The Western Left Misunderstands Power
A critique of Jacobin’s framing of Ibrahim Traoré, and the deeper problem of purity, legibility, and distance in Western left analysis
I recently read an article on Ibrahim Traoré in Jacobin. Normally, a piece like this wouldn’t be worth responding to. But Jacobin is not a marginal outlet—it carries intellectual weight and reaches a broad segment of the Western left. What appears there matters, not because it is definitive, but because it helps shape the terms of debate.
Writing for Jacobin, Bettina Engels compares Traoré’s so-called Popular Progressive Revolution to Thomas Sankara’s Democratic and Popular Revolution. It’s a familiar comparison; Traoré is measured against Sankara and found wanting: less democratic, more pragmatic, and ultimately a diminished reflection of a revolutionary legacy that has taken on near-mythical status.
The concern underlying this critique is not trivial. Engels suggests that invoking Sankara risks turning his legacy into a shield, one that can be used to legitimize actions that are neither democratic nor popular. That concern deserves to be taken seriously. Revolutionary symbols can be mobilized in ways that obscure as much as they reveal.
But the question is not simply whether Sankara’s name is being invoked correctly. The deeper issue is the standard being applied in the first place. What kind of revolution is being assumed in this judgment? Because the revolution being evaluated in pieces like this often bears little resemblance to the one unfolding on the ground in Burkina Faso.
Here, a broader problem emerges, one that extends beyond a single article. The Western left does not just critique revolutions. It critiques them according to an image of revolution that has been abstracted, sanitized, and, ultimately, detached from the conditions in which real political power is actually seized and exercised.
The Western left, whether it admits it or not, carries with it a very specific image of revolution. It is an image shaped less by lived conditions than by retrospective interpretation; an image of coherence, discipline, and ideological clarity. Revolution appears as something almost orderly, guided by theory, led by figures who seem to embody it, and unfolding along lines that, in hindsight, feel inevitable.
In this image, even figures like Vladimir Lenin are remembered less as products of instability and contingency and more as symbols of control—composed, deliberate, and intellectually grounded. The chaos, improvisation, and coercion that accompanied revolutionary struggle are flattened into a narrative that feels legible, even refined. Revolution, in this sense, becomes something that can be understood cleanly, judged cleanly, and, most importantly, imagined at a distance.
But this image does not survive contact with the conditions under which revolutions actually occur. In places like Burkina Faso, political life is not structured by stability but by pressure, internal fragmentation, external influence, and the constant threat of disruption or collapse. Leadership does not emerge from theoretical expectation, but from circumstance. A geologist becomes a military captain. A captain becomes the head of state. Not because this trajectory aligns with an ideological script, but because the conditions demand it.
The result is a revolution that resists the very standards by which it is being judged. It is fragmented where the imagined revolution is coherent, reactive where it is expected to be deliberate, and pragmatic where it is expected to be principled. And when it fails to conform to that imagined form, the response is not to reconsider the model, but to condemn the reality.
What this reveals is a deeper discomfort with power itself, especially power exercised under conditions that do not permit clean choices. The Western left often speaks the language of revolution, but it does so at a distance from the constraints that make revolutionary decisions what they are: urgent, consequential, and frequently irreversible.
In stable societies, politics can afford the luxury of deliberation. Errors can be absorbed. Contradictions can be managed over time. But in environments defined by instability—where governments face internal fragmentation, external pressure, and the constant threat of removal—politics takes on a different character. Decisions are made not in the abstract, but under the weight of immediate consequence. To hesitate is not to remain principled; it is, at times, to lose power altogether.
This is the dimension that critiques like those found in Jacobin often flatten. Power is treated as though it can be exercised in accordance with standards developed in conditions where power itself is not under existential threat. The result is a kind of moral clarity that is only sustainable because it is never tested. It demands that revolutionary actors adhere to principles that presuppose stability, transparency, and time; precisely the conditions they do not have.
Under such pressure, the exercise of power cannot remain pristine. It becomes necessarily strategic, at times opaque, and occasionally coercive—not as a deviation from revolutionary politics, but as a condition of its survival. This is not an argument for abandoning judgment, nor is it a defense of any particular decision. It is an acknowledgment that the terrain on which these decisions are made does not allow for the kind of politics that can be fully justified in advance to an external audience.
For those engaging politics primarily as discourse, power remains something to be evaluated. For those forced to wield it, power is something that must be maintained, often against forces that do not recognize the same constraints or moral expectations. The gap between these positions is not simply one of opinion, but of condition. It is the difference between imagining revolution and being responsible for its outcome.
