Minerwa Tahir
I hereby again and formally announce my resignation from the Awami Workers Party (AWP) and Women Democratic Front (WDF). Those of you who know me longer and politically more closely will know that this was a long process of consideration as well as political discussions both within and outside the party. In the following pages, I will explain my reasons in detail. I know that my resignation letter is long. However, I felt that I owed it to myself and the party to develop a thorough critique. I also know that the critique formulated is sharp.
This is so because I think that there is a dire need for serious and analytical work to rebuild the left today. I felt that thus, I had an obligation to not just explain what I think is wrong with the politics of the AWP and the WDF, but what a series of fundamental programmatic positions are around which, I hope, the revolutionary left can be rebuilt. I have furthermore decided to undertake this task in the future alongside comrades of the Revolutionary Socialist Movement.
I am aware that some will want to use this document as a pretext to isolate, to denunciate and to prevent any future practical cooperation. My intention however is to draw a clear political line, to engage in an argument rather than disengage in cooperation in the class struggle. I have not just built the AWP and the WDF, I have also built trust with its activists. I envision to continue fighting for every practical demand which we can agree on in the future. And I hope that a new generation of comrades will grow to understand the real need for united front politics.
The Need for a Party: My first steps with the AWP
I joined the AWP in August 2018 after I had been with the NSF Karachi since 2016. This step was taken collectively by us, a group of socialist activists who used to be members of the NSF-Karachi. Since most of us were no longer students, we increasingly felt the need to join and build a political party. I was tasked with reading the manifestos of the AWP and Pakistan Mazdoor Kissan Party. I wrote a comparison of the two parties’ manifestos and made proposals to my group. This resulted in our collective decision to join the AWP.
Speaking from my personal experience, I want to emphasise here that I did join the party in August of 2018 with hopes and aspirations of building a socialist party. During my membership I did so in whatever capacity I could, particularly by building the organisation’s factual women’s wing, the WDF. This was primarily so because I felt that more room to be active existed there.
A year in London: New Perspectives on Programme and Party Democracy
A month after joining the AWP in Karachi, I went to London on a scholarship in September 2018. Briefly after my arrival, I tried to engage with the AWP’s UK section. This was precisely where the series of disappointments in the party began. The UK branch was inactive and stagnated. It would meet frequently, but for personal fun and merry-making. Meanwhile, it had little to no political life as a section of the party. It had no social basis in Britain’s working class, not even a plan on how to engage the large number of Pakistani workers and workers of South Asian heritage. During my stay, I saw how party leaders based in Pakistan would visit the UK, but without actively engaging with the group or hauling it out of its stagnation. I felt disappointed to see my own party’s leader Aasim Sajjad Akhtar speaking at my university, but as an academic, not as a socialist who aspired to build a movement and a party. When I asked him how we as socialists had to approach sections of the Pakistani middle classes to further our revolutionary aspirations, I was being smiled at.
Meanwhile, studying at SOAS, I met activists belonging to all kinds of tendencies and political currents. Quite a number of them identified as radicals and socialists. Although I did not necessarily agree with them on everything, I couldn’t help but note that they were all far more active than the AWP section in the UK, both in terms of theoretical work and practical activity. And although I found there was not enough appreciation for the need to build a collective party, I did value the willingness to engage in common action beyond strategic differences amongst leftists.
In December of 2018, my flatmate asked me to accompany him to an international solidarity event against the enforced disappearance of then missing Baloch student Jiand Baloch. Again, I found it telling that a group of people with no direct connection to Pakistan were staging such a protest, while the AWP’s UK section kept inactive. I introduced myself to the organisers of this protest and exchanged contact. Little did I know back then that this was going to be a turning point in my political trajectory.
The protest was organised by comrades of Red Flag, which is the UK section of the League for the Fifth International (LFI). A series of discussions with this group was to begin from December onwards. It was the first time in my life that I had met a political group that actually proactively had given me an action programme not just in order to read and agree, but to engage, share with them my thoughts and critique on it. Until then, my idea of programme was strongly influenced by the way the AWP understands it, a passive piece of text, not a living experience which would impact and unite the actions of a whole organisation. It was again through an extensive exchange of questions and ideas that I came to understand the significance of a programme in the revolutionary sense. Over time, this understanding also helped me realise why my journey of activism in Pakistan had been so directionless up till now. The programme of the League was not simply a set of positions that we had on different issues – it actually offered a set of tactics vis-à-vis what was to be done. What I successively realised was that the programmes of the AWP and the WDF were typical of Social Democracy. They surely mention socialism and a series of important demands. But they also draw a clear demarcation between the minimum programme and a maximum programme. The immediate demands are finally divorced from the stated goal of socialism. Thus, socialism remains a utopia for the distant future, at best, or a baggage when attempting fusions and collaborations with liberals at worst.
