No true socialism...or a grotesquely deformed workers´ state?

Eritrean dictator Isaias Afwerki
with some Russian bloke

Has ChatGPT been secretely hijacked by Trotskyists? Look what happened when I asked the system whether or not Eritrea is socialist!   

Does Eritrea have "socialist" economic policies? Such as a formally planned economy, government-owned businesses, etc?

Eritrea's economy today bears some traces of socialist structure, but it's better described as a highly centralized, authoritarian command economy rather than a fully socialist or Marxist one in the classical sense.

Here’s a breakdown:

---

🏛️ Government Control Over the Economy

1. State Ownership

• The Eritrean government owns or controls most major sectors of the economy, including:

  • Telecommunications

  • Banking

  • Energy

  • Media

  • Import/export trade

• Private enterprise is severely limited, especially in areas deemed strategic by the state.

2. Lack of Market Liberalization

• There is no stock market, and foreign investment is tightly regulated or discouraged unless aligned with the government’s interests.

• Currency exchange is state-controlled.

• The Eritrean nakfa is not freely convertible.

3. National Development Projects

• The government uses mass mobilization, including compulsory national service, for infrastructure and development.

• Many workers, including conscripts, are assigned to state-owned companies or government-run farms and mines.

• This system resembles state-driven development more than true socialism, as workers have little or no say in planning or profit-sharing.

---

⚒️ Mining and Foreign Partnerships

• The government has joint ventures with foreign companies, especially in gold and potash mining.

• However, these are typically structured with the state holding majority control, and labor is often provided through national service conscripts — a point of international human rights criticism.

• No large-scale private capitalist class has been allowed to emerge in Eritrea.

---

🧠 Ideological Roots

• The ruling party, the People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), evolved from the EPLF, which had Marxist-Leninist influences during the liberation struggle.

• However, the PFDJ does not currently identify as socialist or Marxist.

• Isaias Afwerki rejected both Western capitalism and Soviet-style communism, promoting instead a model of self-reliance, discipline, and centralized control.

---

Summary

Feature	Eritrea
State ownership	Extensive (banks, telecoms, major industries)
Economic planning	Centralized, non-transparent
Private sector	Severely restricted
Ideology	Post-socialist nationalism / self-reliance
Market economy	Very limited
Foreign investment	Limited, mostly in mining under state terms

---

🚫 Notable Absences:

• No independent trade unions

• No workers' councils

• No real market or democratic socialism

---

In short, Eritrea has a state-dominated, command-style economy, rooted in its revolutionary past and maintained through tight authoritarian control, but it does not officially follow a socialist ideology today.

Would you like a comparison with how this model differs from Cuba, North Korea, or Ethiopia’s past Marxist regime?

Ett parti för extremister?

 

Credit: Carlos Spitzer (Pexels)

Han har fel om bostadsrätterna.

S, ni fortsätter att gå extremisters ärenden

Välkomna till Järvafältet

 

Är socialdemokraterna i Stockholms Stad infiltrerade av EPLF, eller vad? En inte helt ironisk fråga... 

Diktaturfestivalen på Järvafältet stoppas inte av S i Stockholm 

Migrant factions

 

I know it´s pointless to teach Breitbart News basick geopolitix, but imagine their headlines if the "migrant factions" had been Venezuelans or Cubans...

Something tells me Breitbart would go full Cold War and embrace the anti-Communist faction! But perhaps Eritrea, dubbed "the North Korea of Africa", isn´t too Commie for these guys? LOL.  

Riots break out in The Hague as migrant factions clash

Veckans Strasser...igen!

Det verkar ha blivit populärt den senaste tiden att beskylla invandrargrupper för att "importera sina konflikter till Sverige". Till och med Wolfgang Hansson gör det. Och han är väl ändå något slags liberal, antar jag.  

OK, grabbar. Två saker. 

Ett: Vem tog hit invandrarna? Vem tog hit invandrargrupper som befinner sig i konflikt med varandra? Bjöd de in sig själva, eller vad?

Två: Har inte de svenska myndigheterna själva tagit ställning i x antal internationella eller interna konflikter? Gäller inte detsamma medierna? Till helt nyligen var Sverige "pro-kurdiskt" och under en kortare period även "pro-YPG" (ja, det är PKK). 

Jag skulle kunna nämna ett stort antal andra konflikter av samma typ. Don´t tempt me. 

Och för att använda ett annat argument som blivit populärt den senaste tiden: är det inte "naivt" att tro att Sverige kan uppfostra resten av världen i hur den svenska yttrandefriheten fungerar? 

Så vem är *egentligen* ansvarig för att olika utländska aktörer (de goda, de onda och de fula) pucklar på varandra i Grönköpings förorter?

Asking for a friend named Otto. 

 

Afrikas Nordkorea

Eritreas diktator Isaias (till vänster) i glatt samspråk
med Etiopiens premiärminister Abyi, 
som fick Nobels fredspris istället för Greta Thunberg

Ett gammalt problem jag hörde talas om redan på 1990-talet. Ja, Eritreas skatt, alltså. Att den humanitära stormakten Sverige är för flat mot olika diktaturer är (kanske) en ny insikt. Eller? 

Vill man vara extremt petnoga så ska Eritreas diktator Isaias Afwerki kallas "Isaias" om man bara använder ett av namnen, inte "Afwerki" som Hansson skriver. Detta trots att Afwerki faktiskt ligger närmare det vi kallar efternamn.

Tydligen.

Fast denna lokala namnkonvention kanske inte följs internationellt? Men som sagt, detta handlar ju inte om *sådana* konventioner... 

Hur kan vi låta Eritreas diktatur bedriva utpressning i Sverige?

