When I started as an SFI activist, the ideology of neoliberalism was very dominant. The anti communist ‘triumph’ after the fall of the Soviet Union and the socialist countries in Eastern Europe and subsequent hegemony of neoliberalism had significantly altered social science departments in academia. Across the length and the breadth of the country, social science and humanities departments in higher education were heavily influenced by Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of the History” and Daniel Bell’s “The End of Ideology”. Historical and materialist analysis of colonialism and neocolonialism was marginalised in academia. On the other hand, several schools of “post colonial” and “post modern” analysis—dovetailed to the decline of class analysis— were mushrooming.
The students who wanted to pursue research on agrarian issues or capital-labour relations within a Marxist framework were struggling to find supervisors and funding. Whatever “Marxism” left in academia was mainly “Western Marxism”. There were some honourable exceptions. Then came the 2008 financial crisis. It was a major blow to neoliberal consensus as well as the capitalist knowledge industry. Mainstream Economics as well as Post Modernism failed to explain the crisis.
The crisis reiterated the superiority of the Marxist Leninist tradition of social enquiry. I vividly remember how the 2008 crisis instilled a desire to delve into Lenin’s “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism”. Written in the Bolshevik spring of 1916, Lenin’s masterpiece was meant to educate the working people of the “fundamental economic question, that of the economic essence of imperialism”. The beauty of studying Lenin was that it invigorated our ideological conviction against imperialism which we inherited from SFI.
When “Student Struggle” asked me to reflect on the extraordinary rise of Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traore as a major anti imperialist figure in the contemporary world, the first image that came to my mind was of Thomas Sankara, known as Africa’s Che. Sankara, Traore’s hero and role model, was born in Burkina Faso in 1949, the year of the anti-imperialist Chinese revolution. In 1949, Burkina Faso was known as “Upper Volta” and was notorious for French colonial looting. The country was blessed with abundant natural resources but colonial exploitation made the peasants and workers very poor. Sankara encountered Marxism as an officer cadet in the military academy in late 1960s. Marxist and anti-imperialist military officers—who were also very close to peasant and worker movements—did a military coup against the pro-imperialist regime in 1983, and Sankara rose to become the head of the revolutionary government.
Sankara, who was intensely influenced by the Cuban revolution and the political and military writings of Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara changed the name of his country from Upper Volta to Burkina Faso, which can be translated as “Land of the Upright People”. The charismatic and ideologically sound Sankara theorised that “because of the oppression and exploitation of our people by imperialism”, Burkina Faso has “evolved from a colony into a neo-colony”. His Marxist understanding on neocolonialism made him a trenchant critique of bourgeois social sciences or “neutral writing”. Attacking African ruling class intellectuals aligned with imperialism, Sankara wrote “in these stormy times we cannot give today’s and yesterday’s enemies a monopoly over thought, imagination and creativity”.
Sankara’s dream was to smash neocolonialism and build a “New International Economic Order”, where self-reliance of the Global South is crucial. Scholars have pointed out that this vision of Sankara is theoretically close to Samir Amin’s conceptualisation of “delinking”. For Samir Amin, the crux of the delinking, from the perspective of the Global South, is “the refusal to submit national development strategy to the imperatives of the globalisation”. Sankara was convinced that “the policy of foreign aid and assistance produced nothing but disorganisation and continued enslavement”. Sankara’s deep conviction that “all that comes from man’s imagination is realisable for man” guided his policies. His radical agrarian reforms and public spending policies were coming from the understanding of revolutionary marxism. Peasantry, workers, youth and students gained from these policies.
The widely read Sankara’s revolutionary project also had a strong anti patriarchal component. To him, it was important to make a “new society”, where man will “become human”. In a nutshell, Sankara’s policies increased the purchasing power of the working people and caused considerable damage to the foreign monopoly corporations. The real economic growth during his term (1983-87) was higher than the previous puppet regime. His international recognition and real possibility of the “communist danger” spreading across Africa resulted in his assassination by the imperial agents on March 15,1987. Targeted assassination of African anti-imperialist leaders was always a method deployed by imperialism; martyrdom of Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, Walter Rodney and Maurice Bishop testifies to it.
