IDEOLOGY, CLASS STRUGGLE, AND ETHIOPIAN POLITICS

By Tecola W. Hagos

 [December 1996/ slightly modified on June 25, 2005]

I. Ideology and Change: �Socialism� is not Dead

It might be helpful (for my analysis of the ongoing political struggle in Ethiopia) to bring some perspective on the role of ideology in Ethiopian political structures. It is during the government of Mengistu that for the first time in Ethiopian history a government was instituted pursuant to an ideology. Before that, almost all Ethiopian governments were traditional power structures born out of (then) existing social systems. The few exceptions to this fact might be the case of Gragn Mohammed in the 16th Century, where Islamic religion provided a political ideology that was deliberately instituted; and later in the 17th Century the attempted introduction of Catholicism by Emperor Susneyos might qualify as another attempt at changing existing traditional political structures pursuant to an ideology. Thus, efforts of most Ethiopian liberation movements at the present time need be seen as a positive development to replace the tradition of personalized state power by structuring political power in adherence to an ideology.

At this point, it will be a grave mistake for anyone to conclude that socialist ideas are obsolete and the communist world-view is dead and buried because of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Consider this fact, as expressed by Ralph Nader in one of his Presidential candidature addresses (at Stanford University, October 1996), that a mere three hundred eighty (380) individuals control as much wealth owned by three billion people of the world (counted from the bottom up)! This is a world where billions of dollars is spent to feed pets whereas millions of children are starving and dying in appalling conditions. Living in a world of such extreme cases of greed and poverty as well as frivolity, who can say in his right mind that we are living in an equitable and just world and remain satisfied with the status quo?

Francis Fukuyama, as a too eager modern days Cassandra or Pollyanna depending on your trajectory, penned in his book, The End of History and the Last Man, a book expanded from an article by the same title written in 1989, wherein he declared that Western liberal democracy has won and that is the �end of history,� and everything else after is mere elaboration and semantics. In other words, we are living in the watershed of history, that there can be no new or creative political engagement nor the possibility of meaningful epoch-making change. 

Fukuyama's glossy capitalist world-view at its core equates socialist change with the Soviet Union, and the demise of the Soviet Union to be empirical evidence that socialism does not work. Of course, such reasoning is based on two false premises: a) the Soviet Union was a socialist state, and b) the demise of a single state structure is a conclusive proof that socialism is a failure as a political and economic system. The existentialist philosopher, Sartre, a well informed critic of Marxism and a far more enlightened intellectual than the novice Fukuyama, perceived of the end of history as the coming of age of �ethics� (Jean-Paul Sartre, Cahiers pour une morale, 1983) and not the triumph of the philosophy of greed and laissez-faire. And even that in the indefinite future, no where close to our time or Century. At any rate, Schweickart in his monumental book (David Schweickart, Against Capitalism, 1996) has refuted such premature hooray on the alleged triumph of capitalism and the demise of socialism (communism). Even more important, Schweickart has provided us with an alternative socialist model of economic and political structure that deserves our attention. 

The struggle of oppressed and disfranchised people of the world did not die with the demise of the Soviet Union. In as much as the Soviet Union never truly addressed the political empowerment of workers in its heyday, it will not derail the course of history with its new found love affair with capitalism nor would it deter workers from struggling for their rights elsewhere in the world. The fact remains that Cuba and China are still with us. The Soviet Union was never a champion of the working person, and as a matter of record, the only time there ever existed a government run directly by workers was during the few months the Bolsheviks were in power before they were destroyed by Lenin and his collaborators. The immense value of the Soviet Union was not for its democratic institutions or the promotion of the economic and political power of workers, but for its symbolism and deterrence of the capitalist West from overrunning the world at a time when the world was too backward and uninitiated. On the other side of the scale, the value of the United States was not for its stand for equity or justice, nor for freedom or equality but for its usefulness as a counterweight against immediate annihilation of minority groups and as a place for temporary refuge from persecution by despotic regimes.

What we are observing in the  last two decades of the Second Millennium is not the advancement of liberal democracy but rather the breakdown of civil society everywhere: a deterioration of social responsibility, and the surge of individualism and ethnicity. Both are expressions of negative primordial and primitive urges; the first focusing on the individual's primitive acquisitive nature, and the second on how such individual form anti-social groups in tandem with others and how they relate to such groups.  This deterioration is not limited to the Soviet Union, but is also a fundamental aspect of the reality of Western societies. For example, the United States is going through political and racial fracture with no solution insight, and the end of which would be most disastrous as symbolically expressed in the Oklahoma bombing, on one hand, and a series of anti-people laws issued by the Congress and imperialist policy pursued by the Executive, on the other side. And After 9/11 terrorist attack, the erosion of democratic and human rights with the enactment of The PATRIOT Act is a clear example how far the United States has compromised human rights. The Abu Gharib and Guantanamo Bay Prisons of torture and abuse are clear examples of the corruption of �capitalism� at its worst.

The recent diplomatic effort of the U.S. government to create a rapid deployment force to be used as an intrastate enforcer of peace and stability in Africa is no different from the establishment of a mercenary army aimed at quelling all future revolutions in African nations. This is a time when liberalism is considered to be a dirty concept. The resurgence of Nazism in Germany and fascistic tendencies in Italy, France and Britain all point to the fact that the problem is pervasive and world wide. This world wide phenomenon of excessive xenophobia, unrest and greed might even be the calling (warning) card of the Third Millennium and necessarily a harbinger of future world disasters. In Ethiopia, they have succeeded to train and equip a mercenary force called Age�azi that resembles more like the Tom-Tom-Macoute of Papa-Doc Duvalier of Haiti.

Whether we call it class struggle or aggregation of individualized struggle for political and economic power, such grouping by interest is a human social reality and not some flimsy semantic or word association or construction. Through out history, people have formed groups, pulled by common interest, and have sought protection by being a member of such a group. It will be naive for any one to deny such reality when the evidence is clearly laid out in front of our eyes. Even in the animal world, we see such primordial groupings of a class of predators and a class of preys. What distinguishes the human class aggregation from that of animals is the deliberate nature of the class groupings of the human actors. Although this statement might be seen as a proposition that confused animal instinct with human nature, at any rate the point is made. In an essay of this nature, I will not attempt to reiterate the conceptualization of this reality to the same degree and thoroughness and elaboration by Marx or other philosophers of materialism.

However, on a far more fundamental level, even class interest alone cannot explain adequately the existence of groups. Throughout human history, some groups, although small in number, had welded disproportional economic and political power over a vast underclass. In order to understand the dynamic of power-groups, I believe we have to dig deeper into the recesses of human beginning to have an understanding of the dynamic forces that shaped societies and made civilization possible. It seems to me that it might have to do with two conflicting interests: a) the male urge to have access to mate with as many females as possible and to propagate issues,  and b) the female, as the key of life, wanting to insure the best possible male to father her children. Each had developed unique strategies, and society, as we know it is the result. The female represent tremendous internal personal investment in this drama of life; whereas the investment of the male is on the outside on social power structure. That is why it is a fact that biology is far more entrenched than sociology. Freud alluded, in his books Civilization and Its Discontent and Three Essays  on Sexuality  to this same basic sex based explanation of the deformities of all cultures due to the frustration or unfulfillment of sexual desires (the Oedipus and Electra complexes) of the individual. While both Marx and Sartre identified culture as repressive, they did so basing their conclusions on sociological and economic reasons, a positivist manner of reasoning, i.e., from society to the individual. 

In fact, it is within such understanding of basic human urges and frustrations that one can speak of human nature. Although the labeling of certain actions or behavior as a question of human nature is a highly contested issue, recent scientific postulates suggest that there might be certain and identifiable characteristics of human nature shared by all human beings. One may see this as the initial wiring of the brain. How else can we explain the basic similarity of grammatical structure common to all languages? (Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures, 1957; Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 1964) Or the recognition associated with the concept of the self in all human beings? Or fear and anxiety? Or altruism?  Of course, this is not the same as claiming inherent normative (moral) nature. However, there seems to be a strong case supporting the existence of some form of a shared human moral nature which has much deeper origin than being a result of a mere consequence of sexual repression or frustration.

For example, by contrast, Sartre frontally rejected the concept of human nature. He saw human beings sharing in a general human "condition" and acting or reacting individually in that condition and not having a pre-ordained "nature" (Jean-Paul Sartre, Reflexions sur la question juive, Anti-Semite and Jew, 1968; Cahiers pour une morale, 1983; Critique of Dialectical Reason, 1976). This idea of being in a common "condition" is far from sharing in a "nature" (taking the common meaning of the word). One might argue that Sartre's approach might completely undermine the idea of free will and the human creative dimension since according to such views human (re)action becomes wholly dependent on external events. Sartre's problem seems to be a misreading of the human positive response, which is proactive from the one that is part of history that is either reactive or reflective. It seems to me that both "nature" and "condition" may explain aspects of individual lives and human history, thus the (Sartrean) dichotomy or the Marxist exclusive and tight understanding of history may not be necessary or proper.

