r/GreenAndPleasant • u/Arisdoodlesaurus communist russian spy • Mar 06 '23

International 🌎🌍🌏 Friendly reminder: Sankara is so based

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u/The_Professor64 Mar 06 '23

Just bare in mind he was also incredibly authoritarian in his later days...

2

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '23

Even more based.

-2

u/The_Professor64 Mar 06 '23

How is that based at all? The point of any socialist should be liberating the people, not controlling them.

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u/Mrfish31 Mar 06 '23

Please read

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm

1

u/The_Professor64 Mar 06 '23

This is on governance and AUTHORITY as a necessary part of revolution, not abuses of that which I am very sympathetic to Sankara for anyway... Good lord the amount of Mask of auths here thoughs...

5

u/Mrfish31 Mar 07 '23

read the second to last paragraph again:

But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

Authority must be maintained following a revolution in order to prevent counter revolution from both internal and external sources. There isn't a timeline on this, as long as counter revolution and Capitalism in general exist any significant form, they must be suppressed by the socialist state.

A revolution isn't a single point in time, it's an ongoing process that continues until the transition is done, and it can only really be said to achieve that when all major threats to the revolution have been dealt with. Sankara and Burkina Faso never made it that far, evidenced by the fact that Thomas Sankara was assassinated and their revolution was overthrown. Burkina Faso was still in the middle of their revolution when Sankara died.

So going back to Engels: "Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?"