What I today think of is crucial for a socialist programme is that it embraces a transitional method, i.e. a method and set of demands which help the party not just to relate to workers in struggle but to show these workers a bridge between the daily struggles and the question of workers’ conquest of power. This crucial characteristic of a revolutionary programme is completely missing in the strategic outlook of the AWP and WDF. Indeed, how to relate to the task of building the workers’ movement as an active agent of change is mostly missing. There is little mention of strikes and workplace struggles, or how to advance and practically relate to them. There is no strategy how to rebuild the trade union movement. And beyond the abstract mentioning of the different struggles of the socially oppressed such as women and sexual, religious and national minorities, there is no thorough conception of how this actually links to the working class’ daily struggles and socialist goals. And finally, there is no understanding of the mechanics of class struggle, of exploiting revolutionary situations, advancing workers’ control, and ultimately exploiting situations of dual power to transform them into genuine revolutions, whether by means of general strike or otherwise. Indeed, I did have, and most of our party members still have only a limited capacity to even think about those questions in the first place, as such a conception simply lies outside the considerations of our party’s leaders.
Having read the League’s programme, I discussed my questions and observations with its members and made the decision to join its London branch. I couldn’t help but notice that organisational life in Red Flag was drastically different to what I had seen in Pakistan or even the AWP’s UK section. Weekly branches were held so as to integrate all members in, and also develop, the life and activity of the organisation. The role and character of the leadership was also new for me. Unlike my past experiences, this was an organisation that offered and ensured democracy at the most basic level. I, as a new and candidate member, had the right to interact with and question the most long-standing members and leaders of the organisation. I myself participated in the election of this leadership in the UK’s yearly conference. The spirit of accountability and recallability felt inviting. Of course, there was also discipline. But I felt this was a discipline born out of understanding a shared goal. And it was a discipline that counted doubly and not half for the group’s leaders. Here, I enjoyed being part of an organisation that prepared all its members for fulfilling the tasks and duties of leadership. Leadership did not mean a small clique of all-powerful decision makers. Leadership was something all of us aspired to, in the sense that all of us wanted to become active and respected activists within the class struggle. In order to prepare us for such tasks, we had regular internal educationals to introduce new members to Marxism. The pattern of these meetings was in sharp contrast to the “study circles” of most organisations in Pakistan in which one person “delivers” the lecture, while the rest silently consumes and at best asks brief questions. The educationals would be a real learning experience for me because of their interactive nature. We were encouraged to read and would have a focused discussions on the readings with everyone being encouraged to ask questions, contribute or introduce. Be it formal or informal discussions, comrades would ask for my opinion on a variety of things and would then discuss those opinions. I felt that there was a real interest in my experience and knowledge about the social struggles in Pakistan. Something that my new won comrades felt was a contribution to their own understanding of the world and their practical work in London. But more importantly, I saw how being a woman or being young did not mean that I would be taken less seriously here. My opinion was not only valued, it was sought more often than I was accustomed to expecting. Nobody would shame me for saying “something wrong”. Instead, comrades would argue their position comradely, and through this and our shared experiences most often convince me. The motto, I felt, was not to dominate or control young comrades who were finding their way to Marxism but to help them understand. Logically, I was encouraged to go to a diverse range of protests and solidarity actions on my own initiative, which were organised by different organisations and initiatives of students, workers, women, and the racially oppressed. In short, I was encouraged to go to the class, sell our press to them, engage in a discussion to win them to our programme and simultaneously fight alongside them even where disagreements existed. Unlike in Pakistan, I was not once dissuaded from having discussions, meetings or collaborative activities with members of other left organisations. It makes sense now. Joining Red Flag was based on a conscious agreement and deeper understanding of its programme. This was not something left to chance, but the group’s lively political culture. All my future discussions would naturally then stem from the logic of that programme. A sectarian attitude towards other organisations was no necessity for Red Flag as it had no “need to shield its members from bad influences”.
AWP: Discipline of a Tomb
This all seemed in contrast with what I would see in the AWP. The essence of democratic centralism – unity in common action to the outside and freest possible debate on programme, strategy and organisation within – stand violated in every sense of the word with the AWP and to some degree in the WDF. Every serious critique will most often be ignored or, if seen as “too dangerous”, muted and mocked by apologists of “party discipline”. But what is party discipline if not the understanding of the party’s programme. The truth is, there is no conscious discipline by choice as the majority of members have not even read (or been read to) the party’s programme, not to speak of socialist history and Marxist theory.
