few elements alone suffice to illustrate the legacy left to us by twenty-three years of neo-colonialism, twenty-three years of a policy of total national neglect. No Voltaic who loves and honours his country can remain indifferent to this most desperate situation.
Indeed our people, a courageous, hardworking people, have never been able to tolerate such a situation. Because they have understood that this was not an inevitable situation, but a question of society being organised on an unjust basis for the sole benefit of a minority. They have therefore waged different types of struggles, searching for the ways and means to put an end to the old order of things.
That is why they enthusiastically greeted the National Council of the Revolution and the August revolution. These constitute the crowning achievement of the efforts they expended and the sacrifices they accepted so as to overthrow the old order, establish a new order capable of rehabilitating Voltaic man, and give our country a leading place within the community of free, prosperous, and respected nations.
The parasitic classes that had always profited from colonial and neo-colonial Upper Volta are, and will continue to be, hostile to the transformations undertaken by the revolutionary process begun on 4 August 1983. The reason for this is that they are and remain attached to international imperialism by an umbilical cord. They are and remain fervent defenders of the privileges acquired through their allegiance to imperialism.
Regardless of what is done, regardless of what is said, they will remain true to themselves and will continue to plot and scheme in order to reconquer their “lost kingdom”. Do not expect these nostalgic people to change their mentality and attitude. The only language they respond to and understand is the language of struggle, the revolutionary class struggle against the exploiters and oppressors of the people. For them, our revolution will be the most authoritarian thing that exists. It will be an act by which the people impose their will on them by all the means at their disposal, including arms, if necessary.
Who are these enemies of the people?
They revealed themselves in the eyes of the people during the 17 May events by their viciousness against the revolutionary forces. The people identified these enemies of the people in the heat of revolutionary action. They are:
1.The Voltaic bourgeoisie, which can be broken down, by the functions of its various layers, into the state bourgeoisie, the comprador bourgeoisie, and the middle bourgeoisie.
The state bourgeoisie. This is the layer known by the label political-bureaucratic bourgeoisie. This is a bourgeoisie that has enriched itself in an illicit and criminal manner through its political monopoly. It has used the state apparatus just as an industrial capitalist uses his means of production to accumulate surplus value drawn from the exploitation of workers’ labour power. This layer of the bourgeoisie will never willingly renounce its former privileges and sit by passively observing the revolutionary transformations under way.
The commercial bourgeoisie. This layer, by virtue of its business activity, is tied to imperialism through numerous bonds. For this layer, elimination of imperialist domination means the death of “the goose that lays the golden egg”. That is why it will oppose the present revolution with all its might. Coming from this category, for example, are the corrupt merchants who seek to starve the people by taking food supplies off the market for purposes of speculation and economic sabotage.
The middle bourgeoisie. Although this layer of the Voltaic bourgeoisie has ties to imperialism, it competes with the latter for control of the market. But since it is economically weaker, imperialism supplants it. So it has grievances against imperialism. But it also fears the people, and this fear can lead it to make a bloc with imperialism. Nevertheless, since imperialist domination of our country prevents this layer from playing its real role as a national bourgeoisie, some of its members could, under certain circumstances, be favourable to the revolution, which would objectively place them in the people’s camp. However, we must cultivate revolutionary mistrust between the people and individuals like these who come over to the revolution. Because all kinds of opportunists will rally to the revolution under this guise.
2.The reactionary forces that base their power on the traditional, feudal-type structures of our society. In their majority, these forces were able to put up staunch resistance to French colonial imperialism. But ever since our country attained its national sovereignty, they have joined with the reactionary bourgeoisie in oppressing the Voltaic people. These forces have put the peasant masses in the position of being a reservoir of votes to be delivered to the highest bidder.
In order to safeguard their interests, which they share with imperialism in opposition to those of the people, these reactionary forces most frequently rely on the decaying and declining values of our traditional culture that still endure in rural areas. To the extent that our revolution aims to democratise social relations in the countryside, giving more responsibilities to the peasants, and making more education and knowledge available to them for their own economic and cultural emancipation, these backward forces will oppose it.
These are the enemies of the people in the present revolution, enemies that the people themselves identified during the May events. These are the individuals who made up the bulk of the isolated marchers who, protected by a cordon of soldiers, demonstrated their class support for the already moribund regime that had emerged from the reactionary and pro-imperialist coup.
The rest of the population, aside from the reactionary and anti-revolutionary classes and social layers enumerated above, is what comprises the Voltaic people. A people who consider imperialist domination and exploitation to be an abomination and who have continually demonstrated this by concrete, daily struggle against the various neo-colonial regimes. In the present revolution the people consist of:
i.The Voltaic working class, young and few in number, but which, through unremitting struggle against the bosses, has been able to prove that it is a genuinely revolutionary class. In the present revolution, it is a class that has everything to gain and nothing to lose. It has no means of production to lose, it has no piece of property to defend within the framework of the old neo-colonial society. It is convinced, however, that the revolution is its business, because it will emerge from it in a stronger position.
ii.The petty bourgeoisie, which constitutes a vast, very unstable social layer that quite often vacillates between the cause of the popular masses and that of imperialism. In its large majority, it always ends up by taking the side of the popular masses. It includes the most diverse components, including small shopkeepers, petty-bourgeois intellectuals (civil servants, college and high school students, private sector employees, etc.), and artisans.
3.The Voltaic peasantry, which in its big majority consists of small peasants, who are tied to small plots of land because of the gradual disintegration of collective property forms since the introduction of the capitalist mode of production in our country. Market relations have increasingly dissolved communal bonds and replaced them with private property over the means of production. In the new situation thus created by the penetration of capitalism into our countryside, the Voltaic peasant, tied to small-scale production, embodies bourgeois productive relations. Given all these considerations, the Voltaic peasantry is an integral part of the category of the petty bourgeoisie.
Because of the past and its present situation, the peasantry is the social layer that has paid the highest toll for imperialist domination and exploitation. The economic and cultural backwardness that characterises our countryside has long kept the peasantry isolated from the great currents of progress and modernisation, relegating it to the role of reservoir for reactionary political parties. Nevertheless, the peasantry has a stake in the revolution and, in terms of numbers, is its principal force.
4.The lumpen-proletariat. This is the category of declassed individuals who, since they are without jobs, are prone to hire themselves out to reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces
