The Sudanese civil war: a local struggle that is part of the global scourge of imperialism Pt. 2

We resume this study on Sudan, the first part was published in The International Communist #3, which covered the history of the country from the Ottoman invasions to independence

Sudan was Born Weak

Even before the general imperialist war broke out again in 1939, the financial executors of the Sudan Political Service (SPS)—the administrative body of the Anglo-Egyptian condominium—distinguished themselves by their servile obedience to the dogmas of liberalism.

In their narrow-minded view, the state should not go beyond its role as guardian of private property and arbiter of trade, shunning the heresy of direct intervention in the economy.

Their greatest fear—completely unfounded—was that they would go down in history as the promoters of a non-existent “socialist experiment” in Sudan.

Nothing could be more grotesque:

State control of the capitalist economy is not, and can never be, socialism.

But beyond this misunderstanding, the reality was that in their zeal to preserve the colonial economic order, they even discouraged industrial development, both by local and foreign capital.

The only exception was

the cotton industry, which had already begun in the 1920s. This industry was structured according to sharecropping arrangements and confined to the cultivation of raw materials for export.

Here, the dilemma of imperialism is clearly evident.

On the one hand, capitalism demands productive expansion; on the other, colonial logic imposes the maintenance of a subordinate and backward economy.

Moreso than phobias about socialist “statism,” the colonial administration’s real concern was that industrial takeoff would strengthen the Sudanese proletariat to the point of enabling it to subvert the existing social order.

During the war, there were fears of a wave of inflation, fueled both by the increase in the money supply—which rose from £1.75 million in 1939 to £4.25 million in 1943—and by difficulties in importing consumer goods.

This scenario could have prompted urban proletarians and farm laborers to demand substantial wage increases.

To avert this danger, price stabilization measures were adopted, including trade agreements with the United Kingdom, which in return obtained cotton on favorable terms.

Even the sharecroppers accepted compromises.

Foregoing profits from the price increase, cotton producers saw their surpluses set aside in a special insurance fund, which was intended to compensate them during periods of decline.

During the war and immediately afterwards, cotton production grew significantly, especially in Gezira, with repercussions on Khartoum and Port Sudan, a key logistics hub.

Production of lower quality cotton also began in Kordofan, near the Nuba Mountains.

In addition, water collection works were completed shortly before the conflict, in Gash, in the province of Kassala.

In the province of Equatoria, the Zande Scheme was launched, with the cultivation of cereals, legumes, coffee, and tea, generating relative economic development in the southernmost region.

However, transportation and communication difficulties prevented Equatoria from establishing solid economic ties with the rest of the country. Instead, it was anchored to the economic sphere of the Colony of Kenya.

At the same time, outlying regions, particularly Darfur, were sinking into famine and misery.

The war and the post-war period only widened the gap between the central areas and the suburbs.

This disparity was also reflected in institutions, where positions of greater responsibility were reserved for native Arabic speakers. This was to the detriment of the southern populations, who were excluded from even the possibility of social advancement and lacked their own bourgeoisie or technical class.

Thus, while Sudan contributed to the British war economy, its own development remained stalled.

The empire’s post-war appropriations—a paltry two million pounds—could only clash with the dilemma of every colonial economy.

Modernization meant unleashing unmanageable social contradictions, while inertia condemned the country to stagnation.

Moreover, colonial officials and the Sudanese elite had already had occasion to deal with the first manifestations of proletarian struggle.

The Sudanese Workers’ Federation of Trade Unions (SWFT) was founded in March 1949, a year of major strikes, especially by railway workers.

Since its foundation, the union has represented the majority of the country’s wage earners.

In 1950, the SWFT tested its strength by calling a general strike, which was then called off by union leaders.

Threatening to unleash class warfare was enough to obtain a new labor law that recognized the right of Sudanese proletarians to strike and associate.

But rights alone do not feed the proletariat.

In 1952, there was a large wave of strikes, culminating in three consecutive days of general strikes.

Sudanese railway workers drove this struggle, and they demanded large wage increases.

