By Liv Shange Moyo PRMI in Sweden. 16 April 2025
Two years of civil war between the RSF and the SAF – two counter-revolutionary forces that together suppressed the revolutionary movement that was sparked in 2018 before falling out – has left Sudan’s people ravaged, brutalised, starved, but not defeated. What is behind the war in Sudan, and what may lie ahead?
This article is crucially limited by the fact that it is written in solidarity from afar, without any direct connection to Sudan – but written nevertheless because paying attention to this war, considered by the United Nations (UN) as the world’s most severe humanitarian crisis, and studying the crucial last decade of revolution and counter-revolution in Sudan is essential for all hoping to contribute to the ending of war, genocide, neocolonial and imperialist looting, violence and oppression, not just in Sudan but worldwide.
This week marks two years since mounting tensions between the coup generals in the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) tipped over into war – a continuation of the counter-revolution seeking to suppress the mighty revolution that had begun in 2018.
The exchange of fire began on April 15, 2023, in Sudan’s capital Khartoum, and quickly spread across most of the vast country. On 26 March, 2025, the SAF captured a battered Khartoum, and were met with overflowing relief by residents who had been entrapped in the RSF’s reign of horror for nearly two years.
The war is however far from over, and the prospects for possible endings to the bloodshed are ominous too. Amongst them is the possibility of the country splitting between the two warring counter-revolutionary factions, as each of them have proclaimed their own government and intensified fighting over key territories.
Nightmare in al-Fashir
While the brutal regular army, SAF, has made real gains in recent months, the even more notorious paramilitary RSF controls significant parts of the country. In recent days it has brutally advanced towards al-Fashir, the capital of North Darfur which is the one remaining SAF-aligned major urban centre in the region, where battles are ongoing at the time of writing.
Over 10-13 April, the RSF took first the Abu Shouk and then the huge Zamzam refugee camp, with a population of 750 000, outside al-Fashir. This supposed “liberation” involved the killing of at least 300 civilians including the execution of the entire medical team of Relief International which had been the last remaining healthcare provider in the camp. Community kitchen volunteers were specifically targeted and killed – one of many horrifying reports.
Those able to have, again, been forced to flee carrying nothing or very little, even leaving the wounded behind to die. An estimated 400 000 have fled, many towards al-Fashir which had already swelled to 900 000 people.
The UNICEF estimates that there are 825 000 children in al-Fashir and Zamzam, trapped in a nightmare with catastrophic shortages of food, water and other necessities for life. Like the war in Sudan in general, this major and desperate situation has received little if any attention in Western media.
Massive death toll
How many have been killed over these two years of war is not fully clear. Systems for registering the dead have largely collapsed along with the health care system. Estimates vary massively, from 20 000 to 150 000. Even the highest-end of these estimates are likely undercounts, however.
Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine have brought together and compared several sources and found that in Khartoum State alone, at least 26 000 were “intentionally killed” between April 2023 and June 2024. With disease, starvation and other causes of death included, the death toll for this period in this state alone stood at 61 000 – 50 percent higher than the pre-war death rate.
What is clear is that most who die are killed not by guns or bombs but by starvation and disease. Malaria and dengue fever are surging, and cholera outbreaks have been reported. Untreated illnesses like cancer and diabetes cost further lives.
Starvation and malnutrition, in combination with infectious diseases like respiratory infections or diarrhoea, kill children in particular. According to the Sudanese Doctors Syndicate, 45 000 children have died from malnutrition in two years.
14 million people have been forced to flee their homes. Most are displaced within Sudan.
The Trump administration’s recent freeze on aid is having direct and dire consequences for many refugees.
Both warring parties have been found by various actors to have carried out an “appalling range of harrowing human rights violations and international crimes”, to quote a UN fact-finding mission in September 2024. These include the systematic rape of women and children, torture, mass targeting of civilians, forced displacement, blocking food, aid and medical supplies and imposing starvation as a weapon of war, the destruction of vital infrastructure like hospital, schools, electricity and water supply etc etc.
Genocide in Darfur, again
Both armies and their allied forces have also carried out killings on grounds of tribal/ethnic grounds. SAF and allied militias have for example been reported to target and summarily execute young men considered to belong to the tribes associated with RSF, for example carrying out such massacres after conquering Khartoum. The RSF has carried out massacres, ethnic cleansing and other ethnically targeted atrocities against people considered non-Arab, in particular the Masalit in West Darfur.
That this constitutes another genocide (as even the US State Department, dripping with hypocrisy, pointed out late last year) became clear early in the war, for example in its November 2023 assault on al-Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, when the RSF killed an estimated 1300 civilians, raped countless women and girls, drove away thousands, and destroyed homes and essential infrastructure.
The pattern leading up to the al-Geneina massacre is ominously similar to the currently ongoing assault on al-Fashir further north, with the RSF’s scramble to take full control of Darfur clearly fueling the genocidal elements of its warfare.
The violent, racist targeting of non-Arab ethnic groups has long roots, going back to the British-Egyptian colonial rulers’ conscious divide-and-rule policies and added to by subsequent reactionary regimes like that of Omar al-Bashir. He ruled Sudan for three decades until 2019 when he was overthrown by the revolution.
In the early 2000s, al-Bashir’s right wing Islamist dictatorship set up (with al-Burhan himself playing a key role) and deployed the Janjaweed militia to suppress the uprising of the marginalised populations in Darfur in the West and the Nuba mountains in the south. In Darfur, this resulted in the 2003-5 genocide where the Janjaweed killed at least 200 000 people.
The Janjaweed was the forerunner to the RSF, before al-Bashir in 2013 decreed its rebranding as an official state force. Amongst others reasons, this was so it would be more palatable recipients of EU anti-refugee funding through the so-called Khartoum Process – acting as the outsourced border guards of Fortress Europe – but also as a parallel military structure that could keep the army in check, and ensure that no single security institution could challenge his power.
Imperialist complicity
On 15 April, the second anniversary of the war, Sudan’s former colonial masters Britain opened a conference in London, where the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was amongst the states invited to discuss solutions for peace in Sudan. Five days earlier, the International Court of Justice began hearings on accusations against the same UAE of complicity in the ongoing genocide.
This encapsulates the complicity of virtually the entire “international community” – ie the various imperialist powers – united in their drive to use the engineered chaos and breakdown of war to plunder Sudan off its rich resources, as well as to crush the revolutionary energy its working class and poor have kept mobilising with incredible resilience.
Follow the gold
UAE provisions of weapons, funding, mercenaries – some from as far away as Colombia – clearly play a key role for the RSF’s warfare. The UAE is also the main destination for Sudan’s gold.
Sudan has long been one of Africa’s main gold producers, and gold mining has seen a massive expansion in the course of this war, after initially plummeting at its onset. It is now being traded at dizzying profit and via dizzyingly complicated smuggling routes involving actors in for example Chad, Libya, South Sudan, Uganda, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, which all try to get their share of the loot, though none can compare with the UAE.
These states, in particular Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, but also Kenya, Israel, Ukraine, Ethiopia, Britain, the United States, and blocs like the European Union and the African Union (and their capitalists) also have their hands deep into the pockets of Sudan.
90 percent of the official gold sales, from both armed forces, go to the UAE, but in addition it acquires vast amounts irregularly from the RSF which operates mines in Darfur and South Kordofan. The SAF, meanwhile, sells ‘legit’ gold from the mines under its control in the north and east, also using the revenue to buy weaponry, like drones and fighter jets from Iran and China respectively.
For both armed groups, gold is a key source of funding, and control over gold mining and -trade is a key strategic goal in this war (just as it was a major fault line between the factions in the run-up to and outbreak of the war).
