50 years since the Ethiopian Revolution

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Ethiopian Revolution, which began as an uprising against the semi-feudal despotism of Emperor Haile Selassie but would go much further, culminating in the abolition of capitalism in the country. In this article, Ben Curry, gives an account of these dramatic events, and explains the complex processes that shaped the revolution’s course.

The article was orginally published as part of issue 45 of In Defence of Marxism magazine, the quarterly theoretical journal of the Revolutionary Communist International. Subscribe and get your copy here!

This February marked the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Ethiopian revolution of 1974, which overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie, putting an end to an 800-year-old dynasty that claimed to trace its roots back to the Biblical King Solomon.

In the course of the events that followed, not only was the autocracy crushed, but so too were landlordism and capitalism. And Ethiopia is not the only country in which this took place; nationalised planned economies were established in a series of countries across Africa in the postwar period, including in Angola, Mozambique and Somalia.

However, instead of providing the spark for a continent-wide socialist revolution, these regimes took on the same deformed characteristics as Russian Stalinism. By the 1990s, the process went into reverse and capitalism was restored.

Today, the crisis-wracked capitalist system offers no perspective of development or progress. In fact, it threatens the Horn of Africa, and indeed the entire continent, with barbarism. Only the world socialist revolution can offer a way out. Revolutionary events like those of 50 years ago in Ethiopia, with all of its peculiarities, contain enormous lessons, won at a bitter price, for the young generation of revolutionaries in Africa and around the world today.

Modernising a feudal state

Historically, Ethiopia was more-or-less unique among the nations of Africa insofar as it avoided direct colonial occupation by a European power – with the exception of the short period of occupation by fascist Italy. But from its inception, Ethiopia was moulded economically, politically, and even in its borders, by the extreme, external pressure of imperialism.

The modern Ethiopian nation-state was forged in the late 19th Century, amidst European imperialism’s ‘scramble for Africa’. It emerged as a complex patchwork of ethnicities, nationalities, languages and religions over which the Amharic Christian Emperor and his clique ruled with the utmost brutality and without the slightest regard for his subjects.

In 1916, the young Emperor Haile Selassie acceded to the Ethiopian throne. Selassie was no fool, and he understood that to withstand being directly absorbed into some European empire, his feudal regime had to modernise, and so he set about a programme of reform.

Indeed, a layer of the old aristocratic elite shared his vision. Called the ‘Japanisers’, they dreamed of remedying Ethiopia’s underdevelopment by emulating the feats of Meiji Japan in the second half of the 19th Century. At that time, the feudal Japanese state had succeeded in forcing the development of a powerful domestic Japanese capitalism by copying the industrial and commercial practices of the West. The problem was that Ethiopia’s ‘Japanisers’ hoped to achieve the same feat some 50-100 years later, when the world was dominated by a handful of advanced imperialist powers.

Ethiopia’s development was extremely late. By the time of the 1974 revolution, the country remained extremely backward – far more backward even than Russia had been in 1917.

In 1916, the young Emperor Haile Selassie acceded to the Ethiopian throne / Image: public domain

Under Ethiopian feudalism, the four fifths of the population were subsistence peasants. Almost all the arable land was owned by the aristocracy and church. Largely concentrated in the cooler highland regions, the peasants paid huge tributes or rents to their local feudal aristocrats, in some cases, up to 50 percent or more of their produce, as well as corvée labour and military obligations.

Illiteracy stood at 93 percent, average life expectancy was 33 years, and annual per capita income was just US$60, one tenth of that of contemporary Algeria – reflecting the fact that much of the peasantry did not even use money.^[1] As in mediaeval Europe, a traditional feudal pyramid of military obligations, with the Emperor at its apex, formed the basis of the state. The aristocracy therefore enjoyed significant power.

But on the basis of Selassie’s reforms, this aristocracy was increasingly supplanted by a modern state bureaucracy and army staffed by salaried professionals, paid for by foreign aid (in the postwar period, principally from the United States) as well as by cash crops grown for export, such as coffee. To fill the professional roles in the state and encourage the growth of domestic industry and development, the state also assisted young people from humble backgrounds to go abroad for education at foreign universities.

Whatever might have been hoped for, the result was not the creation of a developed, liberal capitalist nation. Selassie’s reforms left feudal land relations untouched. Their destruction was absolutely essential for ending the country’s overwhelming backwardness.

