On March 25, the Edmonton YCL-LJC club organized an event at the University of Alberta with the Communist Party of Canada and the Sudanese Communist Party. The event featured a panel of speakers from each organization that participated discussing the current situation in Sudan and what is needed to build the solidarity movement inside Canada. The Speakers were Naomi Rankin, member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Canada and leader of the CPC Alberta Committee; Dr. Fathi al-Fadl, member of the Central Committee of the Sudanese Communist Party, vice president of the International Centre for Trade Union Rights and a former student leader in Sudan and leading member of the International Union of Students during the 1970s and 1980s; and Ivan Byard, General Secretary of the YCL-LJC. Below are the remarks at the event from comrade Ivan.
I will start today by extending our utmost solidarity on behalf of the entire YCL-LJC to our sister organization the Sudanese Youth Union, the Sudanese Communist Party, the working class of Sudan, and all forces in the country struggling for freedom, peace, and justice.
This word, solidarity, is just a word. But the action it represents is one of the most powerful we have. Solidarity is a force for change, for a better world. Solidarity means we have a common enemy or perhaps more importantly a common goal. Because as Young Communists, as equal partners in the World Federation of Democratic Youth with our comrades in the Sudanese Youth Union, we know we have more in common with the railway workers, the farmers, the students and teachers, and all working and oppressed people in Sudan than we do with the ruling class of Canada. The ruling class that owns mines, railways, and weapons factories in Canada has its eyes on Sudan. They want the chaos of this unnecessary conflict to open up the mineral resources and fertile land of Sudan for their profit.
They know they can strike a deal with the old generals of the armed forces or the militias who have committed countless massacres in the past and continue to commit atrocities today. Obviously, the situation for working-class youth in Canada is starkly different from that of the youth in Sudan, the youth who are facing starvation, disease, bombs and gunfire from a fight over continuing the ruthless brutal policy of patronage and military rule that has dominated Sudan for too long.
The vicious vestiges of the British colonial rule that profited from primitive capital accumulation are the brutal processes that separated working people from their means of subsistence, concentrated wealth in the hands of landlords and capitalists, and subjected landless people to being proletarianized by working in urban factories. But even in the desperate inhumane conditions of the refugee camps or the streetfighting in Khartoum, we the working people and students here in Edmonton have more common with our brothers and sisters in Sudan than we do with the oil and gas executives in Calgary that fanned the flames of war in Sudan 20 years ago and the mining investors on Bay Street in Toronto that have their eyes set on the gold and copper in Sudan today.
So this is what we need from the peoples of Canada to contribute to the cause of the Sudanese people for freedom, peace, and justice. We need solidarity, not only because we share an enemy in the profiteers of bloodshed but we share a common goal in freedom, peace, and justice. And we need this solidarity from the democratic institutions of the peoples in Canada. Of course individuals can take action, you can write to your elected representatives, you can speak at a union meeting, you can pen a letter to the editor of a newspaper, but what will really help bring about change to this growingly dire situation is the collective strength of the democratic institutions.
The trade unions first and foremost have the power, but the student unions, the environmentalists, the language-based community organisations, and more have the strength that is greater than the quantitative sum of their individual memberships to bring about the urgent change that is needed. The people of Sudan have played their part, in 2018-19 they took to the streets and faced harsh violent repression to take down a fascistic, fundamentalist, military regime. And now they need the support of the workers of the world, especially here in the belly of the beast. Because the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, the two main sides that are responsible for this escalating violence, are receiving outside help from the United States, from the European Union, the oil-rich Gulf states, and Russia, who want to buy off the local agents to divide the mineral wealth and fertile land for extracting a profit. And the Canadian companies, particularly the mining companies, are preparing to extract the mineral wealth from Sudan and exploit her people.
These mining companies are owned by the same ruling class in Canada that wants to privatize our hospitals, that wants to turn our public universities into transactional stopgaps for their specific needs rather than places of critical thinking and higher learning, the ruling class that keeps our wages down and our rents high.
What we are seeing in Sudan is taking place all over the world, because capitalism in its imperialist stage is immersed in incurable contradictions and crises. It is in this framework, where they are looking to maintain and even increase the rate of profit — that we must frame the imperialist forces such as the U.S. and the EU seeking to maintain their dominance in the current escalation of imperialist tensions, aggressions, occupation, and wars over the redistribution of the world and natural resources, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, the increase in the exploitation and oppression of the working class and its youth through the attack both direct and indirect on wages and on our political, social, and labour rights.
In recent years, we have witnessed the consolidation of the reconfiguration of the world with major changes and the emergence of new regional and international forces, some of them not aligned with the imperialist interests of the U.S. and the EU, but rather in growing imperialist rivalry with them. Today, the conflicts we can observe around the world are an aggressive manifestation of the incurable contradictions of capitalism, in which the ruling classes and monopolies seek at all costs to increase their profits and power while others are emerging to question their supremacy. The conflicts for spheres of influence, market shares, raw materials, energy plans, and transport routes, and the ecological, resource and waste crisis exacerbate this scenario.
The aggressiveness of imperialism is by no means accidental and comes from the nature of the capitalist system and the ferocious struggles between imperialist powers and alliances and their corresponding monopolies to rule resources, markets and transport routes, in a fight for a new share of them, which presents increasingly narrower margins. As Lenin said one hundred years ago, globalised capitalism is war.
Imperialism is a global system where imperialist forces take part, and hold their respective position according to their economic, political and military force. This position is given in the imperialist pyramid and through this they demand for their monopolies the best share, participating in a process of balancing and antagonizing, moving up and down the pyramid with the changes of the correlation of forces. The capitalist classes of all countries and the political forces serving their interests are all organic parts of the international imperialist system, with their intertwined relations of exploitation. Their alliances, temporary or long-term, their participation and dependence in imperialist organs, such as NATO, the EU, the IMF, the World Bank, and regional alliances, aim at serving more successfully the interests of the ruling classes. That is why they must be targeted by anti-imperialist struggle.
We understand the link between the fight for peace and international solidarity. To make this link is to bet that the working class in Canada has more to do with the working class and the peoples of the world than with “our” bourgeoisie. In an imperialist country like Canada, this testimony of international solidarity is essential and represents the strongest profession of faith in favour of the working class, the exploited and the oppressed.
As Young Communists, we commit to building the solidarity movement with the revolutionary people of Sudan in Canada. Our clubs and their members must do more to build this movement and most importantly bring the labour unions into this movement because the situation in Sudan is only growing more urgent by the day.
To quote from the founding pledge of WFDY:
Not only today, not only this week, this year, but always
Until we have built the world we have dreamed of and fought for
We pledge ourselves to build the unity of youth of the world
All races, all colors, all nationalities, all beliefs
To eliminate all traces of fascism from the earth
To build a deep and sincere international friendship among the peoples of the world
To keep a just lasting peace
To eliminate want, frustration and enforced idleness
We have come to confirm the unity of all youth
salute our comrades who have died-and pledge our word
that skilful hands, keen brains and young enthusiasm shall never more be wasted in war
Workers of the world, unite for freedom, peace and justice!