Celebrate Red October: "Socialism without democracy is unthinkable"

EPRA fighters in a base area, late 1970s

November 7, 2017 in the Gregorian Calendar marks the centenary of the Russian Revolution of October 1917 (where the Julian calendar was observed). Despite its eventual defeat, the Russian Revolution ushered in an era where the old systems of oppression and exploitation were fundamentally and fiercely challenged as models for the organization of society. It marked the first successful attempt by socialist revolutionaries to overthrow capitalism and replace it with the rule of the common people. It was a watershed moment in human history, and capitalism and imperialism spent the rest of the twentieth century trying to reverse its successes. As a timely series of articles commissioned by the African American Intellectual History Society for its Black Perspectives feature on the Russian Revolution and the African Diaspora explains, the Russian Revolution came even to inspire a generation of revolutionaries around the world: and Ethiopia was no exception. As students of the Ethiopian revolution know, this was a complicated legacy, and during the Derg time, both pro- and anti-regime forces would claim the same socialist legacy as their own. In my opinion, however, any claim to inherit the spirit of the Russian Revolution by the military regime was entirely illegitimate.

To mark this occasion and provide some clarity, I am transcribing and republishing an article on the meaning of socialism from Abyot, information bulletin of the Foreign Committee of the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Party, that in turn translates and summarizes an article from the EPRP’s clandestine journal Democracia. This article appears in the Feb.–March 1979 issue (Vol. 4, No. 2) of Abyot. I have re-typed this article and errors of transcription are my own; I’ve made a handful of small spelling and punctuation corrections for legibility. I assume the cited Democracia article is translated to English from the original Amharic by the Abyot editors.

In today’s post-Soviet era, many of these arguments about how the Soviet Union came to betray the original vision and intent of Lenin and the Bolsheviks seem somewhat distant, but in fact they should inform any sober assessment of the continued relevance of socialism to the still-necessary liberation of the world’s peoples. —ISH

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DEMOCRACIA Exposes the ‘Socialism’ of Social-Imperialism

In its Volume 5, No. 4 issue, Democracia, organ of the EPRP, exposes the ‘socialism’ of social-imperialism.

For the broad masses, says Democracia, there is no socialism without democracy and there is no democracy without socialism. Democracy is necessary and useful for the construction of a socialist society. However, social-imperialists and revisionists, presenting themselves as examples are trying to show that ‘socialist construction’ is possible with the absence of any sort of democratic and human rights. That is not all. They have gone to the extent of trying to show how “socialism” can be built under fascism. Exposing their true colours, however, they have shown that democratic and human rights erode socialism, and that socialism and democracy are mutually exclusive.

EPRP’s position, continues Democracia, on the relation between socialism and democracy is diametrically opposed to the position of the social-imperialists and revisionists. At a time when all sorts of anti-socialists are professing about socialism, we have found it necessary to explain in short the principal charateristics which scientific socialism differs from all the ‘socialisms’ of the anti-socialists.

Socialism, says Democracia, is a system which arms the proletariat and broad masses with broad democracy. Socialism is a system which is based on the power and supremacy of the proletariat. Socialism is a system in which the proletariat and broad masses organize themselves in many forms to be able to administer themselves. Socialism is a system in which the proletariat and broad masses acquire more democracy, welfare and development than the capitalist system in the political economic and cultural fields. In the Soviet Union, however, the party which still works in the name of the proletariat is trampling the proletariat and broad masses underfoot and deprives them their democratic rights. It has kept the proletariat aside from political power. It has concentrated all the power in its hands and has become an anti-socialist party of few bureaucrats which defends their bourgeois interests.

Thus continues Democracia, the first socialist country has been turned to be a social-imperialist country. As a bad example and through its practices, policies and influence it has and is still challenging, opposing and fighting against the purity, expansion, development and triumph of socialism. Putting the parties in Eastern Europe, Cuba, Mongolia and Vietnam, who are in power, under control; the Soviet Union has also had these parties establish an anti-democratic and anti-people rule.

The dictatorial rulers of the Soviet Union, says Democracia, have and are still attempting to present the rules of their anti-people and anti-socialist puppets in a number of countries as ‘socialist’. In contradistinction to the struggle of the masses for democracy and socialism, the Soviet rulers have presented the anti-people rule of their puppets as ‘socialist’ in an attempt to prolong the life of the reactionary system and destroy the peoples’ resistance. Hasn’t the demagogue Mengistu’s fascist regime calling itself ‘socialist’ also called the proletariat, broad masses and the proletarian party counterrevolutionaries?

For the social-imperialists and fascists, continues Democracia, socialism means a system of which a regime of handful few dictators has the control of the masses and when the people do not have any control of the government. For them, socialism is being against democracy, anti-proletarian, anti-people and which combines the reactionary superstructure and practices which enables them to maintain their fascist and exploitative rule. The difference between the socialism we are fighting for and the ‘socialism’ of the social-imperialists and fascists is as wide as heaven and earth. To us socialism is a system in which the proletariat and broad masses hold state power; in which they take part in all responsible positions, in which the right of the people to call or change the officials of the government elected locally or at a country-wide level is guaranteed, in which there is a proletarian- led regime that stood for the broad masses of the people.

For the social-imperialists and fascists, ‘socialism’ means depriving the proletariat and broad masses of the people their democratic and human rights; depriving them the right to free speech, press and assembly; and depriving them the freedom of movement in their own country. ‘Socialism’ for the social-imperialists and fascists is a system in which the masses are subjected to constant repression, harassment, torture and execution until they bow to silence. For us, socialism is the exact opposite of this. Socialism without democracy is unthinkable. Socialist democracy is different from and superior to bourgeois democracy both in breadth and form. Socialism is not only a system in which the proletariat and broad masses have the right to free speech, press and assembly and organization; but also the right to sound out their opinions or protests against their regime or any organization without restrictions. Under socialism the masses also have the right to take a different position and make it public, the right to protest. Socialism cannot be a system in which a democracy narrower than bourgeois democracy reigns.

A system in which the proletariat and broad masses do not directly take part in the excercise of power, says Democracia, cannot be socialist. There is no socialism if the proletariat and broad masses do not take part in decisions of government affairs and if they do not administer themselves in a democratic system. Socialism is not democracy for the ruling class and government officials and dictatorship over the masses as it is like in the Soviet Union and its allies. Socialism cannot be a system in which those who oppose are imprisoned, kept in concentration camps, tortured, executed and where the freedom of speech of the masses is abolished.

Under socialism political power is in the hands of the proletariat and broad masses. Thus the existence of the special and highest form of organization of the proletariat, its weapon of struggle and leader, the proletarian party, is indispensable. Without its party the proletariat cannot seize political power. For us, however, a proletarian party is not something that the masses would worship and follow blindly because it claims to be one. It should be one which the masses support and have confidence on due to the correctness of its political positions, the struggle it conducts, its method of work and the day-to-day activity it performs. A proletarian party cannot replace the proletariat to make the revolution. It cannot be commanding and know-all against the proletariat and peasantry once it seizes political power. It is the proletariat and broad masses who are the creators and the driving force of the locomotives of history. This is true under socialism too. The guarantee of the existence of a genuine proletarian party, its source of power and legal base are the masses. The right of the proletariat and broad masses to control their party, to criticize the party, to express their views before any important decision is taken, to oppose or support or to take part in decisions is guaranteed. Socialism does not mean where a party isolated from the masses imposes its dictatorship over the masses as it is in the Soviet Union.

For the social-imperialists, socialism means when few self-proclaimed “geniuses” control state power isolating the party members, suppressing inner-party democracy and speak on behalf of the members of the party. It means where few (or one) individuals become autocrats worshiped and feared like gods. For us socialism means where party members discuss and decide on important decisions, where the leadership is everytime elected, where the party works on the basis of collective responsibility and leadership, where a genuine party which do not have mini-gods seize state power.

For the social-imperialists and fascists socialism is where a policy of chauvinism reigns supreme in the name of ’unity and indivisibility,’ the right of oppressed nations is trampled under the rule of the gun and where national oppression is maintained in many forms.

For us, socialism is a system in which the equality of and right of nations to self-determination is guaranteed; in which the languages, culture existence are respected, in which oppression nations use their own language as the medium of instruction; where there are no national privileges; where unity and assimilation is created on the basis of voluntariness and equality; where proletarian internationalism flourishes; and which is free of chauvinism and narrow national mindedness.

For the social-imperialists, socialism means depriving the political and organizational rights of other political organizations and putting them under their tutelage. It means to claim the right of invading other countries, exploiting peoples, controlling other goverments and abolishing their state sovereignity.

Socialism is democracy, equality and respect of people and countries, brotherhood and proletarian internationalism, justice and peace. What social-imperialism practices is the invasion of Czechoslovakia, dispatching mercenaries to put down national liberation movements of other countries. As an imperialist power, it also competes and contend or collude and agree with other imperialist powers for the plunder and division of the world.

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Quote of the Day: Actions Speak Louder Than Words

"To anyone who does not have a nodding acquaintance to Marxism-Leninism, what is confusing about the regime in Ethiopia is the contradictions in the regime's talk of socialism while it kills communists; in its declaration of 'unrestricted democratic rights to the broad masses' while it massacres workers who staged peaceful demonstration using their declared 'rights,' in its declaration of land reform while depriving the peasants to defend themselves from counter-revolutionary landlords, and so on. The latest act in this historical drama of self-contradictory double talk is the latest proclamation to disarm the people with the bluff of 'arming the people' at the same time." —Abyot, Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Party Foreign Section, March 1977

Quote of the Day: Power and the State

“[T]he attitude of Marxists toward reform and fundamental change is very clear and unequivocal. Marxists are not against reforms as long as the ‘reforms’ do not create obstacles to the strategic aims of the proletariat; peoples’ democracy and socialism. Similarly; we are not against the Dergue’s decree on land. What we are saying is the hard fact that Lenin taught us on the one hand and what the practical reality in Ethiopia has shown on the other; namely the decree alone won’t be the solution so long as it is devoid of the political power of the popular masses. The Dergue’s decree is simply equalised land tenure, which Lenin castigated as petty-bourgeois utopia and more over, ‘useless.’ Land reform cannot be carried out without the political power of the proletariat and peasantry and against their political participation. History has many cruel examples where attempts to use the feudo-bourgeois state, which is an instrument of enslavement, as an instrument of liberation brought untold sufferings…. It is for the building of the proletarian-peasant dictatorship through a revolution from below to resolve the agrarian question in a revolutionary manner that the EPRP stands.”
From “When Ethiopian Opportunists Are in Trouble Their European Counterparts Also Make the Loudest Noise” by Kelisen Belew, Abyot, Published by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party Foreign Section, Vol. 2, Number 4, March 1977

A Pivotal Moment: The Executions of 1976

The PMAC in the mid-1970s: at center are Mengistu, Teferi, Atnafu.

Continuing a series of reprints from the EPRP’s press of the 1970s, I'm happy to present two related unsigned articles from an issue of Abyot, originally published in August of 1976. These articles deal with the increasing repression by Ethiopia's military regime, foreshadowing the most violent period when the EPRP’s armed urban wing began a series of targeted counter-assassinations only to be met by the massive organized extermination campaign that came to be called the “Red Terror.” 

I have retyped this from the published manuscript, and with a couple minor exceptions, not attempted to add any of my own editing or corrections; some of the writing in these articles is a little awkward.

Following the original text, reproduced here in full, I will add some reference notes on unfamiliar terms and names, and offer a few thoughts of my own analysis, and some correlating details. —ish
 
From Abyot, Vol. 1 No. 6, August 1976:

THE TOTTERING REGIME OF THE DERG

THE ETHIOPIAN PEOPLES REVOLUTIONARY PARTY has consistently affirmed that the regime of the Derg is terribly isolated, fascistic and inherently anti-democratic. For all those who had the common sense and the conviction to see through the regime's demogogy and the apologist press, it was/is clear that the Derg is wobbling on its feet and is clinging to power only due to the backing of US imperialism and the use of brute force against the popular masses. Events since May Day have proven the EPRP's affirmation and pointed out that the popular demand for the establishment of a popular provisional government is the only solution to get the country out of chaos by giving power to the masses.

The Derg's problem, which started the day it took over power and even first when it constituted itself and moved objectively to perpetuate the exploitative system, are insoluble and immense. Its demagogy, its radical rhetorics, its blind repression have not succeeded to arrest the mass struggle. In the cities and the rural areas, the class struggle rages on. It has put out fascistic laws curtailing all democratic liberties, it has outlawed strikes (punishable by death “in serious cases”), made contact with the EPRP a fatal “crime,” arrested and executed countless militants. But the defiant struggle of the proletariat and poor peasantry, as well as that of the democratic petty-bourgeoisie, continued unabated. The EPRP is getting stronger more and more. The forms of combat of the masses are diversifying and deepening. The contradictions within the Derg itself are exploding violently and manifesting themselves in bloody purges. The democratic movement of soldiers is gaining strength.

The Derg has led Ethiopia into a political and economic chaos that has never been seen before. It had crowned terror as its demagogy, which was supposed to have been improved by the Haile Fida group of pro-fascist intellectuals, fails miserably to confuse the masses. Within the present context of developing, rich, complex and difficult revolutionary process in which the EPRP is assuming the vanguard role, the neo-colonial regime of the Derg is doomed.

THE REASONS FOR THE EXECUTIONS OF “19” PERSONS

On July 13, the military regime announced that it has executed “19” persons. Among the executed figured Major Sisaye Derg member and chief of the Political and Foreign Affairs commission, General Getachew Nadew, military governor of Eritrea, seven individuals accused of “economic sabotage”, seven others accused of “leading the country into a bloodbath” (actually a junta monopoly!), two of taking “bribes” and one for “selling state secrets.”

To begin with all evidence points out that the number of executed goes up to 75–81 of whom many were arrested workers, students, etc. Secondly one is obliged to go deep into the reasons for these executions as the junta is a known liar and as it has a habit of mixing leftists and rightists and executing them together under the label of “counter revolutionaries.”

Meison leader Haile Fida, left;
with Negede Gobeze,
in Europe in the early 1970s.

The execution of Sisaye manifests the instability that grips the Derg at such a high level of its power-holders. Though Sisaye, a well-known rightist, was rumored many times to be in the process of preparing a coup d'etat, it seems unlikely that he actually attempted one as the Derg wants to make us believe. Sisay's fate was sealed when he came out in open (in a latest Derg meeting) and uncompromising opposition to the alliance between Major Mengistu (chief of the Derg) and the Haile Fida led intellectuals grouped around the “All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement”, a reformist outfit. Thanks to the backing of Major Mengistu, the Haile Fida clique not only started a purge within the military and the bureaucracy but was filling these vacant posts with its own loyal people. As ministers, political commissars, directors, executives of the powerful “Peoples' Organizing Office”, the Haile Fidas were becoming a threat to Sisay and his group. Their Peoples' Organizing Office was making his political commission powerless. They were sending his elements within the Derg to foreign countries on the flimsy pretext of “political education courses” (Sisaye's assistant, lieutenant Bewketu Kassa, refused to go to Moscow for such an education and is now in hiding). Major Kiros member of the Derg and reactionary head of the “zemetcha” (Campaign of students to teach in the rural areas), was also opposed to the Haile Fida group.

There is no doubt that Major Sisaye was a trusted man of the Americans. When Kissinger visited Kenya, Sisaye talked to him for three hours in the Nairobi Continental Hotel. No doubt they must have discussed the chronic instability of the Derg. America, which plays a double game of fully supporting the Derg and also trying to stabilise it via a coup from within it was no doubt symphatetic to the Major. All in all then, Sisaye's elimination is a victory for the Haile Fida group who have utilised the occasion to continue the purge of all the elements opposed to them. Within the Derg itself, the contradictions sharpen and become concretised between the colonel Atnafu and Major Mengistu groups.

In fact, it is reported that the seven civil servants executed under the charge of leading the country into a bloodbath are pro-Atnafu elements. All are Gojjame Amharas, and Atnafu (who is from Gojjam himself) have been known to use regionalist sentiments to find backing for himself. Reports of other pro-Atnafu elements are also coming in.

The death of General Getachew Nadew seems to have been precipitated by his support to the demand of soldiers in Eritrea who refused to fight and called on the Derg to find a peaceful solution. In fact, the general had brought such a message to Addis Abeba prior to his execution. Though politically a rightist, he was claiming to support the soldiers' demands. As to the other seven who were executed on charges of economic sabotage (for having kilos of red pepper) were added to the list of execution for colour. Some of them were mere guards of stores, one was an old man who rented a store to a merchant, one other was the son of a merchant who had escaped. These people, whom the Derg presented as rich traders were so rich that a collection of funds has been initiated at the Mosque in the market area for their bereaved and destitute families! The person executed for “selling state secrets” was an unemployed who had earlier been demoted (from Major) and expelled from the Army by the Haile Sellasie regime for no other reason than for having sold secrets if the state to a foreign country!

