Adal Isaw
Almost all Ethiopian political
parties except EPRDF adopt liberalism as their political ideology. And these political parties are looking
forward to put liberalism at work, if and when they’re endowed with the
political power to do so. Liberalism,
they argue, is the ideology in need to build a middle-income democratic
Ethiopia. In contrast, EPRDF contends,
that the arduous work to build a middle-income democratic Ethiopia will be
nearly impossible; one, if and when it is based on a liberal worldview that
favors the unfair and controlling economic and political interest of the
Western world; and two, if and when it is based on economic and political
philosophy that exaggerates the inalienable rights of a self-seeking
individual.
The movement by the Western world to
make liberalism appear more desirable than any other conceivable economic and
political worldview has succeeded by default. In other words, if ideological success
is merely measured by the prevalence of a political and economic worldview,
then liberalism has become the most successful modern ideology of our
interconnected world. With the collapse
of the so called communist blocks of Eastern European countries, the dominance
of liberalism has even become all the more thoroughgoing - so much so, a
renowned American political scientist daringly claimed that ideological
struggles, as we know them in the past, have come to an end. Liberalism, Fukiyama
affirmed, has triumphed.
Disproving Fukiyama, the struggle
between ideologies lives and in fact has become vibrant to a degree, even in
Ethiopia - a country that barely entered the global ideological market - where
used and a sort of newly formulated ideologies are spoken for sale. As you’re reading this article, the Ethiopian
people are still shopping from political parties eager to sell their ideologies
in exchange for political power. EPRDF is on one side selling its own sort of
brand new Ethiopian-born revolutionary democratic worldview, while the rest of
the political parties are on the other side, selling a Euro-centric worldview
of liberalism.
What is liberalism or a liberal
outlook anyways? And what makes revolutionary democracy a fitting worldview for
economic and political development of Ethiopia? Liberalism, according to
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia is a “political and economic doctrine that
emphasizes the rights and freedoms of the individual and the need to limit the
powers of government.” For over three hundred years, liberalism has been the
most fundamental experience of Western political civilization. And its fundamental credo is comprised of
individualism, civil rights, private ownership, and pluralism. Liberalism is inseparable from capitalism - an
economic system that is known for having defined the Western and non-Western
countries’ economic and political relations for centuries. Strictly speaking, liberalism is also more
than a Euro-centric political-economy; it is a way of life that the Western
world wants to export to as many countries as it can - with or without the
consent of a people at the receiving end.
The underlying ideas of liberalism
were given formal articulation by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Locke gave the most “eloquent” articulation
of liberalism in his Second Treaties on Civil Government, published in 1690 but
written earlier. For Locke, the
individual is at the center of an economic and political universe. He is free, equal, and self-governing. He has the right to his body and to his
life. And these rights to his body and
to his life constitute the most inalienable form of property.
Locke’s emphasis on individual
rights goes even further asserting that property rights of the individual
predate the state and that they’re absolutely immune from state
interference. In other words, according
to Locke, any legitimate government is limited by individual rights of those it
has been created to serve. An important
consequence of this very bold argument is that rights are always individual
rights, and that the community, or society as a whole, has no rights what so
ever. Apart from the individual that
comprise it, according to Locke, the community is simply an abstracted
personification with no life, moral and political standing. This is the
ideological underpin of liberalism that almost all Ethiopian political parties
except EPRDF adhere to and it is very troubling.
A country that badly needs a
collective effort for its political and economic development should not
subscribe to impractical and hypothetical worldview of liberalism that demeans
and rejects the collective rights of a people.
For Ethiopia - a country of diverse nations and nationalities, this type
of unmitigated individualism is a recipe for disaster. Ethiopia will not arduously work itself to
become a democratic middle-income country, built on a society of self-seeking
individuals, each pursuing disparate objectives of the mind, lacking a commonly
desirable master plan of an Ethiopian purpose.
A society of self-seeking
individuals, each pursuing disparate objectives of the mind, lacking a commonly
held desirable plan, according to liberals is also the basis for the
“un-designed” nature of a capitalist economic system. For example, the Scottish liberal Adam Smith
in his Wealth of Nations argued that, the spontaneous actions of innumerable
separate individuals each pursuing their personal benefit accreted to
astonishingly efficient, prosperous and free forms of human association.
