21st Century Imperialism: A Debate Within the Pakistani Left - (Part 2)
Illustration: Jamhoor
This is the second and final part of our discussion on imperialism with leaders of Pakistan’s three major leftist parties – Aasim Sajjad Akhtar (Awami Workers’ Party), Ammar Ali Jan (Haqooq-e-Khalq Party) and Syed Azeem (Pakistan Mazdoor Kissan Party).
In Part 1 we debated different approaches to a Left anti-imperialist politics in Pakistan in the historical context of America’s War on Terror in the region and its relationship with the Pakistani state and military. In Part 2 we discuss the complexity of building an anti-imperialist politics in the current conjuncture of crushing international debt, fractures in the ruling elite and emerging imperial rivalries in the region.
Jump to section:
9. Political Alliances against Fascism
10. China
6. Anti-Imperialist Politics
Tayyaba: In the first part of this conversation, we took a more historical lens on the engagements of the Pakistani Left with the question of imperialism, specifically US imperialism and its entanglement with the Pakistani state through the War on Terror in the region. Today, we will focus on the current conjuncture. To start off, how would each of you characterize the building blocks for an anti-imperialist politics in Pakistan today?
Aasim: Pakistan is a rentier economy. Sometimes we beg from America, and sometimes from others. We have been borrowing from the IMF regularly for the past 40 years. The IMF has shaped the economic model which has been institutionalized along with its various forms of accumulation. This includes the military’s corporate empire, accumulation by the state, and accumulation by the capitalist and land-owning classes.
The progressive community has left unanswered this question of the economy, of class and empire. To re-occupy that space, we have to propagate the fact that this empire and imperialism are primarily economic constructs. Without that understanding, the progressive response ends up being a cultural critique only. This is the time to do that. There is a recognition now more than ever that the economy is dominated by lobbies or special elite interests, which, no matter what conditions the IMF imposes on us, still manage to keep intact their power and various sources of accumulation.
“we need to focus on imperialism as an economic construct to separate ourselves from the likes of Imran Khan and the Taliban whose anti-West rhetoric deals exclusively with the cultural aspects of imperialism.”
Azeem: I agree with Aasim. In the last phase of anti-imperialist politics in Pakistan, we were stuck with the question of terrorism, or dealing primarily with the military, political and cultural sphere of imperialism. That phase is now coming to an end. While we did criticize the IMF, World Bank, privatization, deregulation etc., we did not engage with those issues in a serious manner. The dire dependency of Pakistan on international forces has become clear. Not just on the IMF and the World Bank, but also the US, EU, the Arabs and other international consortiums, and now our dependency is quickly shifting towards China. How do we understand this dependency? How is it going to affect us, and how will we struggle against China? Where do we place China? Is it an imperialist force or not?
As Aasim said, we need to focus on imperialism as an economic construct to separate ourselves from the likes of Imran Khan and the Taliban whose anti-West rhetoric deals exclusively with the cultural aspects of imperialism. In spite of his anti-West rhetoric, all Imran Khan has to show for is his Ehsaas Program, and reliance on mainstream economists like Shaukat Tareen. They believe in capitalism. They believe in charity, rather than giving rights to workers. We have to have a very clear plan to counter this politics. Our next phase of struggle should be focused on the dependency and semi-colonial nature of Pakistan.
Ammar: I completely agree with what has been said so far. Increasingly, the question of imperialism is getting embedded within everyday experiences of Pakistanis. This is particularly evident when you work in any community with an infrastructure crisis. We were recently involved in a campaign around education, and we found that there are so many schools shutting down in working class areas, because parents cannot afford to pay 500 rupees tuition fee. On the other hand you have elite private schools popping up charging exorbitant amounts like 50,000 rupees per month. The class gap is huge. It is becoming increasingly clear that these loans that are crushing the country and our infrastructure were taken by the elites, whether from IMF, the international market and different lending sources like China, Saudi Arabia etc.
This is an unproductive, clientelist, patronage-based elite, who have only invested in unproductive sectors like real estate speculation. The surplus was absorbed in the unproductive sector so when it comes to paying the money back, the country is left with nothing. It almost always leads to a balance of payment crisis because this money is used to fuel a certain elite lifestyle, which leads to an increase in imports, but you have nothing to export. I mean you can not really export plots [real estate].
With this balance of payment crisis, the IMF comes in asking the country to make sacrifices. Eventually, however, the only people who are sacrificed are working class people or even the middle classes. This sacrifice happens through austerity. They face severe budget cuts, in education, health etc., and increasing interest rates, which lead to a slowdown in economic activity causing unemployment and inflation. This is how the elites are able to shift the crisis onto the working classes, and how this parasitic elite has sustained itself through imperialist loans over the past 75 years.
These loans have become more and more vicious over the past 40 years. At the behest of the IMF, even the new government is transferring the burden of the loan onto the public. When you go to any working class area, the kind of desperation that you see with the hike in fuel prices, unemployment, cuts to education and basic infrastructure, electricity and gas shortages, it becomes very clear that this very dangerous nexus between Pakistani elites and international finance has completely hollowed out the state. The state has become more of a way of sustaining Pakistani elites.
So The question of debt is becoming increasingly politicized. I was at a protest by denim factory workers earlier today, and there were a few people from the intelligence agencies there. The first thing they said was “You don’t know, this is a foreign company and we need foreign investment. The world is already so scared of us, and you are giving us a bad name.” So we are at a point where we are willing to sacrifice our labour laws and environmental laws just to satisfy global capital. And yet, they are not even getting satisfied.