There is no conception of a theoretical journal which actually is debated and read by both leaders, rank and file and those militants the organisation gets in touch with. Nor is there a regular paper or even regularly updated website through which the party disseminates its positions, calls and advised tactics to the working masses (or even just a few radical intellectuals). Leaders like Aasim Sajjad Akhtar can write frequent columns for bourgeois publications like Dawn, but it appears time is lacking to develop a collective organ of the party. Surely, nothing speaks against disseminating socialist ideas through bourgeois press. I have repeatedly done so myself. But there are clearly two problems at hand. One, for any serious Marxist organisation, it must be clear that even the most “liberal press” will censor its content to its own class standpoint. And even if it would not, socialists had to have an own press in case the bourgeois press was censored by a third force. Nothing spoke against getting a “censored” piece published in e.g. Dawn to reach new sections if the prerequisite of having a solid party press, which those sections could be drawn to, was fulfilled. Two, the sad truth is that comrades like Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, like most other party leaders, are actually writing their full programme when they write for Dawn. This does not mean that I disagree with every aspect of what they write about. But in the final conclusion and in their entirety, they promote nothing more than social-democratic and populist ideas, not socialist ones. These are often positions that are not even in line with the insufficient programme of the AWP itself. While internal debate is often suppressed, and Facebook comments of rank and file members are sometimes checked with immense scrutiny, the unauthorised and undebated dissemination of positions of different factions’ leaders in the bourgeois press is completely unproblematic?
But this makes sense if we understand that the formation of the AWP in 2012 was a merger of organisations that all had a qualitatively different outlook to politics. Instead of resolving differences through a broad and open debate over the new organisation’s programme, they were at first brushed under the carpet, and an abomination of a programme which satisfied none and convinced none was agreed upon. The real “resolution” however was achieved through a distribution of party offices and positions amongst the different groups’ leaders. Not much later, a tug of war over which faction holds more control over the affairs of the party took precedence. But without a coherent agreement over programme across the party, there can be no party press, no internal democracy, and indeed no real, lived discipline.Thus, the discipline of the AWP and WDF is the discipline of a tomb. It appears rock solid to the corpses trapped inside, but it offers no fighting power to reach the living.
Attempts to join the AWP Lahore: Better inactive than having a Trotskyist?
After making those realisations, I returned to Pakistan in September of 2019. I moved to Lahore as I got a job there. Shortly after arriving in Lahore, I approached its AWP branch in order to get active with it. A few leaders agreed to meet me and we had a discussion. I explicitly expressed an interest in building the branch. But I was never invited to any regular branch meetings because they simply did not exist. Only the leadership would meet, issuing minutes for passive consumption (of the few members who would actually read them). However, there was a bigger bone that the Lahore leadership had to pick with me. I had made no secret of the fact that I had become a “Trotskyist”. The fear that I would, through my activism and comradely arguments, “corrupt” an otherwise mostly inactive organisation was too great. The worst form of bureaucratic insecurity was put on display when the Lahore branch leadership openly wrote on the WhatsApp members’ forum that Minerwa is not a member of the “Lahore party”. I was openly termed an “illegal member” of the AWP. Subsequently, comrade Khurram Ali, the general secretary of the Karachi branch, wrote an official letter of “transfer of membership” to the Lahore general secretary. Still, the Lahore leadership maintained that it never received the letter. Only after I resent it in PDF form via WhatsApp, the issue was settled. Nevertheless, this formal membership in the end meant nothing as the political life of the AWP Lahore was as dead as that of its UK branch.
It was then that Ismat Shahjehan approached me to invite me to a founding ceremony of the WDF in Lahore. This was an act in defiance of the Lahore leadership of the AWP who did not want the WDF to be founded in Lahore. They rejected the women’s question on the basis of flawed “economist” arguments. But even more, they feared that the WDF would be controlled from Islamabad. It became clear to me that “leadership” in the AWP was thought of as an “inherent right of the leaders”, instead of something that was earned through thorough theoretical work and hard labour in building the party and its fronts.