As members of the human family, Ethiopians too suffered similar fracturing and preemptive social disassembly as the rest of the world (humankind). It is only within that world-context of the larger community of diverse peoples of the world that we could be able to make sense of our peculiar problems. If we lose sight of such world perspective, we will start thinking that our pedantic problems are world-shaking problems and start mistaking the anthills of our discontent for mountains of insurmountable adversities. We are not unique in our suffering of injustice, deprivation and exploitation in a desperate neck and neck struggle with an exploitative class represented by all formal structures of suppression and oppressors called governments (with an obvious degree of irony). To argue the relative importance of such conceptual trajectory is one thing, but to deny outright the legitimacy of such an explanation or description of social reality amounts to burying ones head in the sands of history like an Ostrich faced with the reality of its mortality.

Could anyone explain to me why leaders of a liberation movement, the TPLF/EPRDF that had struggled against one of the world's worst dictatorial governments for almost two decades, take into their wings entrenched officials who had served Haile Selassie and the now defunct military government of Mengistu, if it were not for class interest? Or was it necessary to seek out the sons and daughters of past feudal masters in diverse ethnic groups around the country to establish satellite fronts. It is not blood that binds but class interest, which creates strange bedfellows. Meles who thinks with an arrogant sense of infallibility that he is in control of the different forces in play in Ethiopia, is in reality a clay being molded and manipulated by the entrenched Ethiopian bureaucrats and rich merchant class who had successfully infiltrated and survived every Ethiopian government that had come into power in the last one hundred years. Like all Ethiopian dictators before him, he too has failed as a revolutionary leader, and his leadership has decomposed into a self-dealing ethnocracy and oligarchy. 

In general, there are three objections to the idea of the existence of classes in society that are in perpetual antagonistic relationships: 1) pre-industrial societies did not have clear dichotomy of classes; however, conflicts were prevalent during such periods; 2) the idea of class conflict is deterministic and does not acknowledge the individualized initiatives of specific events and actions taken by individuals throughout history; and 3) that it is a simplistic formulation of a very complex socio-political and economic process and favors without adequate basis the idea of group evolutionary selection. I believe that these objections, though valid as observations on the general human condition, could not qualify as legitimate criticisms of Marxism because such objections seem to confuse methods of understanding of events in history with suggestions of solutions to economic and political problems. Marxism deals with both method of understanding of current situation through its history and also provides solutions based on objective and scientific synthesis of the experience of society.

II. Against Ethnicism: Delaminating the �Self� from the �Selfish,� Altruism as Socialism

The first ideology based solution to the age-old economic and political problems of Ethiopia came in the form of a coup d'etat attempted by some elite military leaders in the 1960s. Of course, there were numerous challenges to Ethiopian despots in the past. However, those early challenges, prior to the 1960s, were usually attempts to acquire power rather than an attempt to change the political structure of the nation. The military takeover in the 1970s was an attempt to make a clear jump from the traditional power structure of Ethiopia, which was based on the beliefs and circumstances of medieval mentality, right over the periods of mercantile and industrial transformations to that of a Twentieth Century Marxist ideology. It was more of a leap of faith than scientific.  

On questions of political and economic ideology, especially on issues of liberation movements and nationalism, I can surmise my thought in one simple sentence: all are means to an end, and their value is rooted not in their immutable truth but in their relation to the type of results that can be achieved through them. Nationalism is based on primitive and primordial impulse of the need for group formation. I do not think of the concept of nationalism, especially the one that is narrowly defined, as a particularly enlightened one. Narrow nationalism may be synonymous with ethnicism, which has no place, in my view, in any political processes especially in a country like Ethiopia. I admit that in the past I have written about the more inclusive idea of nationalism with some emphasis. I still believe that nationalism has a constructive role to play in the construction of the modern cosmopolitan man and as a process of liberation, and not as an end goal. This view maybe misunderstood easily and could be mistaken as a support for narrow nationalism or ethnicism. Even though nationalism is in my view the lower part of the ladder of civilization, we cannot be able to climb up to enlightened society without the support of those lower steps. Ultimately, even boundaries between states cannot be justified if one is honest enough to see the humanity of the one in all other human beings and the superficiality of national boundaries become very obvious.

I believe that a group led by a democratic liberation movement with the right formulation of an economic and political ideology, with a good sense of nationalistic identification, might advance the development of a "national" economic and socialist political system. In fact, this is tautological, and almost no one can disagree with such a blanket statement. The problem arises on questions of methods, and on how fast to get there. There are as many diverse approaches as individuals and their political views. There are many roads that can take us to Addis Ababa. Socialism is one such a road, and in my view the best yet to be realized. However, the road being taken by the present Ethiopian government definitely will not work. The Ethiopian government on the economic front has attracted mostly profiteers and carpetbaggers; and on the political front, the government of Meles seems to be mainly interested in its own power hegemony and has become increasingly alienated from the Ethiopian public. 

In the past and in our own time, there have been innumerable arguments against socialist mode of economic and political structures. In fact, famous scholars like Hayek had outright asserted that socialism "is the road to serfdom" (F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 1944). Even a left leaning famous economist of our own time, Robert Heilbroner, conceded in 1989 that the contest between capitalism and socialism was over and capitalism had won. (Robert Heilbroner, "The Triumph of Capitalism," New Yorker, January, 1989; David Schweickart, Against Capitalism, 1996) These criticisms of socialism or concessions are all existential conclusions or understandable personal reactions to a dramatic moment in history (in case of Hayek, Nazism and World War II; and in case of Heilbroner, the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union) and do not in any formal and empirical manner conclusively disprove the positive claims of socialist thinkers.

The fact remains that capitalism is a very wasteful system, and ultimately doomed to self-destruction. Capitalism is a system built on a negative worldview, a world, the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson described, lamenting the death of a dear friend in his poem �In Memoriam,� as "Nature red in tooth and claw." There can be no peaceful future in a world where less than 5% of the world's population controls 90% of the world's wealth. In a world where billions of people are living under appalling conditions, change cannot be on a piecemeal basis and gradual. And closer to home, the economic and political condition in Ethiopia, with over 50% unemployment rate and with the lowest per capita income in the world, is illustrative of a sick world. Thus, change has to be swift and drastic. And revolution is the proper and inevitable method to effect such change in the type of world we have at this point. Revolutionary change does not necessarily involve violent methods.

There is no strong argument against a fair distribution of the resources of a society among those who produced those resources. The question becomes more confusing as we try to see the mechanism for such distribution. Distribution includes not only the distribution of resources, but also duties to society. In order to make some sense of all social interactions, we must assume that society is ultimately a consensual endeavor. Whether such consent is perceived to be a constructed or an actual one, the fact remains that in numerous instances individuals act in manners those societies would expect them to act even where there are no supervisors or overseers. It is in the best interest of the individual to live within society and abide by the rules of such a society. The relationship between the individual and society seems to be asymmetrical in the sense that the individual benefits from his relationship in society more than society would have lost because of the individual's nonparticipation.

For years, the idea that evolution favored a selfish individual over an altruistic one had given strength to the argument in support of capitalist or laissez faire economic systems (George C. Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection, 1966; Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976). On the other hand, there are studies that confirm the fact that communal or collectivist social structures are the natural state of human existence and society. The social Darwinists (which ironically included both extremes from the capitalist and communist camps) from the Nineteenth Century to date had misrepresented Charles Darwin's ideas on the struggle for survival and natural selection. Either they supported the idea of an open-ended social and economic struggle without any innate restraint, or they saw life caught in a relentless deterministic process. Darwin and many evolutionist scientists saw group selection/altruism as a fundamental biological evolutionary process. Darwin wrote, at the very outset of his scientific inquiry into life, "I use the term struggle for existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another." [Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, 1859; The Decent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1871] Developing this theme further, Kropotkin acknowledged the collectivist idea of cooperation to be far more in tune with the natural world than the antagonistic and confrontational world picture of Marxism. [Petr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Dover, 1929]

Recently, even the Pope is reported to have acknowledged the fact that theories of evolution are more than mere hypothesis. In other words, group selection is an evolutionary reality, which is a favored natural condition as opposed to narrow individualism. How else can we explain the chastity of the Catholic Church's priesthood or those of monks of different religions if not for altruism and group selection. This view is not some fanciful stretching of the mind. There are individuals who had devoted a life time of rigorous study on this same issue whose finding support altruism and the theory of evolutionary group selection. David S. Wilson and Elliot R. Sober had written extensively for the last twenty years on the question of group selection and/or altruism, and their book, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish behavior, Harvard, 1998. The famous biologist E. O. Wilson said, �Unto 0thers is an important, original, and well-written book. It contains the definitive contemporary statement on higher-level selection and the evolutionary origin of cooperation.�  And to those who are more reflective and ambivalent about either school of thought, Helena Cronin might provide some solace (Helena Cronin, The Ant and the Peacock, 1991). However, one must be aware also of the danger of a too rigid interpretation of the concept of group selection at its worst it could be used as a devastating racist tool. I have discussed this problem extensively in my essay "Altruism and the Social Contract."

