I’m watching a documentary called Thomas Sankara: The Upright Man (link) and it mentioned that Sankara banned trade unions. In one scene he also said, “Anarcho-syndicalists?”, to which the crowd replied, “Down with them!”. This struck me as odd, since anarcho-syndicalists would surely be leftists, and trade unions would be a source of political power for the proletariat — so I searched Prolewiki, and all that site seems to say about the reason for Sankara’s ban of trade unions was, “[the unions] were reactionary and a tool of the bourgeoisie in Burkina Faso”.

So what I want to know, essentially, is how did this situation come to be? Why were the trade unions reactionary in Burkina Faso, and how were they utilized by the bourgeoisie? And why would Sankara refer specifically to anarcho-syndicalists as something worthy of a “down with them”? And are there any lessons we can learn from Sankara about how to handle trade unions in a dictatorship of the proletariat in other countries, particularly in an exploiting country like my Norway, rather than an exploited country like his Burkina Faso?