Building the WDF in Lahore: Establishing a Class Standpoint
Regardless, I attended all the introductory events of the WDF in Lahore. I felt that the formation of an organisation in Lahore that identified as socialist-feminist was, compared to the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois groupings that already existed, a step forward. I hoped that a new branch would also initiate an open, but focused debate over the organisations programme we all were about to join. But such a debate never fully materialised at the command of the national leadership. I still managed to get across a rough plan of action for building the WDF alongside a series of class standpoints during the meeting that was called to elect the leadership of the WDF. All participants endorsed my suggestions and it was proposed, to my surprise, that I should become the Lahore branch convenor. I was unanimously elected by the direct vote of all members present. Key to my approach in building the group was to refrain from simply collaborating with bourgeois-feminist groups like any other civil society pressure group. Instead, the WDF Lahore was to attempt to maintain a working-class perspective wherever we went. This was not to mean disengagement. Quite the opposite, I went to nearly all Aurat March meetings. Through our distinct politics, I was able to attract a few young radical women to socialism. All recruitments of active members were the result of such interventions. The task was not to dilute the class perspective or to make it more digestible to bourgeois feminists, but to break the most militant young women away from bourgeois feminism and engage them in building a working women’s organisation. And naturally, why would any young female student have joined the smaller WDF branch and not e.g. the much bigger Progressive Students Collective had it not been for a more convincing theoretical foundation? Besides such recruitments, the WDF-Lahore built its connections in working-class neighbourhoods in villages surrounding the DHA. Wherever protest actions were organised for the nationally minoritised and oppressed, the WDF would attend them. The protest for Bramsh Baloch was a glaring example of this, and whether or not organisations of Lahore have it in them to acknowledge this, it was the five radicals standing alone at that protest that pressured other organisations of Lahore to attend and mobilise for future such protests. We were surely not the biggest group, but our dynamism and our critique compelled other organisations to take more radical stances in their speeches, too. In short, despite the hegemonic sectarianism of the mainstream Lahore left, the WDF-Lahore not only grew in numbers, it also impacted the overall political mood of the Lahore left landscape.
Yet, despite all these victories, the reformist leadership of the WDF based in Islamabad was unhappy with me due to our strategic differences. Both sides knew that the differences existed but, instead of openly debating them, the leadership used its powers, both formally and through behind-the-door machinations, to suppress such debates or to side-line and undermine my practical work in the WDF. Therefore, after these experiences with the AWP and WDF, it is now time to coherently express my programmatic positions and my strategic critique openly.
A Lost Chance for Rebuilding the Unions
But before doing this, I think it is important to once again state that despite all the weaknesses of the AWP, the foundation of the party once held significant potential. Discussing and reading about the history of the AWP since 2012 convinced me that back then there was a real potential to make important steps towards the creation of an actual workers’ party. However, eight years later, there exists the need to draw a balance sheet. And in my opinion, and my own three years of practical experience inside the party, I have to say that this potential was lost. To put it figuratively, the success of the AWP can be measured in the number of working-class militants that the party has won to the party, organised in the unions and established as socialist shop-floor leaders. How many of them do you know?
And this is not due to the complete “unwillingness” or an imagined non-existence of the working class. There were many opportunities for the party to make inroads in the existing trade unions, the recent Pakistani history has seen a series of courageous economic class struggles, some even successful. As of 28th November, workers of the Pakistan Steel Mills blocked the highway against their sackings and again on 1st December. It was the lady health workers who staged an impressive protest in Islamabad’s red zone – these protests were far bigger in number than the bourgeois media projections of the PDM protests that the AWP finds so fascinating. In neighbouring India, a massive general strike is happening against new neoliberal legislation of the BJP-led regime that attacks the rights of workers. Trade unions project participation at 250 million. The class is revolting in different parts of the world. But one can only see all of this if one decides not to close their eyes to its existence as a justification for one’s own strategic blunders.
And indeed, when the AWP was formed, the formation and consolidation of a united trade union federation was set as a goal. This was a task that required patience and hard labour. Unfortunately, this was precisely what the AWP leadership lacked. After initial meetings, the will to achieve this goal was lost. The Pakistan Trade Union Federation (PTUF) is the official federation of the AWP even today. But this relationship exists on paper. It has no positive repercussions for the union movement, nor for the increase of socialist consciousness amongst the PTUF members. Most workers are even unaware of the fact that their trade union is “that of” the AWP.
The fight for a united single federation was abandoned sooner than it was conceived. In the existing trade unions, no attempt was made to build a socialist faction of conscious shop-floor workers. In its early stages the AWP might very well have had the resources, but at least the momentum to do so. But it lacked the strategy to actually go ahead with that. For the AWP, most important was the membership and trade union affiliation… on paper.
