As the horror of U.S.-imperialist-backed genocide in Gaza has unfolded for all the world to see, a terrible human toll has been mounting in Sudan. While the latest span of open warfare in Africa’s third-largest country has been raging for close to a thousand days, the mass slaughter has escalated over the last two months. Ever more gruesome reports are emerging of atrocities committed in and around El Fasher, the capital of the state of North Darfur.  Previously controlled by the brutal Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), El Fasher came under an 18-month siege by the equally vicious Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a rival militia.  After the city of 1.5 million fell this past October, workers faced mass rape and summary executions that left pools of blood visible to satellites (NBC, 11/1/25). Initial estimates stand at 68,000 deaths, but the true toll may never be known (Al Jazeera, 11/4/25).

Even before the El Fasher massacre, over 21 million workers in Sudan were at “crisis” levels of hunger, with 1.4 million children in a state of starvation (UN World Food Programme, UNICEF). Workers in Sudan are also facing the world’s largest displacement crisis, with more than 12 million people driven out of their homes (Fox News, 12/16/25). Hundreds of thousands of El Fasher refugees have joined this flood of human misery.

With capitalism in a global crisis and inter-imperialist competition sharpening between a rising China and a waning U.S., the world is a volatile and dangerous place for the international working class. Lives that families have struggled to build over generations are being blasted to bits from Gaza to Sudan to Venezuela and beyond.  The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) remains steadfast in the struggle to build a communist movement today and an international Red Army tomorrow.  These are the only forces that can turn imperialist war into class war and smash the nightmare of capitalism for all time. 

SAF vs. RSF: Partners in brutality

Since 1956, when they gained independence from British and Egyptian colonial rule, rival capitalist factions have torn Sudan apart for its oil, gold, minerals, and fertile land in a near-continuous civil war. The RSF and the SAF are the present-day heirs to this sordid tradition, matching each other in the callousness of their assaults on workers. 

The Sudanese government’s SAF is ruled with terror by the henchmen of the hated former president Omar al-Bashir. It has deep ties with religious fundamentalists and a decades-long history of massacring communists, smashing unions and workers’ organizations, and engaging in widespread sexual violence. Most recently, the SAF was accused of dropping chlorine—originally produced to purify water for 17 million workers—as an indiscriminate poison gas on RSF-held working-class areas of Khartoum (France24, 11/29/25).

The SAF’s bitter rival, the RSF, is an openly racist, Arab-supremacist militia that routinely commits its own mass atrocities and sexual violence against Sudan’s richly multiracial working class, including workers who identify as Arabs. Following their massacres from Khartoum to the Masalit ethnic group in West Darfur State, the RSF turned to El Fasher. They wiped out an entire hospital of 460 workers, shattering its sanitation infrastructure and triggering an outbreak of cholera (World Health Organization, 10/29/25).

Two tools of imperialism

The SAF, with roots going back into the anti-U.S. Bashir regime (1989-2019), is backed by Chinese imperialism and a number of fractious regional powers: Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. These capitalist bosses value Sudan’s strategic geography, with territory spanning from the Nile to the Red Sea.  More recently, Russian imperialism has forged ties with the SAF in exchange for the offer of a Red Sea naval base at the strategically vital Port Sudan (Wall Street Journal, 12/1/25).  The base would project Russian military power from both ends of the Suez Canal into a maritime route that connects Europe, East Africa, and Asia.

Prior to its overtures to the SAF, Russia had backed the RSF in a desperate bid for access to Sudanese gold, which could help the Russian bosses evade U.S. financial sanctions. The regional imperialist United Arab Emirates (UAE), with its own interest in destabilizing Sudan and moving in on the country’s gold reserves, is also funding the RSF. At present, 99 percent of the gold mined in RSF-held areas goes to the UAE, whose capitalists have amassed the world’s second-largest gold reserves in a move to diversify away from exclusive reliance on oil revenues (Arab News, 11/20/25).   

