In previous meetings, we provided an overview of the history of Burkina Faso from pre-colonialism to the present day, as well as a brief analysis of the political and economic situation in the country after the coups d’état of 2022, its relations with other neighboring countries in the Sahel, Mali, and Niger, culminating in the first military, then economic and political alliance of the Sahel States (AES), its ongoing war against the Islamist insurgency, a direct factor leading to the coups, and its potential future prospects for the global class struggle.

At this meeting, we focused on the movements of the working class from colonialism to the present day and on labor relations within the colonial economy.

The proletariat in Burkina Faso has historically been, and still is, a statistical minority of the total working population, the majority of which belongs to the peasantry. However, from the last days of colonialism to the present, the working class has been a decisive factor in the country’s political events. In an early developing capitalist economy, the organized labor movement has not yet been completely co-opted by the bourgeoisie as in the metropolitan countries.

At the end of the 19th century, at the height of modern capitalist colonization in Africa, French capitalism found pre-capitalist and largely communal social structures in the west of the continent, characterized by work within family units, with slave trade and the exchange of a few goods on the margins of communities. The vampire logic of capital, hidden behind the ideology of “civilization,” saw it as an area open to its ’expansion. Upper Volta, later Burkina Faso, due to its lack of natural resources and poor soil fertility, was mainly used as a labor reservoir for other West African colonies, particularly the Ivory Coast.

This form of primitive accumulation, while maintaining a colonial capitalist structure, perpetuated non-capitalist forms of production. This was not only due to the purely colonial nature of the plunder, which stabilized capitalist underdevelopment, but also to the resistance of the indigenous population.

The population of colonial Upper Volta was divided into the dominant colonial class and the peasants. Within the former, a distinction was made between the administrative bureaucracy, military officers, and the capitalist class proper, i.e., the purchasers of labor. These different classes were also in conflict with each other and within themselves: between colonial administrations (in 1933 between the Ivory Coast, Sudan, now Mali, and Niger); between private capital and the state represented by colonial administrators; between national capitals, in this case French and British.

French colonization initially sought to establish cotton plantations. It also attempted to commercialize the ancient practice of harvesting shea nuts and kapok (a cotton-like material). However, these attempts were unsuccessful.

With the increase in food production during the 1930s, commercial production for the world market also grew. This was boosted by the Régie-Abidjan-Niger railway, which opened in 1910 and was extended to Bobo-Dioulasso, further southwest of Ouagadougou, in the 1930s.

French economic policies sought to impose a double burden on the indigenous population: in addition to the evils of capitalist production and its labor relations, they flooded the colony with goods imported from the metropolis. But this attempt also failed, as the peasants rejected the monetary economy, relying on family/tribal agricultural production for their food needs and on local crafts.

To force the indigenous population to participate in the monetary economy, the French imposed a tax system, in particular a per capita tax in 1906. This necessitated administrative and accounting procedures and periodic censuses. But even in the 1930s, the gap between the peasant economy and the capitalist economy was still very wide. The resistance of the village economy continued even after the Second World War.

French colonial rule imposed a number of forced, unpaid days of labor per person per year on each village: about eight days of work per person between 1917 and 1938. This labor was used to build and maintain basic local infrastructure. The labor was drawn from the non-capitalist sphere at almost no cost to the colonial economy, as the costs of maintaining and reproducing the workforce were outsourced to the peasant economy.

In addition to forced daily labor, wage labor was also used.

In the late 1930s, in order to develop crops on the Ivory Coast, which required a large labor force, the French introduced programs to encourage the Mossi and Gourounsi ethnic groups to colonize the area. This policy was only moderately successful: families were instead attracted by wage labor and the production of cash crops.

Conscription into the French army was another form of forced labor. It reached its peak during the First and Second World Wars. We have already mentioned in previous reports the Volta-Bani War of 1915-1916, a heroic resistance by peasants against the large quotas of young men sent to war. This turned into an armed struggle against the colonizers, some of whose notorious reprisals we have already mentioned.

In general, these labor policies imposed by the colonialists were obviously extremely unpopular, and the peasants rebelled in subtle but effective ways to avoid them.

The peasants avoided colonial labor and taxes either by fleeing, simply moving to another village, or emigrating to the Gold Coast. The Gold Coast, a rival British colony, had a much more developed economy than the French colonies at the time, did not need a forced labor policy, and required more wage labor.

Public infrastructure, roads, railways, and telegraph links were not built to integrate the colony or colonies into a unified internal market or to promote industrialization, but to extract labor and raw materials more efficiently for the metropolis and the world market. As Marx observed, colonialism was not “progressive” even by the standards of capitalism: not only did it lead to a sharp deterioration in the quality of life of indigenous Africans, but it even failed in the raison d’être of capitalism, ultimately blocking the development of the productive forces. Only the overthrow of colonial rule and subsequent political independence could allow capitalist relations to develop beyond colonial limits, thus preparing the material ground for the emergence of the proletariat and the subsequent proletarian revolution. This is the main reason why communists supported the bourgeois-democratic movements in the colonies.

The next report will document and interpret the emergence of the proletariat on the historical scene and its class struggles in post-colonial Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso).