After months of mass demonstrations against a military coup and crackdown that killed over 100 protesters in June, Sudan’s governing generals, the Transitional Military Council (TMC), are negotiating a power-sharing agreement with liberal capitalists in the political opposition, the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC). But the main contradiction in Sudan, the tension that generated the current crisis, is the same one shaping events around the world: inter-imperialist rivalry between a rising China and a declining U.S. as they head toward the next world war.
Sudan is a gateway into Africa from the Middle East. The country’s current instability is an opening for the U.S. main-wing finance capitalists to reassert their power in the Horn of Africa and the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial trade route and potential choke point between the Persian Gulf and the open ocean. Only 24 miles wide, the strait is “the only route to the open ocean for over one-sixth of global oil production and one-third of the world’s liquified natural gas” (aljazeera.com, 7/11). For the main wing bosses, control over eastern Africa is critical to their control over Middle East oil, the capitalists’ lifeblood.
But the domestic wing of the U.S. ruling class, represented by the Koch and Mercer families, Sheldon Adelson, and President Donald Trump, is less inclined to commit a big outlay of troops and tax dollars to keep its clamps on the region. Instead, these bosses are giving free rein to the rabid ruling thugs in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel to do their bidding.
As this split deepens, it will accelerate the bosses’ move toward war and fascism. It will only hurt the working class. Only under an international communist movement, led by Progressive Labor Party, can workers end wars for profit and create a society to meet our needs.
An echo of Darfur
In the June massacre in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, “heavily armed troops burned tents, raped women and killed dozens of people, some dumped in the Nile”(New York Times, 6/15). This brutal paramilitary was following the leadership of the TMC’s General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti. The murderers were carrying on the legacy of Darfur, the Sudan region where a genocidal civil war slaughtered hundreds of thousands and displaced millions between 2003 and 2008 (The Lancet, 1/30/10).
As one protester said, “For years Hemeti killed and burned in Darfur. Now Darfur has come to Khartoum” (NYT, 6/15). The militias had carried out massacres and atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan in 2003. The U.S. bosses, who looked the other way under both George Bush and Barack Obama, also have Darfur blood on their hands.
Sudan: a notch in China’s belt
As the U.S. bosses’ infighting under Trump has created a global vacuum of power, the more unified rulers of China have filled the void. Given its location on a vital trade route between Asia, Europe, and Africa, Sudan is critical to the success of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (formerly One Belt One Road). As the Chinese bosses take on U.S. imperialism and push to become the world’s leading economic power, Port Sudan on the Red Sea will be an important notch on that belt. (Nearby Djibouti, which borders the Strait of Hormuz, houses China’s first foreign military base).
The Chinese rulers’ challenge has been a long time coming. In 1995, they signed an oil deal with Omar al-Bashir, the recently deposed Sudan president. China now controls 75 percent of Sudan’s oil output of 133,000 barrels a day (thediplomat.com, 6/17). The ousting of al-Bashir in April by the TMC was a blow for China—and a potential opening for U.S. imperialists to reassert their influence.
Meanwhile, faced with a weakening U.S. and an aggressive Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are moving to align the Horn states with their axis against rival regional imperialists Iran, Qatar, and Turkey. After funding the ouster of the unreliable al-Bashir (Foreign Affairs, 7/19), they are now backing the ruling TMC with political and military support, as are Egypt and Eritrea. The prize is control over the Gulf of Aden and the Strait of Hormuz, which figure to play a prominent role in the coming battles leading up to World War III.
U.S. bosses’ splits play out in Sudan
While both factions of the U.S. ruling class understand the importance of Sudan, they are split on how to manage that relationship. In 2017, after al-Bashir’s dictatorship committed 7,000 troops to the U.S.-backed Saudi-Emirati coalition’s genocidal war in Yemen, a campaign now opposed by the main wing, the Trump administration lifted economic sanctions and removed Sudan from the Muslim travel ban list (NYT, 7/18). Most recently, the Trump administration is considering “new ways to remove Sudan from its list of state sponsors of terrorism” (reuters.com, 4/16) and has refrained from open criticism of TMC repression. This hands-off policy squares with the domestic wing’s push to outsource the job of maintaining Middle East stability to its regional thugs-for-hire.
On the other hand, the main-wing finance capitalist coalitions—including the European Union, the United Nations, and the African Union—all support the “pro-democracy” FFC’s “nonviolent civil disobedience” opposition. Their hope is for the U.S. to take the lead in extending the liberal world order’s long-term influence over Sudan. This will be a rebuke to China and Russia, neither of which backed the UN’s condemnation of the TMC junta: “U.S. leadership has been badly lacking…The [African Union] has an important role to play, but it needs an international ecosystem of support” (Council of Foreign Relations, 6/11).
Democracy for the bosses, dictatorship for the workers
The U.S. and EU bosses’ media are hailing Sudan’s power-sharing agreement as a step toward “democracy,” the term they use for a dictatorship of the bosses. But history has shown that workers can never negotiate the terms of their freedom through our oppressors’ democracy. When workers are duped into compromises with the capitalists, the consequences are always deadly. Workers in Sudan will be “sharing” power with the very forces responsible for the genocide and displacement of millions of our working-class brothers and sisters in Darfur and Yemen.
Workers in struggle today must rebuild a communist movement that will correct the errors of its predecessors. Otherwise, the brave struggle against Sudan’s junta will be diverted into fighting for the interests of either U.S. or Chinese imperialism. Protesters must pick up the red flag where the old communists of Sudan left it, before making a wrong turn toward national independence. Join the communist movement with PLP!
Chicago, July 13—Thousands of workers poured into downtown Chicago this weekend to protest against the racist attacks on undocumented workers. This multiracial, multi-gendered and multi-generational crowd showed the power of a united working class. As a youth marching with our Progressive Labor Party (PLP) contingent said, “If we don’t get it, shut it down!”
As in: a revolution, where we replace capitalism with an egalitarian communist world run by the working class. We led anti-racist, anti-sexist chants and even got many protesters to abandon the slogan “close those camps” and start chanting “smash those camps.”Closing them isn’t enough; we have to destroy them along with the borders the bosses use to justify creating them.
This protest showed working class anger and will to fight back especially when we passed a city jail in the middle of downtown that is believed to detain undocumented workers. We paused there, chanting and showing solidarity with workers we could visibly see at the top of the building, but it isn’t enough.
Six days later, ICE, in collaboration with Homeland Security and the TSA, detained three children ages 9, 10 and 13 at O’Hare International Airport in an attempt to lure their parents into picking them up and being arrested. All three children were born in the United States, but their parents are undocumented (Chicago Tribune 7/19).
Until the working class holds state power, the ruling class will continue to terrorize and brutalize us. Whether it’s ICE raids or “stop and frisk”, we have to beat back the bosses’ attacks, as we build a revolutionary movement for communism.
Bosses go on the attack
Trump’s threat of deportation raids against immigrant workers and their families, kicking off his 2020 re-election campaign, is just the latest attack caused by this racist, declining, capitalist system. There has already been an increase of immigrants being detained by ICE. In early June, there had been approximately 52,500 immigrants detained in more than 200 detention centers. Families have continued to be split up and forced to live in torturous conditions.
Hundreds of migrants are being forced to take more dangerous routes across the U.S. border since there is a bottleneck at the ports of entry where workers wait for an asylum interview. And the conditions on the Mexican side are becoming unbearable because of extortions and kidnappings. As a result, hundreds are dying in the desert, in the rivers and in the extreme heat. Instead of trying to help or rescue these workers, the bosses’ government has been harshly prosecuting people who leave water and other supplies for these immigrant workers!
Two brands of fascism: overtly racist or liberal veneer
As they attack immigrants, the U.S. bosses are deeply divided because their international rivals, mainly China and Russia, have been challenging and competing with them for more markets and resources. Trump does the bidding of the more domestically oriented bosses who are content with a smaller, less expensive, predominantly white military trained as racist killers. But the dominant finance capital bosses, who have a world empire to control, understand that they need a “multicultural” army for World War III. These bosses see immigrants as invaluable cannon fodder in the bigger wars to come.
Under Trump, the attack on immigrant workers has shifted and intensified, but history shows that the working class can’t trust the Democratic Party to defend and protect immigrant workers. Last fiscal year, U.S. Enforcement and Removal Operations deported more than 250,000 undocumented immigrants. But, under President Barack Obama, the “Deporter in chief,” the annual number of deportations peaked in 2012 at about 410,000 (New York Times, 6/18).
