We Get Good Press!

 

 My book has been (favorably!) reviewed in the independent leftwing website Counterpunch!

Historian Doug Enaa Greene concludes in the article published this week, 

This review can only scratch the surface of this book. There are many debates that gripped the Ethiopian left crossing its pages such as the relation of national liberation to socialism, the role of imperialism, and the nature of fascism. All the questions discussed in this book make this more than a work of history, but a work informing revolutionary struggles of today. As the example of the EPRP reminds us, courage and dedication are not enough to realize socialism, but a revolutionary strategy is needed.

Like Ho Chi Minh! Like Che Guevara! is a book that deserves a wide audience for its rigorous research and fierce partisanship. It is a worthy tribute to the martyred revolutionaries of Ethiopia.

He also had kind things to say about my publisher, the Foreign Languages Press, despite not himself being any kind of Maoist. Thanks, Doug! After a decent interval I will copy this review in full over here, but for now check it out at the source here.

Foreign Languages Press Book Launch Video

My book officially launched on Sunday, August 30, with a virtual global event. It features presentations by me, another author releasing a book the same day, Comrade Ajith of the Indian Maoist movement, plus Christophe Kistler of Foreign Languages Press and comrade Joshua Moufawad-Paul, one of today's most exciting communist theoreticians based out of Canada, whose work is also featured by FLP.

Anyway, here's the video from the event. Mine is the first book presentation, following a little promo video they did of me, and then after Comrade Ajith speaks, we answer some audience questions.

Direct link for Like Ho Chi Minh! Like Che Guevara! is here.

 

Socialism and Democracy in Africa

 

In the course of writing my book, I found a wonderful article in the only issue of Ethiopian Marxist Review that the EPRP published in Rome in 1980. Entitled "The Struggle for Democracy in Africa," it was bylined "F. Gitwen." Well it turns out that was a pseudonym for Iyasou Alemayehu, one of the few longtime surviving leaders of the EPRP who features prominently in my just-published book.

The good comrades at Cosmonaut have consented to republish the entire article, previously only available in the super rare original journal or more recently on a PDF buried in the depths of the Marxist Internet Archive's Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism Online.

Here is the first paragraph of this article. Visit Cosmonaut to read the whole thing including an introduction by yours truly, or check out my new book to see how this point of view is contextualized in terms of the Ethiopian struggle.

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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.”
continued here