Workers World, Vol. 19, No. 48
(also appears in the pamphlet “The Ethiopian Revolution and the Struggle Against U.S. Imperialism)
December 12 – Once again, as has happened twice before, the Ethiopian Revolution has successfully passed a profound crisis. The revolutionary forces have come out on top and the Revolution itself is now on firmer ground than ever. It is, of course, by no means the last or decisive phase of the Revolution, but it is a giant leap forward.
The bourgeois press here has deliberately given it scant attention, but the media has not hidden its dismay at the outcome of the struggle.
The execution of Lt. Col. Atnafu Abate, carried out under a decision of the Congress of the Provisional Military Administrative Council (PMAC) – called the Derg – came as a distinct shock to the imperialist bourgeoisie and to the U.S. in particular. Ever since last February when a counter-revolutionary plot was successfully foiled by the government and the people, the imperialist press has not hidden its preference for Atnafu as the “rival” and more “acceptable” element in the Derg. They continually called attention to the fact that Atnafu was nowhere around during the February struggle in which the revolutionary elements triumphed over the reactionary plotters.
In a certain sense the current crisis was even more serious, for the Revolution is in a much more serious stage, literally in a life and death struggle against both external and internal reaction vastly complicated by the systematic efforts by imperialism to dismember Ethiopia and unleash the most violent civil strife in the history of Ethiopia.
Why has the Ethiopian Revolution taken on such a long, protracted, and violent form? The imperialist press would like us to believe that this is one of the manifestations of irrationality which they say so often overtakes vast sections of humanity. But this is merely one of their many ways of glossing over, in the crudest manner, one of the deepest and profoundest class struggles and attribute to it the character of senseless violence. They hope thereby to play upon the peaceful sentiments of the popular masses.
The real reason for the so-called “senseless violence” and “irrationality,” by which they mean, incidentally, the violence of the revolutionary masses against the oppressors and not the truly irrational and senseless violence of the oppressors, lies in the very nature of the specific stage of the Ethiopian Revolution. What is this stage?
It is characterized by an attempt to make a transition from the democratic phase of the revolution, that is the bourgeois democratic stage, directly to the socialist revolution. Therein lies the crux of the problem. Behind this problem lie all the inner tensions, conflicts, and the development of virtual civil war, imperialist invasion, and attempts by the foreign exploiters to dismember and parcel out the country.
Why couldn’t, or why can’t even now, all of the so-called progressive forces unite and merely confine themselves to carrying out only the tasks of the democratic phase of the Revolution? Because Ethiopian society is and has been divided by antagonistic classes having not only opposing views of the democratic phase of the Revolution but diametrically opposed class interests of an irreconcilable character. At the beginning of the overthrow of Haile Selassie some wanted to stop the Revolution right there. But that was merely the anti-royalist phase of the struggle. It had not touched the profound class interests that divide the exploiters from the exploited. Feudalism remained intact. He anti-royalist phase was merely a political changeover, merely anti-monarchical in character.
But then came the historic proclamation which abolished serfdom, gave land to the landless, dispossessed without compensation the landlord class, and thereby dealt a blow to all the propertied classes who in reality depend on the exploitation of the peasants and the workers. For the masses the land reform – which in no way resembles the so-called land reforms in other countries like India or Mexico – for them, that was their revolution. The workers wanted to deepen this and did deepen it when all of the basic industries were nationalized and the imperialist bourgeoisie was put on the run and the Ethiopian government, in the words of Col. Mengistu, cut the umbilical cord to imperialism.
For all of them, that is the exploited masses, the democratic phase was swiftly becoming transformed into the socialist phase with the establishment of workers’ organizations, peasant associations, and a popular militia. The strenuous efforts to enforce all this is what lies at the bottom of each of the succeeding crises which have caused veritable social earthquakes on the Ethiopian landscape.
What’s involved here is not that the Derg, the PMAC, has gone to ultra-left or extreme and unnecessary measures of a social and political character. What is involved is the attempt by the various representatives of the feudo-bourgeoisie, as it is called in Ethiopia, to reverse the gains of the Revolution. The masses, on the contrary, show a will and determination to deepen and widen the social character of the Revolution, that is to make it a thorough-going socialist revolution.
In the indictment against Lt. Col. Atnafu Abate, he is quoted as saying that he “did not subscribe to the fact that socialism could be constructed in this country in his lifetime.” Further, he was quoted as saying, “We have deprived the country of friends in the name of socialism. I do not believe in this. Ethiopia alone cannot build socialism in Africa. We have to be friendly with the East and the West.”
The bourgeois press has, since last February, given hints of all sorts that this was substantially Atnafu’s viewpoint all along. His world outlook clearly reflects the hostile attitude of the dispossessed ruling class. It is not without significance that he showed impatience and utter disdain at the attempt to establish a working class party. The Atnafu crisis represented a most serious challenge to the very existence of the Revolution. The fact that the imperialist press played it down here in no way militates against this enormous fact. Given the character of the acute class struggle being waged in Ethiopia and the complications of the war waged against the country by the Eritrean secessionists and the Somalis, it is easy to see after the fact that the Atnafu crisis posed the specter of the emergence of an Ethiopian Pinochet. His victory would have put the Chilean bloodbath into the shadows. Yet no one can say that the crisis has been fully resolved. For the Ethiopian Revolution – the deepest and profoundest on the African continent and whose success would have repercussions far beyond Africa – is still fighting a life and death struggle.
As the Ethiopian Herald of Nov. 15 states in its editorial, “However, it has to be clear that since this counter-revolutionary [Lt. Col. Atnafu Abate] has not been acting alone, his accomplices in the bureaucracy should be exposed and dealt with appropriately before they appoint another leader and continue to implement the conspiracy, which has been authored by the grandmasters of the counter-revolution.” The grandmasters of the counter-revolution, it should be added, are Wall Street imperialism aided and abetted by and working in concert with all of the NATO imperialist robber barons. One can only hope that the Ethiopian Revolution which has demonstrated so much revolutionary energy, resourcefulness, and protracted staying power and determination, will successfully defeat imperialist attempts at dismemberment and bourgeois reaction at home.
In talking about building the party Lenin is often quoted as referring to an incident in one of Tolstoy’s works: From a distance it would seem that a man was bobbing and weaving and making all sorts of irrational motions with his hands and feet. However, as one approached and saw the man at a closer view, one could easily see that what the man was doing was sharpening his knife on a grindstone, which of course entailed moving his hands and feet simultaneously. In Lenin’s analogy, the man was also performing a useful job – building the party.
Viewed in the light of what one is obliged to see in the bourgeois press about the Ethiopian Revolution, one might surmise from where we are that the Ethiopian Revolution is like the man in Tolstoy’s incident. On closer examination, one ought to be able to see on the basis of Lenin’s analogy that what is happening in Ethiopia is an attempt at a two-fold task which the Ethiopian leadership must conduct simultaneously. One the one hand, it is trying to frustrate and defeat the blatant effort at imperialist aggression and dismemberment. At the same time, it is trying to establish a revolutionary working class party along the lines of Marxism-Leninism as its most urgent talk. All of progressive humanity can only benefit from the tasks the Ethiopian revolutionaries have set themselves and hope for their early success.
Last updated: 11 May 2026