Working people have no nation
As internationalists, communists welcome immigrants as fellow workers who are fighters against capitalist brutality and exploitation. We are encouraged by the growing movement in Chicago to defend and protect our immigrant sisters and brothers from the ravages of these bosses’ attacks. Workers have struggled against loopholes in the Sanctuary City laws, the racist gang databases, orders of deportation against countless immigrants and their families, and against the holding of children separated from their parents.
But the biggest lesson workers must learn is that we will be stuck in the endless struggle for reforms as long as we rely on billionaire politicians, like the governor of Illinois J.B Pritzker, for protection and relief. We must destroy the capitalists’ state power and replace it with working class power. The Progressive Labor Party calls on all workers to defend our immigrant fellow workers against deportations and murder in concentration camps and along the border. Smash capitalism! Fight for communism!
August 23 marks the 80th anniversary of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (also known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact) between the then-socialist Soviet Union and Hitler’s Nazi Germany, on the eve of World War II. This was a non-aggression treaty, not an alliance, as the anti-communist capitalist historians want us to believe. The Soviets needed to buy time to build up their military and industrial capabilities before they could take on the German fascists. Not only did the Soviet Red Army take on the Nazis, they smashed them, driving them all the way back to Berlin. 80 percent of German casualties in World War II were at the hands of the Soviet forces. But this victory came at a political cost as the communists promoted the nationalist idea of “defending the motherland” instead of inspiring and organizing workers everywhere to rise up against the Nazis and all capitalists.
Pre-World War II period
The capitalist bosses lie about this treaty because it exposes their own loyalty to fascism.During the 1930s, Britain, France, and the U.S., desperate to crush the first workers’ state that they had failed to do in their onslaught after the Bolshevik Revolution, encouraged Hitler to move East to attack the Soviet Union. They allowed him to take back the Rhineland, a region of Germany that had been occupied by the U.S., France, Belgium and Britain as a result of Germany’s defeat in World War I; to build up Germany’s military in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I; and to incorporate Austria as part of Germany. In the 1938 “Munich Agreement,” the British and French gave Germany more of what it wanted, the most industrialized part of Czechoslovakia, in a brazen attempt to aim the Nazis toward the Soviet Union and hold off war in Western Europe.
In 1939, the Soviets tried to get Britain, France, and Poland to agree to a mutual defense treaty against Hitler. Britain was reluctant; its negotiators were sent to Moscow on a slow boat, instructed to drag out the talks, and given no authorization to sign anything. The French also did nothing. The Soviets got the message – the Allies wanted Hitler to smash the USSR, headquarters of the world communist movement that the capitalists of the world hated far more than they hated Hitler.
All the while, the USSR was at war with Japan, which had attacked it from Mongolia at Khalkhin Gol in May 1939. This was clearly a Japanese probe to test the strength of the Soviet Far Eastern Army. Without a temporary treaty with Germany, the USSR might have faced two wars at the same time. But by early September 1939, Japanese forces were defeated.
Meanwhile, Hitler wanted to conquer Poland without worrying about the Soviet Red Army. He rightly guessed that Britain and France would not fight.On August 23, 1939, the USSR and Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. On August 25, Britain signed a treaty with Poland promising to go to war if Germany attacked it (France and Poland later signed a similar agreement).
World War II begins
On September 1, 1939, Hitler’s armies attacked Poland. On September 3, Britain and France declared war on Germany. From September 1939 to May 1940, the “Phony War” took place with no large-scale military land operations. The Western capitalists were signaling Hitler that they still wanted him to “move eastward” against the Soviets.
Communist led workers defeated the Nazis
Tactically, the Pact was of some help in defeating Hitler. It temporarily kept Hitler’s armies 300 miles from the Soviet border. When the war started in September, Leningrad and Moscow, two centers of Soviet industry and political strength, were that much further from the Nazi armies. But it was the heroic workers of Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad and throughout the USSR that defeated the Nazis. Just think of what an inspired and organized working class throughout Europe and the world could have accomplished.
