Some lessons from the events in Sudan, 1971

Some lessons from the events in Sudan, 1971
International Communist Party
Africa Reports
Some lessons from the events in Sudan
(
Il Programma Comunista
, No.19 1971)
It has been about two months since Sudan was rocked by yet another
coup d’état, bloodily suppressed by Nimeiry with Libyan-Egyptian help.
What emerges once again from Sudanese events is that:
1) An underdeveloped country, no matter how hard it tries, cannot on
its own achieve economic and thus political independence from
imperialism, on which it becomes in fact even more dependent;
2) The national bourgeoisies of colonial and ex-colonial countries
have shown that they are not even capable of carrying out their own
revolution and therefore from time to time they have to put up with the
influence or domination of this or that capitalistically advanced
country;
3) Caught in the maelstrom of the war of conquest of world markets,
even attempts to escape imperialist domination through multinational
federations are doomed to failure;
4) The urban and rural proletariat, where it exists and is
organised, cannot expect from its bourgeoisie any appreciable
improvement in its living conditions, any relief from the state of
misery and humiliation in which it finds itself;
5) Only the linkage with the international workers’ movement,
especially in capitalistically developed countries, will succeed in
wrenching it out of the super-exploitation to which it is subjected,
within the framework of the revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of
the capitalist regime throughout the planet.
The massacre of the Sudanese communists, like those in Iraq,
Indonesia, Syria and Egypt, is the tragic result of the tactics of class
collaboration that the pro-Russian parties have always followed,
especially in the so-called ‘third world’, and that we alone have been
denouncing since 1926-27, which saw the disintegration of the Communist
Party of China in Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang and the massacres in
Shanghai and Canton. This was not a fortuitous episode, or an
‘accident’, but the necessary culmination of a distorted view of the
goals and tasks of the working class in the national and colonial
revolutions.
Unstable dependence
A brief historical overview will give us a more accurate picture of
the situation not only in Sudan, but of many countries that achieved
independence following the collapse of the immense British colonial
empire.
In December 1955, Sudan shrugged off the Anglo-Egyptian condominium
and became an independent state; thus died Egypt’s ambitions for a
political union to create a large state in the African Middle East, and
with it control over the Suez Canal and much of the Persian Gulf.
While Sudan was freeing itself from the British colonial yoke,
Britain was more interested in preserving its influence over a young
republic than in seeing its territory irretrievably slip away. The
oldest colonialist power in the world supported – it may seem a paradox
– the independence of countries already under its political and military
control, in the belief that it could thus maintain and perhaps
strengthen the ties of economic and financial dependence. Besides, it is
well known that, in the imperialist phase, historical colonialism
becomes a nonsense: US world domination rests on much more than the
possession of colonies in the traditional sense of the word!
The Sudanese Republic inherits from the past a tangle of problems
destined to periodically disrupt its life, first and foremost that of
the southern provinces. Sudan, in fact, is divided into two large ethnic
areas: the North, inhabited by Arab and Nilotic populations with Islamic
traditions and civilisation; the South, inhabited by black populations
with a very backward civilisation and practising a mixture of
Christianity and animism. The North is more developed industrially and
commercially and enjoys an outlet to the sea (Port Sudan); the South
generally lives off vast cotton plantations, the major proprietors of
which, partly within the framework of pre-capitalist relations, exploit
a mass of peasants living in conditions of extreme poverty.
Already in an article that appeared in issue No. 1 of 1956, entitled
Behind the Independence of Sudan
, we noted that it was ‘not the
first time that populations subject to British domination have been
politically divided as they prepare to emancipate themselves from their
former masters and move towards independence’ (The case of Pakistan,
divided into two sections separated by the immense space of continental
India is more than eloquent). Colonialist imperialism, forced to
withdraw from its former territories, ‘does so by leaving, in the places
they have abandoned, dangerous political mines destined to weaken or
render precarious the new state institutions’.
The diagnosis has now found yet another confirmation. Since then, a
series of coups has ‘changed the guard’ at the top, but has not solved
any problems, least of all that of the three southern provinces. The
Umma party, representing the interests of the southern landowners, and
the Unionist party, exponent of the interests of the northern
bourgeoisie, have alternated in government, in turn serving the
interests of imperialist powers soon reduced to three: the USA, Germany
and the USSR.
In May 1969, with the rise to power of Nimeiry and Awadalla, it
seemed that the scales were definitively tipped in favour of the USSR;
the break in relations with the United States and Germany, accused of
instigating southern separatism, the rapprochement with Nasser’s UAR,
the diplomatic and trade relations established with the countries of the
Moscow area and with China, seemed to confirm this reversal. Abdel
Mahjub’s Sudanese Communist Party itself supported Nimeiry, albeit
‘critically’, and the diplomatic orgy made the prime minister of the new
republic, Awadalla, say that ‘our socialism is
specifically
Sudanese
and it is on the basis of our own traditions that we will
build the new Sudan’, while Nimeiry professed himself ‘a moderate
socialist who believes in Arab nationalism’ (‘
Jeune Afrique
’,
no. 440/1969).
Soon, however, the inconsistency not only of the umpteenth ‘national
road to socialism’ but of the same old ‘road’ to the country’s economic
and social development was revealed in all its rawness, with the
political incapacity of the Sudanese bourgeoisie and the failure of
Moscow’s foreign policy. The famous ‘mines’ were exploding again and
again.