Subsequently, the president and secretary of the SWFT were arrested. This triggered a second wave of political strikes in May, with further arrests and serious acts of class violence.

Frightened by the modernity of class struggle, in 1954, local planners decided to perpetuate this vicious cycle.

They focused once again on expanding cotton production. Sharecrop contracts were expanded and the water infrastructure in Gezira was strengthened, while the rest of the country was deliberately ignored—especially the southern provinces, which were condemned to chronic poverty.

Inevitably, independence in 1956 found Sudan economically powerless and politically fragile.

The exclusive reliance on cotton proved to be a double-edged sword.

The collapse of world prices between 1954 and 1958 shattered all budget forecasts. This made it impossible to finance infrastructure projects for marginalized provinces, which lacked even the most basic services.

This led to a mutiny by the army and police in Equatoria as early as 1955, which soon degenerated into a full-scale war against the central government.

The revolt, as will be seen below, was the beginning of the first Anyanya War, a terrible conflict that lasted 17 years, marking serious unresolved contradictions in the country.

During this period of instability, a real tug-of-war took shape between the state and the trade unions, which were strongly influenced by the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP).

The cotton crisis also gave the SCP an opportunity to rally sharecroppers behind the demand to cancel the contracts binding cotton producers to creditors and the agencies that manage the Gezira water infrastructure.

However, it did so using populist tactics very similar to those we have already widely denounced in Italy, when the Italian Communist Party was building the backbone of its organization with sharecroppers from Tuscany and Emilia. In effect, the Italian Communist Party replaced the fascist party, which used sharecroppers as a rear guard for conservatism.

Sharecroppers and smallholders are facing an increasingly rapid and widespread process of agricultural industrialization. However, they cannot access this due to the fragmented nature of their farms, which are limited to the narrow confines of the farmstead.

It follows that their “struggle” stems from the aspiration to individually own the means of production which, by their very nature and function, require associated labor.

In the Sudanese case, for example, associated work was conditioned by the complex water management system of the Gezira, which necessarily extends beyond the limits of small plots and individual farming.

It is on this antagonistic basis that, with the increasing penetration of machinery into agriculture and the structural necessity of centralized water management, both sharecropping and small peasant farming have become historically inadequate.

Furthermore, cotton production itself is subject to market dynamics that are beyond the control of small producers and even the Sudanese government.

The sharecroppers see their crisis worsening, driven to agitation by pressure from landowners, creditors, the body that manages the water infrastructure, and the global cotton market.

However, they react by calling for a return to a utopian economy for family businesses or, at most, with modest use of associated labor, never with a view to the revolutionary overcoming of capitalism.

Their political position and their struggle arise from the psychology of the “poor relative” who wants to get rich, or at least not become proletarianized, not from that of the proletarian who has no use for private property and can only expect liberation from a system of social production and distribution.

Thus, the anti-Marxist SCP, which has adopted the democratic and populist program of the sharecroppers, the petty bourgeoisie, and professional associations, renounces the proletarian and revolutionary perspective in this textbook example of opportunism.

Nevertheless, the considerable strength of the Sudanese proletariat, when it led a powerful general strike in October 1958, seriously undermined the government’s hold on power.

Thus, by completely failing in its economic policy, the Sudanese central government exposed itself to irreconcilable contradictions.

The Anglo-Egyptian rivalry, intertwined with the dynamics of the Cold War, did the rest.

In November 1958, the political crisis ended with the fall of the democratic system and the establishment of Abboud’s military dictatorship.

The Abboud Regime

As the direct expression of the state—itself nothing but the committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie—the military identified political legitimacy with economic growth, replacing suffrage with the measurement of per capita income.

From this perspective, capitalist development in the most advanced regions is nothing more than yet another expedient to perpetuate class domination and guarantee the stability of the bourgeois order.

Thus, with their rise to power, nothing changed in the substance of economic and social relations.

The dictatorship of the ruling class remains intact, while the misery of the proletariat persists and deepens.