The postwar upswing of capitalism led to the ever-more decisive domination of the world market, which crushed the peasants. As they sought to escape slow death from hunger on the land, cities like Addis Ababa grew at a breakneck pace. But unlike other semi-colonial nations, foreign capital had barely begun to penetrate Ethiopia. In the cities too, capitalist development was extremely limited. The urban population of Ethiopia stood at about 3 million out of 32 million by 1974. But the majority of this population were either part of the informal sector, unemployed or lumpen proletarians. The working class was a minority even in the cities. The Confederation of Ethiopian Labour Unions (CELU), drawing upon workers from all sectors, had just 80,000 members. ^[2]

Yet, despite its small size, the proletariat would leave its decisive stamp on the Ethiopian revolution.

And although the Emperor’s reforms didn’t succeed in building a powerful national capitalism, the creation of a modern, bureaucratic state nonetheless served to free him from dependence on the feudal aristocracy. As a result, power became increasingly concentrated in the hands of Selassie the autocrat, resting upon the narrowest of props: the newly formed professional army. It too would leave its peculiar stamp on events.

The revolution of February 1974

Worldwide radicalisation in the 1960s reverberated through Ethiopia as it did everywhere. The students that had been sent abroad to Europe and America to train as functionaries for the bureaucratic state instead came back with radical ideas, influenced by the anti-Vietnam War, Civil Rights, and Palestine solidarity movements – but above all by Maoist ideas then in vogue among many students in the West.

By the 1960s, Ethiopia was a powder keg. Peasant revolts erupted and were crushed in Sidamo, Gojjam, Bale and elsewhere. Many revolts took the form of national liberation movements.

In the postwar period, the United Nations, in all its wisdom, had conjoined the former Italian colony of Eritrea with Ethiopia – without the least regard for the opinions of the Eritrean people. Heroic guerrilla movements were growing among the Eritreans and in the lowlands of the Somali-majority Ogaden in the East.

In Tigray, memories festered of how the Woyanne rising of May 1943 had been defeated by British RAF bombers sent from Aden, and how Selassie’s recently restored regime slaughtered peasants and introduced vicious, punitive taxes five times higher than those of the Italian fascists. ^[3]

Dealing with these peasant insurgencies, and permanently encamped in the hot, arid, mosquito-ridden lowlands from which the guerrillas operated, were the poorly paid rank-and-file soldiers.

Selassie had envisaged a modern, bureaucratic state as a means of keeping up with the pressures of imperialism. But the men who made up the rank-and-file and the lower echelons of the officer corps of his army had their own ideas about Ethiopia’s trajectory. They despised the parasitic aristocracy that lived off the fat of the land without raising a finger to develop the nation.

As early as 1960, a group of officers had launched a coup against Selassie, whose regime they saw as the primary force keeping Ethiopia in backwardness. The coup failed and its leaders were publicly executed. But the mystique of the monarchy was forever tarnished. This was a mere foretaste of things to come.

Already difficult conditions were becoming unbearable for the masses. Whereas in the advanced capitalist countries, the economic upswing of the postwar period allowed certain reforms to be granted by the ruling class, in the so-called third world it was a completely different picture. Everything came to a head with the worldwide crisis of capitalism in the 1970s.

In 1973, the effect of the immense sums extracted from the peasantry by the feudal aristocracy combined with drought to cause a terrible famine in the north of Ethiopia. At least 200,000 people starved to death. The state made a futile attempt to cover up its crime, but scenes of the famine circulated, spliced with footage from Selassie’s obscene 80th birthday celebrations, which opened around the same time with an 80-gun salute and cost $35 million.

In the same year, war in the Middle East provided the catalyst for a global recession. The shock sent oil prices skyrocketing. In a situation that has parallels with the world today, the rapid rise in oil prices led to a 50 percent increase in the price of petrol overnight in Ethiopia.^[4]

Everywhere the movement spread, ‘coordinating committees’ were established spontaneously by workers, students, teachers and soldiers / Image: public domain

It was more than the masses could take. The working class exploded onto the scene. Strikes began breaking out: first among the taxi drivers, who were among those most immediately hit by the fuel price hike. They were quickly joined by radical teachers and students. From here, the strike movement spread like wildfire.

It was soon clear that what had begun was no mere strike wave. It was a revolution.

Economic demands were supplemented by political demands for the right to protest and democracy. Although the movement was at this stage wholly urban, the students began raising the important demand of “land to the tiller”.

From these layers, social unrest spread to every sector of the population. Major riots erupted in Addis Ababa.

The army was not immune. The rank-and-file soldiers suffered the same privations as the workers and urban poor, compounded by discontent at being perennially bogged down in counter-insurgency campaigns in Eritrea and Ogaden.