Considering the frequent executions that the Derg carries out from time to time (openly and in secrets), it may seem justified to think that it consults a witchdoctor who advices it to engage in such a practice to exorcise all problems! However, these executions are dramatic affirmations of the intense problems that the Derg faces. It is gripped with a developing mass struggle that in turn fuels and accentuates the internal contradictions of the Derg itself. Sisaye's execution may give space to Major Mengistu but is a poisoned atmosphere. The latitude of manoeuver is restricted by the masses who have entered the political scene with conviction and unity since February 1974 and are NOT at all disposed to assume secondary roles. The mounting repression against the masses show that the Derg's so-called programme has failed, it means that its alliance with the traitorous intellectuals led by Haile Fida has not brought it any solace. It means that we shall witness more executions in the near future as a result of the internal power struggle of the Derg.

Unlike the reformists, we do not have worries or nightmares speculating as to whether it will be the body of Major Mengistu or that of colonel Atnafu that will be riddled with bullets. We shall continue the struggle against the whole fascist batch and imperialism. If we have anything to add to this it is to caution the progressive world about the practice of the junta of killing known reactionaries together with revolutionaries and labelling the whole of them as “counter revolutionaries.” In november 1974 (when it executed feudalists along with more than six democratic soldiers and officers) when it executed Tadesse Birru and student leader Melese Tekle, recently in Agare when it killed militant Zematch student along with feudalists, the junta has shown its sly manoeuvre to cover up its anti-revolutionary actions and dupe the international progressive forces. Such forces, who should expose and attack the repressive junta, need to remain vigilant.

— End of original articles —

NOTES:

Sisaye or Sisay is Major Sisaye Habte, who was referred to in a previous post.

Haile Fida was the leader of the All-Ethiopia Socialist Movement, or Meison, which we have discussed here at great length. Long active in the Ethiopian Student Movement in Europe, he returned to Ethiopia after the 1974 revolution, opened a left book shop, and began to act as a political adviser to left-leaning members of the Derg; he was a renowned Oromo linguist. Meison joined the Derg's POMOA, and became instrumental in guiding the repression of EPRP. When Meison fell out of official favor in 1977, Haile Fida went underground. He was captured and executed by the Derg in 1978.

Colonel Atnafu Abate was Vice Chairman of the ruling junta, the PMAC, with Mengistu Hailemariam. He has been briefly discussed in previous posts. At this juncture, 1976, the PMAC was led by non Derg-member General Teferi Bente. Teferi was to be killed in early 1977 when Mengistu seized control of the government. As predicted here, Atnafu and Mengistu eventually came to blows: Atnafu was killed by Mengistu later in 1977.

Tadesse Birru was an Oromo nationalist, a General in the Ethiopian Army under Haile Selassie. He was imprisoned by both the Emperor and the Derg for his activities, and executed in 1975.

SOME THOUGHTS FROM ISH:

One of the major revisionist narratives of post-revolutionary Ethiopian history is that the EPRP initiated the violence that ultimately consumed its urban strength and leadership, and therefore bears the brunt of responsibility for the massive bloodletting that was shortly to follow. It's been pretty clear to me from the course of my research that while EPRP may be accused of escalating the violence, or of unwisely pursuing an unwinnable urban guerrilla strategy, the EPRP was absolutely responding to the Derg's consistent use of brute force to inflict its will. These articles, published in advance of the EPRP's decisions to commence military action against the Derg and to violently retaliate against the pro-Derg civilian leftists like Haile Fida's Meison — who seemed, by the way, to have been more than instrumental in picking out targets for government repression — clearly document an already extant pattern of lethal force...by the Derg, not the EPRP.

The political assassinations had actually commenced in November of 1974 when the Derg executed dozens of officials from the previous governments and the ranks of the nobility, adding in a few of its own members for good measure. Setting aside the ongoing military conflicts in Eritrea and the various localized peasant and national minority uprisings that continued to background the first few years of the revolution, the military regime showed an understanding of the utility of violence. The EPRP members executed along with the others in July 1976 were not the first EPRP members to be killed by the Derg, and they certainly wouldn't be the last.

What these articles also document, is that the military government was itself riven with internal conflict, and violence was a way of resolving those internal contradictions with a certain finality. Ironically it was to be a war with external enemies, the Ogaden war of 1977–78, that would ultimately swing the balance of popular support in the Derg's favor, and suppress for at least a while internal dissent within the regime.

Ethiopian red peppers..the motive
force of revolution?

Here's a fascinating sidebar to the story that Abyot reports. (Well, fascinating to me anyway because I am the world's biggest fan of hot pepper!) In researching the events described in these articles, I came across an article from the New York Times which reported on the execution of General Getachew and went on to describe the role of red pepper, alluded to by Abyot, in the Derg's summer 1976 repression. The article was written by Michael T. Kaufman, and entitled “Ethiopian Regime Puts 18 to Death, Charges Plotting.” It was published on July 14, 1976. Here's an excerpt:

“The refugees, mostly university students who fled what they described as harassment and repression by the military, rulers, say that the execution of some persons charged with the hoarding of red pepper underscores the council's inability to arrange effective food distribution to the urban centers despite one of the most bountiful crops in Ethiopian history.

Peasants in such fiercely independent regions as Gojam are reportedly refusing to harvest fields except for their own needs as a way of protest against what they view as Government interference with traditional cultural and religious practices.

The refugees say that in the last three months an underground group, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party has managed through unions and commercial organizations to get control over the sale and distribution of red pepper, a key ingredient in the preparation of the Ethiopian national dish, watandnjeri, a spicy, curry‐like stew.

The refugees say that the clandestine party had organized the distribution of pepper to villages but had withheld it from the army. They believe that the announced executions of the hoarders was a council attempt to quash the protest.”

The Abyot articles mention the Derg's relationship with the United States. I also checked in with Wikileaks for how these events were seen from the viewpoint of the US Embassy. An Embassy cable from July 23, 1976 reads in part:

“CIRCUMSTANCES SURROUNDING EXECUTIONS ARE STILL UNCLEAR (AND MAY WELL REMAIN SO) INCLUDING REASONS WHY DIRG CHOSE EXECUTION ROUTE RATHER THAN LESS DRASTIC MEASURES. MOVE OCCURRED AGAINST BACKDROP OF FRUSTRATION OVER INTERNAL POLICY FAILURES INCLUDING DISASTROUS OUTCOME OF "OPERATION RAZA" (PEASANT MARCH), PROBLEMS WITHIN AIR FORCE AND AIRBORNE, REPORTED DEMANDS BY SECOND AND THIRD DIVISIONS FOR A RETURN TO CIVILIAN RULE AND PEACEFUL SETTLEMENT OF ERITREA PROBLEM, LACK OF PROGRESS ON ERITREAN NEGOTIATIONS, SEVERE INFLATION AND SHORTAGE OF SOME IMPORTANT FOOD COMMODITIES IN URBAN MARKETS, AND INCREASED DOMESTIC OPPOSITION FROM THE CLANDESTINE MARXIST GROUP, THE ETHIOPIAN PEOPLE'S REVOLUTIONARY PARTY (EPRP)….SEVERAL SOURCES HAVE TOLD US THAT THE SEVEN WHO WERE EXEUCTED FOR "PLOTTING AGAINST THE REVOLUTION" (REF B) WERE MEMBERS OF THE CLANDESTINE, ANTI-DIRG ETHIOPIAN'S PEOPLE'S REVOLUTIONARY PARTY. ALL OF THEM APPEARED TO BE NORTHERNERS, WHICH IS CONSISTENT WITH WHAT WE ARE TOLD IS THE ETHNIC SOMPOSITION OF THAT MARXIST GROUP. TWO OF THE SEVEN, THE ASNAKE BROTHERS, WERE EDUCATED IN VETERINARY MEDICINE, ONE IN THE US, THE OTHER IN EASTERN EUROPE.”
 
The embassy cables go on to speculate at great length about ethnic conflict within the Derg.

There was clearly some massive mutual ambivalence between US imperialism and the Derg. Nominally, relations were good: some time around this period the US and the Derg agreed to a massive arms deal, which in the event conveniently failed to be consummated before the Derg's 1977 turn to the USSR. Oddly I think the US embassy's general observations bely the EPRP's suggestion that the Derg was a “neo-colonial” regime. While the US embassy was obviously always looking for evidence of communist meddling, their attitude to the military regime is pretty clearly advanced apprehension: they don't talk about the Derg like it was some American creature, a suggestion that historical evidence certainly doesn't validate. Anyway the cables continue to be fascinating reading.

