Symbolic Confusion: More Hammers & Sickles

1975 Amharic edition of the EPRP Program

I'm pleased to present another gallery of images from the Ethiopian Revolution featuring the use of the iconic Hammer and Sickle by competing sides in the revolution. Other galleries of images and some explanation of the politics behind these images can be found by clicking the “Symbolic Confusion” label at right. If you click on the images you can see them larger.

Above are the front and back covers from the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Party program, as issued in Amharic on the public announcement of the party’s existence in 1975. The full document can be read in Amharic only on the Ya Tewlid website. Click around for the link to a PDF. This cover bears a grid where someone has used an old-fashioned analog trick for enlarging art for a poster or banner.

EPRP logo from “Abyot”

Pro-EPRP poster, probably USA ca 1975–76

“Long live the worker peasant alliance!” reads the solidarity poster at right.

Back cover of POMOA’s “Abyotawit Ityopya”

POMOA was the “Provisional Office for Mass Organizational Affairs,” the Derg’s office for building support, one might say for co-opting, support among Ethiopia's left organizations. POMOA established EMALEDH, the Union of Ethiopian Marx-Leninist Organizations, in what proved to be a futile attempt at “partybuilding.” EPRP rejected participation in both POMOA and EMALEDH. Meison, Waz League, Echat, and Malerid joined with the military party Abyotawit Seded, though all were eventually serially purged from EMALEDH during the “Red Terror” except Seded. Abyotawit Ityopya was the journal published by POMOA, and this version of hammer and sickle was the one used by EMALEDH.

An Amharic edition of EMALEDH's
“Yehibret Demtse”

An EMALEDH sign featured on an issue
of “Abyotawit Ityopya”

Two more items from EMALEDH: An Amharic issue of their journal (I've previously featured an English language cover of one), and EMALEDH supporters holding up a sign at a rally featured on a cover of Abyotawit Ityopya from 1977.

Below are some further uses of the hammer and sickle. First is an illustration symbolizing unity of worker and peasant, but from the Derg’s perspective, again an issue of POMOA’s Abyotawit Ityopya. The worker and peasant are rather gruesomely using the hammer and sickle to dangle three symbolic corpses, which makes sense since this is from the height of the Red Terror. After that are several militia-themed items from the Derg. First, “Revolutionary Unity Through Struggle” with a fairly modernist design. Followed by a cover of Milisya, the Derg’s militia publication, showing the militia logo incorporating a hammer and sickle. Finally, a photo showing an Ethiopian woman passing under a poster of a worker and soldier bearing a hammer and sickle flag, date unknown. The military mobilizations against the Somali invasion of 1977-1978, and subsequently against Eritrean rebels, proved to be an effective tool for undercutting the civilian left.

With the abandonment of EMALEDH and POMOA and the establishment of the “Committee to Organize the Party of the Working People of Ethiopia” and the eventual founding of the “Workers Party of Ethiopia” by Mengistu in the 1980s, a version of the hammer and sickle went on to become an enshrouded national emblem.

A cover of “Abyotawit Ityopya” from 1976

“Revolutionary Victory Through Struggle”

A cover of “Milisya” from 1979.

I'd like to express my thanks to donors of graphic material.

Symbolic Confusion 2 - Hammers and Sickles

From Abyot, 1978. EPRP, EPRA, EPRYL, ELAMA logos.

The hammer and sickle icon was developed in Russia during its 1917 revolution. The hammer symbolizes the proletariat, and the sickle the peasantry. Like Ethiopia, Russia was a country with vast social forces outside the urban working class, and the Bolsheviks wisely sought ways to symbolically reflect this necessary alliance of power and unity against oppression and exploitation. The hammer and sickle became the symbol of communism, wielded proudly by socialist revolutionaries of every imaginable ideological stripe around the world, and wielded menacingly by anti-communist reaction as proof of communism's authoritarian violence.

While the hammer and sickle was replaced by various socialist movements, especially in developing countries seeking to suggest independence from the Soviet Union, it seems to have become the absolute symbol of the Ethiopian revolution's socialist ambitions.

It was adopted by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party, despite the EPRP's general animosity to the modern revisionist Soviet leadership, and used by their mass organizations like the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Army (EPRA), the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Youth League, and the EPRP's revolutionary trade union ELAMA.

