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.