The SAF has long operated a network of companies controlling an overwhelming share of Sudan’s economy, including the gold trade. They have also given leading figures in the SAF the opportunity to enrich themselves through mining investments. The armed forces’ gold profiteering includes granting leases to companies to operate mines in the no-rules militarised zones, allowing for extreme exploitation. Other state forces, like Intelligence agencies, and the RSF, have built similar super-exploitative networks.
The RSF went from being hired as armed guards of mining operations to taking them over and establishing a vast network of mining and trading with the UAE and Russia as major buyers, and now backers in the war. Saudi Arabia and Egypt in turn are key backers of the SAF.
Sudan also has strategic locations, like its access to the Red Sea, and other rich natural resources – for example its rich farmlands and mineral deposits – that are being plundered, or eyed for future plunder. It is the world’s largest producer of gum arabic, which is largely traditionally produced in the Kordofan and Darfur regions, where its production is now being usurped by RSF forces.
Counter-revolutionary war
The characterisation of the war in Sudan is sometimes a subject of debate – is it a proxy war with imperialist and regional powers pulling the strings, a one-sided genocide, or a civil war (this framing is often tinged with racist prejudice about ‘perpetual ethnic conflict in Africa’)?
While there appears to be elements of each of these manifestations, fundamentally the war needs to be understood as a continuation of counter-revolution – the suppression of the revolutionary process that was set in motion in December 2018, therefore known as the December Revolution, which kept wave upon wave of resilient struggle rolling despite the ruling class’ bloody repression and its attempts to corral it into safe channels via ‘transitional’ power-sharing agreements (which were actively backed by imperialist agencies like the AU, EU and IMF).
The revolutionary background
Here we can only give a brief summary which, especially from afar, cannot do justice to this revolutionary process, let alone to Sudan’s exceptionally rich history of revolutionary struggle – which saw workers, the urban youth, rural communities and poor farmers relentlessly organise and rise, from the early 1900s’ mass struggles against colonial rule and exploitation, to the overthrow of one oppressive regime after another in the 1964 and 1985 revolutions, and then crucial mass struggles in 2011, 2013, 2016 which registered key lessons for the 2018 revolution.
It was the al-Bashir regime’s removal of flour subsidies – at the orders of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – which acted as the spark for revolution in December 2018. Cost-of-living protests quickly assumed a revolutionary, anti-regime dynamic and spread across the country. The state’s bloody repression failed to stop the demonstrations and strikes – instead they spurred the protests further.
Within days of its onset, the movement saw the beginning re-emergence of Resistance Committees (RCs, which had been a feature of mass struggles from 2013 onwards) across neighbourhoods and villages, alongside the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA, a combative coalition of independent trade unions and professional bodies organising several sectors, that had emerged in 2016) emerging in the following weeks and months as key forces of the struggle.
The movement also drew on the mass based campaigns, for example against the encroachment and environmental degradation of the mining industry, that had developed in the preceding years.
The RCs grew dramatically in number and impact when the SPA in January 2019 called for them to be established to organise decentralised protests in each neighbourhood, in a tactical response to police and army violence against central mobilisations.
In the following months, the RCs coordinated protests that “surged across Sudan with unprecedented scale and frequency”. In the process they evolved “into sophisticated units capable of sustaining momentum under repression” as demonstrated in the insightful research report Sudan’s Revolutionary and Popular Movements, recently published by the Middle East Solidarity Network.
At the same time workers’ strikes and other protests also rose – the unstoppable force of the Sudanese working class, with women and young people to the fore, was beginning to feel and test its power.
By April the movement encircled military headquarters across the country in sit-ins, demanding “the fall of the regime”, a completely civilian government with no military involvement, alongside calls for living wages, gender equality, justice and rights for the oppressed peoples of Darfur and other marginalised regions.
Warlords intervene
On 11 April, 2019, a group of al-Bashir’s own generals intervened and removed him from power, claiming their commitment to “uprooting the regime” while also outlawing protest action by announcing a three-month curfew. This was powerfully defied by the SPA and the masses, who maintained the sit-ins. Within a day the first appointee of the coup had resigned and been replaced by General al-Burhan as the head of a “Transitional” Military Council (TMC).