And so mutinies erupted over pay, pensions and arbitrary and harsh discipline. In one explosive incident, a general was taken hostage by soldiers. The regime had to tread carefully, and in that incident Haile Selassie personally intervened to free the captured general. But upon his release, the same unfortunate general visited a second battalion and was immediately arrested again, and was force-fed grit-filled bread and contaminated water by the soldiers: the same that they were expected to subsist on. ^[5]

Within a couple of weeks, the prime minister was forced to resign. Everywhere the movement spread, ‘coordinating committees’ were established spontaneously by workers, students, teachers and soldiers. In Jimma, the biggest city in Oromia province, the coordinating committee even briefly took power.

These committees were not at all dissimilar to soviets, revolutionary assemblies of workers and soldiers that emerged in Russia in 1905 and 1917. Had a revolutionary party been present in Ethiopia at this time, it would have put the call out to link up all the committees into city-wide, regional and nation-wide committees. It would have naturally invited representatives of soldiers’ coordinating committees to sit jointly with those of the workers. It would have launched a systematic campaign to win over the rank-and-file of the army and, through such connections, to arm the workers. On this basis, such a party could have seized power.

But the Ethiopian working class was only just coming into existence. No such party existed. The students returning from abroad, it is true, had begun to form the nuclei of future mass parties. But they had barely begun to build links with the workers.

In fact, the students did not even possess the conception of a revolution led by the proletariat through democratic organs of working-class rule along the lines of that in Russia in 1917. Instead they clung to the Maoist idea of peasant guerrilla war. If one country seemed ripe to test the Maoist conception of rural guerrilla warfare, it would surely have been peasant Ethiopia. But their schemas were utterly exploded by the events of 1974, which took them completely by surprise.

This was therefore a true baptism of fire for the young Ethiopian working class. With no party capable of organising and bringing clarity to its most advanced layers, it was not able to assume its rightful place at the head of the revolution. In these circumstances, events unfolded in a very peculiar manner.

The rise of the Derg

Through concessions, the Emperor was able to convince the army to return to barracks in March. But just as unrest temporarily settled in the army, the tobacco workers went on strike, and on 8 March 1974 the CELU trade union confederation announced a general strike. Every layer of Ethiopian society that had suffered some oppression or injury came out with their demands. On 20 April, there was a march of 100,000 Muslims through Addis Ababa demanding the right to freedom of worship and an end to discrimination. Even workers employed by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church came out on strike!^[6]

A key demand raised everywhere was for corrupt officials, provincial governors and army officers to be fired. Indeed, the soldiers were only convinced to return to barracks based on the promise to remove hated senior officers. But when, by April, the majority of old officers remained in place, the coordinating committee in the 4th Division of the army began taking things into its own hands. It arrested some 200 senior officials.

But in the months of May and June, the strike movement started to ebb. Without a unifying revolutionary leadership to channel all the streams of discontent, events began unfolding in an uneven manner.

A curious situation now existed in the army. The temporary ebb of the strike wave left the soldiers and junior officers isolated. They were fearful of launching a coup, lest they suffer the same fate as the organisers of the 1960 coup. But they could hardly retreat: by carrying out arrests, they had already gone too far and they feared reprisals.

So committees continued to be extended across the armed forces until, in June 1974, every army unit was called upon by the coordinating committee of the 4th Division to send three delegates (of any rank excluding the hated senior officers of the old regime) to a new body. This body, composed of 106 delegates, referred to itself as the Provisional Military Administrative Council, and was known simply as the Derg (from the Amharic for ‘committee’). ^[7]

Soon, this powerful committee began flexing its muscles. It politely ‘asked’ ministers to carry out this or that request… and the ministers could hardly refuse. The Derg even went to Selassie himself and ‘asked’ the Emperor for permission to ‘work with’ the cabinet to further the unity and development of the country. Selassie assented, and the Derg acquired a legal cover for its actions.

In short, in the second half of 1974, Ethiopia witnessed what has since been called a “creeping coup”, in which the Derg began concentrating more and more power in its hands. Only in September 1974 did it finally announce that the Emperor was deposed, and in 1975 Selassie died in mysterious circumstances – presumably killed on the Derg’s orders.

The Derg had ascended to power.

When army units were initially asked to send representatives to the Derg, most failed to grasp its significance. No doubt those who convened the Derg were just as little aware of where their course would lead. All sorts of accidental elements ended up being represented on it. In some cases, commanding officers sent misfits as representatives to the Derg simply to get them out of the way – and would come to regret doing so. Such were the origins of one Derg delegate, Mengistu Haile Mariam, the future dictator of Ethiopia.

What emerged was a military clique of soldiers and low-ranking officers. But its self-declared right to rule didn’t go unchallenged. In September 1974, sensing that the Derg was consolidating a military dictatorship, the CELU made the call for a hastily organised general strike. But without proper preparation, the general strike failed to materialise and the Derg reacted with repression, shutting down the workplace coordinating committees.