In every struggle we do now, the global dimension becomes very important. How will financial markets react? What will foreign investors think? What will foreign governments think? Which means that every struggle in that sense has become international.
Tayyaba: The right-wing has been successfully mobilizing immense support on economic questions as well - IMF, inflation, elite capture – such that IMF, anti-imperialism and anti-American have become buzzwords. How should the left mobilize this discourse at this time and put forth an alternative politics that is genuinely different from the right but also resonates on the ground. Do you see the current moment as an opportunity?
Aasim: I feel very strongly about this “moment” question. It is true that because of increasing cost of living, increasing petrol and electricity prices, the pain from all accounts is set to intensify. This has boosted the support for Imran Khan. However, I believe the right is not taking up this issue in a serious way, and perhaps even how much its pay-masters are willing to allow for.
“Since we are not concerned about staying in power right now, this is the time and place to articulate a very clear project of what redistribution looks like.”
Ammar’s point is very important. Whenever we talk about these things, we get such reactions that ‘now is not the time’, ‘we need foreign investment to resolve this economic crisis’, etc. All of the markers of how the mainstream understands the crisis, like the dollar exchange rate and macro-indicators, do not reflect anything about how the crisis is crushing the working masses. This forces us to distinguish ourselves from the mainstream.
It has been 40 to 50 years since there was a mass left alternative. And the mass will not form through a merely cultural narrative — we need a robust materialist basis. Our challenge is to bring that politics from the peripheries into the mainstream. Articulating a mass politics in mainland Pakistan is not something that the right-wing is doing beyond making some token gestures.
It makes sense for the PTI to oppose the US right now. Interestingly, a few days ago the President, who is from the PTI, gave a guard of honour to the incoming US ambassador. Therefore, it is clear that aside from rhetorical posturing they will not do anything.
So this is the time and place to articulate a very clear project of what redistribution looks like. There are intelligent people, even in the mainstream, who recognize that it is no longer about making small changes, but it is a fundamental question of redistribution of assets and wealth. In the first instance, we have to mainstream that debate. And you can do that even without being a mass force. If nothing else, leftists are able to influence public opinion to a certain extent.
So even if we are not yet in a position to have an organic mass politics that is founded upon these questions of class, equality, debt, empire, elite capture and so on, at the very least we can come together to say that there is no other way but to talk about these issues. You can not manage with temporary measures anymore. For example, the super tax that Shahbaz Sharif imposed is a temporary measure that is certainly not enough to deal with the crisis.
We have space to do that now. This space will not always exist. This economic crisis will only get worse, no matter who is in power. But there is something distinct about the present moment because PTI supporters have started mobilizing around slogans such as “Death to America”. On the other hand, the PDM movement that displaced the PTI government, claiming to have restored democracy, are also clearly failing to improve things. There is a clear intellectual bankruptcy and lack of answers on both sides of that mainstream fence.
In this moment, leading up to the general election, you can introduce your position in an organized manner by making the idea of redistribution mainstream — at all scales, from the micro to the international. That includes creating mass consciousness for the idea that this accumulated debt has been taken by the ruling classes, not the people. Why are the people bearing the burden of this debt? There is a need for building that narrative and creating unity in action. This summer (2022), we had a meeting of many left parties. Everyone agreed that this is a good time to demonstrate this unity in action around real concrete issues. Right now, there is no other concrete issue which recognizes the unevenness between the centre and the periphery, and also allows us to form political action that brings them together. That is something that only the left can do. No one else is interested.
Azeem: We are witnessing a contradiction of capitalism in Pakistan. On the one hand everyone is against the IMF loans. They consider them unfair and want them waived off. At the same time, local elites are accusing each other of corruption. I feel, as long as this parasitic elite exists, even if we demand and achieve a debt write-off, the elite will make sure that all the concessions go to them, without significantly improving things for the masses.
What I have gathered from mainstream politics in the last four years, particularly the rise of PTI, is that we are getting trapped in a constructed politics, particularly in how discourse is being shaped. There are about 20 news anchors on TV who give their analyses on the country’s political situation and people listen to them. While people are aware of the hardships Ammar talked about, the mainstream political discourse is shaped by these 20 anchors who just flit between their offices and homes, disconnected from issues on the ground.
Aasim is correct that what sets us apart in this constructed politics is the question of redistribution. But who are we addressing when we talk about redistribution? Are we addressing people in this constructed politics? We should actually be addressing our labour, peasantry, and the working class people Ammar was talking about.
We have to take the question of redistribution and the economic aspects of imperialism to the working class, rather than thinking that we can make space for our politics in this constructed political sphere. We are the custodians of not just anti-imperialist struggles, but also economic struggles of the peasantry and the labouring classes.
The system itself is trapped at the moment. This is absolutely the right moment to have a separate narrative about redistribution (and about privatization) that differentiates us from charity-based models. For example, the Ehsaas Program wants to give charity to labouring classes. But where is the tax collection from the elite, as in the Scandinavian model, which will sustain this program? How are you going to provide free healthcare in the absence of that revenue? So of course there will be fraud or you will take further debt.
I think the question of redistribution should be pushed in our classical sense, in our way of struggle. But we have to be clear about our strategic horizons. I admire the efforts of our left parties in coming together in Islamabad where we agreed that now is the time to work together.
