Dave Zel
The great French Philosopher Alain once said ,"When I am asked if the division between parties of the Right and parties of the Left, between leftists and rightists still has any meaning, the first thing which occurs to me is that whoever is asking the question is certainly not on the Left." When I read my Facebook friend FikrieSintayehu’s post and his follow up comments on the subject of whether it is appropriate in the Ethiopian context to use the Left/Right dichotomy of political positioning, Alain pulsated in my vein. However, one shouldn’t capitulate to the things that occur to him first without critical reflection. The only way to compensate, as humanly possible, for the likely bias from any relic of my rushed reaction is to engage with his points of argument intently.
Fikrie nailed his colours to the mast by declaring that the use of Left and Right in Ethiopian, in fact in the broader African, is inapt. He tells us that if at all a Left and Right description is appropriate, putting an accent on a “big may be”, then everyone is leftist. The gist of his argument is “Africa is communal which means communist that is left...” and that stratification and inequality are the sad consequence of European colonialism. Here he is committing a gross nomenclatural and conceptual misappropriation on what a collectivist society (communal society) is and its presumed relation to the politics of the Left. Contrary to his allusion, there isn’t a direct relationship between being collectivist (communal) and the lack of hierarchy. You can have a vertical collectivist society (e.g. Japan and India) or a horizontal collectivist society (e.g. Iceland and the Israeli kibbutz). You can also have a vertical individualistic society (e.g. U.S. and Great Britain) or a horizontal individualistic society (e.g. Norway and Australia).
The normative underpinning that makes a collectivist society as opposed to an individualistic one is the idea that people are, first and foremost, members of larger entities such as groups, tribes, nations, etc. These larger entities are more than the summation of the people who constitute them; they are tangible and vital, hence have to be defended beyond and above all other considerations. If for example it was believed that the way to sustain this collective entity is by maintaining hierarchical relationship and emphasising deference to authority, everyone will simply submit themselves to play their assigned roles in this entity. In fact, I can’t think of a country that so well bears witness to the cleavage between vertical and horizontal collectivism as much as Ethiopia does. If we take Hofstede’s cultural dimensions Ethiopia is generally understood as a highly collectivist society. However a closer look shows the North/South cleavage (the divide here used as an interrogative tool) is marked by a discernable difference in the character of collectivism. In ethnographic and archeological studies by scholars like Alfredo González-Rubell, a historian/archeologist who extensively studied the persistent values of the collectives that inhabit the Ethiopian-Sudanese borderland, the evidence is strong. Alfredo meticulously illuminates the difference in collectivism between the hierarchical highlanders and those groups like the Mao and Gumuz who in between the dark cracks of states and chieftainships repeatedly wrestled back to sustain their deeply egalitarian way of life. The 19th century traveler Henry Salt wrote that the Gumuz “have neither priests, nor rulers, all men being looked upon as equals”. His words are almost a fitting description to a highly organized fictional anarchist society. You won’t find a single traveler or writer who penned of the highlanders in those terms. The above points out how a totalising understanding of collectivism is misguided. I have always causally wondered why there isn’t any serious academic work that uses cultural psychology as a heuristic device to understand the historical problems of Ethiopia, at least some of it. Furthermore, the only shared essential I can think of between the Left (specifically here communism) and a collectivist society is the supremacy of community ethics. But any politics of the left, as an emancipatory idea, seeks to challenge forms of inequalities and dismantle all unjustified hierarchies that breathe into them.
The second point of his argument which ascribes the emergency of inequality, hierarchy and in extension, I suppose, the problems of diversity to the European colonialism is also uncritical. I am not quite sure in what sense European colonialism is relevant to the Ethiopian context. In any case, there is a strong argument to be made that problems of inequality are in fact uttermost in those states that were created by Africans themselves, not by Europeans. The reason is that European colonialism imperilled all Africans to the common domination of foreign power. However, inbred African states were almost unavoidably centred on the power of one group within that state over others, and consequently the logic of inequality is very firmly entrenched into the state itself. Ethiopia is a glaring epitome of this.
To not run the risk of making this post jejune I’m not going to go through the approaches we can take to understand the Left-Right dichotomy. It suffices to say that the world is far from the hopes of enjoying its face in the sun of a post-political world of consensus. The Ethiopian State in all its history has harboured a great deal of inequality, exploitation and oppression - to say Left and Right are inapplicable is to deny their immanency to political conflict and render their status as political resource irrelevant. One shouldn’t mistake the absence of strong organisational manifestation of Left and Right, which often results from a democratic deficit, with the absence of the dichotomy, its weight and applicability.