What could the AWP have done alternatively? To begin with, a key and consistent position of the party should have been to attempt to unite and reorganise the existing unions not according to the wills of some leaders but the actual chain of value production. The goal of building actual industrial unions would have thus been key to achieve this reorganisation in order to give the unions real fighting power. This could and still should be connected to a campaign which workers of different sectors could unite (e.g. Eight Hours day, Minimum Wage on a sliding wage scale, re-nationalisation of industries, a system of inspections and social security). No such campaign was ever thoroughly and, over a series of years, consistently carried out, even though at least attempts in this direction were made by groups much smaller than the AWP.
For an organisation of the size of the AWP, such a campaign could have made it the party that the class, or at least its most conscious layers would have identified with. Such a situation could have been used both for the creation of new unions in unorganised and informal sectors. It could also have been used for the call to form a real workers’ party. What does that mean? It means to draw the unions and its members into the actual formation process of a real party, but on the basis of struggle and programmatic debate. The AWP never achieved the latter. But it also never actually became a workers’ party in the real sense of the word. For me as a socialist, a party is truly only an organisation which has important influence over at least the most active sections of the working class. The AWP despite its name remains a big propaganda group (with ever fewer proper propaganda to offer…).
The organisation simply lacked a plan, sometimes simply the will, to intervene. In my opinion, no real steps were taken on the side of the AWP to engage the rank and file of existing trade unions, to raise their level of organisation, to win the best of them to socialism and to both transform and unite the existing unions. Indeed, the party completely lacks a specific political platform for the trade union struggle.
Instead, it simply copied its politics of internal gerrymandering and applied it to its dealings with the existing trade union leaders. It needs to be said here that I do not mean that revolutionary trade union politics just needs to be more radical in words. But it certainly is not to idly sit with the reformist trade union leaders in order to get their formal support or signature for paper campaigns. This is not even or necessarily a polemical attack against those trade union leaders. It is one against the “party” leaders. It would have been our task of developing socialist consciousness through our press and through the practical experience of advancing certain tactics within the trade union movement and strike movements. It is the task of the party to go beyond the “spontaneously reformist” consciousness of both the union leaders and its rank and file members. This is a core principle of the Leninist understanding of party-building which both the “Leninists” and the “anti-Leninists” in the party are indeed denying. And this is the central reason why no new unions are successfully built by the left or existing ones strengthened. And it is simply a question of doing the hard “labour of Sisyphus” as Rosa Luxemburg called it. To map the industries. To visit the shop-floor. To go to the working class areas. And to do this with a developing plan that is increased and reformulated by the experience in the struggle.
Strategy: Parliamentary Road to Socialism?
Meanwhile, the AWP and the WDF have chosen to often act as little more than pressure groups, social advisors for the “reasonable” factions of the ruling classes and at best as self-help groups for a few workers in an attempt to be electable. The logic is very simple, the majority of leaders and members have adopted the same logic that has driven most social-democratic and left-reformist organisations into ruin over the past few decades: to adapt what the party thinks is the “current consciousness of the class”. These leftists have unfortunately forgotten that Marx already very early and rightly so expressed that “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” Only under specific conditions and through a class conscious intervention can this be broken for sections of the class, and only in revolutionary situations this is questioned on the level of all of society. It is this problem that lies at the heart of the AWP’s electoral disappointments. It is not the fault of the class or its imagined non-existence.
But in an attempt to bend the stick, the leadership of the AWP has done everything it can to ensure the possibility of a merger with the National Party and Mazdoor Kissan Party in an attempt to distract from and not engage with its theoretical and practical failures. What the leaders sell as a way to strengthen the left, is in fact preparing a further political sell-out to even “socialism just in words”. The National Party is a bourgeois democratic party at best. The programme of the National Party categorically states: “New avenues will be introduced to harmonise the economy with modern conditions and, instead of subordination to international financial institutions, avenues of development will be found to create a mixed economy in national interest by developing human and natural resources. The struggle to transform the state into a welfare state will be waged (Constitution and Manifesto, National Party 2014, emphasis mine).” In fact, the party is quite clear in its goals when it states in the programme: “Struggle will be waged against military dictatorship, one-party form of government, and undemocratic and non-political measures. And an attempt will be made for the establishment of a federating parliamentary democracy in real terms.” This is a liberal programme. And everyone who does not see it, is a liberal themselves.
