Thousands of its members and supporters were then killed or imprisoned, including Haile Fida himself. Ironically, both Berhane Meskel and Haile Fida were executed in the same prison in 1978, strangled by a graduating class of military cadets. Soviet advisors urged Mengistu to purge any traces of Maoism or Chinese influence, and so the last remnants of the civilian left were exterminated. By the end of the year EPRP was reduced to a struggling guerrilla force in the countryside; it survived through the end of the Derg era, but was banned by the new government. That, as they say, is another story; EPRP today calls itself social-democratic but it jettisoned the most radical Marxist parts of its program in the 1980s.

EPRP, Meison and the Derg all waved hammers and sickles. But an investigation of what they meant by those hammers and sickles reveals conflicting visions of socialism and a fundamental dishonesty on the part of the Derg. The Derg was always the creature of the military officer corps: it propounded a theory of the “men in uniform” meant to rationalize the role of the military as agents of social change. The Derg was not made up of the soldiers of the 1917-era Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies, it was the creature of Kornilov’s officer corps. Like the emperor before them, it repeatedly and openly said that the Ethiopian people were not ready for democracy. It acted out of expediency, not principle. The EPRP’s base included a layer of the urban petty bourgeoisie, but the Derg’s base included the massive layer of lumpenproletariat displaced from the countryside and crowding Ethiopia’s cities who could be counted on, sometimes mildly coerced, to turn out to pro-government rallies. But even with the transformation of the regime from a provisional one to a formalized single-party state over the course of the 1980s, military figures kept a tight grip, making up the majority of “Workers” Party membership.

The EPRP certainly deserves scrutiny. It can be said in some ways that they were too little too late, and all their study and preparation failed to prepare them for the heavyweight of repression that was to fall on them. Although they made ingenious plans for clandestine organizing and had a clear vision of their final destination, they ultimately failed at people’s war and their detour into urban guerrilla war and terrorism lost them support among those concerned generically about “violence.” They wavered when confronted with strategic choices for a united front to keep the revolution on track.

The revolutionary left achieved hegemony over the Ethiopian student movement at a time when that movement was hugely influential, and this was remarkable. None of its factions believed that students would themselves be the vanguard of a revolution per se; they studied Lenin’s writings on the party and understood the limitations of student organizing. The whirlwind of events confronted the left with an array of choices for breaking out of their demographic limitations, but also a shrinking horizon of possibility. Some turned toward organizing the proletariat and the peasantry directly from their midst and simply ran out of time. Others turned toward the revolutionary state for leverage in organizing society from above; they would find themselves outmaneuvered and paying with their lives at the hands of institutions they helped create.

Those interested in reading more about the EPRP and Meison may have to wait for my own book-length documentary history to see the light of day; for now, the Ethiopian section of the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism Online hosted by the Marxist Internet Archive is definitely worth a perusal. The bottom line, however, is that an understanding of revolutionary Ethiopia — perhaps more accurately labeled counterrevolutionary Ethiopia — is not possible from taking the words and visuals provided by Mengistu and his allies at face value. There are complicated ideological issues here that a short article like this one can’t address. But there are also facts. And the worshipful appetite of segments of the left for a military ruler who held on to power by suppressing the left, by suppressing ethnic dissent, really makes a travesty of the foundations of our commitments as communists.

What happened in 1974 was a real revolution at the conjuncture of contradictions in Ethiopian society. That revolution continued with critical mass support for a few years, but the process was hijacked by a brutal military that sought to control and channel it for their own power. In 1991, the masses of Addis Ababa enthusiastically welcomed the toppling of the massive Lenin statue that had been supplied by North Korea in 1984. This is the cost of getting it wrong: socialism is remembered in Ethiopia as the dark time when untold thousands of people, including children beyond counting, lost their lives at the hands of people who claimed to be acting in the shadow of Marx and Lenin.

People have been in the streets around the world in the past decade in sometimes surprising places. Are some reactionary while others revolutionary? Sure. Without a dominating ideological resurgence of clear class-based revolutionary praxis, that’s likely to continue. But if you’re gonna pick a side that is a government against its people, you’ll need to have a deep and factual understanding of why and be prepared to fit that answer into an ideological matrix of human liberation. Or maybe you’ll have some explaining to do if you keep calling yourself a Marxist.

A Short Suggested Reading List on the Ethiopian Revolution:

- John Markakis and Nega Ayele, Class and Revolution in Ethiopia, Red Sea Press, 1978. Still in print I think. Markakis is a respected Ethiopianist academic; Nega was a former student activist and a key member of the EPRP who perished in the terror. While dated, contains lots of factual analysis and a healthy suspicion of the Derg.
- Babile Tole, To Kill a Generation; Free Ethiopia Press, 1989/1997. Out of print but PDF widely available online (see EROL link above); Babile Tole is the pseudonym for a collective of EPRP insiders.
- Hiwot Teffera, Tower in the Sky; Addis Ababa University Press, 2012/2015. A little hard to find in the US, but an easy, moving read. One of the many memoirs by veterans of the period. Somewhat controversial in a world where the arguments and tragedies of the 1970s remain in living memory among survivors. The bibliography of my own work references something like a dozen of these memoirs, all worthwhile reading.
- Kiflu Tadesse, The Generation, Volumes I and II. Out of print and expensive, these two volumes by one of the highest-ranking EPRP leaders to survive the period contain extraordinarily rich detail about the party’s history, politics, and organization. Also somewhat controversial.
- Hama Tuma, The Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor And Other Stories, Heinemann paperback, 1993. Out of print, but not hard to find. Bitter, moving, satiric fiction about the revolutionary era from the pseudonymous Hama Tuma, actually also a founder of the EPRP.
- Left-wing books on the subject written during the Derg era by Fred Halliday, the Ottoways, and René Lefort are rich in detail but marred by also being rich in excuses for the Derg. More modern post-Derg works on the revolutionary period have their merits but are generally marred by anti-communism. Solomon Ejigu Gebreselassie’s The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party: Between a Rock and a Hard Place, 1975-2008 from Red Sea Press is still in print and covers a lot of this ground but is a sort of diaspora polemic with the modern remnant of the EPRP.

Ian Scott Horst is an independent communist living in Brooklyn, New York. He has been a supporter of a variety of defunct groups including the post-Trotskyist Revolutionary Socialist League, Lavender Left, Queer Pagans, and the post-Maoist Kasama Project. He recently completed a book-length documentary history of the Ethiopian revolutionary left and is currently shopping for a publisher. Updates on his research and the progress of his book can be found at his Abyot—The Lost Revolution blog.