The consolidation of the Ethiopian Multi-National Hatse State in the era of the beginnings of the struggle against imperialism created, the material and social basis and conditions for the subsequent rise of irreconcilable class antagonism between the toiling gabar class and the exploiting gultegna class, that is, the landed and armed ruling class of gubernatorial, ecclesiastical, ministerial, mercantilist leaders and members of the feudal aristocracy and nobility of Ethiopia.
In 1907, the organized and armed ministerial, ecclesiastical, gubernatorial, and mercantilist leaders and members of the gultegna ruling class jointly seized the State Power in the new Council of Ministers and bureaucracy of the Hatse State.
They subsequently created the new systems and institutions of their own court, judiciary, property, inheritance, and private ownership, sale, purchase, exchange, and transfer of land as a commercial commodity for the first time in the long history of the country.
Thus they began to change the Menilik system of maderia, gindebel, and semon possession of land into the new system of inalienable and inheritable private ownership over and against the toiling gabar class.
After the Menlik period the power struggle between the old and young members of the gultegna class, the younger and highly armed faction of ministerial, ecclesiastical, gubernatorial, and mercantilist landlords deposed Queen Taitu, the wife of Menilik II; dismissed Lij Eyasu (1913-1914), the grandson and successor of the late Hatse; crowned Empress Zawditu (1916-1930), and designated Ras Teferi Makonnen (the future Haile Selassie I, 1930-1974) as the heir regent of the Hatse throne. In 1916, they even made a political alliance with the neighbouring British, French, and Italian imperialists to assist in their successional rivalries.
Between 1916 and 1974, the Heir Regent Teferi (Haile Selassie I) became the leader and symbol of the triumphant ruling gultegna class and transformed the Ethiopian Hatse State into an autocratic and absolutist feudal monarchay by a series of policy, legal, constitutional, and political measures.
Among such measures the gradual replacement of the gubernatorial administration of provinces by salaried administrators, and feudal dues and services by monetary taxation of gabars, the Haile Selassie Constitution of 1931 in which the gultegna ruling class made legal attempts to legitimatize and perpetuate its power and privileges. The period also saw growth of new commercial, financial, urban, and educational centres, institutions, organizations, and activities in the country up to the Italian invasion of 1935-1941.
The Italian invasion of 1935-1941, and the subsequent liberation and reunion of Eritrea with the Motherland, in 1952, greatly encouraged the interim rise of the feudo-bourgeois class and mode of production in Ethiopia which lasted until the eruption of the Ethiopian Revolution in 1974.
The destruction of the two archaic systems of slavery and gabar serfdom during the Italian occupation; the enemy’s massive activities in road, bridge, urban, and housing construction;
the Haile Selassie post-war expropriation of peasants’ property and the rise of a massive provincial bureaucracy with a resultant distribution of lands to the privileged leaders and members of the ruling gultegna class; the rise of the national armed forces and industrial workers; the incorporation of the Eritrean national petty-bourgeoisie into the Ethiopian gultegna class at large;
the commercial, educational, and cultural penetration of the western imperialist countries and Japan, and the Haile Selassie Revised Constitution of 1955, all facilitated conditions for the transitional emergence of the feudo-bourgeois system of economy and society in Ethiopia, and intensified the irreconcilable class differences and antagonisms between the ruling gultegna class and the oppressed and exploited masses of the workers and peasants.
These conditions and forces finally led to the popular Ethiopian Revolution of 1974. The Revolution dramatically liberated the long-oppressed and exploited working class, and created the necessary conditions for the subsequent rise of the Ethiopian Workers’ Party (EWP), and the Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (PDRE), with its own new system of Provincial divisions and administration for the socialist reconstruction of Ethiopia.
(Source: National Atlas of Ethiopia)
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