I will conclude with few points that Fikrie’s comment tangentially instigates. It is my understanding that most people in the unitarian camp will agree with him and I that Ethiopia is a highly collectivist society – and one wonders, why most unitarian parties have in the post 1991 era emerged as militant evangelists of liberalism. Let’s put aside for a moment their smattering knowledge on the subject, or lack thereof. How do these “liberals neophytes” see a political philosophy (specifically their version of liberalism) that rests on the assumption of the self as an individual entity will squarely fit in a society in which the self is fundamentally linked to the collective, or one might even say, is the collective? Strangers to the concept of consistency, should I less politely say? Or as the historian Teshale Tibebu points out, should we say that there is such a palpable hypocrisy and intellectual bankruptcy? Drawing a parallel between the old Marxist adherents and the new liberal priesthood, Teshale delivers his scorching criticism against the new liberal coverts from Professor Mesfin Woldemariam to this generations’ urban intellectuals. He deplores, “The torrential Marxist rain that once flooded Ethiopia had passed into history. Enter now another torrential rain, liberalism. Those who once preached the ‘scientific truth’ of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Tse-Tung’s thought are now steadfastly echoing the catchphrases of the globalization paradigm….. Just as Marxism was accepted wholesale and uncritically in the past, it is now rejected and liberalism accepted wholesale and uncritically. In place of the left arm raised during the Marxist days, two middle fingers are raised now. Even then, these fingers seem to be on the wane now. All this, I surmise, stems from the shallowness of the Ethiopian intellectual encounter with Western modernity.”
What Teshale fails to see in my opinion is the fact that the emergence of Liberalism in Ethiopian politics has little to do with the search for alternative to the problems Ethiopia faces. It’s neither reformist nor revolutionary - it is rather the impulsive retort of the historical status quo to the decline of it past privilege, in other word, it is a reactionary politics. Like every reactionary and conservative politics its inception is loss – a loss of something that was never justifiably possessed in the first place. Its paramount aim is not preservation or reform, it is rather recovery and restoration of its historic privileges. But it does so in a way that wiles people into believing that the boundary between the progressive forces and them is largely blurred. It advances by reorienting the old with its core still intact, at the same time, in attempt to articulate a new archaic system, it absorbs the values and manoeuvres of the very revolution or reform it does battle with- always deployed instrumentally, not as a normative goal. But history serves us so well in identifying a reactionary politics when we see it. And there are a lot us who stand in opposition to it. We protest the legitimisation of history without scrutiny and interrogation. We argue that Ethiopia has to be viewed as a moral idea and, even more so, as a moral problem. The world between us is no crevice - it is an abyss. The only way to bridge this gulf is to engage in politics that has moral content.
The great French Philosopher Alain once said ,"When I am asked if the division between parties of the Right and parties of the Left, between leftists and rightists still has any meaning, the first thing which occurs to me is that whoever is asking the question is certainly not on the Left." When I read my Facebook friend FikrieSintayehu’s post and his follow up comments on the subject of whether it is appropriate in the Ethiopian context to use the Left/Right dichotomy of political positioning, Alain pulsated in my vein. However, one shouldn’t capitulate to the things that occur to him first without critical reflection. The only way to compensate, as humanly possible, for the likely bias from any relic of my rushed reaction is to engage with his points of argument intently.
Fikrie nailed his colours to the mast by declaring that the use of Left and Right in Ethiopian, in fact in the broader African, is inapt. He tells us that if at all a Left and Right description is appropriate, putting an accent on a “big may be”, then everyone is leftist. The gist of his argument is “Africa is communal which means communist that is left...” and that stratification and inequality are the sad consequence of European colonialism. Here he is committing a gross nomenclatural and conceptual misappropriation on what a collectivist society (communal society) is and its presumed relation to the politics of the Left. Contrary to his allusion, there isn’t a direct relationship between being collectivist (communal) and the lack of hierarchy. You can have a vertical collectivist society (e.g. Japan and India) or a horizontal collectivist society (e.g. Iceland and the Israeli kibbutz). You can also have a vertical individualistic society (e.g. U.S. and Great Britain) or a horizontal individualistic society (e.g. Norway and Australia).