Coordinating committees in the rest of the army – particularly those most sympathetic to the workers in the engineering corp, the airforce and the First Army – also challenged the right of the coordinating committee of the 4th Division to form an exclusive clique around itself. They demanded civilian rule, nationalisation of the land and major enterprises, and economic planning for the country. They too were subject to repression.

But the blows that the Derg delivered to cement its power were not only directed at the left. It also rounded up high-ranking government officials from the old aristocracy. On 23 November 1974, the Derg got its first taste of blood when it executed 60 of its opponents. Most were senior officials of the old regime, but they also numbered Derg members, including its first chairman, Aman Andom. This was a foretaste of violent internal faction fights to come inside the Derg.

But the ruling clique was not satisfied with a few arrests of regime stalwarts. To consolidate its power it had to go further. In early 1975, it took decisive steps to completely break the back of the old ruling class.

Although it had no intention or desire to concede power to the masses, the Derg now rested upon them to deliver blows against the old aristocratic elite and the old state. Land reform was initiated. The land was nationalised and allotted to the peasants on the basis of use. These measures were wildly popular and their announcement brought out hundreds of thousands in demonstrations of support.^[8]

The Derg could not break the aristocracy by relying on the old state apparatus to carry out its orders. It therefore mobilised some 60,000 radical students and teachers and sent them into the countryside to agitate among the peasants to redistribute the land among themselves. The encouragement was hardly necessary, but the measure had the advantage for the Derg of dispersing across the countryside thousands of radical youths whom it correctly perceived as a serious threat to its rule.

It didn’t stop there. Urban housing was nationalised, and so too were the banks, insurance companies and most major industries.

The Derg’s nationalisations went so far that they actually abolished capitalism in Ethiopia – and yet the capital expropriated didn’t amount to a value of more than US$30 million! Of this sum, US$10 million was constituted by the capital of the big British and Italian-dominated banks. The barely-existent Ethiopian capitalist class amounted to a fraction of the rest. ^[9]

What was the Derg?

In an article analysing this process, titled The Colonial Revolution and the Deformed Workers’ States, Ted Grant explained that what was unfolding verified Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, but in a distorted manner:

“The whole essence of Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution lies in the idea that the colonial bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie of the backward countries are incapable of carrying out the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution. This is because of their links with the landlords and the imperialists. The banks have mortgages on the land, industrialists have landed estates in the country, the landlords invest in industry and the whole is entangled together and linked with imperialism in a web of vested interests opposed to change.”^[10]

Therefore, the only revolutionary class in Ethiopia that could seize power and take up the tasks of smashing feudalism, carrying out land reform and modernising the nation was the working class, resting on the support of the peasantry. But the working class would not stop there. It would also have to carry out inroads and expropriations against the counter-revolutionary capitalist class, thus beginning the tasks of the socialist revolution, although these could only be completed on a world scale. Thus, the revolution becomes ‘permanent’.

The EPRP persisted in referring to the regime as “fascist” by pointing to its ongoing repression / Image: public domain

Events were following a similar path to that predicted by Trotsky, but with a twist. In 1975, capitalism and landlordism were smashed in Ethiopia. However, they were not smashed by the organised working class seizing power with a perspective of world socialist revolution, as in Russia in 1917. Rather, they were smashed by a military clique that had leaned on the masses to deliver a killer blow to the deposed capitalists and landlords, but which had also dealt blows to these same masses.

How could this unusual regime be characterised? Here the importance of a correct theoretical approach rooted in the Marxist method looms large.

Tragically, the two main Maoist groups in Ethiopia – the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP) and the All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement (or ‘Meison’, after its Amharic acronym) – failed to understand the nature of the regime. Their mistakes would have catastrophic consequences.

At first, both pointed to the repression of the workers in late 1974 and superficially denounced the regime as ‘fascist’. But then came the revolutionary measures of 1975, which utterly disoriented both groups.

In attempting to characterise the Derg, each latched onto one of its features and arrived at diametrically opposite conclusions. The EPRP persisted in referring to the regime as “fascist” by pointing to its ongoing repression. Meison, on the contrary, turned 180 degrees, pointed to the Derg’s revolutionary measures, and threw their full support behind the junta.

As in the parable of the blind men who encounter an elephant, in which each comes to a completely different description of the animal based on feeling just one part of its anatomy, the Ethiopian Maoists had each identified one side of the regime without grasping its essence. It is a fact that Ted Grant alone understood the real significance of the Derg.

When the revolution broke out in Ethiopia, the working class was too small and without the leadership needed to seize power. But if the working class was weak, the Ethiopian capitalist class was even weaker.