But beyond this, the National party’s political record is tainted with the blood and suffering of the Baloch people. A look at this party’s practice shows us that as much as the AWP is socialist only in words, so the National party is only “anti-imperialist” and liberal in words. It is infamous for the free hand it gave to enforced disappearances and mass killings of Baloch people. The first mass graves were found during the rule of this party in Balochistan. It has lent support to neo-colonial projects in the region such as CPEC. But for the AWP leaders, the National Party has a certain appeal: a few positions in the Senate and the provincial assembly. The tilt towards a party with such a track record in the most persecuted province of Pakistan can only be explained by the electoralist designs of the AWP. In the heads of most of the AWP leaders, a merger with the National Party would help them attain some form of long-aspired electoral relevance in Balochistan, where it has no substantial social basis. That this merger only appears “problematic” to some people, but not completely outrageous and fundamentally unacceptable that those negotiations are happening in the first place, shows how deep the socialism of the AWP has been dragged through the mud. A merger or strategic alliance with a bourgeois party like the National Party is simply unacceptable for any socialist party. A merger would indeed change the character of the new party. It would not even be reformist. It would simply become a slightly “more left” bourgeois party. The only thing the AWP and the MKP would achieve was to decorate bourgeois nationalism and liberalism with socialist phrases, i.e. to further confuse the left and the few workers who are still listening.
All of this is not to say that socialists should not use elections where they can be used as a stage to promote socialist thoughts. But for the majority of AWP leaders, Parliament is the goal, not a means. And organisational advances and principles have time and again been sacrificed for this goal.
Meanwhile, the debates around the National Party also point to another fact, that despite the AWP’s formal acknowledgement of the right to self-determination, the party has no or very flawed conceptions of addressing the national question and thus interacting with (left) nationalist forces. This is not just the case in regards to the Baloch question. It could also be seen in the way the party, or better its different factions, related to the PTM. Some were completely uncritical of the existing leaders, and offered no independent working-class standpoint that would have not just distinguished the AWP but helped in building the mass base of the movement and connecting it to the labouring masses outside Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and former FATA. Even worse, others engaged in appalling denunciations of the PTM – not to speak of the historical betrayal of the party to support Zarb-e-Azb back when the operation was started “as long as parliament would control it”.
China Pakistan, Bhai Bhai?
As just mentioned above, in the AWP, there is open or tacit support, silence in the case of most remaining, and resistance only by a few courageous leaders (like Baba Jan), for mega-development projects like the CPEC. A bit like Imran Khan, some in the party believe that Pakistan can solve all its problems if it learns from the Chinese example. According to them, we need to do away with emotional sloganeering about socialism. After all, China is showing us the “new socialism”. Instead, they say, we should focus on the fact that in order to defeat feudal and tribal remnants in Pakistani society, we will have to allow private capital for modern and industrial development that includes “national capital as well as multinational companies”. According to this standpoint, it is only by doing so that such productive forces and relations will be born that will create a secular state and it is only then that the struggle for socialism will be possible. Ironically enough, by all flaws of the Chinese Revolution of 1949, they forget that those remnants were abolished in China by (surprise!) revolution. Of course, since then much has changed, and indeed the former Maoist party bureaucracy has introduced capitalism with Chinese features, and more than that, is today asserting itself as the main challenge for imperialist world hegemony against the United States.
But when it comes to imperialism, a prevalent understanding is limiting the global system to the US, and then simply Europe, particularly Britain and France. The question of rising Chinese imperialism is an enigma for the China apologists. The end result is that the AWP, the “largest” left party of Pakistan has, no clear position on Chinese – or for that matter, Russian or Japanese – imperialism today. This is like Indian socialists having no position on British imperialism in the Subcontinent back in the Raj. The reason is simple. Those comrades never knew or understood the Marxist conception of imperialism as a global economic and political system. They only learned to understand imperialism through the geo-strategic machinations of Cold-War Peking or Moscow.
Besides the national oppression of those living in Balochistan, Sindh, Gilgit-Baltistan and other regions due to One Belt One Road, the whole glorification of the Chinese example ignores the plight of the Chinese working class, or for that matter the Latin American, East African, Central or South-East Asian workers who increasingly have to dance to Peking’s tune. The historical defeat of the Chinese working class at the hands of the bureaucracy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) provided the latter the opportunity to launch major attacks against the social gains made by the workers and to slowly restore capitalism in China from the 1970s onwards. This defeat, a specific historical constellation and the ruthless political dictatorship of the CCP, is the basis for “the Chinese miracle”. The fundamental basis for capitalist development in China lies with horrific exploitation its workers. It does not lie with its upper middle-class people who can now afford to drive BMW or Mercedes.