The treacherous Western Allies were hoping that Hitler would conquer the Soviet Union defeating the world’s first workers state. Today they rewrite history saying the Soviets invaded Poland after dividing it up with the Germans. Not true. The Germans invaded, the fascist Polish army provided little resistance, and the Polish government fled to Rumania. Quickly the Germans declared that the Polish government was no longer in control of the country and therefore the Polish state no longer existed. That meant that the secret “sphere of influence” clause in the Pact was no longer valid. Hitler ordered the German army to help form a fascist Ukrainian state in former Eastern Poland. The Soviets sent in the Red Army to keep the Nazi army away from their border by occupying those parts of Poland that had been seized from Soviet Russia by imperialist Poland in 1921.
Everyone – Soviets, Germans, and the Western powers – assumed that the Polish government would make peace with Hitler and then form a buffer state that, no matter how anti-Soviet, would also be anti-German. But the Polish government did not form a so-called government-in-exile. “Their own” ruling class abandoned the Polish working class to Hitler’s Nazis, who proceeded to murder several million of them.
Reject nationalism, fight for communism!
It is in the interest of workers around the world to get to the truth behind historical events. Our working class worldview allows us to develop our revolutionary communist ideas. We can’t depend on the rulers to do this for us, as they do in our schools, because their “truth” is always based on their class interest, and therefore lies. When the working class controls all aspects of society, then we will tell the class history of humanity.
From the standpoint of the USSR, the treaty was a delaying tactic, as the Soviets prepared for the German attack. Progressive Labor Party criticizes this treaty as the Soviets succumbing to nationalism and prioritizing the “defense of the motherland” instead of building the international communist movement. In spite of their weaknesses the Soviet communists, with a monumentally heroic effort, defeated the Nazis. We must learn from their strengths and weaknesses as the imperialist powers once again are headed toward world war. Say no to nationalism. Workers of the world unite! Fight for communism!
Further Reading: Pages of articles and evidence at tinyurl.com/furr-mlg09 ; Grover Furr, Blood Lies (2014), Chapters 7-8.
NEW YORK CITY, July 24—When Eric Garner fought for his life five years ago, saying “I can’t breathe” 11 times before dying in a chokehold captured on video, outrage at this racist cop murder exploded in an outpouring of militant multiracial demonstrations that shut cities down.
Eric Holder, Obama’s do-nothing attorney general, refused to pursue a federal civil rights charge against Daniel Pantaleo, Garner’s killer. This has now resulted in no punishment for this fiend. Meanwhile liberal mayor Bill de Blasio refuses to meet the Garner family’s demand to fire Pantaleo.
Garner’s mother, sister and others have called for eleven days of outrage in the wake of the federal decision, and Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members were there on the first day’s rally. At points, marchers around us picked up PL-led chants like “If we don’t get it, shut it down!” and kept them going through the crowd. “I can’t breathe!” choked the streets of lower Manhattan, as hundreds demanded the imprisonment of Pantaleo.
PLP’s presence and CHALLENGE was also felt at a gathering organized by the Garner family the Saturday before the federal no-indictment decision, which brought together mothers of 24 Black youth slain by the police. At this intergenerational event CHALLENGE was welcomed by Garner’s mother and multiracial unity in the struggle for justice was emphasized by his sister.
NYPD rotten to the core
Each time one of these police is cleared of wrongdoing the political message is crystal clear—brutality and wanton murder is not an aberration or a mistake, but an essential function of policing in racist, capitalist United States. Pantaleo walks free. Of course, Pantaleo has a pattern of abuse: “Pantaleo was previously accused of false arrest and violating police procedures in two lawsuits, according to court records…In one lawsuit, two Black plaintiffs each won $15,000 after claiming they’d been falsely arrested in 2012 and forced to publicly strip for a search” (Vox, 7/14/2015). Similarly, Black NYPD cop “Bad Boy” Phillip Atkins who killed Shantel Davis caused over $200,000 in excessive force settlements to be paid out before he took her life.
Though a rash of high-profile racist police murders marked the tenure of Amerikkka’s first Black president not a single cop was punished by Obama’s so-called ‘Justice’ Department.
Violent nature of capitalism
Families like the Garner, Livingston, West, Davis and more fighting for justice over many years are positioned to see clearly a lesson the entire working class must absorb: elections do not change the basic violent, racist and anti-worker nature of capitalist state power.
It is up to PLP to organize these families and many millions more into a movement to smash that state power in a multiracial communist revolution that will forever abolish racist police murder.