Ammar: I completely agree. The anger is there, and I think the role of ideology is to inform where to channel this anger. That is where the debate is right now. There is a very powerful cultural and nationalist critique of the US, given by Imran Khan and others. Then there is the PDM coalition saying that beggars can’t be choosers. They have a pragmatic, realpolitik understanding of global politics, that you have to work with Big Brother.
We can differentiate ourselves from them on the question of workers’ power. It is not that Muslim League-N, for example, is opposed to welfare measures. If they have money, they will use welfare measures to win an election. The People's Party does the same. The PTI also put in a lot of money in welfare schemes, particularly the Ehsaas Program, and the initial investment in the health card, because they thought it would solidify their constituency. These are all measures to reverse the effects of accumulation, dispossession and exploitation. They reverse some of the effects by taking a hundred rupees from the people, but giving 2 rupees back. This is a fundamentally different conception of politics than the left’s. The left is not just interested in giving crumbs to the working class. It is about building a politics of the working class, of the marginalized, of the dispossessed. Once you say that, you shift your entire emphasis away from ‘how do we govern’, to ‘how do we build power from below?’
This is a real difference in worldviews. If you meet any of the bigwigs from PML-N, PPP or PTI, they’re very much concerned about good governance. You will find some good people as well, true bleeding-heart types, proposing different reforms, but they cannot even acknowledge that workers themselves can have power, not just for some crumbs from the state, but to assert their own rights and dignity. That this would include labour rights, social security, questions of decent pay in the rural sector, decent support prices, the right to unionize, the right to education grants, death grants, marriage grants for their family members, all of which are already in the law. This would mean expanding the law over time and expanding what we can get from the state. In other words, creating a dynamic in which you are pushing the elites to negotiate harder with their lenders as well.
“the elites are getting 2,700 billion rupees annually as privileges and subsidies from the state, whereas the poor are only getting 624 billion...This is really a welfare state for the rich, it is socialism for the rich.”
This is the kind of crisis that we need. Instead, we have a crisis in which the lenders are putting pressure on the state, and in turn the elites who run the state are putting pressure on the public, and then when they have to contest elections they ask how they will ameliorate the crisis that they themselves have created. Instead of that, we need a genuine workers’ movement like the uprising against the labour law in Indonesia. That kind of autonomous workers’ power creates a dynamic of its own, it upsets calculations, it expands the horizon of possibilities and it expands the debates. Even the IMF has been forced to change its position in a number of countries where there has been resistance. We know that the elites are getting 2,700 billion rupees annually as privileges and subsidies from the state, whereas the poor are only getting 624 billion. The elites are getting 4 times more. This is really a welfare state for the rich, it is socialism for the rich. To call this economics is to completely veil the violence. This is elite capture, this is the ruling class, this is capitalism in the periphery.
The entire logic can change if it is not a one-sided classroom — if the other side prepares itself. We have to prepare, we have to accept that there is a class war going on, and it is being imposed by one side while the other side is being completely demobilized and disaggregated. Our task right now is to create institutions that can bring together the dispersed power of the marginalized.
If that happens, then we are back in the game of class struggle. The debates are going to shift massively. Good governance will not remain the only issue and technocrats are not going to remain the only solutions to every problem. An autonomous, left-wing organized point of view will come, backed by the force of the people.
7. PDM vs Imran Khan
Arsalan: How do you feel about PDM? Was it something the left should have ignored or supported ? Was it just an unraveling of the military’s project? How do we understand the working-class support base of Imran Khan?
Azeem: I do not think left parties supported PDM. If individual leftists supported it, it was because of the way Imran Khan’s regime was co-opted by the military establishment. No one knew who was running that government. It was really a bad time for Pakistan, the way the military was manipulating the regime, whose class composition is primarily professionals from the upper-middle class and the diaspora.
It was clear that the regime was moving towards fascism. If something could be done to push back against the dominance of the military, and Imran Khan’s fascist ideas, that is fair. Eventually it was the same elite that came back to power through PDM. If there is a difference between the PDM and Imran Khan, it is that the PDM know the limits of where to accept military dictation. Imran Khan is a new phenomenon.
Whether it is PDM or Imran Khan, it is clear that the elite cannot deliver because we are a dependent economy and the elite is parasitic. Nothing great will come out of the PDM government either. As Aasim and Ammar said, international institutions have shifted the burden onto our elite, and they have shifted that burden onto the people. That is the story of the Pakistani state.
Newspapers headlines about Imran Khan’s ouster a day after the No-confidence motion against him passed on 10th April 2022. Image: Irish Times
Aasim: I think these are partly strategic, tactical questions — i.e. how vocal one should be in engaging with mainstream palace intrigues. For me, this was Pakistan’s Biden moment. Our standards have lowered so much that we are applauding the same person who was the reason for Trump winning in the first place. The same has happened in Pakistan. Imran Khan was viewed as so dangerous and threatening, and I do not disagree with that necessarily.
I think it’s important for the left to develop a shared understanding [of the situation] even if we approach these tactical questions differently. This understanding will develop based on how we respond to the fact that there is such a threatening entity like Imran Khan that is able to mobilize, even if rhetorically, large numbers of young people for such an agenda.
My understanding is that there is an extreme center, and when it fails, phenomena like the PTI emerge. The military’s intention was to run this project for a while, but it did not work. Imran Khan fell out of line, and they forced him out. I do not think that had a lot to do with democracy — democracy was not at stake here, perhaps procedurally it was, but this had more to do with palace intrigues. Nevertheless, it is the first time that a mainstream politician has so openly abused America. These are not developments that anyone would have foreseen.