The overall ambiguity of the AWP’s position on the Chinese imperialism question basically shows how little they understand anything happening around the world. The “great game” of today is the power struggle between the US and China. Just last month, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) was formed as a trade bloc. This free trade bloc will be bigger than the European Union. It is made up of 10 Southeast Asian countries together with South Korea, China, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The bloc is going to be an obstacle in the way of US ambitions towards world market dominance. Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, minor or major imperialist powers in their own right, and in military alliances with the US are, in today’s world, dependent on economic cooperation and trade with China. They, or the other semi-colonies of the region, cannot escape the attempts of China or the USA to reorder Asia. Those attempts feature through trade agreements, economic projects at the Belt and Road Initiative, and military alliances such as that of Pakistan and China. They also feature through increased tensions, trade wars and an increased drive towards actual military conflict as we can see on the India-China border or the South Chinese Sea. While the strategists of the Chinese and US bourgeoisie both know that the route to world domination today leads through the gates of Asia (and are struggling to find out new ways to win this new great game for world domination), and the strategist of Pakistan’s bourgeoisie are eager to sell themselves to the best bidding devil, the “strategists” of the AWP keep dreaming about socialism “Made in China”.
Indeed, the tasks of Marxists today need to be the exact opposite. The class-conscious workers and radicals, and following them the entire labouring masses of Asia, have to be put into a state of high alert. They will be and are already the first to pay the price of this confrontation between imperialist powers, which might at some point well escalate into a new world war. The AWP leadership, which does not even have a viable response to the tasks facing us in this regard today, is completely oblivious to the revolutionary tasks if it should come to the latter. And most certainly such a response cannot be formulated with an exclusive focus on US imperialism while having a soft corner for the Chinese one. Such an exclusive focus on one imperialist power simply serves the purpose of confusing the Asian working masses. The logical conclusion of this focus is to call on the Asian working class to, at best, “stand on the side lines” whenever China intervenes, or to even call for its defence. Such a ridiculous stance can only alienate most Asian workers who are already very aware that China is their new master or at least attempting to take over the whip (South China Sea, Sri Lankan High Sea Ports, Industrial Free Trade Zones, Balochistan, etc.). And it also pushes those workers either back into the arms of nationalists or indeed, and ironically, US imperialism.
As Marxists, the ultimate conclusion we would come to in a confrontation between the US and China would be revolutionary defeatism. That means to call on e.g. the Chinese and US workers and those called upon to die in the imperialist war to bring revolution to their respective home country instead of slaughtering abroad. The AWP, with its confused and confusing logic of only denouncing one major power of imperialism, would have to support China.
The logical conclusion arising for socialists should instead be the building of an international revolutionary party, a new communist International. However, important factions of the AWP have maintained a tradition of looking for “progressive” sections of the bourgeoisie on the national level in Pakistan. It follows suit on the world stage when it comes up with apologia for China.
WDF’s romance with a not-so-Progressive International
The WDF might now tell us, that such an International already exists, and the WDF is a part of it, as the leadership of the WDF added to its populist credentials when it decided to make the WDF a “founding member” of the Progressive International. Of course, there was no debate in the membership on the liberal programme of this International. The social base i.e. the membership was, as always, deprived of a say in taking this decision. In fact, the decision was announced on the Twitter page of the Women’s Democratic Front and members weren’t even accorded the respect to be informed on the WhatsApp chat thread.
According to the website of this “International”, the Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25) and the Sanders Institute issued an open call in December 2018 to all “progressive” forces to form a common front. That call has been answered in the form of the Progressive International, launched last month.
It defines its values as democratic, decolonised, just, egalitarian, liberated, solidaristic, sustainable, ecological, peaceful, post-capitalist, prosperous and plural. In short, all kinds of academic, petty-bourgeois jargon. Bhutto sure would have been proud of this excellent mix of word bubbles, just before he decided to suppress the workers revolts of 1972.
Its council of advisors, which is responsible for setting the strategic direction of the Progressive International, includes all kinds of bourgeois leaders and petty-bourgeois academics, including Noam Chomsky, Argentinian minister of women, genders and diversity, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, the Prime Minister of Iceland and the Leader of the Left-Green Movement, an MP from Portugal, Naomi Klein and former finance minister of Greece Yanis Varoufakis, as well as CEOs of all kinds of “progressive” private companies and NGOs as its members . At least half of these people have a proven track record of losing practically and selling out to liberals ideologically. The Council convened in September for the inaugural Summit in Iceland, where they were hosted (online) by the Prime Minister of Iceland and the Left-Green Movement.
From Pakistan, the Haqooq-e-Khalq Movement, Pakistan Kissan Rabita Committee and WDF are members. What is interesting to note is that in Pakistan, leaders of all these organisations still present themselves as socialists but, indeed they have only sold out their programme to support a left-liberal and left-populist paper tiger.
