Sudan - November 21st, 2021

Huge resistance to the coup

To defeat the officer’s caste and their recently created government council

It is necessary to break with the support to the boss parties that uphold the generals! Let's set up workers and peasants militia and expand, coordinate and generalize the resistance committees!

For a workers and peasants government

More than two weeks have passed since the officer caste staged a coup in Sudan and the masses have not left the streets. A general strike paralyzes all economic activity. At times, openings of one or two days are observed, but immediately they return to the strike.

However, the masses have not advanced to defeat the coup of the murderous generals. This is due to the fact that the CP, from the leadership of the organizations that promote the mobilizations and the strike (the doctors committee and the trade union center called Sudanese Professionals Association), continue to subordinate them to the bourgeois sectors of the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC), the same ones that shared the transitional government with the military until the end of last October, which had came to power after the fall of Bashir in mid-2019 to divert the enormous revolution. This bourgeois party and the CP continue to call the workers to unarmed “million marches” against the army that continues to repress them. The medical committee has reported 40 deaths in the clashes, but there are also dozens and dozens of missing, thousands of seriously injured.
The masses have also set up "resistance committees", self-determination bodies for the political struggle against the coup. The CP has entered inside them and is promoting the same policy there.The reformist leadership of the masses is the greatest obstacle they have to advance.
This resulted, at first, in a new Council made up of the army officer caste and related people. Then the commander in chief of the army, the repressive assassin general Abd el Fatah Burhan announced that the Prime Minister would once again be the same as it was in the transitional government: AbdallahHamdok, an economist of the so-called “technocrats” who is the direct man from the US.Hamdok said that the political agreement with the generals includes the possibility that in the future he may appoint other members of the government, to march to a "government of technocrats", that is, to a council of graduates and doctors with recognized international trajectory to represent the USA. Thus, US imperialism makes sure to put its men at the head of the government of Sudan, supported by the murderous bayonets of the generals, and secure their iron fist on the Sudanese nation and its source of raw materials and an important route along the Nile.
However, Hamdok's appointment as Prime Minister has not contributed to misleading the masses and taking them out of the streets. They have denounced the political agreement between Hamdok and Burhan and continue to fight for the fall of the military government. That is why the FFC has been left out of the new government together with the CP, as they are containing the masses that refuse to leave the streets and continue to fight to defeat the coup.

The reason is that the protests of the masses did not begin against the coup. They startedbefore, against the aforementioned transitional government, because it deepened the hunger and desperate situation of the Sudanese. The demand was that the people wanted that government of the military with the FFC and the CP to fall. The latter blamed the military. The officers struck and imprisoned some of their leaders.And thus they managed to form a new government and an opposition outside of it that today is containing the mass actions, despite the fact that only a few months ago both had already been unmasked as the continuity of Bashir's plan of hunger and misery. It has been imposed a regime of a dictatorship of the same caste of officers of Bashir and an opposition outside the government that contains the masses so that they do not overthrow it.

The Syrian genocide is a chastise upon the Sudanese masses

Until now the repression by the military has been selective and not generalized. Actually, the massacre had already been carried out in Syria. The genocide carried out by Bashar, Putin and the Iranian ayatollahs, on behalf of imperialism, was a lesson to all the exploited in the region. With it they warn every uprising in the region that if they arm themselves to confront the fascist army, there will be a massacre like in Syria. That is why every uprising that we have seen in the Middle East, like in Lebanon or Iraq yesterday, and in Sudan again today, is through massive marches that with the aim of demonstrating before the eyes of the world that the masses are neither religious fanatics nor guerrillas, or jihadists, but peaceful people, and that the murderers are the military, don't carry weapons.
The Sudanese army then has not launched the large-scale massacre because, given the role that the FFC and the CP are playing at the forefront of the mobilizations and the limit to the actions of the exploited imposed by the genocide in Syria, it does not see it necessary to risk a possible rupture of the army base. They remember very well that in mid-2019, when the masses surrounded the army headquarters in a peaceful protest and the death squads (called “Janjaweed”) shot them out, the rank and file soldiers stepped in to defend the protesters.

It is necessary to surpass the limit of the leaderships of the masses to advance and defeat the coup

This is precisely the task that is needed now to defeat the coup, to call the rank and file soldiers to break with their officers and return to defend the people in their demonstrations and their resistance committees. Marches to the barracks must be organized from the resistance committees as in 2019. We must divide the army horizontally and defeat the murderous coup officer caste. This struggle is not different from the struggle to set up a worker and peasant militia to defend themselves from repression. The self-defense committees of the resistance committees must be set up.
But for this, we must break with the limit imposed by the Forces for Freedom and Change, and end the subordination to that bourgeois current imposed by the CP.Any subordination to the bourgeoisie and to the politics of the CP would only end up strengthening the coup.
In the first place, the Sudanese CP is supported by dozens of CPs in the world, which meet among themselves only to keep the workers of the world separated from the Sudanese revolution, refusing to call a single strike in spite of their leading the European trade union centrals and also those from several other countries, and then washing the clothes of their betrayal with testimonial participation in marches of some of their militants.
But we also see the renegades of Trotskyism from the PO of Argentina to praise the Sudanese CP openly by stating that, “The distinctive element in this resistance is the experience of the struggle against the dictatorship and the role of organized groups in the movement.  Forces such as the Sudanese Communist Party, and union sectors such as the Sudanese Professionals Association and the Pilots' union have called to defeat the coup and are in the streets, promoting the protests."("Sudan: coup and popular resistance to the coup", 10/25/2021). For its part, the English SWP, in the dozens of notes that they have produced in their newspaper "Socialist Worker", hides the sinister role of the CP in subjecting the working class to the bourgeoisie. Their former allies of the Revolutionary Socialists of Egypt criticize the CP and call for a break with the FFC, but they do not either advance a program to defeat the coup, dividing the army and conquering weapons. For its part, the IMT, although it correctly calls for the armaments and to leave the army, does not face the trap of the new “opposition”, the main obstacle to defeating the coup. All former Trotskyists demonstrate that they follow letter by letter either one or the other pillar of the Sudanese transitional regime.
From the armed resistance committees, with a worker and peasant militia, we must defeat the coup officers! Let the council of the officer caste fall! For committees of rank and file soldiers who disobey their officers and fight alongside the workers and the people! Out with the bourgeois forces that starve the people! Resistance committees must be extended and coordinated, made function with direct democracy, as organizations of workers' power! For a workers and peasants' government, based on those resistance committees and their worker and peasant militia!