Liberatory

What would freedom actually require here? What are people already doing to build it, and what remains unresolved?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

The national-liberation revolutions carried some of the most powerful visions of freedom in the whole socialist tradition: Che’s new human being, Sankara’s self-reliant and ecological Burkina Faso, Bishop’s small island answering to nobody, Rodney’s grounding with the dispossessed. This lens holds those visions up in full, and it holds them honest. Because these revolutions also produced their own reckonings: the Sandinista government that turned on its people, the “indigenous state” that critics say was neither, the guerrilla strategy that failed again and again. The school takes no verdict. It asks what in these emancipatory projects is worth carrying forward and what must never be repeated, and it leaves the room to decide. It connects to the freedom questions in Anarchism, Mutual Aid, and Prefiguration and the ecological horizon of Ecology and the Climate Crisis.

Anchor questions

• Che wanted to create a “new man.” Is that inspiring, dangerous, or both?
• Sankara refused the debt and planted trees. What would a liberation that is also ecological look like now?
• “Every cook can govern.” Did any of these revolutions actually put ordinary people in charge, or only new elites?
• Nicaragua’s revolution turned authoritarian. Was that the revolution’s fault, the siege’s, or Ortega’s? Does it discredit 1979?
• What in these projects would you carry forward, and what would you refuse to repeat?

Materials

All free. This set holds defenders and critics together, each labeled; the visions and the reckonings belong in the same room.

The emancipatory visions

• Che Guevara (1928 to 1967), Socialism and Man in Cuba (1965). The “new man” through moral incentive and voluntary labor. The vision, and its risks. Free: marxists.org
• Thomas Sankara, Speech to the UN General Assembly (1984). The fullest statement of the Burkinabe vision, for the world’s dispossessed. Free: marxists.org
• Thomas Sankara, A United Front Against Debt (1987). Refuse the odious debt, together. Weeks before his murder. Free: marxists.org
• Thomas Sankara, Imperialism Is the Arsonist of Our Forests and Savannas (1986). Liberation as ecological, decades early. Free: marxists.org
• Maurice Bishop (1944 to 1983), In Nobody’s Backyard (1979). A small island’s right to its own sovereignty. Free: red-spark.org

Popular power and self-rule

• C.L.R. James (1901 to 1989), Every Cook Can Govern (1956). Athenian direct democracy as a model for real popular rule. Free: marxists.org
• Walter Rodney (1942 to 1980), The Groundings with My Brothers (1969). Liberation as horizontal, popular self-education. Free PDF: libcom.org

The revolution’s own critics

The hardest voices to dismiss are not the enemies of these revolutions but the people who made them and then said what happened next. None of these four is an outside critic; every one of them is a participant.

• Dora Maria Tellez (b. 1955). Comandante Dos, who at 22 helped seize Nicaragua’s National Palace and later served as health minister, on why she broke with Ortega. His government jailed her, held her in solitary for 605 days, and stripped her of citizenship. This is the revolution’s own commander describing what became of it. Free: thenation.com and, on the solitary confinement and the statelessness, havanatimes.org
• Sergio Ramirez (b. 1942). The Sandinista vice-president turned novelist, exiled and stripped of citizenship by the government he helped build. His memoir Adios Muchachos is paywalled at dukeupress.edu with no public borrowing copy; his free interview is at confidencial.digital (this host blocks automated checks but is live)
• Ernest Harsch, Thomas Sankara: A Reassessment (2013). Twelve pages that weigh the literacy drives, the vaccinations, and the land reform against the People’s Revolutionary Courts, the press restrictions, and what the CDRs did. Sympathetic and unwilling to be hagiographic, which is exactly what the Sankara material here needed. Free: cdr.lib.unc.edu
• On ujamaa’s coerced villagization: Goran Hyden, No Shortcuts to Progress (1983), argues Tanzania’s peasantry could not be administered into socialism and that forced resettlement failed on its own terms. Free to borrow: archive.org. James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998) makes ujamaa its central case for why high-modernist schemes destroy the local knowledge that makes a place work. Paywalled: yalebooks.yale.edu. The free companion, written from the continent rather than about it, is africanarguments.org

The reckonings, held open

• Ben Norton, “An Inside Look at Nicaragua’s Sandinista Revolution” (2020). A defender of the FSLN government’s social record. A clearly-marked pole. Free: janataweekly.org
• William I. Robinson, “Is the Ortega-Murillo Government Leftist?” (2021). The critique from the left: neoliberalism and repression behind the rhetoric. Free: nacla.org
• Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (b. 1949), “Indigenous Anarchist Critique of Bolivia’s Indigenous State” (2014). An indigenous-anarchist critique of the MAS from the left. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org

Debates and disagreements

This lens keeps the theme’s hardest questions open. Some threads to hold, not resolve:

• The vision and the state. Che, Sankara, and Bishop offered luminous visions of the new society; all three also built centralized states, and two were killed before the contradictions fully played out. Can these visions be separated from the vanguard forms that carried them?
• Nicaragua, then and now. Norton and Robinson disagree over whether today’s Ortega government betrays 1979 or continues it. Read them together and let the room weigh whether a revolution is discredited by what its leaders later became.
• The indigenous state. Rivera Cusicanqui says Bolivia’s MAS gave the state an indigenous face without an indigenous soul; García Linera, in the theoretical lens, says the tensions were creative and unavoidable. Whose account fits the record?
• Did foco work? The romance of the guerrilla is strong; the body count of failed foco insurgencies is real. What is worth keeping from Che’s strategy, and what got people killed?

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Tellez and Ramirez are now here in their own voices. Contributions welcome, especially liberatory currents from the Portuguese-African revolutions, and Burkinabe voices on Sankara: the reassessment here is written by an American, and the critique of a revolution is worth most from the people who lived under it.