Emerging from the positional gap is a pattern, a set of reflexes that structure how much of the Western left encounters movements it does not control and conditions it does not share. These reflexes can be understood as a kind of unwritten triad: purity, legibility, and distance.
Purity appears first. Movements are evaluated not primarily by what they confront or what they achieve, but by how closely they adhere to pre-established standards—democratic form, ideological consistency, procedural clarity. Deviation becomes disqualifying. The problem is not that these standards are meaningless, but that they are applied as if they exist independently of circumstance. A revolution that emerges under pressure is judged as though it had the luxury of developing without it.
Legibility follows. What cannot be easily categorized within familiar frameworks is treated with suspicion. Leadership that does not resemble the expected form, strategies that do not unfold along recognizable lines, decisions that appear reactive rather than programmatic—all of these register as warning signs. The unfamiliar is not investigated on its own terms; it is measured against an inherited image of what revolution is supposed to look like. When it fails to match, the conclusion is drawn not about the limits of the model, but about the failure of the movement.
And beneath both sits distance. Not simply geographic distance, but a distance from consequence. Politics, in this position, is primarily interpretive. It is something to be analyzed, critiqued, and refined in language. But when politics is experienced this way, it becomes possible to maintain standards that are never forced into collision with necessity. One can demand consistency without confronting contradiction, transparency without confronting constraint, principle without confronting risk.
Taken together, these reflexes produce a particular kind of politics, sharp in critique but limited in comprehension. It is a politics that can identify deviation with precision, but struggles to understand why deviation might be unavoidable. And so it returns, again and again, to the same conclusion: that movements failing to conform to its expectations are themselves the problem, rather than the expectations being misaligned with the conditions in which those movements operate.
Ultimately, the Jacobin piece reveals more than a mere misreading of Ibrahim Traoré—a deeper limitation in how the Western left understands politics itself. Revolutions fail to live up to their promises, everybody knows that. The problem is that those expectations were never formed in relation to the conditions under which revolutions are actually made.
To recognize this is not to abandon critique. It is to take critique seriously enough to ground it in reality. Revolutions should be judged. Power should be scrutinized. But judgment that begins from an imagined standard—one abstracted from instability, stripped of constraint, and insulated from consequence—cannot illuminate what is happening. It can only reproduce its own assumptions.
The invocation of Thomas Sankara makes this tension especially clear. Sankara has become more than a historical figure; he has become a measure. But as with all measures constructed in hindsight, his legacy is too often treated as coherent where it was contingent, principled where it was constrained, and legible where it was, in reality, shaped by some of the same pressures that define the present. To wield his image as a standard without reckoning with those pressures is not to defend his legacy, but to transform it into something static, something easier to admire than to understand.
And so the problem returns to where it began. When movements like those in Burkina Faso are evaluated through this lens, what is being judged is not the reality before us, but the distance between that reality and an image that was never real to begin with. It results in a politics that remains confident in its conclusions while increasingly detached from the world it seeks to interpret.
A politics that cannot grapple with power as it exists—under pressure, under threat, and without guarantees—will always retreat into evaluating those who do. It will continue to demand clarity where there is none, purity where it cannot be sustained, and coherence where conditions make it impossible. And in doing so, it will mistake its own limitations for the failures of others.
The task, then, is not to lower our standards, but to ground them. Not to excuse what is done in the name of revolution, but to understand the conditions that make certain actions possible, and others impossible. Anything less is not rigor. It is distance, mistaken for judgment.
Have you ever noticed that Western Leftists are always full of praise for revolutionaries who safely failed, but never for those who succeeded in overthrowing a form of capitalism?
It starts with Trotsky, who lost and is admired, versus Lenin or Stalin or Mao, who dangerously succeeded and are always found wanting by our "democratic socialists." They'll wear T-shirts of Che Guevara, but never of Fidel Castro.
Here, Sankara is safely dead, but Traore is very much alive and a threat to the system upon which they depend, and they'll never admit it.
I read the Jacobin article, read your article, then reread both. I can’t quite figure out what you’re critiquing from Engel’s piece, in part because you only briefly characterize her argument without giving any specifics. Her article lays out a fairly unbiased accounting of the events that have unfolded. She evaluates the similarities and differences between Traoré and Sankara, but it doesn’t seem to me like she’s idealizing Sankara or holding Traoré to his standard. From her conclusion:
“Traoré’s outlook is rather more pragmatic than socialist.
This approach may be strategically astute, as it appeals not only to the younger generation but also to powerful religious and traditional elites. Sankara’s experience showed how difficult it is to overcome those elites. He tried anyway.
It is important to note that the conditions under which Traoré and Sankara operated are quite different.”
Can you help me understand your critique referring to specific points in the article? Because as it stands it seems like you’re arguing against a straw man.