The Ethiopian revolution was about to take a drastic turn. Popular support for EPRP was certainly at a high watermark. Unfortunately, Abyot's predictions about future violence was to be more accurately prescient than its revolutionary optimism about the instability of the Derg and its faltering popular support.

Revolutionary Agitation Inside the Ethiopian Air Force, 1975

EPRP: Provisional People's Government Through Armed Struggle

I am pleased to post an extraordinary document below. It is the text of a long leaflet written by revolutionary soldiers within the Ethiopian Air Force in late 1975, as translated from Amharic and published by the Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Party's foreign section in the journal Abyot in 1976. In the tradition of the Russian Bolsheviks, whose agitation among disaffected rank-and-file Russian soldiers in the waning days of the First World War was a crucial part of the revolutionary effort, the EPRP here addresses soldiers with high-level political arguments reflecting the remarkable tenor of the times.

I have included the original introduction and clarifying edits from the Abyot staff below. I have retyped this from the published manuscript, and with a couple minor exceptions, not attempted to add any of my own editing or corrections.

Following the original text, reproduced here in full, I will add some reference notes on unfamiliar terms and names, and offer a few thoughts of my own analysis. —ish

——

“Voice of the Air Force” and the Struggle of Democratic Soldiers.

From ABYOT, Vol. 1, No. 2, January 30, 1976

The struggle of rank and file soldiers and progressive officers played a significant part in the February revolution. Even though, this movement has been recuperated there are still persistent indications that the struggle is continuing within the armed forces for a democratic and socialist society. The number of progressive officers from the Engineering Unit, Army Aviation, Body Guard, etc executed by the Derg testify to this. Truly, the democratic current within the soldiers has a long way to go; but there is no denying that the continuing mass struggle is accentuating the polarisation within the armed forces itself. Beyond and above the rumors of coup attempts and internal power struggle within the Derg, there is an agitation, weak but persistent, within the armed forces for the same demand as the popular masses. Despite the bloody purges the soldiers and democratic officers have made their opposition heard. Such is the case of the anti-junta leaflet distributed by members of the Army Division fighting in Eritrea, in which they expose and oppose the junta's war there. Below, we present a translation of the leaflet distributed clandestinely by by the democratic elements within the Ethiopian Air Force. Though much of the biting irony and forceful tone of the document is lost inevitably through translation, ABYOT believes that it will give a good insight of the developing current within many units of the Armed Forces and show the isolation of the junta.

“VOICE OF THE AIR FORCE”

ONE CAN’T REPEATEDLY CHEAT THE AIR FORCE

The member of the Air Force, united with the oppressed Ethiopian masses (the proletariat, peasantry, progressive students and teachers, oppressed soldiers) has played a significant role in the popular revolution that has been going on since February 1974. The Air Force still struggles and will continue to do so.

During this time [February - ABYOT] the Air Force, along with the struggling comrades, demanded — long before the Derg proclaimed its government — major rights including:
1. democratic liberties to the oppressed masses;
2. the establishment of a revolutionary provisional government.

However, since the Derg was obsessed with power it swore that "the military will return to the barracks as soon as the people are organised and we hand them power". The Derg also started to propagate that to allow democratic liberties will give the reactionaries the chance to dupe the people. This propaganda of the Derg was able to dupe for a short period of time. Meanwhile, the Ethiopian masses, who had understood the necessity of democratic rights in order to organise the people, strengthened their struggle demanding full democratic rights (free speech, press, freedom to organise, assemble) for the oppressed, and dictatorship over oppressors; the people struggled to be organised by intellectuals who come from their midst (who have the masses' confidence) and to take over power. The Air Force, on its part, demanded the adoption of socialist democracy.

However, the Derg, though it still continued to trumpet that "we will go back to the barracks as soon as the people get organised to take power",

1. proclaimed anti-democratic, anti-organisation and counter-revolutionary laws that denied the basic rights that are crucial for organisation;
2. based on these proclamations it massacred many progressives and arrested countless others;
3. instead of organising the unorganised, it dissolved existing mass organisations (CELU, Teachers' Association, students unions, peasant associations), arrested or killed their leaders
4. within the Air .Force it· (Derg) arrested the progressives like Yigezu;
5. it killed progressive students and Zematchoch whom it villified as "reactionaries"; it arrested them en masse;
6. ignoring the opposition of the Air Force, it went ahead to squander money on a square [the "Revolution Square" which was built by the junta at huge cost —ABYOT] while the masses suffered from the famine; it, again ignoring the opposition of the Air Force, spent money on new uniforms for soldiers in an effort to buy their allegiance;
7. it has unleashed its security agents over the masses and imposed on them a fascist regime like Franco of Spain and Salazzar of Portugal.

Understanding this, refusing to be a colonialist over one's own peoples, affirming its oneness with the masses, the Air Force has said NO to the junta's rule. However, the Derg believing wrongly that the Air Force will not bother about the masses once its interests are kept, considering us as mercenaries, as people who do not care about the masses, it (Derg) tries to allege, that the opposition of the Air Force is motivated by “the internal disagreements between ·officers and others”. And with an underestimation of the Air Force, the Derg speaks separately to officers and others [in the A.F. — ABYOT] acting as "a mediator between husband and wife. All this is to cheat us like innocent children the Air Force that has fully opposed their (the Derg’s) rule.

Hence, from now on, as we have fully understood the situation and as we love our country and class comrades more than. any stage character (clown) we affirm that the Air Force will never be tricked by the sweet words and fake smiles of a hundred actors of the likes of Major Sisaye [he is a top member of the Derg and a former Air Force officer known for his ultra-fascist tendencies — ABYOT].

We shall deal below with the reasons for the present attempt (by the Derg) to divert our attention from national issues to inter Air Force ones·by analysing the origin, nature and solutions for the contradictions·in our midst. At present, while we have risen up to oppose the fascist proclamations made, in the name of the ·revolution, against the masses and the Air Force, Major Sisaye and likes are flocking here [to the Air Force base at Bishoftu —ABYOT] uttering one nonesense after another in the belief that the maintenance of the internal contradictions in the Air Force will be advantageous to them.

TPLF/EPRDF rebels capture Bishoftu Airforce Base in 1991

This means that they intend to practice their divide and rule techniques by making sure that the internal problems keep us from following the crimes they commit at the national level and push us to concentrate on battling within ourselves. Now that we have rise up understanding the suffering and injustice prevailing in the country and realised that the oppression and injustice we suffer inside (the Air Force) is just a part, and a small one at that, of the overall fascist oppression existing in the country, and now that we have up together with our class comrades — workers, peasants, progressive intellectuals and students — they (the Derg) want to separate us from our class brothers, to make us "reconciled" even for a short time and to make us continue to bomb and support their fascist massacres (of the masses) by making us believe that the other sections of the oppressed masses are as “free” as we in the Air Force. This attempt reminds us of the attempt made by General Mulugeta [Chairman of the High/Military/Security Commission, a reactionary organisation set-up by the then prime minister Endalkatchew Makonen to control the soldiers' movement —AB] to push us to sacrifice ourselves and the people in defence of a monarchy that the masses hated and wanted removed. Similarly, the Derg at present is trying to make us support it while the masses want it removed and hate it (the Derg). We have fully realised that this attempt is a trap to make us act against the masses!!

The contradictions that exist within the Air Force are, at present, as follows:

1. between officers and others;
2. between soldiers (officers included) and civilian employees of the Air Force;
3. between the Air Police and Airmen, between technicians and cadets.

Of all these, the first one is primary and antagonistic. And this is because the officers and the others stand for quite different and contradictory interests. If one satisfies his interest it will inevitably be at the expense of the others.

The officers, with the exception of a few progressive ones, consider the other soldiers as human animals (beasts) employed to carry out their orders. They consider them ignorant, stupid, incapable of thinking or giving opinions. On the other hand, the officers consider themselves as angels, as learned (philosophers), as those whose orders should always be obeyed because all that they say and do are at all times and places correct, as those whose words are always to be believed as they never "lie"!! If an officer eats with other lower-rank soldiers in one mess hall, if he sleeps with them in one compound... he considers himself degraded/profaned. If soldiers with lower ranks enter the officers' mess hall the officer considers himself and the mess hall profaned. Such is the Air Force officer, the human angel living separately in a special compound. This is the reality that no amount of denial can hide or wish away.