Into this impasse stepped the junior and mid-ranking officers, who seized power and raised themselves above society by balancing between the classes, delivering blows to the masses and to the old ruling class. This is a typical feature of what Marxists refer to as ‘Bonapartist’ regimes, by analogy to the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte, and they tend to emerge when the class struggle arrives at an impasse.

Such regimes, in which the army balances between the classes to raise itself up, became the norm in much of the so-called ‘third world’ in the postwar period. Why? Because similar conditions produced similar results. The old ruling class was too discredited by the chronic social crisis to rule. But the working class lacked the strength or leadership to conquer power. The class struggle thus arrived at a deadlock.

But not every Bonapartist regime is the same.

As Ted Grant explained, the fact that in much of the colonial and semi-colonial world, especially in Asia and Africa, the capitalist state was of recent vintage, was a significant factor. It had not been perfected over centuries, as in the advanced capitalist world. And the capitalist class had proved incapable of cementing the loyalty of the armed bodies of the state, which it could only hope to do by seriously developing the productive forces.

Many lower and middle-ranking officers despised the landlords and capitalists, who consumed everything whilst contributing nothing to national development. Where and when these officers seized power in the postwar decades, they had no reservations about dealing heavy blows to the old ruling classes.

The main imperialist powers could not intervene directly. Precisely at this time, they were being forced to retreat and withdraw from direct colonial rule by the enormous wave of colonial revolutions, and this encouraged many of these officers to take sweeping measures.

In a number of countries, officers’ regimes made serious inroads into the property of the capitalist class: In Egypt, for instance, Nasser nationalised a series of foreign companies, and important resources, including the Suez Canal; whilst in Iraq, the officers nationalised the oil fields and other resources. However, the state cannot mould society completely at will. Every regime must ultimately base itself on some set of property and class relations in society. In these countries, the expropriations never went as far as to abolish capitalism entirely. They remained, for all intents and purposes, bourgeois Bonapartist regimes resting on a capitalist economy, even though the bourgeois class was deprived of political power.

But it was by no means prescribed in advance that similar regimes might not go all the way, completely expropriating the feeble capitalist class.

And this was precisely what happened not only in Ethiopia under the Derg, but also in Syria, Burma and neighbouring Somalia among a number of other countries during the colonial revolutions. Here, with the complete expropriation of the bourgeoisie, capitalism was abolished. Of course, this was no great feat given the feeble character of the capitalist class in Ethiopia. As Trotsky explained: for a lion you need a gun, for a flea, a fingernail will do.

But under these regimes, the working class were merely passive observers and did not exert political power, which is a prerequisite for a transition towards socialism. As Ted Grant explains, there were no soviets or organs of workers’ power:

“In a revolution according to the norm such ad hoc committees and traditional organisations are indispensable. They are a training ground for the workers in the art of running the state, of developing the solidarity and understanding of the workers. After a victorious overthrow of capital they become vehicles for workers’ rule, the organs of the new state and of workers’ democracy.

“But where – as in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, Syria, Ethiopia – the overthrow takes place with the support of the workers and peasants certainly but without their active control, clearly the result must be different. The petty-bourgeois intellectuals, army officers, leaders of guerrilla bands use the workers and peasants as cannon fodder, merely as points of support, as a gun rest, so to speak.

“Their aim, conscious or unconscious, is not power for the workers and peasants, but power for their elite.”^[11]

These regimes could thus be described as Bonapartist. But it was Bonapartism based on state property, not on capitalist property, which had been abolished. These were, as Ted Grant described them, proletarian Bonapartist regimes. And they had for their model the deformed workers’ state in the Soviet Union, from which they differed only superficially.

Other regimes arrived at the same result by a different route. In China and Cuba, capitalism was expropriated at the hands of victorious guerrilla armies. In Eastern Europe, expropriations took place on the orders of the Red Army from 1948. In all these instances, the process may have enjoyed the passive support of the working class, but it lacked its active participation.

It is a fact that Ted Grant alone understood the real significance of the Derg / Image: public domain

The Soviet Union had begun its existence in 1917 as a healthy regime of workers’ democracy, but in conditions of isolation and economic backwardness had degenerated, leading to the political expropriation of the working class by a parasitic, privileged bureaucracy, whilst economic planning remained intact. These new regimes were not fundamentally different to the degenerated Stalinist regime in Russia.

And Stalinism had been massively strengthened with the victories of the Red Army and the Chinese Revolution of 1949. Here were ready-made examples of proletarian Bonapartism that could be copied. The existence of the bureaucratic caricature of socialism in the USSR had a magnetic attraction for cliques of officers all over the so-called ‘third world’ – and its bureaucratic deformations only enhanced its appeal.