It certainly confirms that the crisis is an organic one. No matter how much the military or America, or whoever the big players are, try to manage it and manipulate it from above, there are big problems at the bottom that persist. There are some unpredictable elements here, like Imran himself is a bit of a loose cannon in ways that perhaps these other entities are not.
There are other stories at play as well, for example, there are two camps in the PML-N, one led by Shahbaz Sharif, and the other one which is a bit silent these days. Maybe that second camp wants to fight the military more openly. So there are a lot of little intricacies in this story. But we the Left should be able to share an understanding that this is an ongoing battle. To expect that any of these people will shake up the system in any major way, is misplaced. It is certainly not my expectation.
The only thing that it clarifies again and again is that this merry-go-round will keep going, and there will be a race to the bottom, until and unless the left also becomes something. Or else, we will just end up being analysts of existing politicians, whereas we should actually become a viable option.
I think that perhaps there was a bit of an overbalancing here, in saying that because the PTI regime was such a disaster that the opening of some space [with PDM] meant that some progressive or pro-democracy sections were perhaps not celebratory but too optimistic. But that optimism has also blown over and it’s clear that PDM is not even taking on the army. The missing persons issue is actually getting more severe ever since they’ve taken up power. It’s clear that the PDM leadership does not have the wherewithal to challenge the military, let alone IMF or the United States.
Ammar: When the government collapsed, it is very important to see what collapsed: a ten-year project which was supposed to go on for another six, seven years. A lot of hard work of our brothers and sisters in the ISI and the military went in vain. They created and projected this guy, they destroyed institutions and they abducted people. Social movements collapsed. We know what we and our students went through. So it was not just authoritarianism, which is the standard of the Pakistani state, no matter who is in power. This was a very distinct regime. It was a hybrid regime in which they thought they needed stability, so they needed a one-party state with the military on top. The rest of the leadership was all in exile. They ran Pakistan for 10 years like that. This particular project collapsed in March because of Imran Khan’s complete incompetence. He crashed the party.
The collapse of the hybrid regime was a cause of celebration to the extent that this was a major, major investment that failed. That is a correct position to take because it shows that it is impossible for even the military to land a long-term orderly project of hegemony and accumulation for 10 to 15 years. They had to go back to the people who they could not stand. And during that time they opened up some space, and relaxed things. This is not to say that the people replacing Imran Khan are revolutionaries. Those are two completely different things.
“The social and economic crisis is turning into a political crisis because political parties are losing credibility. They are collapsing. The party form is unable to reflect the social and economic crises so it has become a machine.”
What it means is there is an absolute crisis of government, of hegemony, of any kind of order in Pakistan. This PDM coalition, for example, logically cannot continue for too long. You cannot have a coalition of 11 parties. You cannot have Ali Wazir, Mohsin Dawar, Shahbaz Sharif, Fazlur Rehman and everybody across the spectrum in the same government. (Ali Wazir is in jail but he is in the government, he voted for them.) There are people like Mohsin Dawar, whose party members have recently been killed by people who are supported by Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam. And they are both coalition partners. And MQM and People’s Party cannot stand each other. This crisis will continue to grow.
The social and economic crisis is turning into a political crisis because political parties are losing credibility. They are collapsing. The party form is unable to reflect the social and economic crises so it has become a machine. Even the machines are not working that well on the ground because of the infrastructure crisis. For example, the PML-N and ANP can no longer get votes the way they did in 2013 and 2008-9. These parties have collapsed partly because of the military, partly because of how they are organized. They are unable to respond to the pressure. The same goes for PTI. The party does not exist on the ground. Imran Khan may hold rallies and collect people from all over Lahore, but his recent long march call shows that the party does not exist on the ground. The working class, in particular, has ignored his call for the long march. It has ignored his call for protests a number of times now.
So we are seeing a vacuum emerge. Who you sit with and when are tactical questions. In our strategic horizon, we have to place ourselves in a larger trajectory. We know that Imran Khan is extremely incompetent. He does not have the infrastructure or the social base to lead a sustained fight in his brand of anti-America and anti-military politics.
Similarly, Bilawal Bhutto and Maryam Nawaz will not be acceptable to this growing middle class as well as large sections of the working class, who are outside the structure of these political parties. There is a growing space for new forces. These forces can come from the far-right, like the TLP, but they can also come from the left, because our ideas are resonating. I am optimistic because in the last few months, wherever we have worked, people have responded in ways that they have not in the past. The way people showed up and reacted to Aasim’s book launch recently. Wherever we have had events, it is visible that people are hungry for ideas. We have to ensure we do not attach ourselves to a declining order.
In the future where, how and when you strike alliances in parliamentary politics, is an ongoing question. Everyone has to do it, even someone like Ali Wazir. But right now, if elections happen on and the PTI loses, they will come crashing down. If they win, the other parties will crash. Because somebody has to crash, this is an unsustainable model.
8. Electoral Politics
Tayyaba: That is a very interesting point, Ammar. I have a follow-up question for Aasim and Ammar. Are these the sentiments that are guiding your electoral tactics and strategy? Where does electoral politics fit into your larger strategic goals of putting forward a strong left vision that resonates on the ground?
