Apr 10 2018
Ken Tarbuck was a member of several different Trotskyist groups in the until the early 1970s. He went to Ethiopia to work as a university lecturer in 1977 and published this analysis in 1992.
Mengistu Haile Mariam was a bloody militarist and nationalist dictator; how is it then that for a period in the 1970s he was hailed as some sort of socialist by many on the left? That indeed is the puzzle and I hope to indicate in this essay the type of confusion which led to this predicament.
The fall of the military regime of Mengistu in Ethiopia which had effectively ruled the country since 1974 poses a number of extremely important questions for socialists, both at the level of theory and in practical activity. The regime in Ethiopia had been a self-proclaimed ‘socialist government’ which had attracted considerable support among the left in the capitalist countries during the 1970s. It was touted as being a regime worthy of support, since it was alleged to have had a socialist orientation, whatever that may mean. Moreover, on a broader canvas the revolution of 1974 in Ethiopia presented some very sharp questions of theory about the role of the state in society, its class nature and its functions. Above all it presented the problem of the nature of a regime in a society that was manifestly underdeveloped from a capitalist and industrial point of view, which allegedly was in a transition to socialism.