From the Barrel of a Gun? Maoist Debates in Pakistan
In the 1970s, the Mazdoor Kisan Party debated the strategies of armed struggle and electoral politics — debates that offer crucial lessons for today.
Illustration: Jamhoor
The scale and audacity of al-Aqsa Flood, the Palestinian resistance factions’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, has once again brought considerable attention to questions of national liberation and armed struggle that, 50 years prior, defined global anti-colonial rebellion and socialist revolution. In the 1960s and 70s, when radicals around the world were splitting on how best to effect revolutionary transformations, they tended to be united on one point, that in situations of direct colonialism, armed struggle was not only justifiable but a political imperative. By 1973, the Mazdoor Kisan Party (MKP), the largest communist-oriented political organization in Pakistan’s history—best known for leading arguably the country’s largest, most effective, and armed peasant struggles—was at the centre of a perhaps thornier set of questions concerning indirect (semi- or neo-)colonialism in Pakistan: Was formally freeing a people from their colonial occupiers enough to achieve genuine national liberation from imperialist domination? If not, if the bourgeoisies and landed elites found new ways to ensure the subordination of working people, then what means were appropriate and necessary to combat these formally independent ruling classes?
“The MKP had emerged in 1968 out of debates on such questions between the so-called “pro-Soviet” and “pro-China” factions of the international communist movement. ”
The MKP had emerged in 1968 out of debates on such questions between the so-called “pro-Soviet” and “pro-China” factions of the international communist movement. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union argued that there could be a peaceful and parliamentary path to socialism in both the imperialist, advanced capitalist countries, and the underdeveloped nations formally liberated from colonialism. There were “national” bourgeoisies committed to anti-monopoly and anti-imperialism, and working people ought to join with them to achieve meaningful democratic development. In contrast, the communists who founded the MKP drew on their own experiences of politics and state repression to side largely with the Communist Party of China in arguing that the meaningful pursuit of emancipation from imperialism and class domination would inescapably involve dealing with the violence of the ruling classes.
By 1973, after five years of intervening in peasant struggles that ranged from civil disobedience to armed resistance, two global events further enabled the MKP to refine its responses to the debates concerning national liberation and violence: On September 11, 1973, a US-backed military coup in Chile had violently overthrown the elected socialist presidency of Dr. Salvador Allende. Soon thereafter, the advances of Arab armies against the Israeli military that began in a surprise attack on October 6, 1973 appeared to stall in diplomacy rather than pressing the advantage for total liberation of occupied Arab lands. For the MKP, comparing across Pakistan, Palestine, Chile, and elsewhere, revealed not only the contours of the US-led imperialist world order, but also the contours of what it would take to meaningfully transform it. The first lesson concerned the class nature of national liberation struggles, where, following Mao Zedong, the MKP argued that working classes needed to organize their own independent political organizations rather than leaving national liberation in the hands of the bourgeoisie. The second lesson concerned the question of armed struggle, and needing to view it expansively in terms of the coercive basis of a working people’s state rather than simply in terms of self-defence, or worse, not thinking about an independent armed force of working classes at all.
MKP’s Circular No. 46: “It is impossible to accomplish revolution without destroying the structure of the bourgeois state.”
A Thoroughly Violent Condition
The communists who founded the MKP in 1968 had already been enmeshed with the immense violence that birthed Pakistan over 1947 and 1948, and became even more intimately familiar with state repression after independence. In 1951, leading communists accused of plotting a coup with army officers, including the Punjabi army Major Ishaq Muhammad, were imprisoned, and the Communist Party was banned in 1954, with many more communists like the charismatic Afzal Bangash of the North-West Frontier Province arrested. After he was released, Bangash became Frontier general-secretary of the National Awami Party in 1957, in which many communists regrouped. But upon a military coup he and Major Ishaq amongst others were re-arrested. One of Pakistan’s most vibrant communists, Hassan Nasir of Karachi in Sindh, was imprisoned in 1960 in the Lahore Fort and tortured to death. After Pakistan lost another war over Kashmir to India in 1965, the National Awami Party ruptured in 1968. Bangash and Ishaq led revolutionary communists to form the MKP, but Bangash and many others were arrested again in 1971 after Bangladesh’s War of Liberation broke out. The leaders of the MKP were no strangers to the violence of the state.
“Landlords also held court (jirgas) over tenant/labourer disputes, and could impose fines and punishments and even kill those who got out of line—landlords had their own armed retainers.”
