Examining the recent and brutal attempts to suppress the Sudanese revolution, Magdi el Gizouli looks at the efforts by the regime and its various factions to seize the initiative from the streets. In recent months the ruthless figure of Mohamed Hamdan Daglo (aka Himeidti), the leader of the infamous Rapid Support Forces, has moved into the centre of Sudanese politics. However, will the ‘neighbourhood committees’ be able to translate their revolutionary zeal into mass political action that can unite rural and urban discontent and challenge the regimes hold on power?

For roape.net Magdi el Gizouli provides a detailed account of the revolutionary crisis in Sudan. Events started on 18 and 19 December last year in the small city of Atbara, but soon spread across the country. However, the forces of counter-revolution in the country are formidable. Importers, wholesale merchants, bankers, military and security officers, large landowners, sharia scholars and preachers embedded in Islamic banks, all have stakes in maintaining in the current regime. Magdi el Gizouli argues that to dismantle their powers and to fulfil the promise of the Atbara moment requires a revolution in Leninist terms. The country and its peoples have been subject to deep and dramatic socio-economic changes of which the current wave of protest is a symptom, it is so far unclear whether the leadership of the protest movement can turn elemental anger into systemic agency.

ROAPE’s Patrick Bond looks at the context for the 14-17 January nationwide protests in Zimbabwe. The protests were called by trade unions against an unprecedented fuel price hike, leading to repression, death, injuries and mass arrests reminiscent of former leader Robert Mugabe’s rule. Bond unpicks what he argues is a full-on capitalist crisis.

In a powerful defence of Marxist political economy John Saul argues that ‘facing down the hulk of capital that presently bestrides the world was...

In the second part of Matt Swagler’s blogpost on the Russian Revolution, he focuses on how Marxist ideas became central to African political organizing...