Once again, it was the eternal problems of the racial minorities in
the South that caused social and political convulsions. The ‘guerrilla’
war in the southern provinces, aimed at gaining autonomy from the
central power in Khartoum, has been going on almost continuously since
1963. Declarations that ‘our Arabism’ is not opposed to ‘our Africanism’
have been to no avail. Sudan, although geographically far from the
Middle East area, necessarily gravitates north towards its richer Arab
neighbours, Egypt and Libya. The country’s development cycle can only
take place in the northern regions, where there are roads, railways, and
hydroelectric power stations, increasingly distancing itself from the
backward agricultural south. It is our very old and ultra-proven thesis
that capital, no matter how small, always tends to invest where it can
most rapidly reproduce itself. This is as true for capitalistically
developed countries as it is for underdeveloped countries – indeed, even
more so for the latter, which are essentially dependent on foreign
investment and loans.
The tragedy of the Sudanese proletariat
These tensions are characteristic of all ex-colonial countries, and
are one of the reasons why, having become ‘independent’, the puny
indigenous bourgeoisies have entrusted and entrust not only the
maintenance of order, but the very exercise of power, to the armed
forces (trained and supplied by this or that imperialist power), and
these forces take on dimensions apparently out of proportion to domestic
economic resources: bloody repression is the order of the day,
especially if, to complicate matters, there exists – just as there was
in Sudan – a numerically small, but fighting and organised
proletariat.
In fact, here, as in Egypt, there was a relatively long history of
strong workers’ associations which, while testifying to the organised
presence of a considerable number of proletarians, could not fail to be
in direct and permanent conflict with the state due to the shameful
living conditions and the atrocious exploitation to which black labour
was and is subjected in the south.
It is no coincidence that the fiercely anti-communist bourgeoisies of
Egypt and Libya hastened to intervene against the architect of the
‘left-wing’ coup d’état of 19 July 1971; it is no coincidence that
al-Atta himself and the pro-Moscow communist leader (whose ‘extremism’
no longer seems to have won the Kremlin’s favour) Mahjub, were massacred
on the spot; it is no coincidence that the trade union leader el-Sheikh
was put to the sword immediately afterwards.
And did Moscow and Beijing lift a finger when faced with the physical
destruction of the organised labour movement and the communist party?
The former kept quiet during the abrupt ‘backlash’; then it limited
itself to asking for... a pardon for Mahjub; finally, but very weakly,
it raised diplomatic protests, essentially concerned with what the
victorious Nimeiry intended to do with Soviet property and how it saw
the future of trade relations. ‘While reaffirming – Tass stated – the
principles of non-interference in internal affairs, there have been some
acts that affect good USSR-Sudan relations, and damage to Soviet
property in Sudan. One wonders whether the Sudanese leadership is
willing to maintain friendly relations’ [very costly ones, these!]. Such
a communiqué was hardly likely to quell the fury of the anti-worker
reaction, which indeed continued for days on end. If Moscow bleated,
Beijing in its turn congratulated Nimeiry, ‘positively registering [his]
return to power’, as it had already done for Bengal and Ceylon.
Evidently, the uranium, gold and iron in which the southern part of
Sudan is rich is too plentiful a booty for a state that is all about
capital accumulation and great power politics: let alone providing ‘aid’
to the peoples of the ‘third world’ for the fight against
imperialism!
For years they continued to boast of the role of the masses of the
underdeveloped countries, who, according to Maoist and Marcusian
theories, were supposed, in the anti-imperialist struggle, to replace
the proletariat of the industrial countries, by then ‘gentrified’, at
the very moment when, having destroyed the Communist International and
put the communist parties at the service of the respective national
bourgeoisies, they were combining business with the maze of
diplomacy.
And the thunderbolt of the Sino-American rapprochement brought the
real interests underlying Sudan’s affairs as well as those of Vietnam
back into the open. The Sudanese Communist Party, which had always
supported the bourgeois and military forces at home, trusting in their
promise to establish a democratic republic and forge good relations with
socialist countries, suffered the tragic fate of the insurgents. What
did the party get out of preaching for years about a ‘democratic front’
with all the country’s forces, from the ‘democratic military’ to
‘national capitalism’, if not the defection of a part of the party
itself, who had merged with the Unionist party, and the inability to
present itself to the dispossessed peasant masses and the urban
proletariat as the representative of their true general interests
against all other classes? At the decisive moment, the Sudanese
proletariat found itself alone, disarmed in theory as in practice, and
had to suffer repression all the more bestial the more it tried to
resist.
And what solidarity was given to the Sudanese brothers by the
‘communists’ in other countries? Only an impotent whimpering about the
methods adopted by Nimeiry, a servile appeal to public opinion to save
the democracy that had been struck dead on the banks of the Nile; and
not even a minute long strike by the proletarians organised under the
banner of all the
Botteghe Oscure
throughout the world! But of
this ‘solidarity’ the Sudanese proletarians, like the proletarians of
any other country, do not know what to make of it. With the story of the
‘national paths to socialism’, the living sense of class solidarity has
in fact been wrenched from the heart of the proletariat, the very
concept of socialism has been destroyed, replacing it with a horrible
mixture of democracy and nationhood, with the obscene myths of ‘one’s
own’ economy and ‘one’s own homeland’. The tortured bodies of the
Sudanese proletarians and militants bear tragic witness to this!
After more than fifty years of counter-revolution and democratic
imbroglio, class revival is still delayed; but it is equally true that
the crisis of the capitalist mode of production, already underway and
destined to become ever more acute, can only be tackled by a general
class movement. The proletariat of the former colonial countries can
only count on the connection with the proletariat of the imperialist
metropolises, if only for the first goal of national emancipation: from
it will come the lesson of the necessity of a general struggle against
the bourgeois empires. A struggle that presupposes a single leadership,
that of the World Communist Party as the organ of the revolutionary
conquest of power and the exercise of proletarian dictatorship. Outside
this perspective, there is only defeat and death.