On 12/25/20 10:48 AM, Joseph Green wrote:
It's illuninating to see the difference between the attitude on this list to the
magazine Jacobin's glorification of Dolores Ibárruri during the Spanish Civil
War
and that displayed somewhat earlier towards Trotsky's glorification of the
Emperor Haile Selassie during the struggle against Italian aggression and
occupation in the 1930s (the Second Italo-Ethiopian war).
Most of my Marxism can be traced back to what I learned from Trotsky's
cohorts such as Joseph Hansen but that doesn't mean that I parrot every
statement Trotsky made, least of all about Ethiopia. As I pointed out in
my post on the need to stop dredging up the past, this fixation on what
Lenin, Stalin or Trotsky said is typical of the sixties that I tried to
put behind me when I launched Marxmail. As a discipline, Marxism is a
very rich resource with many powerful thinkers having sunk roots in
academia rather than in sectarian projects identified by the hammers and
sickles on their newspaper or website.
From the early 2000s:
It is no small irony that while Haile Selassie was becoming an icon of
resistance to racism and imperialism to Africans in the Diaspora, he was
simultaneously imposing a regime of national chauvinism on peoples who
had become captive to the Amharic crown and rifle.
The lyrics to Bob Marley's "War", which is probably the most politically
conscious song in the entire reggae repertory, come from Haile
Selassie's famous League of Nations speech:
"Until the philosophy which holds one race
Superior and another inferior
Is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned
Everywhere is war, me say war
"That until there is no longer first class
And second class citizens of any nation
Until the colour of a man's skin
Is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes
Me say war"
Reggae is linked to Rastafarianism, the Jamaican religious cult honoring
Ras (Lord) Tafari--Selassie's name prior to becoming emperor. The Rastas
believed that repatriation to Africa--Zion--would be made possible by
Selassie's rebirth in glory. They say, "Selassie cyaan dead", he is
living still. They regard themselves, and all blacks living in the
Western Hemisphere, as living in slavery.
While Christian mysticism and potent marijuana might explain Rastafarian
beliefs, there is little explanation for W.E.B. DuBois's
misunderstanding of the nature of the Abyssinian imperial state.
"Ethiopia then is a state socialism under an Emperor with almost
absolute power. He is a conscientious man. But what will follow his
rule? A capitalist private profit regime or an increasingly democratic
socialism; or some form of Communism?" ("The Giant Stirs", 1955)
Unfortunately, the Ethiopian state had nothing to do with socialism, but
rather more closely approximated what Perry Anderson dubbed the
"absolutist states" of the 16th and 17th century in Europe. This
probably was the only option, outside of a socialism linked to the USSR,
open to an Ethiopian ruler in the beginning of the 20th century when the
country was still gripped by feudal relations. I first made this point a
week or so ago and was pleased to discover that Ethiopian Marxist
scholar Gebru Tareke makes the identical point in "Ethiopia: Power and
Protest".
Haile Selassie's goal was to rein in the aristocracy, while creating a
central state and bureaucracy dedicated to "modernization." It would be
a mistake, however, to conclude that the feudal lords were subjected to
some kind of Jacobin reign of terror under the Emperor. It continued to
collaborate with the central state, while continuing to extract tribute
from local peasants, especially in the newly assimilated territories of
the Tigre and Omoro peoples. Almost to the last days of its reign, the
absolutist state struggled for domination in rural areas against
powerful hereditary authorities, who often used the peasants as pawns
against the oppressive bureaucracy and state, which seemed only
interested in taxing them to death. It is one of the contradictory
aspects of modern Ethiopian politics that the resistance to Selassie's
dictatorship often took place under somewhat dubious circumstances.
Islam, Somalian irredentism, deference to local aristocrats, banditry,
etc. gave shape to peasant rebellions. In the absence of a strong
Marxist movement in Ethiopia, it is pretty much excluded that the
peasant movement would have not exhibited such characteristics. But
rather than fretting over this, it is useful to remind ourselves of what
Lenin said about the Irish rebellion:
"To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by
small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary
outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie without all its
prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious
proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the
landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression,
etc.--to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution. So one army
lines up in one place and says, 'We are for socialism', and another,
somewhere else and says, 'We are for imperialism', and that will be a
social revolution! Only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic view
would vilify the Irish rebellion by calling it a 'putsch'."
The other important thing to understand about the system that Selassie
and his immediate predecessors put together is its imperial nature.
While we tend to identify the term imperialism with modern capitalism,
it would be a mistake not to describe the emergence of the modern
Ethiopian state in similar terms. Like the Czarist empire, it was a
semi-feudal collection of oppressed nationalities that felt no loyalty
to the central state. Moreover, 65 percent of the territory of the
Ethiopian empire was acquired during the "scramble for Africa" in the
19th century. Ethiopian rulers benefited from diplomatic and commercial
contacts with these colonizing Europeans even as they simultaneously
struggled with them to safeguard their independence, or even competed
with them for new lands to conquer in Northeast Africa. To a poor
non-Amharic peasant, it mattered little whether the oppressor was
Italian or Abyssinian. The Abyssinian might have been less racist, but
the whiplash felt just as cruel.
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/state_and_revolution/ethiopia.htm
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