The Green New Deal appears to be very important to the Progressive International as it features as the first thing when you go to its website’s “What we do” section. But every close investigation shows us that the Green New Deal is not a programme of immediate and urgent reforms combined with a strategy to bring down ecosystem killing capitalism. It is a utopian programme of reforming capitalism and making it greener. This is a logical “unthing” (something comrades can read up on in a series of articles I and other Marxists have produced on the ecological question). But it should suffice to say that the task of socialists is to tell the truth about this, and point out the utopian character of those left-populists. But such “minor” questions which only concern the fate of humankind are of secondary concern to our Pakistani socialist signatories, who wish to have their names featured on an international website of “people who are important”.
And equivalent reasoning can be seen in the AWPs pandering to the bourgeois opposition, welcoming the formation of the bourgeois opposition alliance, Pakistan Democracy Movement (PDM). Nearly all Stalinist organisations in Pakistan have expressed an apologia in one form or another for this alliance. The AWP, too, has stayed true to its tradition of tailing what it perceives the “progressive section” (of the bourgeoisie) here. The party feels no obligation to speak to the working class about why it should have no illusions in this alliance of bourgeois parties led by a religious fundamentalist despot. Instead, it promotes illusions in this leadership by urging the PDM leadership to simply “build on the legacies of epochal democratic upsurges of the past such as the anti-Ayub movement, the MRD, ARD and the anti-Musharraf uprisings”. Liberals these days come up with a better programme than this. The question of which class should lead the struggles for democratic rights and which class needs to be installed in power is something that the reformist party cannot be concerned with, as long as they can be a footnote in the bourgeois parties’ machinations.
The External Conditions Demand a Different Party
Meanwhile, simultaneous with the country’s increasing economic and political crisis from Spring 2019 onwards, my health saw a severe decline. The situation worsened very much in the month of May and I could no longer afford to live in Lahore alone. Thus, I returned to my family home in Karachi. The WDF leadership in Karachi was welcoming at first and encouraged me to participate in their activities. But now it was the Islamabad-based centre which was unhappy. “Overnight” I had to cancel my membership for the Lahore branch. Having achieved a pushback in Lahore, the Islamabad leadership now started to raise questions about “why Minerwa was representing the organisation” at meetings of the struggling Dow students in Karachi. All kinds of conspiratorial slander was spread against me behind my back in order to undermine me.
My decision to build the RSM Karachi
This was the time when I decided to leave both the AWP and the WDF. While I was appalled by the bureaucratic manoeuvres and a factionalism which were not based on arguments but power plays, they were not the prime reason for my decision. I simply think that the crisis in Pakistan deepened on an unprecedented scale. Spontaneous struggles have been propping up every other day amongst the workers, oppressed nationalities and students. There was and is a dire need to develop tactics necessary in order to advance those struggles to raise them from the level of spontaneity to actual socialist class consciousness. And I think that the AWP and the WDF are simply not doing this – In fact very often blocking if they are not openly making the wrong arguments as outlined on a set of important examples above. Indeed, my experience has proven to me that the AWP cannot be steered into a different direction.
Making the right argument with the class has simply become more important today than struggling over the right to even make an argument within the AWP and WDF. What we as socialists will do in the coming months and the next years will fundamentally set the course for where the left, the working class and the whole country will go for an entire period to come.
As a result, I finally decided to formally join and actively build the Pakistani section of the LFI, namely the Revolutionary Socialist Movement (RSM). And only after a brief period of time, I feel confident to say that I made the right decision. I started this work only weeks ago and it has already resulted in the creation of a lively branch.
Meanwhile, it has perturbed other organisations who insist at every occasion that our branch is small and unimportant. What a curious thing that such “big organisations” must worry over our existence. But what could such “big organisations” fear of smaller organisations, if not their challenging theory? Myself and the members of the RSM can only say: Comrades, we do not fear a theoretical challenge, a thorough argument, nor engagement with bigger or smaller organisations! Quite the opposite, we are confident and we welcome it. Only through such a process can a fighting working-class party be born. We say to all comrades whether they disagree with us or not: make your own choices. But make them by making use of your critical mind and your practical experience. Observe all organisations and their politics, and read, listen, engage, and work with others wherever possible and principled. I now have chosen to walk forward to build a new communist Fifth International. I would rather walk forward with fewer people more slowly than backward with more people more quickly. The sooner comrades come to similar conclusions, the sooner we will march with increasing numbers towards victory.
Forward to the formation of a Fifth International!
Forward to the defeat of the tyranny of world capitalism!
Forward to the victory of the working masses across the globe!