Mengistu and the Derg Were Never Socialist — Here's the Proof

By Sidoc Haytu

Every time someone in this country wants to kill a conversation about Marxism before it starts, they reach for the same four words: "Look what happened with Mengistu."

I get it. If your grandparents lived through 1977, you didn't hear about socialism in a classroom — you heard about it from someone who buried a brother because of it. That pain is real and it deserves to be taken seriously, not argued away.

But here's what almost nobody tells Gen Z: the Derg wasn't socialist. It called itself socialist while doing the exact things socialism was invented to end. Let's go through it fast, point by point, so the next time someone uses Mengistu to shut down a conversation, you have the receipts.

The claim you'll hear

• "Mengistu was a communist, communism failed here, case closed."
• "The Derg proves Marxism always ends in dictatorship."
• "Ethiopians already tried this. Look what happened."

Sounds airtight. It isn't. Here's why.

Myth vs. reality — debunked fast

Myth: "They called it socialism, so it was socialism."

• Reality: A government's name for itself is a marketing claim, not a fact. The Derg nationalized land and industry under military command — but socialism was never just "the state owns things." It's supposed to mean the working class controls production and the state, not a closed military committee that answers to nobody.
• The Derg was twelve to seventeen unelected army officers who seized power in a coup. Not one worker's council. Not one democratic vote on who would lead.

Myth: "They had Soviet backing, so they must have been the real thing."

• Reality: Alliances aren't ideology. Mengistu turned to Moscow in the late 1970s mainly to get weapons and Cuban troops for a war with Somalia — a transaction, not a conversion. Great powers have armed all kinds of regimes that had nothing to do with liberating workers.

Myth: "The Red Terror was just the cost of revolution — Lenin had one too."

• Reality: Mengistu himself said it out loud: "You cannot build socialism without Red Terror." But look at who the Red Terror actually killed.
• Its primary targets weren't landlords or the old aristocracy. They were other Marxists — the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party and the All-Ethiopia Socialist Movement, the two largest actual socialist organizations in the country, hunted down and executed by the thousands because they wanted power to go to elected civilian structures instead of a military junta.
• Estimates of the dead from that campaign range as high as 750,000. A revolution that murders the actual revolutionaries to protect one man's grip on power isn't purging counter-revolution. It's eliminating the competition.

Myth: "At least they gave power to the people."

• Reality: They banned independent trade unions. They banned every rival Marxist party. In 1984 they founded the Workers' Party of Ethiopia — not built from below by organized workers, but assembled from the top by a military government that had already spent seven years killing the civilian left that might have built something real.
• Genuine socialism runs on workers organizing themselves. The Derg ran on soldiers organizing everyone else.

Myth: "The economy was collectivized, that's the proof."

• Reality: Land and industry were seized, yes — and then handed to a military-bureaucratic elite to manage by decree, not to workers to run democratically. Economists have a term for a state that owns the means of production but concentrates control in an unaccountable elite instead of the working class: state capitalism. Same exploitation, new landlord, uniform instead of a title deed.
• Forced villagization programs uprooted millions of rural Ethiopians under threat of violence. That's not liberation. That's coercion with a red flag over it.

Myth: "This is what all communism becomes, so why even discuss it."

• Reality: This is the actual point. If the test of an idea is whether every self-declared version of it was genuine, no political tradition on earth survives — capitalism has produced Pinochet's Chile and apartheid South Africa, both proudly "free market," and nobody uses that to declare capitalism disproven. Judge the Derg by what it actually did, not by the label it stapled to itself.

What real socialism actually requires — and the Derg had none of it

• Democratic control from below — workers and communities actually deciding, not receiving decrees from a closed military council. The Derg had none.
• Accountable leadership — leaders who can be removed by the people they claim to represent. Mengistu ruled by purge and firing squad, not by any mechanism the population controlled.
• Protection of political plurality on the left — genuine socialist movements able to organize, argue, and build without being hunted. The Derg annihilated its own left flank first.
• The end of exploitation, not its relocation — production organized for human need, decided by the people doing the producing. The Derg replaced private landlords with a military-bureaucratic one.

None of these are Marxist-Leninist trivia. They're the entire point of the theory. A regime that fails all four isn't a cautionary tale about socialism. It's a cautionary tale about military dictatorships that steal socialism's language to legitimize themselves — which regimes across the political spectrum, left and right, have done for a century.

Why this matters to you, specifically

You didn't live through 1977. But you live in a country where "socialism" gets used as a curse word to end conversations before they start, usually by people with a direct interest in you never asking who actually controls the land, the capital, and the state today. The Derg is the easiest weapon in that argument, and it's a weak one the moment you actually check the receipts.

The next time someone says "look what happened with Mengistu" to shut you down, you don't have to defend the Derg. Nobody serious does. You just have to say the truer, harder thing: the Derg is exactly what happens when the actual left gets murdered by a military elite wearing its colors — not what happens when the actual left wins.

That distinction is the whole argument. Don't let anyone take it from you.

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Sidoc Haytu is an Ethiopian writer and researcher focused on political economy, class dynamics, and anti-imperialist movements in the Horn of Africa. If you are ready to build, not just read, join the movement at https://t.me/SiraPress.