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 envisioned true sovereignty, in contrast to the new form of domination of the neocolonial situation. He explained to his people that clear understanding is a prerequisite for accurately assessing the necessary revolutionary tasks that the people must undertake.
Sankara further explained that the revolution must take into account the particular characteristics of the nation. In the case of neocolonial Upper Volta, these included: a low level of economic development; a high level of peasants renting small plots of land with traditional ideas modified by imposed market relations; the lack of an organized working class with working-class consciousness; a lumpenproletariat with undeveloped revolutionary consciousness; a national bourgeoisie that will primarily serve imperialist interests; and a petty bourgeoisie that vacillates between imperialism and revolution, but which can and must be brought on board to the revolutionary project. With respect to this last point, Sankara in his address to the General Assembly of the United Nations called upon the educated petty bourgeoisie of Africa and the Third World to give up the privileges available to it in the neocolonial world order, and to participate in the creation of a system of thought that serves the disinherited masses to which they belong.
On the basis of his analysis, Sankara convoked the people to united anti-imperialist struggle, overcoming nationality and ethnic differences among them. If he had appealed to the workers or to workers and peasants, surely he would have been viewed by his people as not having a good grasp of the reality of Upper Volta, of being more influenced by ideas floating around the world than by the actual situation of his own nation. Because the people knew directly from its experiences that the workers of Upper Volta were few in number and were lacking in revolutionary consciousness. What people would place themselves at risk to follow an individual presenting himself for leadership who lacked an understanding of the actual situation? A successful revolution requires at the foundation the emergence of leaders who demonstrate to the people a firm understanding of the situation, consistent with the perceptions that the people have on the basis of their lived experiences.
In his intellectual formation, Sankara had encountered students and workers who had participated in the 1968 uprising in Paris, and he had studied Marx and Lenin. But he did not apply their ideas to Upper Volta without adapting them to its particular conditions. He forged a reconceptualization of Marxism-Leninism, adapting it to the particular conditions of Upper Volta.
But Sankara’s creative reconceptualization is glossed over in The Militant. The article describes Sankara as “a powerful example to working people across Africa” who “used political power to organize the toiling classes” and to organize women. It asserts that “like Fidel Castro, the central leader of Cuba’s socialist revolution, Sankara acted on the capacities of ordinary men and women to transform the world and themselves. He spoke on behalf of the exploited worldwide, against governments that serve the exploiters.” Since his assassination, the article maintains, “he has become a symbol for millions of workers, farmers and young people.”
Such phrases as “working people” and “the toiling classes” function as window dressing to obscure Sankara’s reconceptualization of the classic Marxist formulation of a revolution led by the working class. The article does not begin to unpack Sankara’s analysis of the class dynamics of the neocolonial situation and its particular manifestations in the case of Upper Volta. It ignores his special appeal to the African and Third World petty bourgeoisie, and his view that the support of this class is central to the success of Third World peoples’ revolutions. The article therefore is unable to point toward reflection on the implications of Sankara’s analysis for a reconceptualization of political struggles of the world today from the vantage point of the Third World and in the context of the decadence of Western imperialism.
Can such superficiality be discerned by the people of the United States? Do our people not have the capacity, in spite of their limited understanding and consciousness, to discern when a historic figure like Thomas Sankara is being used by idealists to further their own agenda, without their necessarily having a profound understanding of the world?
Why does this matter? It matters because we intellectuals committed to truth and social justice in the United States have the duty to call our people to revolution, that is, to the taking of political power in the nation and a subsequent guiding of the nation to participation in the world revolution for the construction of a just world order. In order to do this, we must learn lessons from the recent advances of the world revolution in the Third World plus China, rooted in careful observation. We cannot base our call to revolution in the concepts and methods of the nineteenth and early twentieth century European and American socialist movements.
We must, therefore, convoke the people, and not the workers. It is the people, all the sectors of the people, whose dignity is assaulted every day. Convoking the people is consistent with a correct analysis of the world situation. And calling the people to revolution is unifying, and thus it is politically intelligent. When we convoke the people, we are calling the economically bruised and politically alienated middle class to join us in our struggle for justice for all.
When we remember Sankara, we must seek to understand him, and to discern that his capacity to call the people to revolution was rooted in his intelligent observation of the conditions of his nation, which compelled him to convoke the people. Let us not gloss over this significant conceptual contribution to the world revolution.
And let us not shrink from the power of his example. Let us ask ourselves, what are the particular economic and ideological conditions of our own nation, and what do they suggest to us with respect to a reformulation of the concepts and methods of American and European socialism?
We have to advance intellectually, to learn to do what we have not yet done.
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