Varieties of Marxist experience

“Marxist Regimes” is a series of books dealing with real or purported Marxist governments around the world. Most of them no longer exist, or no longer claim to be Marxist. This volume was published in 1989 and deals with three African nations: Benin, Congo-Brazzaville and Burkina Faso.

Thomas Sankara's revolutionary government in Burkina is well known, due to Sankara's personal charisma, populist mass mobilizations and international promotion. Sankara became a political martyr when he was killed in 1987 in a coup engineered by former associate Blaise Compaoré. “Marxist Regimes: Benin, The Congo, Burkina Faso” was written when Compaoré still claimed to be a left-wing radical who was only “rectifying” Sankara's revolution. Shortly afterwards, Compaoré engineered a purge and moved more obviously to the right, an event not analyzed in this volume. The article on Burkina Faso is relatively short and impressionistic, but nevertheless contains interesting information I haven't seen elsewhere. Sankara seem to be the only Marxist (or "Marxist") leader mentioned in this book who had genuine popular support.

Mathieu Kérékou's government in Benin and the slightly surrealistic People's Republic of the Congo are less well known to the politically interested public in the West. The extended article on Benin paints the picture of a highly repressive regime dominated by the military, dogmatically carrying out nationalizations while being completely dependent on foreign aid from France, the former colonial power. The author, Chris Allen, wonders whether Benin could usefully be called “Marxist” at all and argues that its statist policies are really inherited from colonialism, when the bureaucratic apparatus became the main dispenser of power and riches in the country. Politics in Benin after independence, “left” or right, is really about dividing the spoils from the state, which Kérékou's regime has made even stronger. At times, Benin's Marxist (if that's what it was) regime was involuntarily comical. Thus, the authorities wanted to stamp out belief in witchcraft. The campaign included persecution of the “witches” themselves, denounced as purveyors of feudal superstition. (The “witches” were presumably a kind of shamans.) Soon, the entire thing went out of hand and began to look like a *real* witch-hunt á la Salem, with the obligatory denunciations of elderly women, torture of suspects by placing them inside a “ring of fire”, etc. The anti-superstition campaign probably made belief in witches even more entrenched…

Congo-Brazzaville is often regarded as a parody of a Marxist revolution, due to the strong dichotomy between the stereotypical Marxist-Leninist rhetoric of the “People's Republic” and the political realities, foremost of which was a strong dependence on capitalist-imperialist French aid. The tendency of some Marxists in the Congo to believe in black magic haven't exactly helped. Still, a certain political logic can be discerned, with clashes between a “Maoist” faction based largely on disaffected urban youth, and a “pro-Soviet” faction largely based in the military. The former were the “Jacobins” of the revolution, while the latter stood for stability and Realpolitik. The quasi-Byzantine purges and counter-purges eventually led to the ascendancy of Denis Sassou-Nguesso, regarded as pro-Soviet and pro-military. Otherwise, the story of Congo-Brazzaville is the usual one, with ethnic tensions, a “resource curse” due to oil revenue, unprofitable state enterprises and a bloated public sector largely manned by sociology students with no technical or scientific skills. Congo-Brazzaville was used as a staging ground for Cuban troops during the conflict in Angola. Since the book was published in 1989, it doesn't mention the next chapters in the saga. Suffice to say is that Sassou-Nguesso is back as Congolese president after a brief but devastating civil war, but (of course) no longer claims to be a Marxist…

While “Marxist Regimes: Benin, The Congo, Burkina Faso” isn't intended for the general reader, it should be a relatively easy read for students and is probably indispensable if you by any chance is interested in the history of these three nations, particularly Benin and Congo-Brazzaville. I therefore give it four stars.