The many thousands of workers and peasants who participated in the MKP were also quite familiar with violence, in its many forms. While urban workers faced the repression of police forces acting to protect the interests of industrial capitalists, including dying at their hands, in rural areas “feudal” landed elites held the means of violence in their own hands. The larger landholders, who might own hundreds or thousands of acres, were local despots who ruled over their clients: not only extracting rent, unpaid labour, all kinds of taxes, and controlling market access, but also dictating who their tenants would vote for and what kind of politics they could openly engage with. Landlords also held court (jirgas) over tenant/labourer disputes, and could impose fines and punishments and even kill those who got out of line—landlords had their own armed retainers. In central Punjab villages, relatively smaller landowners as a collective could wield this kind of power over landless labouring castes. Upon pain of losing their homes, livelihoods, and sometimes their lives, peasants and rural labourers across the country were ruled over by landowners large and small.
The localized rule of landowners, which was inherited from British colonialism and still persists in many parts of Pakistan, was for the MKP evidence of the country’s “semi-colonial, semi-feudal” nature. Semi-feudal because the formal power of the state was enmeshed with the informal power of landowners: the police, the bureaucracy, and politicians at all levels (most landed elites themselves) left local rule up to them. If things got out of hand, the formal power of the state would step in to repress uprisings or to mediate conflict in ways that ultimately backed the landowners, although this was to be subverted in some areas due to the peasant struggles the MKP led in the 1970s. Semi-colonial because, if things got out of hand for Pakistan’s predominantly landed ruling classes, it was now US imperialism that, particularly through regional military ties, was guarantor of the country’s underdevelopment in place of the British. Violence was inherent in Pakistan’s semi-colonial, semi-feudal condition.
Major Ishaq Muhammad, the founder of the MKP. Credit: Facebook.
Comparative Politics of the Oppressed
The MKP consciously saw itself as part of a global struggle for national liberation and revolutionary socialism. Rooted in Marxism-Leninism inspired by Mao Zedong thought, party members understood that, although the specific contexts of these varied struggles were unique and required particular knowledges, comparison across the world often yielded valuable insights about what worked and what didn’t for achieving liberation and revolution—that is, to generate revolutionary theory. By comparing violence in Pakistan, Palestine, and Chile, the MKP considered the politics of engaging with anti-imperialist or formally independent bourgeoisies in different forms of struggle against global subordination.
“By comparing violence in Pakistan, Palestine, and Chile, the MKP considered the politics of engaging with anti-imperialist or formally independent bourgeoisies in different forms of struggle against global subordination.”
Analyzing the Arab-Israeli wars for the MKP’s internal bulletin, the Circular in 1974, the literary theorist Aijaz Ahmad argued that when “class power is in the hands of the bourgeois and feudal forces” they take advantage of the “courage, sacrifices, and victories of the masses” for narrow ends rather than for broader emancipatory ends. Having overcome Israeli defences on the Suez Canal in October 1973, Egyptian soldiers smashed racist notions that Arabs were too stupid to fight effectively and cleverly. But Egyptian president Anwar Saadat refused to press their advance, abandoning the Syrian-Iraqi front in the north, because his strategic intentions were limited to reviving negotiations with Israel and recovering control of the Suez and Sinai peninsula lost in the 1967 war. Rather than trusting in the strength of Arab people, Saadat encouraged them to trust in the Gulf’s oil sheikhdoms and the great powers of the US and Soviet Union, while encouraging divisions in the Palestinian movement. Presciently, Ahmad argued that the petty bourgeois leadership represented by Saadat was beholden to a national and bureaucratic bourgeoisie, which wanted its land back from Israel, but mainly so that it could get back to inviting Western and Gulf capital to facilitate even greater exploitation of the Arab working masses.
“Sore spot”: This cartoon shows an oil pipeline as US imperialism’s aorta, which the Arab masses have throttled and which is making imperialism squirm. You, too, can take joy in seeing imperialism in anguish. From the MKP’s Circular no. 47.
Similarly, while Ahmad credited Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for recognizing that the other Arab leaders would not take the initiative on Palestinian liberation, and thus building a popular Palestinian nationalist movement, he criticized the head of the Fatah faction for not connecting it to the revolutionary struggles of Arab working people. Arafat, moreover, focused on the technical aspects of armed struggle at the expense of political organizing amongst Palestinians, including being more concerned with Jordan and Lebanon than Gaza and the West Bank. Writing from Beirut, Ahmad likely saw how the Palestinian Liberation Organization could at once inspire a revolutionary spirit among locals while being a politically disengaged disappointment. Again, presciently, Ahmad argued that the Palestinian national movement under Arafat’s Fatah was beholden to the suppliers of arms and money, the bourgeois and monarchical Arab leaders, and relied more on getting photo opps at international talks than the political resistance of the Palestinian people. For Ahmad, and the MKP more generally, the task of national liberation was too important to be left in the hands of representatives of such shortsighted bourgeoisies.