The pinnacle (achievement) of capitalism is the corporation, an artificial legal creation with most of the privileges and rights of real human individuals, but with none of the inconvenience and pain of real human existence, a perfect machine of anti-democratic and dictatorial system of control and exploitation. The corporation cannot be subjected to the evolutionary process of life. Thus, it remains outside of the natural progression of life, nevertheless anomalous to all human progress without it being affected in turn.

Moreover, concepts of private property and individualized ownership of land (natural resources) are recent developments. Even in the most entrenched capitalist countries, residual collectivist or communist practices are still in existence preserved in concepts like "public domain," "international waters," "wild life," "nature," et cetera. The concept of laissez-faire even where it is coupled with the idea of competition (a far more natural behavior) does not have the type of scientific basis in society as does collectivism or communism. For example, the concept of inheritance, the crown jewel of laissez-faire societies, has absolutely no basis in early human societies. Even in the modern capitalist societies its validity is questionable, the very high tax rates on inherited property, in almost all Western countries, confirms this observation.  

The chronic problem of underdevelopment in countries like Ethiopia is compounded because of ethnic conflict and a tradition of despotic political structures. It does not take much to prove that traditional methods of government and despotic human relations have not worked well in Ethiopia. At the present time, Ethiopia, a country with tremendous natural resources and centuries of independent existence, is considered to be the poorest nation on Earth. It has become a wasteland of unimaginable suffering. How else can we explain this obvious contradiction between existing conditions of stark poverty against the potential for real development other than by the fact of centuries of bad government and horrible personal relations. Until recently, Ethiopians were identified as "subjects" (see Haile Selassie's 1955 Revised Constitution of Ethiopia, Preamble and Articles 45, 47, 49-50, 64, 95-96, 103) in an aristocratic government structure. Moreover, it was only in 1987 that Ethiopians were formally acknowledged as �citizens� by the ruling body under Mengistu's Constitution. Thus, not all traditional political structures that had ever existed in Ethiopia had been beneficial to the majority of Ethiopians.

Ethiopian culture continued to be a negative factor in the political life of even the expatriate Ethiopian population in the United State. The Ethiopian expatriate elite in general remains antidemocratic, unaffected even after several decades of exposure to the infectious Americanism engulfing us all. Some may see this insolubility as a laudable characteristic of an ancient culture, while others consider it as a point of scorn and ridicule. The Ethiopian elite is forced to fight on two fronts at the same time: a) a relentless fight to preserve a certain identity against the tremendous pull into oblivion within a socially disadvantaged group of people of color and the fear of being submerged in a sea of nothingness in foreign nations; and b) the competitive fight to preserve within the Ethiopian community traditionally sanctified positions of respect and importance, where the struggle looks to me pitifully anachronistic.

Africa does not seem to have much future in the next few decades or beyond. Although a group of distinguished intellectuals from the West and Africa, meeting at a workshop in Kenya in 1987, had  concluded that Africa has a bright future in the 21st Century, I believe that such conclusion was more of a leap of faith than the dictate of hard data. African national governments and their economic structures seem to have nothing to do with the modern world economic or political systems; Africans seem to survive as marginalized people and fodder to other human groups. This is an obvious overstatement with a kernel of an ugly truth that Africans are on the way to extinction unless they effect a radical turn of events. In a recently published book, Robert Kaplan wrote about the grim reality he observed in his travels through a number of African nations (Robert D. Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century, 1996). Although Kaplan wrote about the bright Eritrean future as an exception to the general doom Africa is faced with, he did not visit Ethiopia. It may not be that wise to take Kaplan's conclusions without some reservation. After all, Kaplan seems to be a gleeful amateur who is an interested party in the demise of African people or of their descendants elsewhere. However, we must take note of the basis of his analysis as an additional evidence of a looming African disaster, and take appropriate remedial steps to avert that danger.

The ultimate question facing each one of us, in the final analysis, after everything has been said and done, is the issue of our individual mortality. To paraphrase Dostoyevsky, the prospect of an immediate death concentrates the mind. With my own mortality in view, such concentration of mind is inevitable; things and events fall into perspective giving me a far more honest insight into the reality of my own existence and life in general. Thus, let me put it as plainly as I could as follows: There is no reason for me to step aside to let "You" and your issue pass to my detriment (unless it is to the benefit of society). That is precisely what is being demanded of us by a minuscule number of individuals who are illegally in power and fraudulently in control of the means of production of society and the products of our labor, and even of our spirit. As far as I was able to ascertain, there is only one immutable truth, i.e., the need of the many is at least as important, if not more, as the need of the individual. END

Tecola W. Hagos

December 1996, slightly modified on June 25,  2005