Contrary to al-Burhan’s self-professed commitment to “having a completely civilian government”, the coup generals were clearly out to derail the revolutionary process, safeguarding the military-capitalist elite’s grip on Sudan, and to save their own skins – already in the early days of the movement, there had been instances of rank-and-file soldiers and police showing reluctance to shoot against the protesters and even breaking ranks.
While the leaders of the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC) — the coalition which had been formed to ‘unite’ the movement, from the SPA and resistance committees to militia groups and the traditional opposition parties — were hesitating and focusing on negotiations with the TMC, the grassroots of the SPA and the RCs forged ahead, maintaining the sit-ins and escalating strikes, culminating in a massive general strike on 28-29 May, 2019.
Test of counter-revolution
In response, the TMC showed its true colours when on 3 June the SAF generals, sitting inside the Khartoum military headquarters, had the RSF try to break the sit-in outside – and the revolution itself – through a horrific massacre where its soldiers mowed down and shot hundreds, targeting women in particular with brutal rapes. This counter-revolutionary terror was carried out in coordination across Sudan, and accompanied with a three-day internet black-out.
It is testimony to the remarkable resilience and insight of the grassroots of the movement, that they once again found ways to re-group and out-organise the repression. The revolutionary movement’s response to the carnage came in the form of an open-ended nationwide general strike.
Yet the SPA leaders, who had called the strike to “bring down the military regime as the only measure left”, called it off after three days to show their “goodwill” towards international mediators who had come into the country to encourage a power-sharing agreement with the TMC.
On Sunday June 30, the masses displayed again their readiness for a revolutionary showdown, mobilising the largest nationwide demonstration so far in a massive ‘march-of-millions’.
However, at this testing moment, not only the might but also the weaknesses of the movement became apparent. The masses had not yet developed fully an understanding of how to mobilise the full and decisive force of the working class, nor a leadership rooted in and dependent on none but the democratic structures of the streets and workplaces.
Nor did it have a fully clear strategy beyond calling for democratic and civilian rule, or an alternative to follow the overthrow of the oppressive state and its capitalist and imperialist backers. So the FFC leaders were able to step in above the heads of the masses and cut a deal with the TMC.
One has to bear in mind that the FFC itself wasn’t a homogeneous body. While the SPA rank-and-file represented its activist core, it also involved pro-capitalist forces — such as the National Umma Party, widely distrusted by the revolutionary youth for its past compromises with the old regime, a distrust which proved wholly justified as the counter-revolution unfolded.
‘Transition’ – back to military rule
The class-collaborationist approach of the FFC, to which the SPA leaders had tied their fate and refused to break with, led them to the conclusion of a formal power-sharing deal with the very architects of the 3 June counter-revolutionary massacre.
This ushered in the so-called ‘transitional’ period, where the FFC, opposition parties including the Communist Party, and the SAF and RSF generals agreed the setting up of a hybrid “Sovereignty Council” overseeing a ‘transitional’ government. This also included a group of supposed ‘technocrats’, and was fronted by Abdalla Hamdok, a diplomat seen as credible by ‘the international community’, as prime minister.
According to a pattern all too familiar from historically betrayed revolutions across the world, the transitional government let down the aspirations of the working class and poor masses. It failed to address the cost of living or bring those responsible for repression and genocide to justice, fueling ongoing struggles and deepened organising in the short term, while also failing to assure the old elites it was ‘a safe pair of hands’.
The SPA did not withstand the test of this “devastating retreat for the revolution” well. Instead it suffered fatal blows to its revolutionary role through sidelining and internal leadership division, deliberately fuelled by its FFC ‘partners’ as explained by Mohanad Elnur, the SPA’s former spokesperson, to MENA Solidarity.
This significantly weakened workplace-based organising, although workers did reorganise, giving rise to new independent trade unions and strike committees in this period.