But in altered form, the hammer and sickle was also used by the All-Ethiopia Socialist Movement (Meison), EPRP's main leftist competitor, and by EMALEDH, the Union of Ethiopian Marxist-Leninist Organizations that was an abortive attempt to unite Ethiopia's civilian left behind the Derg. And of course the hammer and sickle was adopted by the Derg itself, as a symbol of its eventual governing face the Workers Party of Ethiopia, and of Ethiopia's general allegiance to the socialist camp.

Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Army logo (EPRA)

EPRP logo per Wikipedia

Meison journal cover, from Red Terror museum

Meison logo per Wikipedia France

Meison logo per Wikipedia

EMALEDH's Yehibret Demts, Feb 1979

EMALEDH float? Pro-Derg rally.

Derg banners and billboards, Addis Ababa

A Trip to the Library

Programme of EMALEDH, 1977

I took a research visit today to the famed Tamiment Collection at New York University. The “Reference Center for Marxist Studies Pamphlet Collection” consists of a substantial pamphlet archive donated to the library by the Communist Party USA’s New York City offices. Since this archive was donated by the arch-revisionist CPUSA, today openly engaged in a discussion of whether to endorse right-social-democrat Bernie Sanders or neo-con Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party primaries for the 2016 election, the Ethiopia portion of this archive is entirely material sympathetic to the Derg, the military committee that hijacked the popular 1974 revolution and ruled with great brutality until it was overthrown in 1991.

Nevertheless, it's a fascinating collection of a few dozen pamphlets — required reading for balanced research — and I'm happy to show a few of the covers here.

Above is the cover of EMALEDH's program from 1977, an English translation of an issue of Yehibret Dimtse. EMALEDH was the first of several attempts by the Derg at creating a united front of civilian left groups loyal to the government en route to creating an official ruling party in the image of the communist parties controlling the other countries of the Soviet bloc. (I will leave for another day any discussion of whether those countries earned their socialist credentials.) Eventually the Workers’ Party of Ethiopia was formed after Mengistu worked his way through and eliminated all competition to his own version of a communist party. The cover of that party's program, from the 1980s, is shown next.

Next are two fascinating pamphlets from “United Progressive Ethiopian Students Union in North America,” apparently a pro-Derg split from the much larger and more dominant ESUNA, which was pro-EPRP. The first pamphlet is a length polemic against EPRP entitled, “Petty Bourgeois Radicalism and Left Infantalism in Ethiopia: The Case of EPRP,” from 1977. I'm guessing that Meison was the actual force behind UPESUNA, and this pamphlet rehashes debates from the Ethiopian student movement going back to the 1960s. The second UPESUNA item also dates from 1977, a periodical entitled “Ethio-Inform” which consists entirely of clips about Ethiopia sympathetic to the Derg from the Soviet Press. 

The cover photo of this piece is fascinating. Above the caption “Revolutionary Ethiopia or Death,” a crowd of Ethiopians carries a Meison hammer-and-sickle banner, a well-known Chinese portrait of Joseph Stalin, and a Chinese cultural revolution-vintage poster of Lenin. It's put together in classic low-tech 1970s leftist style.

“The Men-in-Uniform in the Ethiopian Revolution” from 1978 dates from the period after Meison outlived its usefulness to the Derg, it includes a section accusing Meison of “deserting” the revolution. This pamphlet, about the armies and militias of Ethiopia, is one of several in the collection reflecting the increased nationalism and militarism necessitated by the war against Eritrea and the invasion by Somalia that marked the later part of the 1970s.

“The Ethiopian Revolution (Tasks, Achievements, Problems and Prospects)” is attributed to Senay Likke. It's plain, undated and bears no reference of publisher. Likke was the chief civilian leftist advisor to Mengistu, representing his own group Waz League. He was killed by an EPRP sympathizer in retaliation during Mengistu's 1977 internal coup. Likke was educated in the United States.

Finally here, a pamphlet celebrating May Day, from 1977, issued by the Derg's own information ministry. There was plenty more in the collection, so I'll need to make a second trip!

A reminder that I am looking for archival materials like these, more especially materials in English issued by the EPRP and the sections of the student movement sympathetic to it: publications like Forward, Combat, Challenge, Struggle and Zena. If you have something available, either original, photocopy, or pdf, please contact me. You may leave a comment marked "not for publication" with your contact info and I will get back to you.