In a society divided into classes, the ruling and oppressed classes have their own distinct outlooks (ideologies). While the ruling class in our Force considers us, the oppressed, in the manner described above, we the oppressed have also our own outlooks on the rulers/officers. We say the officers are human, we say that they (despite their decorations and baseless self-aggrandisement) are in many cases inferior to lower rank soldiers, be it in work or knowledge. We say that the lower-rank soldiers are as human as any other. With the exception of a few paid agents and reactionaries, we all believe this to be true. In fact, officers are reactionary and contra change. As such, lower-rank soldiers oppose the divine respect accorded to these reactionaries and demand the abrogation of the special privileges accorded (hospital, lodging, assignment, gasoline) to these anti-change officers. The soldiers say that to obey anti-revolution officers is to be counterrevolutionary oneself. This is correct. Hence, the lower-rank soldiers (NCOs) say: “let the angels who do want to bear our hardships and who do not want to eat on the same table with us return to the country of the angels”!! They say: “let us administer ourselves by electing for ourselves and by ourselves those who have the capability, the dedication and the knowledge to lead us”.

This contradiction cannot be solved separately from the objective situation that exists in Ethiopia. It can only be solved, and to forget this is foolish/utopian, when a genuine socialist revolution is made in Ethiopia and only when the present army (structure/set up, etc) is destroyed and a new one built. Aside from the contradictions with the officers all the other contradictions within us are now antagonistic, they can be solved in a democratic way.

With the exception of a few reactionaries, all of us NCOs, civil employees and progressive officers within the Air Force demand the implementation of the following demands so that we can solve our own minor differences and struggle together with our class comrades for liberty, equality and a scientific socialist revolution:

1. Demissew and his likes (officers) who say that they have gone to the Soviet Union to learn how to form a political party should stop declaring that "democratic liberties should not be accorded to the masses during revolutionary times." They should stop their deceitful actions because we know fully that they want to cling to power under the pretext that the "masses are not still organised."

We know (and we did not have to voyage to the Soviet Union to know this) that "a revolution without an organisation and an organisation without democratic liberties" cannot just come about. "Revolution is a festival of the oppressed", and we know quite clearly that popular democracy is necessary (crucial) during the time of revolution. HENCE WE DEMAND THAT DEMOCRATIC LIBERTIES BE ACCORDED TO THE OPPRESSED MASSES: (emph. added)

2. We have heard that these persons taking courses in the Soviet Union have erased from Marxist books what Marx and Marxists have said on (a) the need to destroy the army set-up by the oppressing classes and build a new (people's) army and (b) the incapability of soldiers to lead the socialist revolution. Our intelligent·philosophers (!) have made this revision on the ground that ''Ethiopia's revolution is different from all other revolutions"! Bravo socialists!! But this is not socialism.

WE HAVE REALISED THAT THE DERG'S REGIME IS NOT SOCIALIST BUT FASCIST. If it was not so how does one account for, at least, the problems caused by the reactionary officers within the Air Force? The workers, peasants, progressive students and intellectuals as well as oppressed soldiers are struggling to recuperate the rights that the Derg forcefully deprived them. The masses are struggling in an organised manner. Hence, the Derg should immediately stop its attempts to make us believe that the soldiers are the vanguard of the socialist revolution, and it should cease its attacks against the struggling masses whom it accuse of "greedily vying for power" or “of sabotaging the revolution". It is the Derg that is greedily vying for power, it is the Derg that is sabotaging/reversing the revolution. Power, belongs to the masses and it is the masses who are demanding to have power, to have what is justly theirs. It is the Derg that is vying for power and to deny this or blame the people instead of the Derg is like blaming the mother for the father's mistakes.

3. The Derg should stop telling us to obey "our superiors" by claiming that "popular discipline should exist" or that "in the Soviet Union also there are those who are superior and those who obey orders". The Derg dries for discipline, while it assigns to high positions for reactionaries like Demissew, officers who were arrested during the February Revolution, anti-revolution officers like the Air Force general and the agents of the C.I.A. Popular discipline can exist and popular decisions passed in a democratic way can be put in practice only when our superiors are officers who are progressive, who-are elected democratically and whose interests are not contradictory to ours. Otherwise, we say NO. We refuse to conspire and act against the revolution and the revolutionaries by allying with counter-revolutionaries!!

4. WE DEMAND THE REJECTION OF EXPANSIONISM THAT THE DERG TRUMPETS and all such blatant declarations. Major Sisaye's statement that "the Derg is not opposed to Djibouti's independence but will not allow it to be member of the Arab League" is an expression of such expansionism. By independence we understand the right of the people to decide its destiny freely, and thus Sisaye's statement not only manifests expansionism but also a contempt for (underestimation of) intelligence/understanding.

5. To proclaim one fascist law after another over the people and to slaughter individuals.who present revolutionary ideas/options and at the same time to declare "tell us your problems, ask us questions” is no more than an invitation to present ourselves (sheepishly) for sacrifice. Hence, if democratic discussions are really desired, all the present anti-democratic, anti-people and anti-organisation proclamations must be repealed/revoked. Prisoners like Yigezu Benti (Air Force), the labour union leaders, the teachers' association leaders and progressive zematch students should be immediately released.

6. PEASANTS AND WORKERS SHOULD BE ARMED so that the revolution can be victorious, so that they can control their localities and so that they can put an end to the activities of feudal bandits. LANDLORDS SHOULD BE DISARMED. The Derg should stop asking us to bomb whole villages on the grounds that there are bandits.

7. WE DEMAND THE IMMEDIATE DISSOLUTION OF THE DERG AND THE FORMATION OF A REVOLUTIONARY POPULAR PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT MADE UP OF EXISTING POLITICAL PARTIES, LABOUR UNIONS, PEASANT ASSOCIATION, TEACHERS' UNIONS, STUDENTS UNIONS AND OPPRESSED SOLDIERS.

The struggle of the Oppressed Soldiers and the Broad Masses will be Victorious!!!
(NB — the above document was distributed at the end of NOV/75)

— end of original document —

EXPLANATIONS:
Derg — a committee of military officers that seized government during the course of 1974. At this time Ethiopia was administered by a junta, the PMAC or Provisional Military Administrative Council, run by two Derg officers as vice chairs (Mengistu Hailemariam and Atnafu Abate) and a non Derg member as head of state, General Teferi Bente.

Zematch, Zematchoch — The Zematch was a national development campaign begun at the very end of 1974 where thousands of urban teachers and students were sent to the countryside to uplift the peasants as the Derg rolled out its reforms. The Zematch students proved to be unruly, and a fertile breeding ground for revolutionary opposition. The Derg attempted to abort the Zematch, executing hundreds of students. Returned campaigners became a mainstay of the EPRP's Youth League, EPRYL.

Major Sisay Habte was a member of the Derg. He was executed along with several other officers in mid-1976 after what the Derg claimed was a coup attempt. It's not clear to me if there were substantial policy differences between Sisay and the rest of PMAC.

CELU was the Confederation of Ethiopian Labour Unions, a major force during the revolutionary year of 1974; by the time of this writing it was in the process of being effectively dominated by the EPRP.

Demissew — I think this refers to Derg member Lt. Demissew Kassaye, who was tried by the Meles government after the fall of Mengistu for crimes committed during the Red Terror. Despite the officially allied relationship between “Socialist” Ethiopia and the United States at this time, hundreds of members of the military including the dwindling numbers of Derg cadre were sent to the Soviet Union for political training starting in 1975.

Djibouti is of course the former French Somaliland; the last colonial holding of France on the African continent. A strategic port claimed variously by both Ethiopia and the Republic of Somalia, at the time of this writing it was slated for independence, which was finally achieved in1977.

SOME ANALYSIS FROM ISH:
I was really excited to read this document. It is important evidence of several things: first, the high political sophistication of participants in the Ethiopian revolution, especially of course, the EPRP which produced it. Critics have derided the EPRP as nothing but the children of the upper classes running amok in a situation above their heads: but clearly their involvement in the ranks of the military and the labor movement belies that view.

The writing is matter of fact, clear and patient; it's also notably better than the cliched triumphalist left-speak that often crept into later writings of the EPRP diaspora, heavily influenced by the sects of the North American New Communist Movement.

Like the EPRP, the Russian Bolsheviks
addressed class conscious soldiers but
they did not use the army of the old state
as a vehicle for seizing power.
Flyer from 1917.