Also the RCs continued to spread and deepen their roots. A large-scale survey carried out in March-April 2021 by the Carter Center registered 5 289 RCs spread across the country, in both urban and rural areas. The same study also highlights the chasm between the aspirations of the young people who had put their lives on the line for change, and the reality of reactionary continuity they were experiencing in the ‘transition’.
In short, instead of curtailing the tug-of-war between revolution and counter-revolution, the elites’ ‘transition’ built up for its escalation.
As a member in Sudan (then part of the international organisation the PRMI was forced to split from in 2024) warned in an article in June 2021, it was the positioning of the blood-soaked armed forces “within the state apparatus as well as in the country’s economic life” that formed the basis for “the threat of destabilisation”, a situation resulting “from the fact that the revolution which started in December 2018, while revealing the immense power of the Sudanese masses, was not carried through to its necessary end goal, ie the complete overthrow of the old regime and of the capitalist system upon which it has thrived.”
Indeed, under the pressure of growing mass mobilisations, the “Security Committee” component of the government, led by al-Burhan and his deputy Hemedti, carried out a coup in October 2021, dropping and imprisoning its civilian elements before again coopting some of them as an even thinner cover for its rule by the gun.
Whip of counter-revolution
The October coup acted as a whip of counter-revolution, reigniting the revolutionary movement. Within hours of al-Burhan’s and Hemedti’s takeover, the streets were flooding over with demonstrations which used routes prepared for in advance by the resistance committees.
Five days after the coup, the resistance committees again held a “march of millions”, a massive day of action raising seven central demands including a call for “economic and political sovereignty”. The new wave of protest was sustained for over a year, continuing to raise the revolution’s “three nos” – “No negotiations, No partnership, No legitimacy”.
No legitimacy indeed was gained by the coup generals despite having pronounced themselves government, and as Muzan Alneel from MENA Solidarity Network points out, the living power of the street meant a deadlock: “grassroots defiance had boxed the military into a corner – unable to govern yet unwilling to relinquish power”.
A telling example is the electricity workers, organised in the Electricity Workers’ Salary Committee, cutting power to the military headquarters and the republican palace as part of their protests in 2022 – a glimpse of the workers’ power that was unfortunately not mobilised enough in this wave of struggle, as impressive at it was.
Meanwhile, the RCs grew both in numbers and coordination, and took on a new character more consciously trying to pose a political alternative to both the military rulers and their compromised civilian collaborators. They were treated with brutal hostility by the ‘security committee’ but there were also attempts to co-opt them via their increasing roles as mutual aid or even alternative, grassroots, social service providers; developments which gave rise to significant debates within the movement.
This process was also manifested in the RCs’ organising of vast, democratic discussions – involving thousands and thousands of RCs across the country – which resulted in the successive agreements of a number of Charters, going into both the way forward for the revolution and mapping the ‘people’s history’ leading up to it (see for example the January 2023 Revolutionary Charter for Establishing People’s Power).
All this, in different ways and with significant weaknesses, show that the RCs increasingly took on elements pointing towards a potential alternative, democratic state built afresh from the revolutionary ground, independent of the military, big business and imperialist handlers – a sign of a ‘dual power’ situation beginning to develop.
Once it emerges, dual power cannot exist indefinitely, as seen for example in the 1917 Russian revolutionary process where it was positively ended with the October revolution’s realisation of the call ‘all power to the soviets!’, and in many (negative) examples since.
Fall-out into war
Constantly cornered by this relentless, while not yet decisive, momentum from the masses, the infighting grew in the generals’ ‘corner’. The resulting ‘fall-out’ between al-Burhan and Hemedti may have been the immediate spark of the April 2023 outbreak of war but its underlying meaning was the attempt to break out from the paralysis to decisively extinguish the majority’s relentless revolutionary striving, as outlined by the MENA report quoted above:
“While framed as a rivalry between former allies vying for dominance, the war also reflects a deeper clash: a violent backlash by authoritarian forces against grassroots demands for systemic change. The war embodies the elite’s desperation to obliterate revolutionary momentum and reassert military hegemony.”