Aasim: I do not think of electoral politics differently from the broader vision. Historically, whenever we have contested elections, the purpose has been to participate so we are not ceding ground. At this stage, winning is not a reasonable expectation especially in provincial and national assembly elections. At the local government level, it is different.
On all levels, the strategy is to first recognize that electoral politics is politics. In my experience over the years, I saw many people join us, but they distinguish us as people who are standing with them on matters of dispossession, issues of labour and social justice, but when it comes to elections, they have a different calculus. So participating in electoral politics is a way to move beyond that bifurcation. It shows that we are also involved in this politics, and that we talk about resistance here too. We are open about the fact that we do not have the kind of resources to plaster constituencies with posters and banners, or to lure people with biryani. In engaging with that process, we are also challenging its dominant money logic.
In this electoral cycle, we have had a few local body elections. This is a potential opportunity to scale up our narrative to national and provincial elections because parties on both sides of the aisle have been humiliated because of their inability to deliver to the people.
I would be remiss to ignore that we have a lot to learn. In my experience, the left does not do constituency-based politics, especially one that deals with thaana katcheri (police, courts) or local neighbourhood issues. To be able to do this kind of politics, which becomes more prominent during elections, you have to face it head-on. We have to be able to do these things in a way that is consistent with our worldview, and not have to choose between one or the other extreme.
If we can scale up, together as a broader alliance of the left, it will be easier to manage the expectations of an electorate that has very cynical, common-sense ways of thinking about elections. With time, we can convince people that elections can be won on ideas and programmatic issues and not purely on localized patronage.
Ammar: I agree, it is very important that we change part of our position from resistance into the question of power. The question of power has to be taken very seriously. When we criticize PDM, many people in civil society do not understand why we are criticizing this government. They think something is wrong with the left. I understand where they’re coming from because they really think the left is a civil society organization, which should be working with them for reforms. The general impression is that to do something good, we need to help an MNA, or administer something, and if we want to be political then we should join a mainstream party. They have this impression because we have been removed from the question of power, not because we did not want to address it, but mostly because we were forced to stay away from it, often violently.
While we all have our own strategic calculations on how to engage with electoral politics, the big questions on the left have to do with the road to power. How we define a certain pathway to power. What we want to achieve once we have power, at least on an abstract level, is something that most far-left groups can agree upon. But there is a lot of infighting and disagreements over the path itself.
There has to be a very serious discussion — if we are contesting a union council election, it has to be to win. What does it mean to actually win and take power? Not just once or twice, but actually developing a long term strategy, without necessarily abandoning your principles. Practical politics is about the movement of ideas into the realm of practice and back into the realm of ideas. This back and forth between practice and ideology is what makes ideology a living, breathing thing.
This is not just about elections. Some people are organizing a workers’ movement in Faisalabad under the banner of Labour Qaumi Movement. The question is: what would it mean to have power in factory areas? What would it mean to have an organized workforce that can fight back, that can assert itself in factory areas and create a kind of class-consciousness not limited to this or that struggle, but consciousness of a class? You have to do that, and take up issues of clean water, gas, electricity, and education at the same time. These are all class issues and there has to be some kind of symbiotic relationship between the factory, and the workplace. That brings about class consciousness and actually allows class to turn into a political subject. Only then can we fight elections, have mass movements, defend our partners, our comrades, factories, fight the police, or capture power, whatever your path may be. Fundamentally, we have to start building power with the intention of winning in different sites of class struggle.
If we do this effectively, we can then confront the barriers, counterrevolutionary forces, internal weaknesses, and the real political forces. Hopefully, the future of left politics in Pakistan will be guided by these questions, which means that we have a pretty good chance of winning and getting back the space that we lost.
Azeem: I agree that the aim of revolutionary politics is always the seat of political power. That said, the question that is always relevant is where we can capture power. For one, winning national elections is very hard. But even if we win a few seats and send one or two MNAs or MPAs to the parliament, they get compromised once they reach the top. There are a few examples of this. At most, we hope that at least they will talk about our ideas, but who they will talk to and how is a problem.
If our aim is to capture political power, then the strategy should be to establish dual power. Before our strategy reaches an equilibrium, elections are meaningless. Leftist MNA candidates often end up with a meagre 20-30 votes.
Revolutionary parties use the parliament for power when they are able to capture fifty percent of it. Then we can use the parliamentary forum while we also have power on the ground — we can fight the police, the military etc, because we would have captured power in multiple spaces. So it’s a question of timing. Revolutionary parties do entertain elections. The Bolshevik party contested elections. Recently, the Maoists in Nepal did as well.
In terms of local government elections, I agree that we have to capture local power. For example, in Hujra Shah Muqeem even when a few nazims or counselors get elected, a lot of funds get diverted towards the working class. It is a small constituency, so it is easier to capture power. Since you have done work in these places, you may also be popular. Local bodies are a good forum for building dual power.
In order to build dual power and move towards national elections, we need to further build our community and labour organizing. If we enter national elections prematurely, it may distract our revolutionary politics.
9. Political Alliances against Fascism
Tayyaba: Ammar, on the question of alliances, you said that sometimes tactical alliances make sense against the larger enemy in your long-term strategic vision. So you take the example of supporting the military’s fight against the TLP because the TLP represents an alternative that is much more threatening to your long-term vision. When you are thinking about making alliances, where do you draw the line?