After all, ‘socialism’, as it appeared to exist in the form of the Soviet Union, seemed to demonstrate that there was another route for underdeveloped nations, in which society could be developed through a planned economy, whilst allowing a top layer to continue enjoying enormous privileges. As Ted Grant put it:

“A change to proletarian Bonapartism actually enlarges their power, prestige, privileges and income. They become the sole commanding and directing stratum of the society, raising themselves even higher over the masses than in the past. Instead of being subservient to the weak, craven and ineffectual bourgeoisie they become the masters of society.”^[12]

The slightest degree of political independence of the working class is a threat to the interests of the privileged ruling stratum in a proletarian Bonapartist regime, which has no interest in a transition towards genuine socialism. This layer must inevitably strive to crush such opposition where it becomes a serious threat. As such, the EPRP were correct to describe this as a dictatorial regime that was attempting to consolidate itself through repression. As Ted Grant explained:

“Not for nothing did Trotsky explain to the American Socialist Workers Party that, separated from state ownership of industry and the land, the political regime in Russia was fascist! There was nothing to distinguish the political regime of Stalin from that of Hitler except the decisive fact that one defended and had its privileges based on state ownership while the other had its privileges, power, income and prestige based on the defence of private property.”^[13]

This difference in property relations is key. As such, by equating the Derg with ‘fascism’, and opposing it with an abstract notion of ‘democracy’, the EPRP made a political blunder, undermining its own ability to challenge the Derg. The dictatorial methods of the Derg, to the extent they were applied to the masses, were hated. But to the extent that they were used against the feudal lords and capitalists they were not only extremely popular but historically progressive. Abstract talk of ‘democracy’ left the EPRP open to accusations by the Derg that it was a counter-revolutionary fifth column that stood up for the democratic rights of the counter-revolutionary classes.

The theoretical errors of Meison meanwhile led it to sink far, far lower. In raising up only the revolutionary actions of the Derg and lending it full support against its enemies, Meison subordinated itself to the petty-bourgeois officers, and would find itself complicit in all the crimes of Mengistu’s terror when the latter sought to consolidate his power by smashing the revolutionary youth.

The rise of Mengistu

When the Derg rose to power, there was very little that united the body and it was liable to become a very unstable ruling clique. It certainly did not claim to have any affinity to Marxist ideas, which were utterly alien to its members. To the extent that the officers were united by an ideology, that ideology was a nationalist one, summed up in the Derg’s slogan: “Ethiopia Tikdem” (“Ethiopia First”).

Mengistu saw an opportunity to raise himself by seeking out the support of the Soviet Union / Image: public domain

The Derg soon split over many questions, including over how to deal with the growing mass influence of Meison and especially the EPRP. The latter had grown enormously. It enjoyed the support of the big majority of the youth, it captured the leadership of the CELU, and by all accounts its influence was growing rapidly inside the army too. Other differences were also emerging inside the Derg, such as how to deal with the Eritrean national question.

Amidst these differences, personally ambitious individuals also manoeuvred, among whom the arch-manoeuverer was Mengistu. For pragmatic and not principled reasons, Mengistu saw an opportunity to raise himself by seeking out the support of the Soviet Union, as well as by craftily manipulating differences among the student-led Maoist groups.

As radical students returned from exile, Mengistu’s faction came into contact with Meison members, and entered into cooperation with them. Meison foolishly believed they could ‘influence’ Mengistu, whom they even gave lessons in what they passed off as ‘Marxist-Leninist’ theory! In fact, all Mengistu took from them was enough rhetoric to become an effective demagogue. It was he who was using Meison, whose cadres he bureaucratically installed in state positions, in neighbourhood committees known as kebeles, and even in ministerial posts.

By February 1977, resting on the support of Meison and the kebeles – as well as Soviet backing – Mengistu felt strong enough to make a grab for power. He massacred his opponents in the Derg, reducing it to little more than a rubber stamp committee for his personal dictatorship.

To consolidate this dictatorship, his next move had to be the liquidation of the revolution, and particularly its vanguard. That meant wiping out the mass Maoist parties. A campaign of murder was brought down on the heads of the EPRP and the nationalist guerrillas in what Mengistu and Meison perversely referred to as the ‘Red Terror’. Disgracefully, this utterly counter-revolutionary terror enjoyed the full backing, not to mention technical assistance of the Soviet Union, including phone tappers, high-tech surveillance equipment and intelligence experts.^[14]

Army units loyal to Mengistu, and armed mobs drawn from the lumpenproletariat, connected to the kebeles and led by Meison cadres, were unleashed against the EPRP.