If Palestine demonstrated the folly of focusing too sharply on armed resistance at the expense of a revolutionary political orientation, Chile demonstrated the inverse problem. The Marxist president Salvador Allende had argued that, in a form different from that of Pakistan’s, Chile was subjected to a kind of “colonization or dependency.” US firms exercised considerable control over its economy, including in exploiting its strategic copper reserves, and therefore on its prospects for popular development. However, Allende was committed to using the institutions of liberal, constitutional democracy to effect a peaceful transition to socialism. Indeed, Chilean socialists and communists had been able to push for many progressive laws in the 1960s, including a land reform that began to break the back of landed elites. The MKP Circular’s take implied that if there was ever a test case for a peaceful and parliamentary path to socialism, it would have been Chile, where political murders were rare prior to 1970 and electoral democracy had prevailed since 1925, unlike many other Latin American states.
Allende’s program of nationalizing key industries to socialize the economy and raise the living standards of workers and peasants was, nevertheless, unpalatable to the wealthy and much of the middle-class. The ruling classes, local and foreign capitalists alike, did not allow their own “rules of the game” of constitutional liberal democracy to function if that meant losing their property and the power that came with it. The bourgeoisie and the US economically destabilized Chile and made it ungovernable through a capital and transport strike, but Allende’s popularity kept increasing. Hence, dominant classes resorted to a coup and imposition of open military dictatorship.
But it was, according to the MKP, Allende’s mistake for believing that he could transform the political economy of the country so fundamentally by remaining within the ambit of the constitutional order. There was a difference between formal and substantive power. Though Allende was formally in power, most state institutions, and particularly the armed forces and civil defence forces, remained firmly under the control of the bourgeoisie. The problem, the MKP argued, was that the masses, who supported Allende, were not independently armed and organized. A popular or people’s army was necessary not only to counter and overwhelm the 23,000 personnel of the armed forces but also to guarantee the continued operation of nationalized industries and new institutions of popular rule from counter-revolution. Here, we can see the MKP approaching the question of violence as not merely resistance or self-defence, but in terms of a productive force that undergirds a new political order.
Yasser Arafat in 1978 in south Lebanon (AFP). He remained chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) from 1969 to 2004. Source: Middle East Eye
In Five Years of Struggle, the report that party president Major Ishaq presented to the MKP’s first congress in March 1973, months before the coup in Chile, he laid out the case more generally by drawing on the experiences of Germany, Spain, and Greece. Comparing Pakistan’s lack of democratic tradition to India’s, Ishaq argued that so long as the representative institutions of the modern state were dominated by ruling class interests, things operated smoothly; but if ever working class interests were to dominate in representative institutions, these would be dissolved, and the ruling classes would go to direct dictatorship. That is, regardless of the government of the day, and regardless of the regime type (dictatorship or democracy), the state, in its coercive dimension as a special organized and armed force, was subordinate to the ruling class. He predicted the 1975 Emergency in India: “When they see the revolutionary pressure increasing beyond a limit, then India’s ruling class will also fold up the parliament and take up rifles and guns.”
The MKP therefore argued that ruling classes would never accept their own defeat peacefully, nor were their institutions designed to facilitate such processes. In order for a government premised on working class interests to operate, it would require a force that could overpower the organized/armed force of the ruling classes. That is, working classes would require a coercive apparatus independent of the control of the ruling classes—rooted in a people’s army. There was more, of course, than just force involved. The Circular editorial on Chile referred to all three of Mao’s “magic weapons”—“The revolutionary party, the people’s army, and the united front”—which speak also to questions of political alliances and cultural politics. However, the MKP succeeded only partially in pursuing a model of revolution based on its comparative analysis, before internal and external contradictions pulled it apart.
The Challenges of Actual Politics
The MKP’s leadership of the peasant movement in the Frontier province led to accusations, particularly amongst a more urban left oriented to the Soviet Union or even to China's collaboration with the Pakistani state, of “adventurism”—privileging militancy at the expense of political organizing. But this view severely misread the situation in the Frontier and elsewhere. For the MKP, it wasn’t the point to simply and directly confront the violence of the powerful with counter-violence of the weak. Rather, it understood that political consciousness was tied to struggle, and that struggle would have to adapt even as it contended with the traditions and perspectives of the oppressed.
“For the MKP, it wasn’t the point to simply and directly confront the violence of the powerful with counter-violence of the weak. Rather, it understood that political consciousness was tied to struggle, and that struggle would have to adapt even as it contended with the traditions and perspectives of the oppressed.”