Ammar: I never said we should ally with the military or the state. What I meant was that if the TLP and the state were fighting, my position would not be the same as if the state and the Baloch Liberation Army were fighting, for example. A few days ago, we saw how that right-wing journalist, Imran Riaz Khan, was jailed. I have no sympathy for him, but we have condemned his detention. Similarly, we condemned Shireen Mazari’s detention.
But if the TLP organizes a long march, and they are fighting the police, I am not going to ask the state to respect their rights etc. That is liberal nonsense. We should understand politics with all the complexities that come with it. It is never neat: you make dirty choices in it and that is part of being a political person, as compared to being a “beautiful soul” who takes a politically correct position everywhere.
We do not ally with the state because that would mean that the state is right. The state is not innocent. The state is not right. The state is responsible for the Taliban, for the TLP, for Imran Khan, for Nawaz Sharif because it has empowered them over the years.
But when there are particular contradictions, for example recently Mohsin Dawar and Ali Wazir demanded that the state should wipe out the Taliban from their areas. Now the Taliban have targeted and killed 4 of their kids, even one of my students, so of course they would all seek protection from the security forces.
So those are tactical questions. Sometimes when you are working in an area, you may find people in the municipal corporation, or the Lahore Waste Management Company (LWMC), a person or two who are sympathetic and want to help you. You make contacts in the police so that when you are in trouble, they are able to help you, while you are still enemies at the higher level. That is always the case when you go deep into organizing in any particular area. You start encountering all kinds of institutions. That is not an alliance, but an engagement that happens whenever you become a political actor. It is like engaging with university administrations when you become union leaders in the university. At times, that engagement can lead to good results; at other times, it can lead to really antagonistic situations, even arrests.
Alliance is something completely different from these kinds of engagements. Left political parties have to form alliances with other left-wing or workers’ organizations. Sometimes there are workers’ organizations or trade unions that may not be that progressive, but may be doing important work so you may consider forming an alliance. For example, there is a trade union in the area we work in, the leadership of which is primarily maulvis but they are trying to protect hundreds of jobs right now. When we did a rally in Chungi, they invited us to speak and we spoke about workers’ rights. It is a right-wing union, but it is important to engage with them because right now they are at the forefront of a genuine class struggle. Similarly, Maulana Hidayat ur Rehman is part of the struggle for fisherfolk in Gwadar. Even though I have many critiques of him, we give him strategic support from time to time because he and the women with him are fighting on the frontlines.
You can do tactical engagements with anyone. For example, if someone from TLP wants to organize an event at the same time as us, I may engage them to try and reach an agreement to hold our events on separate dates. That is a tactical agreement, a simple everyday engagement that you need to have to organize in any area. An alliance, on the other hand, is on the basis of your program, which has to be a left-wing program.
A standoff between the Police and the TLP during a 2021 protest for the expulsion of the French envoy. Image: Dawn
Arsalan: Ammar, when we support the state’s intervention against a force like the TLP, what is the difference between that and supporting their operations against the Taliban and Zarb-e-Azb for example?
Ammar: It should not be a burden on us to support the state. Why do we have to support it? I am not going to support either the fascists or the state. I am also not going to join this bandwagon of human rights-type liberals who say the police should move out of the way. I am also not going to call for the police to annihilate them. This is the state’s crisis, they have to deal with it.
It is not our burden to take a lead position on this. Our position is to oppose the state. We even opposed them on the issue of the TLP. We were never saying “long live Punjab police” when these guys were fighting. We were saying “why did you distribute money among them, use them, make them strategic assets, bring them to Faizabad, organize their dharna (sit-in), build their party, and spoil other parties?” We have to ask these broader structural questions.
This idea that we have to immediately take sides when a crisis hits can be circumvented if we keep asking the broader, difficult questions about why the state has done all this. We shouldn’t be asking the state to negotiate with the TLP, bring them into the mainstream, like Imran Khan used to ask for the Taliban, to open their offices in the country and so on. We are not going to do that either.
The TLP are the state’s monsters, and they are going to have to deal with them in whatever way they have to. We will continue our criticism – and the state knows that we are extremely critical of them in those moments –but we will not shout in their favour, and neither would we come to their defence.
Aasim: As we discussed before, we need to distinguish between the liberal and left positions that emerged around the War on Terror. Those distinctions developed over time.
This is also a generational question, and a question of learning from organic developments. Things develop on the ground and facilitate our understanding, which is an important part of the story. I agree with Ammar: the left does not have to take positions on these things, but we certainly should acknowledge, within our groups, that right-wing phenomena like the TLP, the Taliban or even Imran Khan will keep propping up. These groups enjoy the support of certain sections of the masses. We have to acknowledge that in order to understand where that vacuum exists, and that, if we do not fill it, these forces will.
You also do not have to take a position on everything. It is not necessary to satisfy everyone all the time. We can have tactical differences, but as the Left, I do think on big, significant matters, we should have some clear, consistent positions that allow us to be seen as such. Then even if we have small differences on an individual, organizational level, they would not matter as much.
But I see your point – that we should not be seen as supporting the very state that is responsible for these issues in the first place. And as we discussed last time, I remember fifteen or twenty years ago, when all the liberal-left community stood by saying that the US is getting rid of these mullahs. If you opposed that position even slightly, you were immediately branded a Taliban supporter. All these problems are there because we are not one of the [political] players. We are only analysts at this point — as in, there are two sides with stakes in the issue and we are forced to pick a side. But in fact, we do not want to pick a side – we want to put forward our own position which represents our stake. It is difficult and tricky, sometimes you have to take a position. On these issues, we should be able to have a distinct position without feeling goaded into saying something about everything. The more positions you take, the more you will be expected to answer for every position that you do not take.