Mengistu’s reign of terror resulted in the deaths of thousands of young people / Image: public domain

On May Day 1977, the EPRP organised a May Day rally in Addis Ababa. The regime responded with machine-gun fire that left over 1,000 dead. Notoriously, before they could retrieve their bodies from the hospital morgue, mothers and fathers were charged for the cost of the bullets that riddled their children’s bodies.

Mengistu’s reign of terror resulted in the deaths of thousands of young people – the flower of the revolutionary generation. It is hard to imagine that any regime has exceeded Mengistu in terms of the variety and cruelty of torture methods that it applied against its victims. ^[15]

Survivors of that period claim that there was barely a man or woman living in the cities of Ethiopia in that period, between the ages of 15 and 40, who did not endure torture in one of the regime’s jails between 1977 and 1979.

By the middle of 1977, the EPRP scarcely existed any longer in the urban areas. Those of its cadres that survived fled to the countryside.

Having rested on a layer of the lumpenproletariat to smash the EPRP, a second wave of terror was unleashed in late 1977. This time, the main target was Meison itself. This was a much simpler police operation. Meison had no underground organisation, its members were well known to the regime. It was quickly finished off.

By 1979, Mengistu officially made Ethiopia a one-party state. He had adopted all of the methods and external paraphernalia of the bureaucratic regime in the Soviet Union.

But having decimated the revolutionary youth, the Mengistu regime had killed off precisely that layer of the population that might have fought to preserve the revolution’s gains. It was a weak regime that only became weaker as centrifugal forces took hold across the country.

From civil war to collapse

By the end of the decade, the silence of the graveyard descended on the revolutionary movement in the cities. Those who continued to resist the regime did so from guerrilla bases in the countryside. Many of the youth that fled the cities linked up with so-called ‘Marxist-Leninist’ nationalist guerrilla movements.

Mengistu’s Stalinist regime proved to be completely incapable of solving the tasks begun by the Ethiopian revolution, above all the national question, which can acquire explosive potential, particularly in former colonial and semi-colonial nations where the bourgeois-democratic revolution has never been completed.

Mengistu’s Stalinist regime proved to be completely incapable of solving the tasks begun by the Ethiopian revolution / Image: public domain

Not for nothing had the radical students in the 1960s borrowed Lenin’s refrain in describing Ethiopia as “a prison house of nations”. In Russia before 1917, the national question took on similarly acute proportions. It required the most sensitive policy on the part of the Bolsheviks to convince the workers and peasants of the oppressed nationalities that their interests were wholly aligned with those of the Russian workers, and to weld workers of all nationalities into a united revolutionary movement.

To convince the Latvians, Ukrainians, Caucasians, Jews and other minority groups that they were serious about ending the barbaric national oppression of Russian Tsarism, the Bolsheviks promised to respect the right of nations to self-determination, up to and including secession.

In Ethiopia, the Eritreans had been carrying on a long struggle for independence going back to the time of Selassie. National-ethnic guerrilla movements had begun erupting since the 1960s, and had grown with the revolutionary awakening of the peasant masses. Somali insurgents had risen up in Ogaden, and from 1975, radical students had established the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which has continued to play an important role in Ethiopian politics to this day.

A healthy workers’ regime based on Leninist principles could have averted civil war. In fact, the main demand of the Tigrayan insurgents was not even for secession but for autonomy, which could easily have been granted. But the national policy of Lenin and the Bolsheviks was utterly alien to the Derg.

The officers, with their nationalist policy of ‘Ethiopia Tikdem’, were used to imposing their way. They resorted to dictatorial methods to crush the national aspirations of the Eritreans, Somalis, Tigrayans and others.

Mengistu’s ‘Red Terror’ inflamed the situation further and convinced the oppressed nationalities that this regime was little different to that of the Emperors. Bureaucratic methods in Mengistu’s land policy further inflamed nationalist tendencies among the peasants.

With the nominal aim of solving the problem of extreme parcelisation of land, the regime launched a campaign of ‘villagisation’ – forced resettlement of peasants in uncultivated regions, often in harsh environments. In many instances this process was bureaucratically bungled, with peasants receiving none of the support they were promised. But more often than not, this hated policy proved merely a fig leaf for a cynical counterinsurgency policy aimed at resettling peasant communities that sympathised with the guerrillas.

The completely reactionary game played by the Soviet Union amidst the horrors now unfolding in the Horn of Africa should also be stated here. Moscow was happy to help Mengistu rise to power. But prior to this, the USSR had been allied with Major General Barre’s regime in Somalia and the Eritrean guerrillas fighting Selassie’s autocracy.

The Somali regime had also expropriated the capitalists and landlords, and it was fundamentally no different to that of the Derg. But it too pursued a narrow nationalist line and, armed by the USSR, Barre prepared for war to annex Ogaden from Ethiopia.