CHICAGO, July 17 – Workers from Mount Sinai Hospital continue to sharpen the class struggle against their racist and sexist bosses. Today, a multiracial delegation of workers, including comrades from Progressive Labor Party (PLP), marched in the building to interrupt the hospital bosses’ phony “town hall” meeting.
By taking the offensive and regularly engaging in bold direct actions, we are collectively deepening our understanding of our power as a united working class. Those of us in PLP are proud to be giving and receiving leadership from our class sisters and brothers in this struggle for an improved worker and patient environment.
With each step forward, we push the call for a communist society–one without racism, sexism, borders, exploitation or profits–as the only real solution to overcome the failures of capitalism and build the egalitarian world that we truly need and deserve.
Class struggle at Sinai
Mount Sinai is a community hospital in the mostly-Black North Lawndale neighborhood on the city’s west side. It is a safety-net hospital, meaning that the majority of the patients served there are uninsured or underinsured workers and their families. The overwhelming majority of these patients are Black and Latin immigrant workers, and the staff is primarily Black, Latin, and Asian women.
The racist and sexist hospital bosses prioritize their money and profits over the well-being of the workers and patients. They routinely understaff departments in the name of “productivity” and neglect broken equipment and building repairs until the problems become too big to ignore. They regularly use intimidation and harassment against workers who speak up against them or make demands for better conditions.
But the hospital workers have not been taking these capitalist attacks lying down. In recent months, they have been engaging in direct actions against the bosses, many of which are organized through the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) healthcare local. These include marching on the bosses (see CHALLENGE 6/26) as well as holding a mass rally in front of the hospital on Juneteenth, tracing the racist legacy of capitalism from the era of chattel slavery to the present day.
The workers who are already formally recognized by the union, including nurse aides, dietary staff, and housekeepers just recently had their contract expire, and during recent negotiation sessions the bosses have only offered a pathetic 1.5 percent wage increase. On June 6th, the hospital nurses presented the bosses with a majority of signed cards stating that they too wanted to be official union members, a demand that was quickly shot down.
Learning of the nurses’ desire to become unionized sent the bosses into panic mode. They quickly brought in union-busting consultants and launched a counter-campaign of misinformation and manipulation. They systematically pulled nurses into one-on-one meetings with managers. The new chief operating officer (COO), Airica Steed, has released a series of insincere letters, using identity politics and elitism to confuse and mislead nurses from uniting with other workers. They have hosted luncheons, a monthly system-wide town hall meeting, and even a ridiculous “transformation hotline” to try to convince workers that they suddenly care about the racist, sexist, and anti-worker conditions in the hospital.
Don’t take a racist attack sitting down
But the working class is smart, and the majority of the workers see through their crap. We remain committed to the fight! So with this in mind, a PL comrade made the suggestion that for the town hall scheduled on this day, we sharpen the struggle by marching as a delegation to the event, delivering a petition of unity signed by hundreds of Sinai workers, and putting the bosses on the spot.
Over a dozen of us, multiracial women and men workers, entered the main hospital auditorium as the bosses babbled on near the front stage. A few corporate stooges and security tried to usher us into seats, but we collectively insisted on remaining together, facing the bosses in a show of defiance.
When the bosses paused to address the audience for questions, a comrade raised his hand and our group marched closer to the front of the stage. The comrade took the microphone, handed the COO the petitions and reinforced the demand that the bosses recognize the nurses as part of the union and that they stop disrespecting workers both on the job and at the negotiation table. Another comrade then took the microphone and sharply scolded the bosses, in front of over a hundred people, to end their campaign of wasting resources and dividing workers.
The bosses stuttered and quickly gave a meek response, barely addressing the statements made. We then marched out of the auditorium as a group, noting the smiles and raised thumbs given to us by our coworkers along the way.
Communist revolution must be the goal
As satisfying as this action was, we know as communists that the core of our struggle is to connect, bold, anti-racist fightback with revolutionary communist politics. Each time we push the limits with our fellow workers, we must be winning more of them to the reality that we need to ultimately run society after destroying capitalism by means of a mass international PLP.
We are making modest gains. More of our coworkers are getting CHALLENGE and some are coming to marches and study groups. We are ready for the next steps of this struggle, shoulder to shoulder with the working class!J