The UAE is a crucial U.S. imperialist ally among the Gulf States, providing a massive U.S. air base and more U.S. Navy port visits than any other port outside the U.S. (UAE Embassy in Washington, DC). Weakening the Russia- and China-backed SAF strengthens U.S. imperialism in the region.  As with Gaza, years of calls for a Sudan cease fire by state terrorists Joe Biden and Donald Trump are cynical lip service. The RSF could not sustain its mass killing campaign without military support from the UAE, as well as Chad and Kenya, two other U.S. allies.

This muddled cast of monsters set the stage for genocide in Sudan. As U.S. imperialism continues to decline, and new bloodthirsty actors emerge, it opens a path to even more chaos and heartbreak for the international working class. Like the U.S. rulers before them, all of these imperialists are ready and willing to sacrifice millions of workers’ lives, in Sudan and worldwide, as they maneuver for more power and profit.

Communism vs. genocide 

In 2019, masses of women-led workers shut down Sudan and forced the butcher Bashir to flee (Reuters, 4/30/19).  Workers have never stopped fighting back, no matter how dark the political period might seem. Building a mass international PLP means we can and must smash ALL capitalist gangs, big and small, once and for all. From Gaza to Sudan, the international working class is paying a heavy price for the instability of the profit system. From Washington, DC to Beijing, as they scheme for the next world war, the bosses offer genocide as the new normal. 

Our aim of lasting victory over this lethal capitalist system is shared by tens of millions of workers of all nations.  We must make the PLP their party. We’ll end the bosses’ genocides when the workers of the world reunite under the banner of revolutionary, working-class internationalism–and when they fight for communism, a world run by and for the working class. Join us!

Chinese imperialism is no lesser evil forward to communism!

As 2025 finished, the Chinese imperialist ruling class sent the first of two batches of troops to join a UN “peacekeeping” mission to oil-rich South Sudan for a one-year mission of base facility construction, engineering, and “humanitarian relief”  (PRC Ministry of National Defense, 12/17/25).    
More than thirty years after apartheid was supposed to be defeated in South Africa, these troops are serving Chinese capitalism by imposing apartheid conditions on development projects across the continent.  Racist, two-tiered wage structures and segregated housing are the rule. In Sudan, safety equipment and training are prioritized for Chinese staff, while Black workers face higher risks, especially in mining and construction.  Public humiliation, arbitrary fines and firings impose conditions that harken back to European colonialism  (Lee, Ching Kwan, The Spectre of Global China: Politics, Labor and Foreign Investment in Africa, 2017). The contrast with the 1960s, when workers in China were forging a path forward toward communism, could not be more stark. 

For instance, the TanZam Railway from Tanzania to Zambia was built from 1970-75 with Chinese loans, engineers and labor at a time when China was still mainly a peasant society.  Chinese and African workers shared hardship and pride in completing a transport corridor that allowed landlocked Zambia an outlet to the sea that was free from control of white-dominated regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa.   In capitalist terms the TanZam was a money-losing project for Chinese socialism.  As a political project it was an antiracist railway, and it is a glimpse of what internationalist workers’ power was able to achieve despite already being on a course of compromise with world capitalism.  

PLP broke with the right wing elements of the Chinese Communist Party determined to compromise with capitalism in 1968.  Their betrayals morphed a once-socialist and internationalist China into a racist, fascist imperialist power challenging U.S. imperialism for world domination.   

No more retreats!

Seeds of a different future exist in international communist history and class struggle worldwide today.   We draw strength from the internationalism that led Cuban soldiers to volunteer to fight alongside Angolan comrades in a war against apartheid South Africa. We draw strength from the internationalism of the youth today who - without the leadership of a world communist movement - shut down campuses across the globe in 2024 demanding their universities divest from imperialist/Zionist destruction of Gaza.  Their aspirations can only be realized by the movement Progressive Labor Party is building today.  The imperialists may succeed in launching WWIII. PLP carries forward the fight of the millions who sought and millions who seek the final defeat of imperialism. Join us!