This is also evidenced in both warring parties targeting RC and trade union activists with particularly brutal hostility from the start of the war.
Surviving and resisting
While any independent structure of the working class and poor are clearly recognised by the RSF and SAF alike as their strategic enemies and treated as such, not even two years of counter-revolutionary war has succeeded in extinguishing their flame. From the first days of the war, Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) started popping up across the country.
The RCs alongside a range of other initiatives rooted amongst others in community responses to the 2013 flooding disaster and to Covid-19, played a key role in this. The ERRs are today said to number about 600-700, and having started out providing emergency health care, have also often developed to organising food aid and an increasing array of democratically organised communal mutual aid.
Similarly to the pre-war regime’s attitude towards the RCs, they are mostly treated with hostility and their volunteers and activists frequently targeted with deadly violence. Alternatively, the armed forces try to co-opt, exploit and neutralise them – reigniting debate over whether dangers of cooptation and depoliticisation are inherent in mutual aid initiatives. This question is poignantly addressed by Muzan Alneel of MENA Solidarity:
“Far from delaying revolution, such efforts, if guided by a revolutionary understanding, can fuse immediate relief with long-term mobilisation, ensuring survival and solidarity become twin pillars of liberation. However, the lack of such understanding can indeed lead to diluting revolutionary sentiments and exhausting the resources of political organisations.”
The ERRs have evidently played a crucial role in sustaining life in working class and poor communities and refugee camps, again developing new aspects of revolutionary potential and experience, with what appears as mere survival also a form of resistance.
Devastated, exhausted, but not defeated
The devastating toll that the last two years have exacted in particular on the working class and poor and the most oppressed layers of the people has of course meant massive blows to the momentum of the revolution, literally liquidating and incapacitating countless experienced activists (as intended by the generals).
Amid the chaos, disorganisation and exhaustion, there appears to be strong elements of disillusionment and a yearning for some semblance of stability. Such sentiments are deliberately fuelled by the SAF and its allies, posing as the custodians of ‘stability’ and ‘peace’ alongside gloating attempts at re-writing of the whole narrative of the revolution, as pointed out by Dallia Abdelmoniem and Sarah El-Hassan in a recent (highly recommended!) On the Peripheries episode.
As the war has gone on, pressure to ‘pick a side’ has mounted. While many still seem to resist this, holding on to the fundamental aims and lessons of the revolution, a common conclusion among revolutionaries appears to be to tactically support the SAF as a (somewhat) ‘lesser evil’ given the utter, genocidal, destruction the RSF leaves in its wake. Some parts of the ‘movement’, including one side of the split FFC, have sided with the RSF (which is also posturing as ‘stable’ statesmen and ‘liberators’ – apparently employing the services of a renegade former Communist Party activist as its spokesperson!).
Some RC activists have taken up arms alongside the SAF, doing so intent on returning to the struggle against all the warlords once the war is over. It is very hard to from afar gain insight into the state of this armed participation, as well as of the general mood, consciousness and state of organisation, but unless there is some form of truly independent, revolutionary armed self-defence being organised, that tactical move would appear as an illusion likely to be cruelly shattered once there is at some point, “peace”.
No matter which of the armed counter-revolutionary factions wins (and it might be both if they cut the country up between them), its leaders will have the resistance committees, the ERR volunteers, the independent trade unionists, and whatever other independent, revolutionary activists there are at the top of its kill list. A particular warning is due regarding the militias fighting alongside the SAF, which harbour many pro-Bashir islamists who are being re-empowered through the war and will become a new danger against the revolution if/where the SAF takes the upper hand.
Any way out?
Nevertheless, while the question of the way forward has “no clear-cut answer” as Abdelmoniem acknowledges in the same podcast, while the aspirations of the revolutionary masses may be severely let down and wounded, they are also clearly not dead.