Smith’s aforementioned assertion is beyond
paradoxical. How is it possible for a
selfish private vice of separate individuals transcend into a public virtue of
kindly free forms of human association?
Had Smith’s assertions were true about the spontaneous actions of
separate individuals, would America have 400 of its citizens spontaneously
controlling 1.8 trillion dollars of its wealth?
Or, would America have six of its major banks spontaneously controlling
60% of its GNP? These are the few from
the many problems that liberalism continues to create unabated in our
interconnected world.
Indeed; liberalism comes with many
daunting problems and it has been revised to a degree so that the problems that
it keeps creating are ameliorated now and then through major policy
implementations. Wounded by the Great
Depression, Keynesian economics and the New Deal, classical liberalism may not
recover from its wounds, but it has surely given ways to variety of revisionist
liberalism—welfare liberalism, utilitarianism and etc. Nevertheless, revisionist liberalism does not
stand to discredit property rights and individualism that classical liberalism
argues for with passion, since individualism and property rights are principles
that unify liberals of all varieties.
It is therefore up to the revolutionary democrats including this writer,
to eloquently refute a liberal worldview that overemphasizes the rights of an
individual and demeans the collective rights of a people, especially as it
relates to property and ownership rights, for example of land.
The Ethiopian revolutionary
democrats principled argument about land goes pretty much as follows: By virtue
of being naturally immune from becoming a social product that one invests or
works to create, land in Ethiopia is in its own singular class of an absolute
social property. Land is also a natural given to all those who happen to reside
on it, and from which the complete necessities of what life demands can be
produced to benefit the great many of them. Succinctly put, Ethiopia’s land is
not a social product and cannot be claimed as an absolute property by any
individual anywhere anytime. In fact, even a given social product with a clear
rightful owner cannot for that matter be claimed as an absolute property, by
who ever happens to invest and work on it, and here is the reason why, revolutionary
democrats argue.
Consider a hermit inventor working
alone in his garage without any assistance, on a project to invent a highly
sophisticated braking system for a fast car. Can you imagine this inventor to
be unaware of the vast quantity of social knowledge on a brake-system for fast
cars? Of course not; this said hermit inventor would have no clue about
creating a new braking system, had it not for all the accumulated social
knowledge that he had received in the first place. Even what this hermit
inventor discovers is, therefore, not a private creation. It is, in a
fundamental sense a social product, and any absolute claim of ownership on the
new braking system by the hermit inventor is thus groundless, making the idea
of self-seeking, self-contained, atomized and hermit individuals creating
property out of themselves, unconnected and unindebted to the greater society,
quite absurd.
As it has been the case for almost
two decades, the creation of property and the kind of ownership right that
should be ascribed to it is one of the issues that starkly differentiate the
revolutionary democrats of Ethiopia from their liberal counterparts. The EPRDF
led government has been leasing land in manners that incorporates its agro-led
economic development plan and the plan is working marvelously. Ethiopia has
registered double digit development figures year after year and it is now the
fifth fastest growing economy in the entire world.
This very fact should refute the
liberal claim about how selling Ethiopia’s land creates incentive for business
and leasing it curtails economic growth.
Leasing it for suitable years instead of buying land has not curtailed
the interest of a prospective investor in Ethiopia and the evidence attests to
this fact. Billion dollars’ worth of
investment is taking hold on leased land in Ethiopia and it is the uncontested
fact.
Ethiopian liberals who advocate for
scrapping the present land policy consider land much like any other property
that an individual is entitled to own in absolute terms. Their rationale mimics the rationale of John
Locke and Adam Smith - the two renowned classical European liberals. The Ethiopian liberals have merely adopted
Locke’s and Smith’s argument on property, ownership and the role that an
exaggerated individual has on creating wealth and prosperity. In so doing, much like John Locke and Adam
Smith, the Ethiopian liberals see the temple of political and economic
development in the ideological spirit of the exaggerated individual. And for this reason they stand to demean,
reject, or second-guess the collective rights of a community, society, nations,
nationalities or the Ethiopian people at large.
Continues in Part two of this
article titled “The contrast between Eurocentric liberalism and revolutionary
democracy”
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