Moscow tried to reconcile its two allies, initially advocating for a federation of Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia. A socialist federation of the Horn of Africa may indeed have been the most desirable outcome for the people of the region, but the fact that narrow nationalist cliques controlled both Ethiopia and Somalia precluded such an outcome.

What did the Russian bureaucracy do? They simply threw their old allies overboard and switched sides, aligning with Mengistu. It was a move devoid of principles, merely designed to serve their geopolitical interests, with Ethiopia the bigger ‘prize’ for Moscow.

Russian backing didn’t save Mengistu’s regime. An isolated revolution in the conditions of backwardness then prevailing in Ethiopia would always have faced enormous difficulties, despite the advantages of a planned economy. But under Mengistu, isolation was compounded by bureaucratic mismanagement and devastating civil war. This in turn, combined with record low rainfall, led to the horrors of the 1984-85 famine and several hundred thousand deaths. The government responded with further detested waves of resettlement away from the war-ravaged north.

A healthy workers’ regime based on Leninist principles could have averted civil war / Image: public domain

As the eventual downfall of Mengistu’s regime looked increasingly inevitable, the Soviet Union (which had its own problems) withdrew its support in the late 1980s. As the USSR collapsed, an isolated Mengistu, who was never motivated by any principles, attempted to move with the tide, dropping his ‘Marxism-Leninism’ and converting overnight to the powers of the market. Incidentally, so too did the so-called ‘Marxist’ guerrillas that had been fighting his regime in Tigray and Eritrea.

In 1991, Mengistu’s regime met its inevitable demise as the TPLF and its allies swept to power. The same year, Siad Barre’s proletarian Bonapartist regime collapsed in neighbouring Somalia, leading to the collapse of the state, civil war, famine and Islamist insurgency, compounded by US imperialist interference.

More than three decades have now passed since the collapse of the Mengistu regime. The market runs rampant through the Horn of Africa. What has it brought? New, brutal ruling cliques, which have been installed in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia.

For a while, the boom of double-digit GDP growth that Ethiopia enjoyed in the 2000s was hailed as an economic miracle. But that has now begun unwinding, and now all the old wounds are tearing open once more. Unrest; civil war in Tigray; the shadow of famine hanging over the heads of millions across the region; warmongering rhetoric between the regimes. It is not hard to see the future that capitalism is creating in the Horn of Africa: one of terrible misery, mass murder, ethnic strife and hunger. In a word: barbarism.

But there is another path ahead for the people of the Horn of Africa. The whole continent today is a seething cauldron of discontent. The working class, which in Ethiopia was in its infancy 50 years ago, is today stronger than ever – and not just in Ethiopia, but everywhere.

If the workers and youth of Ethiopia can forge a revolutionary party, infused with the lessons of the past, then, in contrast to 1974, they will be able to take up their rightful place at the head of the next revolutionary wave, which will be markedly different from the last.

The conditions that led to the rise of proletarian Bonapartism no longer exist – the bureaucratic, nationalist model of Stalinist ‘socialism in one country’ is dead. It always was a dead end. The next revolutionary wave, if it is to advance, must place power directly in the hands of the working class. No band of officers, no group of intellectuals, no guerrilla insurgents will do it for the workers. That is the lesson. The next wave of revolution must place the working class in power, and pass over into a continent-wide, worldwide struggle to overthrow capitalism and imperialism everywhere.

Then and only then, when the levers of the economy have been seized from the foreign imperialists and their local cronies, can we seriously talk of developing the productive forces, ending national and ethnic strife, and of creating a future free of want, misery and toil for the millions of workers and peasants.

References

[1] The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party Program, printed by the Ethiopian Students Union in North America, 1975, pg 1

[2] A Tiruneh, The Ethiopian Revolution (1974 to 1984), Cambridge University Press, 1993, pg 51

[3] A Bertha, A political history of the Tigray People's Liberation Front, Tsehai Publishers, 2009, pg 54

[4] A Tiruneh, The Ethiopian Revolution (1974 to 1984), Cambridge University Press, 1993, pg 64

[5] ibid. pg 63

[6] ibid. pg 72

[7] ibid. pg 104

[8] ibid. pg 152

[9] ibid. pg 139

[10] T Grant, “The Colonial Revolution and the Deformed Workers’ States”, in The Unbroken Thread, Fortress, 1989, pg 349-350

[11] ibid. pg 355

[12] ibid. pg 345-346

[13] ibid. pg 363

[14] J Wiebel, “The Ethiopian Red Terror”, in T. Spear (Ed.), Oxford research encyclopedia of African history, Oxford University Press, 2017 pg 20

[15] See B Tola, To Kill a Generation, Free Ethiopia Press, 1989