Extremely disappointing to see this, this is not a Sankara thing to do at all.

  • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    3 days ago

    There have been and are real socialist states (not just nominally so) that were some of the most advanced countries in the world on queer issues, specifically East Germany before and Cuba now. I do kind of agree with you in a more general sense, because Hexbear as a whole doesn’t know how to deal with the concept of social discipline.

    AES (the state) doesn’t seem to me to be socialist in any significant sense, though it is worth supporting in its struggle against the west on roughly the same basis as Iran. Parading Sankara’s corpse isn’t very compelling when he could barely be called a Marxist in his approach to begin with (as in his political practice, not his speeches), and they do not approach even him.

    I think the anti-revisionists have a point that “Actually Existing Socialism” is a question-begging term, which makes sense when one remembers that it was popularized by the USSR after revisionists had seized power and was mostly used in the context of justifying what we now all recognize as revisionism in the USSR and elsewhere. Arguments about whether or not your approach is socialist are so much simpler when you start by assuming that you are.

    The soy “A -> B, B -> C, therefore A -> C” vs the chad “C = C”.

      • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        22 hours ago

        He was installed by a military coup, not a popular revolution, and then enacted some positive reforms but fundamentally failed to produce anything remotely like a dictatorship of the proletariat, and was thereby ousted by the military who held the power the whole time. Sankara was genuinely benevolent in his intentions, but his approach to revolution was anti-Marxist and it created a warped state that was basically a military dictatorship when it decided to be (though he did not support such a thing, he ultimately did not stop it), because popular support functioned as a convenience rather than the actual mechanism of decision-making.