On Sankara and The Militant
Understanding the world people’s revolution
The Militant recently published an article entitled “Thomas Sankara showed road forward.” Thomas Sankara emerged as the leader of the people’s revolution in the West African neocolony of Upper Volta, and he was the leader of the revolution in power in the renamed nation of Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987.
It is good that The Militant supports Thomas Sankara, standing against the imperialist forces that seek to erase him from human consciousness. But The Militant skirts over the fact that Sankara promoted and led a people’s revolution, not a revolution of workers, workers and peasants, or workers and oppressed peoples.
As I reviewed in my commentary of August 15, 2023, Sankara’s consciousness involved not the classic Western Marxist frame of reference of a working-class revolution against the capitalist class, but a Third World conceptualization of a struggle for independence and sovereignty against international imperialist powers and their allies in the neocolony. He en…