Continued from an article titled “It’s
Revolutionary Democracy, not Eurocentric liberalism, which works for us”
The contrast between Ethiopian
liberals and the revolutionary democrats on how to develop Ethiopia into a
middle income democratic country is substantive. Nonetheless, the alternative
worldview being expressed by revolutionary democrats is not at all against most
of the tenets that liberal democracy and its market system have to offer.
Revolutionary democrats believe in
the free association of individuals, and the coming to life of more than 90
disparate Ethiopian political parties attests to this fact that it is so. They believe in free but reasonably
restrained, revolutionized and modern efficient market system, and the advent
of the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange proves that it the case. Most importantly,
revolutionary democrats believe in democracy - “government of the people, by
the people, for the people,” convinced in the ability of nations and
nationalities of Ethiopia to self-govern themselves as they see it fit. In
fact, it is the revolutionary democrats that have given in practice the real,
true and essential meaning of what democracy is.
Democracy is the ultimate means to
empower people more than it is the means to empower the individual to reign
supreme over the collective shoulders of a people. The rights of an individual
should not at all tramp the collective rights of a people. And for this reason, the revolutionary
democrat’s worldview of Ethiopia incorporates only those tenets suitable to
Ethiopia’s economic, political and social realities, with the focus to
strengthen the collective democratic and economic rights of the Ethiopian
people. This is just a simple
proposition as far as revolutionary democrats are concerned. Ethiopia is a country of many nations and nationalities,
and by virtue of this very fact, the rights of nations and nationalities should
reign supreme in contrast to any unreasonable, superfluous and exaggerated
individual rights. Seen from this angle,
democratization under Ethiopian context is therefore the summation of a
political and an economic act to empower the nations and nationalities of
Ethiopia, and it’s less of an act to bring God or Goddess out of a self-seeking
Ethiopian soul.
Revolutionary democracy rejects the
philosophy of aggrandizing the individual as if he or she, by uncoordinated
design, is the source of economic and political development. Political and
economic development is the result of a planned collective effort, not the
result of a spontaneous interaction of self-seeking individuals. For all these aforementioned reasons then,
revolutionary democrats are cognizant of the fact 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.
Some argue that “the attack on liberalism is based on confusing
two terms: liberalism and neo-liberalism”. Neo-liberalism is mainly a
re-invented or rehashed grandiose economic movement of liberalism. Irrespective
of its huge reach, neo-liberalism is nonetheless one of the inborn varieties
that liberalism has given birth under its own self-induced economic and
political labor. Neo-liberalism is a major policy implementation and depending
on the countries it is taking hold, it is either thoroughly an economic
movement as in Britain under Margret Thatcher, or an economic and social
movement as in America under Ronald Regan. And its ideology is liberalism of
the kind that John Locke and Adam Smith espoused. But most importantly,
neo-liberalism is a well-known tool of our modern times, used by the Western
powers to swindle a great deal of resources from their own people and also from
people in “under developed” and “developing” countries. How do they do it? By
simply prescribing a major set of unfair and controlling micro-economic policy
changes, surnamed liberalization.
Privatization of the economy; deregulation of the market;
downsizing of the public sector; selling state owned enterprise; letting the
market determine the price of goods and services including essential utilities;
reducing government spending on social services and shrinking the size of
government agencies, and dwindling the number of people employed by government
agencies, are major policy prescription in the name of liberalizing the
economic sector of a country, “to guarantee the rights and freedoms of the
individual by limiting the powers of government.” They seem to be assuming that all these economic and
political courses of action of neo-liberalism are done in an ideological
vacuum, and that’s absolutely wrong.
Neo-liberalism
uses the ideological arguments of both Locke and Smith to restructure the
political and economic fabric of a society into what classical liberal
worldview espouses. Deregulating the
market; letting the market determine the price of
goods and services including essential utilities, are courses of actions
tantamount to letting “The Invisible Hand” run the economy (Adam Smith). Meanwhile, privatizing the economy; selling
state owned enterprise; downsizing the public sector and shrinking the size of
government agencies are actions born out of the womb of a liberal ideology, to
limit the power of government in favor of the individual rights of those it has
been created to serve (John Locke).
Therefore, to claim disparateness between liberalism and neo-liberalism
is to attempt to sell a real bird with no wings. Metaphorically speaking, neo-liberalism is
one wing among variety of wings of the bird that I call liberalism. And this specific wing has helped liberalism
to crash-land in many places of our world, allowing us to observe meticulously
what to buy and what not to buy in the open market of ideologies.
Tightly coupled with individualism and the absolute right to
property, neo-liberalism in general comes as a measurable quantity of major
policy undertaking. Individualism and
the absolute right to property, two of liberalism’s credos that we
revolutionary democrats criticize with cogency, are adhered with similar
passion and authenticity by modern day neo-liberals, for example, the late
Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher of England. In fact, Neo-liberalism is sometimes called
Thatcherism, and Thatcher, following the ideological footstep of her countryman
- John Locke, is a known opponent of anything social and communal.
The
alternative worldview being expressed by revolutionary democrats is not at all
against most of the tenets that liberal democracy and its market system have to
offer. Revolutionary democracy believes in the free association of individuals,
and the coming to life of more than 90 disparate Ethiopian political parties
attests to this fact that it is so.
Revolutionary democracy propagates for free but reasonably restrained,
revolutionized and modern efficient market system, and the advent of the
Ethiopian Commodity Exchange proves that it the case. Most importantly, revolutionary democracy
believes in democracy - “government of the people, by the people, for the
people,” convinced in the ability of nations and nationalities of Ethiopia to
self-govern themselves as they see it fit.
For this reason, it is revolutionary democracy that has given in
practice the real, true and essential meaning of what democracy is, it can be
argued.
The major argument in my piece in
part is based against a liberal ideology that favors the unfair and controlling
economic and political interest of the Western world. And this ideology has an overreaching
contemporary tool called neo-liberalism - with a pinpointed goal to remove all
“barriers” to commerce and to privatize all available services and resources
including water. This grandiose plan of economic globalization is welcomed by Ethiopian
liberals who seem to know less that the whole scheme unfairly benefits the
developed Western powers more so than any other country including ours.
Now that we have established the
hand in glove nature of neo-liberalism and liberalism, a concerned and
well-informed Ethiopian will recognize, 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 to wealth.
The wealth that our beloved Ethiopia accrues
is produced through social interdependence and common efforts. Let alone how we Ethiopians farm,
manufacture, buy, own, sell and consume, even the way how we ideologically
agree and disagree with each other are part of our social existence. Therefore, to isolate property and the ownership
right that is ascribed to it in a fashion that stresses, exaggerates, and
dramatizes the right of a single individual will be a wildly improbable faulty
doctrine to follow. Because the “I” and
“mine” culture and ideology will make some among us to view ownership rights as
unrelated to social life. And such a
path for sure will encourage contemporary and future Ethiopian entrepreneurs to
consider their property as their own absolute wealth, produced and acquired in
some fictional private space they have created behind the Ethiopian
society. This is precisely part of the
liberal credo that we revolutionary democrats criticize, to build a
middle-income democratic society premised on a cohesive communal ethos.
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