Whenever Sudan’s workers, young people (about 60 percent of the population are under 30), exploited and oppressed communities get the chance to, they are sure to discuss the unbearably costly lessons they are undoubtedly accumulating in this war, and to eventually regroup and put them into action – as they have done so many times before.
Without preempting that process, both the war itself, and the process of revolution and counter-revolution leading up to it have obviously shown with devastating clarity that there cannot be any trust in any of Sudan’s established parties or in the “international community”.
Whether through brokering ‘transitional’ agreements, patronage, military alliances, joint business ventures, etc, the imperialist powers and blocs of various iterations and influence – from the EU and Britain, to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Russia, the US and the AU, and so on – have all played instrumental roles in enabling and arming the counter-revolution in Sudan.
Also, history – both recent and less so, both near and far – suggests that those lessons may include a sharpened understanding of how to rely on nothing but their own collective strength. The MENA Solidarity research on the RCs, the workers’ movement and other mass struggles point amongst others toward the need to root RC-type structures in the workplaces, and to harness the force of the organised workers together with all other oppressed layers through the creation of a conscious, independent, revolutionary party.
In this, resuming the mass-based process of evaluating the framing of and strategy for the revolution that was undertaken in Charter discussions, a thorough reckoning with the theoretical legacy of Stalinism with its stageism and submission to allegedly progressive ‘national-democratic’ elements, and developing the alternative, will also be essential.
For example, the Revolutionary Charter for Establishing People’s Power set out to “build a modern, civilian state”, “a national democratic state”. But the reality in Sudan today – with complex funding and profiteering networks of a myriad imperialist powers and their myriad lackeys, fuelling the destruction and violence, with drone warfare combined with medieval-style sieges, with ever-more brutal means to suppress the struggles of ordinary people – epitomises precisely the ‘modernity’ that capitalism in this era of economic and ecological decline, of political brutalisation and militarisation, has to offer.
What Marx concluded for Germany in the 1850s, and Trotsky for Russia in the early 1900s, and which has repeatedly and tragically been shown in many revolutionary derailments since, will likely also form part of the conclusions of Sudanese revolutionaries today – that the struggle against war, dictatorship (more or less military), oppression, exploitation and imperialist domination cannot be confined to one merely for “civil” rule, for “sovereignty” or a ‘normal’ democratic, capitalist country. This system has no space for it – as is currently being demonstrated.
The revolution in Sudan, can only win as a ‘permanent one’: setting sights on the socialist transformation of society – developing the embryonic democratic power of the RCs and the independent workers’ organisations to a new form of sovereign democracy, taking collective ownership of the economic and natural resources of the country and democratically controlling their use, for need not profit.
This means building a revolutionary movement with workers at its centre, with a consistent, active stance against all forms of oppressive division such as along gender and tribal lines, and with an energetic encouragement of uprisings across Africa and the world (strengthening and sharpening elements that have long been discernable in the living revolutionary tradition of Sudan).
“All eyes on Sudan”
Lastly, the situation can seem hopeless at the moment – is there anything that international solidarity initiatives can really do?
Mainstream media hardly mentions this major war and humanitarian crisis, let alone its fundamental character, so using whatever channels available to educate ourselves and raise awareness of it is, sadly, a key task of international solidarity initiatives.
Seeking to offer concrete class solidarity to grassroots organising in Sudan, for example through direct links between trade union/workplace structures, feminist, antiracist, Palestine solidarity organising, also potentially constitutes important contributions.
Not falling into desperate appeals for solutions from the ‘international community’, which has shown where it stands and played a key part in getting us here in the first place; remembering that liberation, justice and peace can only be achieved through the struggle of the Sudanese people, while grassroots solidarity initiatives can of course constitute important lifelines and boosts.
Ultimately, the most critical act of solidarity with the Sudanese masses that activists elsewhere can do is to strain every possible nerve to rebuild viable revolutionary movements wherever we find ourselves in the world, to become able to understand and apply the critical lessons of Sudan.