Thankfully, with time, there is more clarity between liberal and left positions — e.g. on the question of the economy, its becoming increasingly clear. And the more we project ourselves as a united left, having consistent positions on big issues, the easier it will be to move forward.
Azeem: We should always be careful when dealing with issues that may add to the power of the state or imperialism. When we say that imperialism will destroy the Taliban, or that the state will handle the TLP, it is also important to remember that the laws and policies that are developed to do that will most certainly be used against us.
I agree with Aasim that we, the left, do not need to give opinions on every issue. Sometimes we also exaggerate the power of entities like the TLP. I am not saying these are small things, but they are nothing compared to the state or mainstream parties, or compared to Imran Khan. Those are the bigger enemies.
Tayyaba: A final point for Azeem: on the one hand, you have said that we should be more cautious when making alliances or engaging with mainstream politics. On the other, you seem to be saying that the left needs to inject itself into the mainstream as well. How do you see that balance of doing politics on the ground whilst not becoming irrelevant by missing opportunities to engage with the mainstream?
Azeem: Let’s differentiate between the two. First, I was talking specifically about electoral politics, not necessarily participating in the mainstream. I think in the mainstream, political debates and binaries are often constructed — they have a reality but they are also constructed When Trump was elected, it was because of Obama’s failures, and that is how Trump gained popularity. Similarly in India, the Congress, the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) were unable to deliver for the last 70 years and, as a result, Modi came to power. When liberal or social democracy does not deliver, the burden is put on the left to support mainstream liberal forces – something I’m uncomfortable with.
The liberals are going to say, “Fascism is coming! Fascism is coming!” but that does not mean that we should immediately start supporting liberals and social democrats. They will come to power, not deliver to the people and we will end up with even worse fascism. I am not saying that we should not fight fascism, but you have to understand the cost of doing that, and do it in a way that keeps your cadre and rank and file intact.
I am also not against engagement with the mainstream altogether. But we should have our own agenda and perspective, know our own audience, and be clear on the terms on which we engage. And importantly, we should keep our rank and file distinct from liberals. Our focus should be on building dual power and the labour movement because, ultimately, even liberal democracy will be sustained through working-class movments.
10. China
Tayyaba: Let’s finally turn to China. How do you understand the China-Pakistan relationship? Is China an imperialist force in Pakistan? And how do you see a left politics being advanced in relation to that?
Azeem: The main component of imperialism is economic, then we have the political and military components and then the cultural. There are three views on the nature of Chinese capital. One comes from a world-systems framework and it says that Chinese capital is a part of global capital in that the latter is invested in and traded with China.
A second view comes from those who have studied the effects of Chinese investments in Africa and Latin America. They argue that while Chinese capital has strategic interests in capturing raw materials, it does not function under the imperatives of the free market. These particular characteristics mean that it is not a part of Western or global capital. The third view, which I agree with, comes from Ho-Fung Hung. It is that Chinese capital is both part of global capital and has its own characteristics and strategic interests.
It is clear that China is both expansionist and capitalist. China may not have a long history of colonization of other spaces but it certainly has political and military ambitions. However, the scale of these ambitions is still limited to consider China hegemonic.
In terms of cultural hegemony, China uses international legal institutions eclectically. It both uses these bodies for its own expansionist aims and by-passes them when they are an obstacle. It purposefully invests in countries with ‘bad governance’. So we cannot call China imperialist.
That said, Maoist parties in India and the Philippines think of China as a ‘social imperialist’ country. Similarly, some on the left think that we are in a ‘New Cold War’ situation and we need to stand with China. That is a mistaken position. The cold war was a conflict between two world-systems - capitalism and socialism - which is not the case anymore. China is an emergent imperialist power.
There has been an ongoing debate within the Pakistani left on how to categorize China. I thought it was strange that traditionally pro-Soviet parties in India like the CPI-M and their allies in Pakistan have started openly supporting China in this ‘New Cold War’. We made these mistakes in the past and we are about to make them again. Instead of taking these ‘international positions’ of the old era, the Pakistani left needs to focus on the ambitions of Chinese capital in Pakistan and how they are going to affect the working class and its revolutionary struggle.
Ammar: China has integrated with the global capitalist system in the last 40 years in such a way that we cannot understand global neoliberalism without China’s central role as the factory of the poor. Having said that, I think a lot of analysis of China misses out on the class struggle taking place within China.
Categorizing China as this or that veils the fact that it is a deeply divided polity which has an in-built mechanism for massive disagreements and theoretical debates. Currently, there are many debates within the party to the point that magazines like Foreign Policy and The Economist are using the specter of Marxism’s return. For example, Xi Jinping arrested corporate heads of Alibaba. He has also made Marxism a compulsory subject for everyone joining state companies.
As Isabella Weber argues, China never accepted the shock doctrine the way Russia did. Within China, there was a debate on keeping certain limits to capital inflow, on allowing anything that will increase exports, on keeping a majority of their industry within the public sector, and on extreme regulation of banks. So there are many anomalies within China which make it difficult to study.
There are so many contradictions and problems in China that any analysis that purports that things are fixed needs to be rethought. There have been massive anti-corruption campaigns since the 1990s and over 1500 strikes a year which challenged the Western analysis that things are rigidly fixed there.