Second, the EPRP actually had a consistent and revolutionary point of view in advocating mass democracy through a civilian government as a path to transforming the democratic revolution into a socialist revolution. The critique leveled against the Derg and its supporters herein is solid, well based in Marxism-Leninism, and convincing in opposition to the self-serving cynicism and rationalizations of the Derg and its Soviet and civilian left advisors. It is extraordinary to me that the EPRP's call — perfectly clear here — for revolutionary socialist democracy was overlooked by most of the world left, who passed it over in favor of claiming revolutionary precedent in the actions of a military junta which had set itself on top of the unfolding popular uprising. This leaflet's derision of the Derg's cynicism is biting and, I think, correct. It makes me shake my head that there are left tendencies that today, decades later, continue to uphold the Derg; the Derg which would began to bloodily uproot the EPRP from Ethiopian society just a few months after this revolutionary leaflet was circulated.

My research into the EPRP's activities in the labor movement has showed me something similar to this leaflet's perspective: how different the EPRP's orientation was to that of the Derg and by extension, the Ethiopian left who attached themselves to the Derg looking for leverage over the revolutionary process. The EPRP's class orientation within the military is as clear as it was in the labor movement: the EPRP is appealing in this case not to the officer corps but to “oppressed soldiers” to join the mass movement. The EPRP actually expresses faith in the organizing potential of the popular masses rather than in attempting to create state institutions to control and steer them. For this they earned the reputation of being “anarchists,” an insult which ought, from my point of view, to make suspect the ideological revisionism of the Soviets and the Derg supporters who rushed in to give provide ideological backing for the Derg's close grip on state power. It seems absolutely true that the revisionists were terrified of the people in revolutionary motion, and could think only of creating institutions of control over the mass movements.

One of the more controversial positions of the EPRP here is that the Derg was not only undemocratic but “fascist.” In a country that was actually occupied by the Italian fascists before World War Two, I think it would be useful before dismissing the EPRP's line here as utterly fantastic, to consider what this word means in the Ethiopian context. And it really should be noted that the Derg was very quick to solve issues of political conflict with the brute finality of simple violence, state repression, and execution. I would like to delve further into the EPRP's analysis here in the future, as some critics have made appropriate observations about the ramifications of calling the Derg “fascist” in the coming showdown between the Party and the government.

It's hard to avoid seeing that the then-Marxist-Leninist EPRP correctly and presciently diagnosed the key challenges for a revolutionary Ethiopia: both of those — popular democracy and the national question — proved to be the undoing of the Derg's regime in the 1991 civil war that finally removed Mengistu from power. They're arguably the key issues in post-Derg Ethiopia today as well.

The EPRP produced a number of clandestine journals and leaflets: eventually possession of these materials was often an instant death sentence from the “Red Terror” death squads. I'm deeply grateful that Abyot preserved and translated this one.

Symbolic Confusion - Lenin’s Legacy

Pro-Derg rally in Meskel Square, probably 1984

 “It is still incredible to me that the RRC’s [Relief & Rehabilitation Commission, an Ethiopian government agency] most difficult task was convincing our own leaders of the very existence of a widespread famine that was now swallowing up the entire nation. But their sights were set solely on upcoming anniversary celebration. Throughout the country, red flags and pictures of Mengistu, Marx and Lenin were being distributed.... The usual slogans were posted everywhere: ‘The oppressed masses will be victorious!’ ‘Marxism-Leninism is our guideline!’.... Preparations for the celebration were in full swing, including the phony elections for the newly-formed Marxist-Leninist Party.... Hundreds of North Koreans were in Addis decorating the city. They had been invited during Mengistu’s recent visit to North Korea, where he had been impressed by the colorful ceremonies and meticulously planned parades. Money was poured into new buildings, highways, conference halls, and a huge statue of Lenin in the center of Addis. There was no mention of famine anywhere except in my office.” —Dawit Wolde Giorgis, former RRC head, writing in 1989 about 1984, in Red Tears: War, Famine and Revolution in Ethiopia (pp.134-135)

Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mengistu? Workers Party Conference, 1980s

“What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarising it.”—V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution, quoted in “Down with all Revisionist Distortions Against the Ethiopian Revolution, in the pro-EPRP journal Forward, published by the World-Wide Federation of Ethiopian Students, February 1977.

Pro-Derg rally, probably May Day 1977. Civilian left contingent with portraits of Stalin, Lenin, Marx

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was of course the Russian revolutionary who successfully led the Russian October Revolution of 1917. After decades of revolutionary organizing, his wing of the Russian socialist movement emerged triumphant after years of repression and setbacks. His Bolsheviks had rejected the social-patriotism that virtually destroyed the socialist movement during the first World War, and fought their way to dominance after the February Revolution overthrew the Russian emperor or Tsar. When the Bolsheviks emerged triumphant after October at the head of the world's first socialist country, a world communist movement grew like wildfire around the strategical, tactical and philosophical expansion of Marxism that Lenin used to lead the oppressed and working peoples of Russia to victory. Lenin died in 1924, only a few years after the triumph of October, and it's from that moment that Marxism-Leninism appears as the professed ideology of communists around the globe. It is also from that moment that the seeds of future revisionisms sprout.

Huge poster of Lenin overlooks
pro-Derg rally, 1970s

It's too complicated to address here in detail, but numerous rifts and divisions appeared in the communist movement over the coming decades. Lenin’s Communist Party successor Stalin, confronted by a hostile world and to the need to transform the new Soviet Union into a self-reliant power that could resist counterrevolution and imperialism, lead the communist movement for a while, often subjecting the movement to turns necessitated by the foreign policy needs of Russia. Trotsky's defection in the late 1920s spawned a whole new wing of the movement, and Mao’s innovative road to revolution in China in the 1930s and 1940s ultimately led to another wing.

By the time of the Ethiopian revolution in 1974, competing streams of communist thought all claimed the mantle of Marxism-Leninism, and most pointed back to the same inspirational volumes of Lenin’s oeuvre, printed in competing editions in Moscow, Beijing and clandestine printshops around the world. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that not everyone who calls herself a communist actually means the same thing, and here is the challenging thing about revisionism: people with diametrically opposed politics pretend to use the same words and images to justify their actions. 

“Marxism-Leninism eventually became the new reigning orthodoxy both inside the USSR and its allied communist parties. However, it was no longer a vibrant theory of revolution, but a state religion, a dogma and infallible science used to justify the requirements of whatever the policy the leadership needed it to. Soviet Marxism-Leninism was deterministic, mechanical and economistic.” — Doug Enaa Greene writing on the history of revisionism in ‘The Final Aim Is Nothing’ in Links, International Journal of Socialist Renewal

Mengistu's office in Addis Ababa,
occupied by TPLF fighters in 1991

It then becomes a question of subjectivity to interpret who is actually applying — or synthesizing — Lenin’s ideas to make a revolution, and who is using them as a justification for something else altogether.

When an army led by the Tigrai People's Liberation Front entered Addis Ababa 25 years ago this month and overthrew the Derg's fifteen-year rule, they marched into Mengistu's palace office to reveal a wall of Leninist mementos and communist souvenirs. Clearly Mengistu professed a love of Lenin. But Mengistu had also been engaged in a war of annihilation with others who similarly professed a love of Lenin and an adherence to his ideas.


“Combating every brand of opportunism — be it revisionism or dogmatism, ‘is a question of extraordinary, indeed of primary, importance’ to all Marxist-Leninists engaged in the struggle for true democracy and socialism. After enumerating the many episodes in the long history of arduous struggle waged by the Ethiopian people against internal and external enemies, namely feudalism and western imperialism led by US, ABYOT (vol. 2 no. 7) reminds its readers of the emergence of a fresh enemy in the arena of the Ethiopian democratic revolution, the Soviet hegemonists and their cohorts from Cuba and East Europe.

Feature on Lenin in the pro-EPRP
publication Goh (Dawn), 1975

‘The EPRP did not start to to fight the Moscow counter-revolutionaries only at the time they took the side of fascism and stood against the Ethiopian revolution. When the EPRP was founded it declared that revisionism constitutes a very grave danger and is the main one to the international communist movement. Consequently, the EPRP consistently fought against revisionism both inside and outside the party....’

In a number of its publications, especially in its official organ DEMOCRACIA, the EPRP has been widely teaching the masses the danger posed by the Soviet bureaucrats to the Ethiopian revolution... The supply of arms, ‘experts,’ interrogators, etc. and the diplomatic support the USSR is giving to the crumbling fascist state cannot be isolated from the nature of today’s ‘Soviet’ state. ABYOT describes the ‘Soviet’ Union as a ‘country where democracy has been stifled. It is a country where a clique of bureaucrats rule with iron hands in the name of the working class. It is a country where the working class has no say either in the running of the government or the industries. It is a country where the people are muzzled, where genuine Marxists are hounded....”—from ‘Soviet Hegemonism Exposed,’ in the pro-EPRP journal Forward, WWFES January 1978

Lenin quoted in the pages of EPRP's Abyot, February 1978

By all accounts, the idea of Marxism-Leninism was introduced to the the military Derg by civilian leftists who came from the same largely student-based revolutionary milieu as the EPRP.