One week before his assassination, Sankara delivered his last public speech “You Cannot Kill Ideas” to commemorate the martyrdom of Che Guevara. While expressing his solidarity for the Cuban revolution, Sankara beautifully narrated how Che “with his eternal youth”, gave “himself entirely to the revolution”. Sankara reiterated that Che is “a citizen of the free world—the free world that we are building together. That’s why we say that Che Guevara is also African and Burkinabe”.
After the killing of Sankara, Blaise Compaore became the president. In his tenure from 1987-2014, he surrendered Burkina Faso to the dictates of global finance. The Burkinabe working people were reduced to “financial slave”, which according to Sankara is “true slave”. The widespread discontent in the society were channelised by the revolutionary elements in the military and a 1988 born Ibrahim Traore emerged as the president in 2022. Traore’s ascendancy to the power coincided with seismic shifts in the geopolitical economy. Capitalism in general and the imperial block led by the US in particular was declining. Socialist China was rising. The prophetic insight by Samir Amin that “decline is a dangerous time” proved to be right. Capitalism was behaving “more and more savagely in order to maintain its position, to maintain the imperialist supremacy of the centres”.
By all indications, Traore is walking in the path laid by Shankara. Traore’s irreverence to the International Finance Capital and NATO is legendary. For instance, in his harsh indictment of the IMF, Traore says that “your loans arrive with smiles, but they are poisoned arrows wrapped in contracts. You speak of stabilisation, but you deliver strangulation”. He is crystal clear that “we no longer accept economic policies that reduce our people to beggars while our gold binds the vaults of the West. We no longer dance to the rhythm of conditionalities that gut our public services, impoverish our farmers, and force our youth into exile. We no longer accept being told that good governance means handing over our national wealth to foreign firms with smiling consultants”.
Traore’s brave nationalisation of much of the gold reserves and a conscious renegotiation of mining contracts with foreign corporations have earned him the wrath of imperialism. His unceremonious expulsion of the French military from Burkina Faso and deepening military and diplomatic ties with China and Russia are disturbing the NATO. His efforts to strengthen “The Alliance of Sahel States” (AES) consisting of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger and a determined decision to come out of ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) was a setback to imperial interests.
Among many progressive policies including free education, subsidised modern health care and pro people infrastructure projects, Traore’s intervention in advancing radical agrarian reforms has captured my imagination, as an AIKS activist, to the core. Traore is reorganising and modernising agricultural production to achieve food security and undo the damages done by neocolonialism. The agrarian policies, including promotion of the cooperatives in farming, processing and marketing are designed to arrest distress migration from rural areas as well as making agriculture a respectable and rewarding profession for the predominantly young population. The Presidential Initiative for Agricultural Production and Food Self Sufficiency (IP-P3A) launched by Traore is gaining critical acclaim. Videos of young people working in peasant cooperatives using modern technologies give a lot of hope about Burkina Faso and Africa. It resurges the Leninist praxis.
Traore has identified youth as the architects of the new Africa, “a continent reborn”. For him, youth are “not just the leaders of tomorrow” but the “liberators of the today”. In his vision, youth should actively join working people in the larger struggle against “neocolonialism in financial ropes”, a clear reference to end the domination of the International Finance Capital. As a student of revolutionary science, I am of the firm opinion that neoliberalism has reached its dead end. The rise of Traore is symbolic of the scientific quest of an alternative with positive socialistic articulation.
The once seductive songs of Reaganomics and Thatcherism to which the ruling elite of the Global South used to dance have faded. The task of all anti imperialists is to advance towards scientific socialism with deft nuances according to concrete conditions. We have to dream and work for a world where there won’t be any room for imperialist barbarism and old defeatist story-telling. Daring leadership is the need of the hour; of course, keeping the guides of scientific socialism in the era of Leninism.
The Author is a Research Cordinator at P Sundarayya Memorial Trust & CKC Member of AIKS.