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253 “Beyond Nationalism” is a speech that was delivered to a forum sponsored by the Ethiopian Students Union of North America (ESUNA) held at Teachers College, Columbia University, on May 18, 1973. It is followed by a condensed version of the question-and-answer session that followed the speech. The text of the speech was published in the January 1974 issue of Monthly Review. Beyond Nationalism Good evening. It is good to be in New York. Good to have the opportunity to speak to a group that has taken on the responsibility of reflecting upon the state of Ethiopian society in the last half of the twentieth century. All too often it has been my experience to meet African students who embody a conflict of loyalties. That is, they are torn between two roads, between two directions. On the one hand, they feel that they should devote their energies to trying to find a way to mobilize the forces at home to make revolutionary changes in their lives. On the other hand, having tasted the inducements of the West, they are tempted to devote their energies to enhancing their own selfish interests, even though they know that this usually means abandoning their homeland. So they rationalize by insisting that the conditions at home are natural and inevitable at this stage of the historical development. From the literature I have read of the ESUNA group that is sponsoring this meeting , I get the distinct and very gratifying impression that you have chosen the road of responsibility for developing a revolutionary ideology and organization that can involve the masses in struggle for a new way of life in a section of Africa still dominated by a way of life already repudiated nearly two hundred years ago in the French Revolution. I do not know what the position of this audience is in regard to Ethiopia. But let me make clear what my position is, in order to remove any suspicion that I think in any biological or racialist way. By this I mean that I am not going to allow my thinking about the fate of mankind to be decided by my color or by the color of people, be they white or black, yellow or red or brown. All too often today, people tend to excuse or rationalize or support actions by individuals on the basis of their ethnic background. In the course of so doing, they lose all sense of principle in human behavior and historical development. So their minds degenerate. I call this kind of biological thinking “racialism .” “Racialism” is the kind of thinking in terms of color or biological origin that an individual chooses and therefore the kind of thinking an individual can also repudiate. It is not the same as “racism,” which is a social system based on economic and political power. Ethiopia plays a very special role in the thinking of Afro-Americans. Because Ethiopia has a long recorded history and is referred to in the Bible, and also because of the attack on Ethiopia by Mussolini in the 1930s, there has been a broad strand of sympathy here for Ethiopia. This sympathy has been—as sympathy often is—an obstacle to the kind of distinctions and the kind of critical thinking we have been willing to apply Ward.indb 253 12/21/10 9:28 AM Part III 254 to other nations at a like stage of development. What we have to acknowledge is that feudalism—just like tribalism, which came before feudalism—was a stage in the development of man that is now outmoded. Today , wherever feudalism exists, whether it is in Asia or Africa or South America, it is a fetter upon the further development of men and women. It is backward in the sense of going backward. It is against the continuing evolution of mankind, and it is therefore counterrevolutionary or anti-mankind. Those who hail Haile Selassie, whatever their rationale may be, are in essence sanctifying the forces in society who are determined to keep men and women in a state of bondage in order to maintain their own class privileges and their class domination over the material, political, and social development of others. Naturally we must realize that feudalism does not exist anywhere today in its original forms. The forms of its appearance have been modified by the tentacles of capitalism, either in the form of imperialism or colonialism or neocolonialism or multinational capitalism. Today the feudal landlords act as...

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