Latin American governments are enamoured with China and its role in providing investments. While there is no doubt that these are extractive investments, I bring this up because governments do see the emergence of a new pole with the rise of China. For instance, when Greece was in a deadlock with the EU, Yanis Varoufakis was looking towards China in the case of a break with the EU. So the question of how small countries imagine new global alliances is important.
“Our state is rentier in nature and does not have the capacity to defend the public.”
You realize what imperialism is when you look at the Western war machine and its rhetoric which is currently encircling China. NATO is sending German warships and we know what is happening with Taiwan in the South China Sea. Having said that, I completely agree with Azeem that on the one hand, there is a dynamic and global point of view and on the other, a Pakistani perspective on China. The latter must prioritize investigating Chinese investment and relations, and the contestations around them. This means that the Baloch and Pashtun questions become central. Gilgit-Baltistan, as the gateway to CPEC, becomes very important. There is no doubt that because Chinese investments come with the state and its predatory nature that it will hurt the Pakistani economy.
At the same time, Kaiser Bengali, who was initially part of the CPEC negotiations, says that the way our elites negotiated with Chinese officials was laughable. In fact, they did not negotiate at all. They were acting like they were negotiators on China’s side willing to give away things for even cheaper. Our state is rentier in nature and does not have the capacity to defend the public. It does not even have an idea of the public, of public good and of national interest of any kind. So whenever there is any kind of foreign investment, that money will go into rent-seeking and monopolies, from which both China and Pakistani elites benefit.
Even if there was a left-wing government today, China would still play a very important role in the region. The question would be how we renegotiate the terms with China on some of the major projects. For that, we should develop a Pakistani perspective that prioritizes the protection of the peripheries, our environment and our labor, which is not protected in CPEC projects. In fact, our labor is not protected anywhere. In order to ensure these protections, you need a left-wing government with an agenda for sovereignty of the people. In the absence of that, anybody who can make a killing out of Pakistan’s resources will do so in a predatory way and China is no different.
A photograph from the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) held in Beijing in October 2022. As Xi Jinping was elected for a third term, he made several policy statements that for many signal the the end of the Deng era, and a revival of marxist thought into Chinese politics. Image: China Daily
Aasim: I agree with much of what Azeem and Ammar have said. The question of China remains unresolved. As Azeem said, China is integrated with global capitalism in a way that the Soviet Union never was. That is because the structure of capitalism has become truly global in the way that it could not be when the second and third worlds existed. Also because of financialization and digitalization.
Yet, China remains distinct with its own characteristics. While I do not think that we should dismiss their internal debates, we also cannot take what the ruling party says at face value.
Statistics show that surplus value still flows largely to Western imperialist countries on the whole. Having said that, China is exploitative when it comes to debt and investments in countries like Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Chinese debt has played a huge role in driving Sri Lanka to bankruptcy. Similarly, seven years ago, we were being told that Chinese loans were going to be a gamechanger without being given any information about the terms, only to find out that these loans are not any more concessionary than the IMF or World Bank’s. We must be at the frontlines talking about all of this when people are being humiliated in this economic crisis.
My sense is that whether or not China will diverge from Western imperialism will be on the question of planetary survival. I take seriously the Chinese communist party’s claim that it wants to make China an ecological civilization. However, China has to demonstrate that in action. In CPEC, for instance, most of the funding was in thermal power which is ecologically disastrous. Similarly, coal-fired power plants like the one in Sahiwal, have created devastations that are beyond our imaginations. Gwadar port has ruined marine ecology. So I want to take this claim of an ecological civilization seriously but I cannot if China is just externalizing and off-outsourcing its ecological disasters to the rest of the world, much like the Western empire did. The question of the planet will become the defining question of our age, not just with regard to China.
Even just within the last four months, Pakistan has experienced incredible variation in its climate. One day the temperature rises to 45 degrees, the next day there is a flood and snow. This is the most climate change prone region in the world. Chinese leadership will have to demonstrate itself on these matters. We have to remain critical of China while not falling into the trap of China-bashing. While we should continue having these debates amongst ourselves, for now it is enough to say this: China’s role is not the same as that of Western imperialism but China has yet to demonstrate that it will lead the world in a decisive war against western imperialism.
For now, we have to concern ourselves with the role China is playing in Pakistan. If we are talking about the IMF’s destructive role and ignoring China’s, that is not anti-imperialist but opportunistic. Making grand statements about China does not matter. What matters is the concrete positions we take on Chinese interventions in Pakistan, which in turn, automatically clarify where we stand on matters of fundamental importance.
Tayyaba: Thank you, Aasim. That is an excellent closing statement. This was a very enriching and extremely valuable conversation. Thank you so much for making the time for this.
This is Part 2 of a two-part interview. Click here for Part 1.
Aasim Sajjad Akhtar is an Associate Professor of political economy at the National Institute of Pakistan Studies at Quaid-i-Azam University in Pakistan. He is the author of The Struggle for Hegemony in Pakistan: Fear, Desire and Revolutionary Horizons.
Ammar Ali Jan completed his doctoral studies in history from the University of Cambridge. He is a member of the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party and the author of Rule By Fear: Eight Theses Authoritarianism in Pakistan. Ammar is also a Council member of the Progressive International and a Board member of Jamhor.
Syed Azeem is an Associate Professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). His research is on labour in Pakistan, and he is a member of the Pakistan Mazdoor Kisaan Party.