I’m adamantly opposed to any version of leftist or progressive politics that relies on an understanding of power that is formal, structural, and deterministic—that rests on a view that whatever powerful interests and individuals do is always driven by deep forms of reason, by some evolutionary drive towards adaptive advantage set by a fitness landscape. That somehow power knows what it must do to preserve itself against any dangers, that power affords the powerful a transparent vision of the threats they face.
Marx’s analysis provided many insights and assets, but the teleological dimension of his thought has disfigured left-wing politics for more than a century. It’s fine to note that the contradictions of capitalist accumulation or state sovereignty must create certain kinds of recurrent crises which in turn are opportunities for transformation. Up to a point, that’s true enough. But more importantly, the powerful can blunder, they can make contingent mistakes, whether as individuals or acting in concert through institutions they dominate. They don’t necessarily see their own interests clearly or read threats accurately. Elites can and frequently do commit a kind of class suicide by overestimating their power or by overreliance on other groups or institutions that will displace them or destroy them given half a chance.
This is never more true than in the case of war, whether between national sovereignties or in civil conflicts. (And fairly consistently, war has been one of those events that has troubled a certain kind of orthodox left thought.) Peter Capaldi’s version of the Doctor has an impassioned speech in one episode of Doctor Who about the contingency of war. “When you fire that first shot, no matter how right you feel, you have no idea who’s going to die.” The Doctor is more concerned for what happens to non-combatants, but his warning clearly applies to the leaders as well: you can lose if you fight, no matter how confident you feel right now.
If there is any group of leaders on the planet that should understand that utterly and completely, it is anybody with any kind of political power in Ethiopia and Eritrea in the Horn of Africa. Using armed men to facilitate dominating local communities or securing your excessive share of resources? Sure, that works throughout that region in securing the interests of existing elites. I hate that it does, but it does: trying to argue with the people who have power on the ground in Ethiopia and its neighbors from some rarified moral pedestal is a pointless exercise for now.
Going to war or something close to it in scale and intensity? Again and again, it’s been a disastrous move in the region for the people deciding to do it. Whatever Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was thinking when he ordered his military forces to attack regional armed forces in the northern Ethiopian territory of Tigray, it was clearly a bad decision, as evidenced by his order to retreat two days ago, after the Ethiopian army was involved in numerous severe violations of human rights and after insurgents in Tigray and Eritrean military forces and now other regional insurgencies and forces have scored military successes against the Ethiopian army.
It’s not that hard to see what the Prime Minister and his close political allies were thinking: their hold on political power has been more and more fragile for a decade in a region constantly wracked by war and civil conflict since the 1960s, as well as by continuous cycles of authoritarian misrule. They saw enemies wherever they looked and they saw (not without some cause) some of those enemies seemingly preparing to contest the power of the national government through force of arms or through some form of semi-declared autonomy. But again, it ought to have been apparent to them that a major military incursion into Tigray where soldiers were clearly set free to rape, murder and plunder from local communities would simply accelerate the decomposition of their own power. Plainly that was not clear to whomever it was that made the decision, or (incorrectly) the alternative was judged more threatening still.
I think that’s the major question that remains. Scholars, expatriate intellectuals, and interested parties outside of the immediate circles of power in most contemporary African states are, as they long have been, often left guessing to a profound degree about exactly what is being said and thought in the “room where it happens”. For me at least the most pressing issue is what military leaders (and rank and file soldiers) are thinking in these situations. Civilian leaders often have a political backstory that makes them trajectory into power knowable and their alliances and situated thinking perceptible. Many military leaders operate behind multiple levels of official and unofficial secrecy. The most important question about them is really whether the risks that someone like Abiy Ahmed is taking for his own power and prospects—risks that are broadly shared by the old core of the EPRDF elite—are in any way of concern to military leaders or soldiers in the defense forces (the ENDF).
Sure, in the uncertainties of war, soldiers can die—even officers in command. Lose badly enough and not only might you die or if you’re in command, be replaced for at least a short time, but you might even be captured by enemies or have to flee into exile. But while major military conflicts within states and between states in the Horn of Africa plainly have been catastrophic for ordinary people and even for some elites with political power, it’s hard to say whether the contingencies of war often or ever put soldiers at risk of losing their power as soldiers. Their lives are on the line, and the misfortunes of war may turn out badly in other ways, but conflict itself may simply be the fundamental labor process of a political economy based in plunder and precarity—and that the only thing they really fear is the creation of a secure peace in a unified nation. That’s the thought that people like Samantha Power really need to speak to forthrightly if they want to help Ethiopia’s political leaders to recalculate their actions: whether men with political power defending their elite prerogatives need to understand better that their militaries may not care very much about whether war preserves or defends those prerogatives.
What scares military leaders and their rank-and-file about war in a region where military power lives deeply in the bones of both everyday and exemplary power? Maybe very little, but even they ought to be more frightened of it than they seem to be. Its contingencies can and have been fearful even for them. War may be politics by other means—and may enable processes of extraction and accumulation by military leaders—but that simply means that the dangers that civilian elites face are more or less identically faced by military leaders and soldiers. The ENDF’s leadership ought to know that just from the deaths in their ranks over the last five years.
Image credit: Photo by aben tefra on Unsplash