FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
International Communist Workers Party
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FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM! |
International Communist Workers Party | |
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ETHIOPIA, October 2—Ethiopian security forces opened fire on masses of people in Bishoftu, where a cultural festival marking the end of winter turned into a political protest against the fascist rulers. Hundreds of people are confirmed dead, in the latest attack by the Ethiopian capitalist state.
Ethiopia made the news during the Olympics when the Ethiopian marathon runner, Feyisa Lilesa, raised his crossed fists in protest against the murder by the Ethiopian capitalist state of hundreds of protesters in the streets in the town of Ginchi this summer.
Although Lilesa’s protest was specifically against the killing of “his people, the Oromo people,” in fact, the government has killed both Oromo and Amhara people, who are rising in protest against the current regime.
If we flip back the pages of history to find out where the current Ethiopian government came from, we find the Tigray People’s Liberation Front engaged in nationalist struggle against the Soviet-backed military fascist junta called the Dergue. Ethiopia’s current government comes out of a period of conflict in which the Tigray Liberation Front and Eritrean Liberation Front were both fighting to secede and create their own territory so each respective ethnic group’s bourgeoisie could rule over it.
When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1989, the military junta was in disarray, until 1991, when the imperialist CIA imposed the Tigray (a third ethnic group) People’s Liberation Front as the ruling power. The government has served as a US puppet in Somalia and is now allowing the UN to use its territory as a staging ground to prop up the US client state of South Sudan. At the same time, China has invested heavily in infrastructure.
The ruling party, now known as the Ethiopian Peoples Liberation Front, has set up a system of ethnic federalism, dividing the entire country by ethnicity. Each so-called nationality has its own ethnic party and government.
The current protests began when the government displaced 150,000 Oromo farmers from land they have historically used for subsistence agriculture. This land grab was part of the Surrounding Oromia Special Zone Integrated Development Plan. Also known as the “Master Plan,” it aimed to “develop the area around the capital city of Addis Ababa, in an effort to open Ethiopia to European capitalist development.
Starting in December of 2015, there have been continuing mass protests, which have been met with state violence. The ethnic nationalism of the Tigray rulers has created inequality and discontentment among all other ethnic groups. In this situation, Oromo masses, the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, have continued to take to the streets, even though the Master Plan has been scrapped.
In August, Amhara masses in Bahir Dar took to the streets in solidarity and around their own grievances, and both protests were met with murderous state violence.
Nationalist misleaders are exploiting the protests to suit their own agendas. But this is an attack against the poor peasant masses.
Masses of workers in Ethiopia should shed their nationalist illusions and fight to get rid of their domestic and imperialist oppressors. Nationalism saps the class consciousness of the working class and makes the working class an appendage of their nationalist bosses.
We need unity of the working masses against any nationalist bourgeoisie and their imperialist masters to get rid of oppression and exploitation. We need to organize the ICWP in Ethiopia to unite all workers and the oppressed masses to fight for communism.
Only communism frees the working class from capitalist exploitation by destroying the economical basis of capitalist commodity production which gives priority to exchange value over use value. So we should raise our fists high. Let’s build for communist revolution instead of nationalist movements that tie us to our capitalist exploiters. Let us get rid of domestic bourgeoisie and their imperialist blood-sucker masters once and for all and build a communist society based on working class collectivity and cooperation.