The normative underpinning that makes a collectivist society as opposed to an individualistic one is the idea that people are, first and foremost, members of larger entities such as groups, tribes, nations, etc. These larger entities are more than the summation of the people who constitute them; they are tangible and vital, hence have to be defended beyond and above all other considerations. If for example it was believed that the way to sustain this collective entity is by maintaining hierarchical relationship and emphasising deference to authority, everyone will simply submit themselves to play their assigned roles in this entity. In fact, I can’t think of a country that so well bears witness to the cleavage between vertical and horizontal collectivism as much as Ethiopia does. If we take Hofstede’s cultural dimensions Ethiopia is generally understood as a highly collectivist society. However a closer look shows the North/South cleavage (the divide here used as an interrogative tool) is marked by a discernable difference in the character of collectivism. In ethnographic and archeological studies by scholars like Alfredo González-Rubell, a historian/archeologist who extensively studied the persistent values of the collectives that inhabit the Ethiopian-Sudanese borderland, the evidence is strong. Alfredo meticulously illuminates the difference in collectivism between the hierarchical highlanders and those groups like the Mao and Gumuz who in between the dark cracks of states and chieftainships repeatedly wrestled back to sustain their deeply egalitarian way of life. The 19th century traveler Henry Salt wrote that the Gumuz “have neither priests, nor rulers, all men being looked upon as equals”. His words are almost a fitting description to a highly organized fictional anarchist society. You won’t find a single traveler or writer who penned of the highlanders in those terms. The above points out how a totalising understanding of collectivism is misguided. I have always causally wondered why there isn’t any serious academic work that uses cultural psychology as a heuristic device to understand the historical problems of Ethiopia, at least some of it. Furthermore, the only shared essential I can think of between the Left (specifically here communism) and a collectivist society is the supremacy of community ethics. But any politics of the left, as an emancipatory idea, seeks to challenge forms of inequalities and dismantle all unjustified hierarchies that breathe into them.
The second point of his argument which ascribes the emergency of inequality, hierarchy and in extension, I suppose, the problems of diversity to the European colonialism is also uncritical. I am not quite sure in what sense European colonialism is relevant to the Ethiopian context. In any case, there is a strong argument to be made that problems of inequality are in fact uttermost in those states that were created by Africans themselves, not by Europeans. The reason is that European colonialism imperilled all Africans to the common domination of foreign power. However, inbred African states were almost unavoidably centred on the power of one group within that state over others, and consequently the logic of inequality is very firmly entrenched into the state itself. Ethiopia is a glaring epitome of this.
To not run the risk of making this post jejune I’m not going to go through the approaches we can take to understand the Left-Right dichotomy. It suffices to say that the world is far from the hopes of enjoying its face in the sun of a post-political world of consensus. The Ethiopian State in all its history has harboured a great deal of inequality, exploitation and oppression - to say Left and Right are inapplicable is to deny their immanency to political conflict and render their status as political resource irrelevant. One shouldn’t mistake the absence of strong organisational manifestation of Left and Right, which often results from a democratic deficit, with the absence of the dichotomy, its weight and applicability.
I will conclude with few points that Fikrie’s comment tangentially instigates. It is my understanding that most people in the unitarian camp will agree with him and I that Ethiopia is a highly collectivist society – and one wonders, why most unitarian parties have in the post 1991 era emerged as militant evangelists of liberalism. Let’s put aside for a moment their smattering knowledge on the subject, or lack thereof. How do these “liberals neophytes” see a political philosophy (specifically their version of liberalism) that rests on the assumption of the self as an individual entity will squarely fit in a society in which the self is fundamentally linked to the collective, or one might even say, is the collective? Strangers to the concept of consistency, should I less politely say? Or as the historian Teshale Tibebu points out, should we say that there is such a palpable hypocrisy and intellectual bankruptcy? Drawing a parallel between the old Marxist adherents and the new liberal priesthood, Teshale delivers his scorching criticism against the new liberal coverts from Professor Mesfin Woldemariam to this generations’ urban intellectuals. He deplores, “The torrential Marxist rain that once flooded Ethiopia had passed into history. Enter now another torrential rain, liberalism. Those who once preached the ‘scientific truth’ of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Tse-Tung’s thought are now steadfastly echoing the catchphrases of the globalization paradigm….. Just as Marxism was accepted wholesale and uncritically in the past, it is now rejected and liberalism accepted wholesale and uncritically. In place of the left arm raised during the Marxist days, two middle fingers are raised now. Even then, these fingers seem to be on the wane now. All this, I surmise, stems from the shallowness of the Ethiopian intellectual encounter with Western modernity.”
What Teshale fails to see in my opinion is the fact that the emergence of Liberalism in Ethiopian politics has little to do with the search for alternative to the problems Ethiopia faces. It’s neither reformist nor revolutionary - it is rather the impulsive retort of the historical status quo to the decline of it past privilege, in other word, it is a reactionary politics. Like every reactionary and conservative politics its inception is loss – a loss of something that was never justifiably possessed in the first place. Its paramount aim is not preservation or reform, it is rather recovery and restoration of its historic privileges. But it does so in a way that wiles people into believing that the boundary between the progressive forces and them is largely blurred. It advances by reorienting the old with its core still intact, at the same time, in attempt to articulate a new archaic system, it absorbs the values and manoeuvres of the very revolution or reform it does battle with- always deployed instrumentally, not as a normative goal. But history serves us so well in identifying a reactionary politics when we see it. And there are a lot us who stand in opposition to it. We protest the legitimisation of history without scrutiny and interrogation. We argue that Ethiopia has to be viewed as a moral idea and, even more so, as a moral problem. The world between us is no crevice - it is an abyss. The only way to bridge this gulf is to engage in politics that has moral content.
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