Lenin’s ideas were brought to Mengistu first by the likes of Haile Fida and Sennay Likke. Mengistu and his fellows were largely career military officers, isolated from the ideas spreading in the student movement. Indeed while many Ethiopian revolutionaries spent their formative years radicalizing at American universities, Mengistu spent a period in training in the 1960s at US military bases in the American south. Only after “Socialist Ethiopia” was already established, did Derg cadre begin interacting with the Soviet Union, many being sent for education and training in the USSR and Eastern Europe. By 1977, U.S. imperialism had pulled back its support of Ethiopia, and the Ethiopian government needed a strong ally, which it found in the Soviet bloc. It is, of course, left to the observer to decide who best manifested Lenin’s ideas in the course of the Ethiopian revolution.

Soviet propaganda: “Young Ethiopians study the
Russian language, the language of Lenin.”

“It cannot be too strongly maintained that... that the Social-Democrat’s [how communists referred to themselves at that time] ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.” —V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done, 1902

A few weeks ago I posted the story of the EPRP’s role in driving the CIA out of the Ethiopian labor movement. Here's a coda to that story that I think suggests something fundamental about the revisionist attitude toward working people, far different than Lenin's.

This account was written by Valentin Korovikov, Pravda's Africa correspondent, in 1979:

“The bankrupt Confederation of Ethiopian Labour Unions had to be replaced by a new Trade Union Association. The law emphasized that in their political and production activities the unions should be guided by socialist principles and by the overall programme for the country's progressive development.... The new labour legislation showed that the military government was taking practical steps to secure the interests of the working people and to improve their life, even though the underdeveloped Ethiopian economy offered few chances for this. The proclamation of workers’ rights helped to expose the demagogy of the ultra-left and anarchist groups that had sought to depict the Dergue as the anti-democratic dictatorship of a military junta.”—Ethiopia: Years of Revolution, p.51

And so the workers’ struggle was reduced to a law that promoted production, banned strikes, and replaced independent working class organization in favor of a top-down state-allied association.

Toward the end of his life, relatively young but in ill health, Lenin was well aware of the challenges to come: the existential challenge of the Soviet Union to survive, and the challenge of keeping the revolutionary flame burning not only in the world movement but inside of Russia itself. In one of his last essays, Lenin worries about the tendencies to entropy and bureaucratization:

“We have been bustling for five years trying to improve our state apparatus, but it has been mere bustle, which has proved useless in these five years, of even futile, or even harmful. This bustle created the impression that we were doing something, but in effect it was only clogging up our institutions and our brains. It is high time things were changed....

25 years ago: Addis Ababa's Lenin statue toppled
in the aftermath of the TPLF victory. Ironically the core
of the TPLF also described themselves as ‘Marxist-Leninists’

In all spheres of social, economic and political relationships we are ‘frightfully’ revolutionary. But as regards precedence, the observance of the forms and rites of office management, our ‘revolutionariness’ often gives way to the mustiest routine. On more than one occasion, we have witnessed the very interesting phenomenon of a great leap forward in social life being accompanied by amazing timidity whenever the slightest changes are proposed.

This is natural, for the boldest steps forward were taken in a field which was long reserved for theoretical study, which was promoted mainly, and even almost exclusively, in theory..... I think that this has happened in all really great revolutions, for really great revolutions grow out of the contradictions between the old, between what is directed towards developing the old, and the very abstract striving for the new, which must be so new as not to contain the tiniest particle of the old....

The general feature of our present life is the following: we have destroyed capitalist industry and have done our best to raze to the ground the medieval institutions and landed proprietorship, and thus created a small and very small peasantry, which is following the lead of the proletariat because it believes in the results of its revolutionary work. It is not easy for us, however, to keep going until the socialist revolution is victorious in more developed countries merely with the aid of this confidence, because economic necessity, especially under NEP, keeps the productivity of labour of the small and very small peasants at an extremely low....” — from Better Fewer, But Better, 1923

This essay, and the whole thing is worth reading, shows Lenin deeply aware of what was happening inside the Soviet government, and with the hindsight of history we can see that everything he talks about in fact came to worsen, not improve. It's not hard to see how the Soviet view of Leninism evolved into something different than the fiery struggles of working and oppressed people for their own emancipation in which it developed, into a kind of roadmap for following a correct institutional model of state control and development. Certainly the cultural revolution in China, winding down by the time of the Ethiopian revolution, represented an attempt to confront this same tendency, harnessing another interpretation of Marxism-Leninism to inspire ongoing revolutionary will and mass democratic participation. Judging by today's China, revisionism won that round as well.

But the ultimate tragedy of revisionism is that it seems to cast its spell mostly only on its own true believers, and the result is a poisoned well. How, now, to present Lenin's bold, insightful and — I believe — actually still relevant and correct, ideas in the context of an Ethiopia where Lenin became the face of oppression?

Workers Party CC member and RRC head Dawit Wolde Giorgis visited a refugee shelter in the town of Korem during the 1984 famine:

“There were a few who still had the strength to shout at us in anger and despair, ‘Why are you coming to see us? We've had so many visitors, why doesn't Mengistu come to see us?’ As if to mock them, even here [in the famine-struck region] the streets were decorated for the upcoming celebration. Heroic posters of Marx and Lenin frowned down upon them in the streets and even inside the shelters. Some, having nothing further to fear from the authorities, were bold enough to point a bony arm at the red flags and shout, ‘That cloth should be covering our bodies, not hanging in the streets! This isn't our wedding, it's our funeral...it's not a time to celebrate it's a time for grief.... Where is the bread? Where is the bread?” —Dawit Wolde Giorgis, op cit, p. 140

The legacy of the Derg's “Leninism”

EPRP vs. Meison, 1978

Meison contingent in a pro-Derg rally; possibly May Day 1977

Below I am pleased to reprint an editorial from Abyot, the English-language publication of the Study, Publication and Information Center of the Foreign Committee of the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Party, from the February–March 1978 issue. The editorial is a bitter, angry polemic against the All-Ethiopia Socialist Movement, known as Meison or Meisone, the EPRP’s primary competitor on the civilian left. This editorial is really evocative of the political discourse of the time.

Meison sided with the ruling military Derg against the EPRP, and its members were among those leftists who trained the military cadre of the Derg in Marxist-Leninist concepts. Meison seems to have integrated itself into the security apparatus of the state, and at least according to the EPRP and its survivors, the initial phase of the “red terror” was directed by Meison instigators working inside that apparatus, and correspondingly, EPRP urban military operations were often directed against specific Meison members who assisted the forces of repression. This polemic dates from the period after Meison and the Derg fell out, when Meison was added to the list of targets of government “red terror.” The conflict between EPRP and Meison, rooted in political differences first nurtured in the student movement abroad that evolved into lethal sectarianism after 1974, was the central tragedy at the heart of the early years of the revolution. Yet, it must be said that the true nature of the Derg is best revealed by its evolving relationship with the civilian left. Shortly after this period, the Derg turned against all remaining civilian left groups, leaving Colonel Mengistu’s party Seded to transform itself into a state socialist party. Meison leader Haile Fida, mentioned in this text, was eventually executed by the Derg. Despite the optimistic tone at the end of this article, by this time the majority of the EPRP leadership in urban Ethiopia had already been brutally eliminated.

I will follow this posting up soon with some polemics from the Derg itself against Meison justifying its expanded campaign of repression. I have not yet sourced English-language materials of this time period from Meison itself. Indeed, unfortunately the memoirs published by surviving Meison veterans seem to have appeared only in Amharic.

(Note: I have not corrected typos or spelling inconsistencies from the original typed and mimeographed text. In a few cases where the original was cut off or hard to read, I have made an educated guess. By “social imperialism” and “social imperialists,” this text refers to the Soviet Union and its advocates.—ISH)

MEISONE’S “NEW” TUNES FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE

True enough Meisone never pretended to be a party at first. As its name implied, the “All Ethiopian Socialist Movement”, it posed as a movement and if it ended up being a movement confined to the imperial palace and some government institutions, it is no one’s fault but that of its reactionary line and its anti-people leaders like Haile Fida, Negede Gobeze and some others like Kebede Mengesha and Daniel Tadesse.

