Thank you so much for publishing my talk on your site and for giving this thoughtful reply. I wanted to use the opportunity to leave a comment to clarify a few things about my piece that might help to further the discussion or at least shed more light on the argument.

This talk was originally written with a specific audience in mind. Nonetheless, I stand by what I wrote with a few necessary amendments.

First, I want to say that I do not use the Stalinist label pejoratively, nor do I mean it to imply that Sankara (or any other revolutionary given that label by me or anyone else) is somehow on a moral or even necessarily an ideological plane with Stalin. Rather, I think that Stalinism can be an umbrella term for a particular approach to revolution that flourished in the twentieth century for a variety of reasons that were largely outside the control of any particular individual.

Lenin imagined the Bolshevik revolution as the spark for a global revolution that would sweep away the communist order and usher in socialism. When that failed to materialize, socialist revolutions in the twentieth century cohered around the nation-state: this was true in the Soviet Union, it was true in China, Vietnam, Cuba, Burkina Faso, etc. That Sankara’s revolution would take a nationalist form is thus not surprising, and, given his own position, largely unavoidable. My “criticism” of Sankara is therefore less of a second-guessing and more of an argument about the kind of socialist politics we should embrace in the twenty-first century. In other words, it is not a personal criticism but a broader critique of a particular Cold War political context.

That said, it is very difficult for me to see Sankara as an African Lenin (if such a person would even be desirable is a separate question.) He seized power through the military, after all. I think this background deeply shaped his approach to revolution, giving it a very strong state-centered approach that sought to achieve rapid change through largely undemocratic military-style campaigns that would rapidly improve the standard of living in the country.

It is true that Sankara did not describe himself as a socialist. However, when you consider his unmistakeably Marxist discourse, and the similarity between his specific tactics and, say, Castro’s in Cuba, it is hard for me to resist using that label. In fact, my suspicion is that his focus on “democracy” (as well as nationalism, in the sense that he always argued that the solutions he came up with were fit for Burkina Faso and could not necessarily be applied to peoples of other countries), was more a way of eliding a troublesome label, rather than an attempt to make an actual ideological distinction. But there is certainly room for debate on this question.

I don’t find the argument that the revolution was democratic credible. Sankara himself critiqued his own revolution on these grounds. Yes, he talks about the peasantry being inspired to build schools, etc., but this does not demonstrate that there was genuine popular control over the revolution. In fact, the structures for this did not exist. On a related note, I think that we need much more data on peasant perspectives on Sankara and the 1983-1987 revolution. In other words, I’m less interested in hearing what Sankara said, and more interested in learning what ordinary Burkinabe thought of the revolution. During Compaore’s long rule of the country, such research would have been very difficult if not impossible. I hope that changes in the future.

Finally, I think we need to really think about why this revolution failed, and whether this failure was avoidable. Sankara demanded a lot from the population during his reign…it is difficult for me to see how the revolution would have sustained itself beyond the 1980s. It needed many more allies, a much more robust and international left to defend it from its many enemies. When you consider the country’s position vis a vis France, Cote D’Ivoire, the IMF, etc., I think its failure was quite foreseeable during the 1980s. Part of the argument of my piece is that the liberation of the African continent will require a far stronger left in the US and Europe than certainly existed in the 1980s. Or, for that matter, than exists today.

Thanks again for the opportunity to engage in this debate.