The global class war goes to Ogaden

"The Ethiopian Revolution and the struggle against U.S. imperialism" is a small book published by the Workers World Party (WWP), a left-wing radical group in the United States. The party has Trotskyist origins, but its real politics sound like a curious blend of pro-Soviet Communism and Maoism, making the WWP "Stalinist" rather than properly Trotskyist. It's notorious for strongly supporting the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Judging by this and other WWP material, the group also strongly backed the Derg of Ethiopia, a Soviet-backed military regime claiming to be socialist and revolutionary. The Derg's chairman was Mengistu Haile Mariam.

Mengistu's rule was challenged from pretty much every quarter: moderates within the armed forces, various ethnic guerrilla groups, armed supporters of the old feudal regime, hostile neighbours and (surprise) the United States. The conflict within Ethiopia was further complicated by conflicts between rival left-wing organizations. In this book, the WWP actually admits that much of the "counter-revolutionary" violence was perpetrated by the EPRP, a leftist group whose formal program was almost identical to that of the Derg! They also admit that the Eritrean EPLF was left-wing. When Ethiopia was ruled by the pro-Western feudal emperor Haile Selassie, most leftists had supported the EPLF. After the Ethiopian revolution, things got more complex, as the Derg and the EPLF drifted further apart, the Derg refusing to grant Eritrea independence, the EPLF siding with conservative groups and pro-Western Arab regimes. According to this little book, the Palestinian DFLP actually made some kind of attempt to mediate between the two contending parties, apparently unsuccessfully. In the end, the WWP and most Soviet-oriented leftists sided with the Derg, while the Maoists and Hoxhaites sided with the EPLF and other ethnic/leftist guerrillas fighting Mengistu's increasingly more brutal regime.

However, Eritrea plays only a minor role in "The Ethiopian Revolution", which instead focuses on the Ogaden war. The United States and various conservative Arab regimes had launched a virtual proxy war against Mengistu's Ethiopia, the more than willing proxy being Somalia, a traditional adversary to Ethiopia. The eastern parts of Ethiopia, including a region known as the Ogaden, has a predominantly Somali population. The Somali regime of Siad Barre, which had originally been pro-Soviet, made a dramatic turn after the Ethiopian revolution, instead siding with the Western powers in return for military and financial assistance. Somalia then attacked Ethiopia, overrunning the ethnically Somali provinces, and threatening important non-Somali towns. With the aid of the Soviet bloc (including Cuban troops), the Derg eventually managed to repulse the invasion and retake all of Ogaden. For some reason, the WWP's book doesn't mention the presence of Cuban troops in Ethiopia, although it does admit that there were Soviet and Cuban "advisors". Instead, most of the book is devoted to exposing the Western propaganda concerning the Ogaden War: U.S. president Jimmy Carter's feigned neutrality, Somali denials that any invasion had taken place at all (!), and the machinations of various Arab regimes, most notably that of Sudan, at the time a U.S. ally in the region. Siad Barre's flip flops are also meticulously detailed.

"The Ethiopian Revolution" consists of articles published in the Workers World newspaper from August 1977 to January 1978. It also contains the Program of the National Democratic Revolution, adopted by the Derg in 1976. Many of the photos in the book are original, taken by Workers World reporter Deirdre Griswold during her trip to Ethiopia. Although this little book is (of course) a propaganda tract on behalf of the Derg, it nevertheless struck me as relatively interesting, and I therefore give it three stars. Of course, I heard quite different versions of events from Ethiopian and Eritrean refugees living in Europe...

Civil war, what civil war?

This is volume 2, part 2 of the ambitious reference work "Flora of Ethiopia and Eritrea", originally called simply "Flora of Ethiopia". It's published in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and Uppsala, Sweden. Funding has been provided by SAREC, better known as SIDA, the Swedish Third World aid agency. (Since SIDA means AIDS in French-speaking Africa, the Swedish agency called itself SAREC when working in African nations.) Inga Hedberg and Sue Edwards are listed as editors, together with Mesfin Tadesse.

Work on this project began already in 1980, and it has continued pretty much ever since. Interestingly, the flora was not affected by the regime change in Ethiopia in 1991, or by the independence of Eritrea the same year. The people on the editorial board remained the same, and so did the SIDA grants. Perhaps botanists are so non-political that neither side in the Ethiopian Civil War cared much? Or perhaps both sides needed aid money from Sweden...?

As already said, this is "volue 2, part 2" and covers 27 families from the Canellaceae to the Euphorbiaceae. The flora is illustrated, but only with black-and-white line drawings. It's obviously a reference work intended for botanists. Still, it's no mean accomplishment on its own turf, so I give it four stars despite the rather narrow target audience.

An interesting aid program

"Flora of Ethiopia and Eritrea" was originally known simply as "Flora of Ethiopia". The very first volume was published in 1989, when Mengistu and his bizarre Communist-fascist military junta were still in power in Addis. Interestingly, the editorial board of the flora continued pretty much as before after the revolution in 1991, when Meles Zenawi replaced Mengistu as the nation's president, while Eritrea declared its independence.

How did the people behind this project manage to be on such a good terms with both sides in a brutal civil war? Let me guess: the Swedish aid money? The flora is financed by SAREC (or SIDA) and one of the editors is Swedish. Well, SIDA sure has some interesting aid programs going!

That being said, I have no particular problem with "Flora of Ethiopia and Eritrea". This is the first part of volume 2, covering Magnoliaceae to Flacourtiaceae. The illustrations are all in black and white, and this is obviously a reference for botanists, not a field guide for the general public (or Ethiopian soldiers). Still, it's a tour de force at its own turf and therefore deserves four stars.