The coup d’état is nothing more than the synthesis of the balance between the factions of the national bourgeoisie, sanctioned by the tacit consent of the two main parties:

the Umma, voice of the cotton-owning class, and the Popular Democratic Party (PDP), instrument of the military bourgeoisie.

The economic crisis, caused by the fall in cotton prices, exacerbated the living conditions of the urban poor, farm laborers, and rural masses, pushing them to revolt.

The weak Sudanese bourgeoisie, in its perpetual fear of proletarian revolution, sees as a threat not only the federalist movements of the rejected provinces, but also professional associations, trade unions, and the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP) itself. By the way, far from being a revolutionary vanguard, the SCP remained trapped in reformist mediation, rooting itself in universities, professional associations, the middle classes, and the sharecroppers of the Gezira, without ever escaping the yoke of capital.

For the Umma and the PDP, military rule is a necessary interlude to bring the economic process back within the bounds of bourgeois stability, waiting for cotton prices to stabilize and the farce of democratic elections to be restored.

The imperialist structure of international capital manifests itself in the influx of loans from the centers of Western power—the United States, the United Kingdom, West Germany—and the International Monetary Fund.

The flow of capital has no flags.

Even Nasser’s Egypt, in its nationalist mystification, bowed to the logic of exploitation, granting the use of the waters of the Nile with additional dams to feed the agricultural income of the “Arab” bourgeoisie.

Furthermore, during this period, Sudan also attracted the attention of Arab monarchies for the first time, as Kuwait granted a significant loan to expand the African country’s railway infrastructure.

Like every bourgeois government, Abboud’s regime succumbed to the superstition of “economic balance,” basing its entire strategy on cotton monoculture.

This was the fetish commodity, the beating heart of agricultural rent and imperialist domination in Sudan.

The bourgeois economic illusion was based on calculations made by state accountants.

It was estimated that even an 80% drop in the price of cotton would keep production profitable.

But this “miracle” was nothing more than the product of the brutal mechanism of exploitation, in which the only variable that could be compressed was, as always, the flesh and blood of the Sudanese proletariat and sharecroppers.

It was not enough that cotton was sold at a good price on international markets.

Capital, by its very nature, demanded tribute paid to the usurers of global finance.

The Sudanese bourgeoisie, in its servile subordination, lulled itself into the illusion that its “friends” in the Western bloc would show clemency.

A benevolent suspension of payments was expected when, in 1962, a disastrous harvest threatened profits.

It hoped for some leniency in 1964, when, strangled by deficit, it was forced to beg for new loans to carry on with its illusory “development plan.”

But capital knows no friends.

The credit crunch is not a political choice, but rather an iron law of economic domination.

Interest rates are not concessions that can always be renegotiated, but rather the tribute that every subordinate national bourgeoisie must pay to its imperialist masters.

Meanwhile, in the southern provinces, the war for autonomy erupted as a manifestation of the irrepressible contradictions of central rule.

The rebellion against the central power in Khartoum was supported by neighboring countries:

Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya.

The rebellion spread geographically, also involving the provinces of Bahr al Ghazal and Upper Nile, although internal conflicts between Nilotic and Equatorial groups ultimately weakened the rebel forces despite the geographical extent of the war.

The war was a serious problem, especially for the image of Aboud’s regime, which repressed the separatist guerrillas through widespread use of terror, committing indiscriminate reprisals against the civilian population and causing hundreds of thousands of deaths.

When a conference entitled “The Problem of South Sudan” was organized at the University of Khartoum in October 1964, Abboud’s military forces stormed the venue. This triggered a wave of civil protests and a massive general strike.

Since the strike did not subside despite dozens of proletarians being killed in various pockets of unrest across the country, Abboud himself dissolved the government and the supreme council of the armed forces to prevent the situation from getting out of hand.

Abboud’s regime crumbled under the weight of its own lies.

Per capita income did not grow, “stability” was not achieved, and consensus was not bought.

It was not the shortcomings of an incompetent government, nor the absence of a more prudent economic policy, but rather the very logic of capital that sealed its fate.