In the early days of the February Revolution there was a small group in Addis Abeba which used to put out leaflets, later to be called “Voice of the People”, supporting the demand of the EPRP and the broad masses for the formation of a popular provisional government. However, when Haile Fida returned to Ethiopia after a prolonged sejour in Europe, along with his tetinue, this group underwent a transformation. The local elements who supported the popular demand and stood against the junta were purged. The reformist and reactionary group of Haile Fida took over and later emerged as Meison (or the AESM). Starting with full support to the regime while being outside of the regime and moveing fast to giving full support (in practical sense) to the regime by being the actual functionaries of the regime, the Haile Fida group emerged as the most ferocious enemy of the struggle of the oppressed Ethiopian peoples.

Meisone argued that “the Derg is progressive” and should be given support by revolutionary forces. Hiding behind the slogan of “critical support” the Haile Fida group allied itself with an anti-democratic regime that would have been critically and firmly exposed and combatted. Leaving aside the reformist claptrap about “critical support” let us look briefly if the Meisone grouping did employ this. Primarily, a party or group that allies itself with a regime under the watchword of “'critical support” must have its own independent existence, must have a strong base and must be critical of the regime’s anti-democratic actions while extolling and supporting its progressive ones. We do not subscribe to this opportunist fantasy but that's what its exponents say. Meisone talked a lot about critical support but in practice it not only supported each and every anti-people actions of the Derg but it initiated these repressive acts itself.

Meisone was the organiser, the ideologue, the propagandist and the executioner for the Derg. Meisone filled the bureaucracy, run the so-called Provisional Office for Mass Organizational Affairs (POMOA), etc. At a critical time when the junta was besieged by the mass revolutionary movement and cornered, Meisone mercenaries came to its rescue and beautifying the fascist regime through “Marxist” phrases carried out a wide and extensive campaign of confusion and repression. Together with the full and unconditional backing to the DERG (so much so that there was absolutely no difference practically between Meisone positions and that of the Derg) they undertook the physical liquidation of militants and progressives from all sectors.

Specifically:

1. Meisone undertook a wide campaign against the formation of a provisional peoples government and struggled for the maintenance of the military regime. It labelled this popular demand for the formation of the provisional peoples government as a “reactionary petty-bourgeois demand.”
2. Meisone not only pushed for the banning of the Confederation of Ethiopian Labour Unions, the Ethiopian Teachers' Association, the Ethiopian Women Coordinating Committee, etc but it zealously worked to form a pro-Derg, Derg-controlled trade union, women’s union, etc.
3. Meisone spearheaded the ferocious villification campaign against the EPRP and labelled the EPRP as an “enemy organisation that must be destroyed by force imeediately".
4. Kebede Mengesha, Chairman of the .Addis Abeba POMOA and central Committee chairman of Meisone was the first to propose the carrying out of house to house searches in Addis Ababa. His proposal presented to the Derg in a written form were later applied causing the loss of so many lives amidst the people.
5. Long before the Derg declared total war against the EPRP (September 1976), the central committee of Meisone gathered to vote death sentence on a list of EPRP members and sympathisers. The list was forwarded to the Derg and served as the first base for the massive man-hunt carried in Addis Ababa and other places.
6. The members of Meisone organised within the POMOA and within the Kebeles carried out direct repression on the masses. The examples are many but suffice it to mention that the central committee member of Meisone, Negede Gobezie, led the assault on assembled university students and personally killed scores of students. Abdullahi Yususf, a leading Meisone member, brutally tortured and killed scores of workers and students in Harar, Dire Dawa, etc.
7. On the eve of May Day 1977, using an anti-Derg demonstration as a pretext, Meisone armed groups roamed according to a predetermined plan killing more than 1000 people, majority of whom were young anti-Derg militants.
8. The Meisone leaders evolved the Peasant March project on Eritrea and the EPRA areas in Tigrai in 1976. This project, code named Raza Project was defended by Meisone leader Negede Gobezie (in a talk to Ethiopian Ambassadors in Bonn) as a revolutionary action against “reactionary separatists”.
9. When the Derg members restructured the Derg and reduced the dictatorial powers of Mengistu and tried to curb the killing spree undertaken by Meisone, Haile Fida and his clique schemed and plotted with Mengistu and stage a coup d’état in the palace and executed Major Moges, Teferi Benti and others.

Meisone worked hand in glove with the dictator Mengistu. Their policy was not critical support but uncritical and unconditional backing. And this is hardly surprising as the dictator was implementing the actions drafted and worked out by Meisone. Meisone wanted to be declared the legal and only party ruling the country. On this, Mengistu had other ideas. His group, Sede [sic], was being inflated by forced and whole sale “recruitment.” The contradiction between the dictator and the Haile Fida Group grew and it was not long before Meisone fell like a house of cards. The social imperialists who used Meisone as a bridge to establish good relations with the Mengistu regime knew quite well in which plate they could find their goulash and so remained allied to Mengistu and are helping him establish his “party.”

Meisone was not a group within the camp of the revolution. It had slipped from reformism into outright crime against the people. Meisone members were killers, informers, anti-people vermins. As such, they have been subjected to the wrath of the people and have paid for some of their crimes.

Nowadays, a central committee member of Meisone who has escaped to Europe, the killer and torturer Negede Gobezie, has been giving press interviews in which he has tried to sing “new” tunes and to make it appear as if Meisone had been championing the demards of the masses! Let us briefly look at this “new” position of Meisone (or what has remained of this group).

1. Meisone now claims that it fights for the democratic rights of the masses and the immediate promulagation of these. The truth is that when the EPRP raised the slogan of “democratic rights to the masses without any restriction”, Meisone led the attack against this revolutionary demand and labelled it as a reactionary demand of “anarchists.” One can refer to the various newspaper articles written by Meisone members and the various issues of the Meisone paper, “Voice of the People,”, to see that this group stood against the demand for democracy and favoured the continuation of the military rule without any democracy till the “masses become conscious”'. In fact Meisone argued time and again that democracy did exist under the Derg’s rule.

2. Meisone now claims that it was opposed to the peasant march (Zemetcha) against Eritreans, etc. However, the truth is that the conflict between the regime and Meisone was only as to who (Meisone or Seded) will lead the peasant militia. Making this amply clear, Meisone commented in its organ, “Voice of the People” (No. 59, june 1977), in the following terms:

“Meisone is not a.petty bourgeois pacifist or peace worshipping organization. Thus it supports all the actions in Northern Ethiopia or other areas taken to liquidate reactionaries and to safeguard Ethiopia’s revolution and unity.” (This was written explicitly to counter the “rumors” which, according to Meisone asserted that Meisone was against the peasant march on Eritrea, etc)

3. Meisone now claims that it supports the Eritrean people's right to self-determination and independence. This is another lie. Meisone has been attacking the EPRP as “reactionary” because the EPRP supported the right to independence of the Eritrean masses. Meisone had been crying “death to Eritrean separatists!” in Abyot Square and in its publications. In fact the aforementioned issue of “'Voice of the People” explicitly states on page 3 that “Meisone does not support the separation of Eritrea...and Meisone believes that the solution to the Eritrean question is not independence but the strong unity of the nationalities of Ethiopia.”

Meisone’s new tune is, in short, as false as its previous affirmation of critical support and other related hodge podge. It is another attempt at deception by a group which has taken deception as principle. Meisone tried to play with another devil in the form of Mengistu and found out that the dictator and his followers are as cunning and as devoid of morality as them. Meisone is a victim of its own crimes and if the regime it has tried to strengthen turns against it, we can only say that they got what was coming to them. The Meisone rif raff brought social imperialism into the country and has now found out that the Kremlin criminals have abandoned them and glued themselves to the military thugs. Thus, Meisone may try to wear anti social imperialist masks just as it is trying to e[illegible] the mass demands which it had been fighting against so ferociously just a few months before.

Meisone did a lot of damage to the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed masses. Meisone caused the death of countless invaluable militants of the EPRP and the broad masses. Meisone no longer exists as a viable [word cut off] let alone a movement. However, the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed masses continues to rage unabated. The EPRP continues to grow stronger to deal heavy blows to the enemies of our people. The fate of Meisone shows all opportunists to what end they will come and that all their machinations are futile and will not succeed to destroy the EPRP and the mass revolutionary struggle.

“Against the social-traitors, against reformism and opportunism, this political line can and must be followed in all spheres of the struggle without exception. And then we shall win the working masses. And with the working masses the Marxist centralised political party, the vanguard of the proletariat, will take the people along the right road to the triumph of proletarian dictatorship, to proletarian instead of bourgeois democracy, to the Soviet Republic, to the socialist system.”—LENIN