Indeed, the MKP typically began its mobilizations through peaceful civil disobedience tactics, of which there was a long history in the Frontier, to politicize working people. For example, in response to mass evictions and increases in rent in the late 1960s, the MKP organized tenants and labourers in and around the Hashtnagar region to observe a strike on April 19, 1970. This led to even more peasants joining the movement, often beyond the control or supervision of MKP cadres. If evictions did occur, they encouraged tenants and labourers to gather in large numbers to deter landlords, their armed men, and the police forces. If violence broke out, then the MKP absolutely believed in and actively prepared for self-defence. As it happened, the conflict soon took on larger proportions, say of a low-intensity conflict, but the speed and strength of the movement’s spread far exceeded the MKP’s wildest imagination. In south Punjab, though, the violence did not reach this kind of organized level, and largely remained at the level of mass civil disobedience. Ideologically, the MKP conceived of this entire class struggle in terms of war: “In our view the jagirdar (landlord), regardless of whatever area he is from, is deserving of hatred. And we will continue the war against him.” But this was not gunning for a quick and decisive confrontation with the state. Rather than washing their hands of popular momentum, the MKP sought to develop the party through involvement in popular struggle—what many more urbane leftists saw as adventurism.
Once the struggle became violent, the MKP tried to take practices of conflict common amongst Pakhtuns and provide more advanced military training for peasants, thus organizing a relatively more regular armed force. “Laṣhkari” conflict was common in the “tribal areas”—lashkar literally means army, but here it referred to a large group of men somewhat spontaneously facing off another group of men—the call to battle would be given through drums and residents of surrounding areas would join in. The numbers could range from hundreds to thousands, and this sight in itself, if it got off the ground, could help alleviate fears of those looking to participate in the laṣhkar—and strike fear into the opposing side. But a better organized force could easily surround laṣhkars and this could have adverse consequences for the peasant struggle, which the MKP took into account to try and improve the armament, tactics, and organization of the peasants’ militias. For example, during the July 3, 1971 battle of Nasafai, a village very close to the crossroads town of Mandani, the MKP laṣhkar entered into a direct conflict with police and paramilitaries, leading to at least 11 tenants dying and inviting considerable state repression.
“Whoever tills should eat” (Land to the tiller). From the MKP’s Circular no. 50.
After that, the MKP sought to systematically arm tenants and spread some basic political tactics. Many tenants and labourers could not afford arms and guns, and would approach battles with sticks (lāṭhīs) dyed red. MKP leaders like Afzal Bangash, according to police reports, “urged the workers to avoid wasteful expenditure on marriages and charities and instead purchase arms.” They also encouraged tenants to avoid confronting the police, but instead to melt away when evictions were enforced and to later re-occupy the land once police had left. In the village of Ghalla Dher in Mardan district, for example, the Nawabzada of Toru hired a police platoon from November 1971 to April 1972 to enforce his possession of the village. But the erstwhile tenants took back the land as soon as the police left, forcing the new tenants to leave at gunpoint. (The Nawabzada asked the police for a refund.)
The overall effect of the combination of laṣhkari battles and spontaneous outbreaks, as well as more systematically planned laṣhkars, and the advanced training and organizational techniques of the MKP’s paramilitary wing, was that landlords in many parts of Hashtnagar, Malakand and Mardan found it very difficult to enforce their possession of land. In northern Hashtnagar, especially, khans and their agents found it almost impossible to even enter the area, period—tenants would start firing on almost any car because it almost certainly belonged to a khan. In other words, khanism in northern Hashtnagar had collapsed. This shift in the balance of class power outside of the state apparatus was a crucial enabling condition for de facto land and tenancy reforms, and the formation of institutions of peasant-based authority, that accompanied the armed struggle. That’s not to say there were not other fronts of struggle, including legal struggles with an ambiguous track record, but that armed struggle was the lever that enabled tenants to realize developmental improvements in their lives and end a decrepit feudal structure.
“The militant rural united front between landless workers and peasants began to break down, in favour of a rural order in which richer peasants now had a somewhat more significant political and economic power. ”
But what the MKP could not do was to transform these political economic victories into resilient “magic weapons.” For one, much of the of the peasant struggle was outside of its organizational control, for it had very few cadre at the onset of the struggle in 1970, and faced the same challenges that Chinese communists faced in their areas of strength: trying to popularize socialist ideals while contending with the existing traditions and views of peasants, which could often be patriarchal and status-oriented in their own way. MKP leaders were caught up in the operations of the peasant struggle and mass political activities, and were unable to devote sufficient attention to building the kind of disciplined, revolutionary party of cadres they had envisioned. This is not to say this kind of party-building did not advance, but evidently not sufficiently enough.
The militant rural united front between landless workers and peasants began to break down, in favour of a rural order in which richer peasants now had a somewhat more significant political and economic power. Peasants had multiple political interests, and many who had joined with the MKP to protect their possession of lands quietly retreated from active struggle once they got land. Rather than asserting greater autonomy from the Pakistani state, or engaging in revolutionary self-governance independent of the traditional jirga system, the elders and emerging elite amongst peasants sought greater accommodation with the state. Meanwhile, plenty of ideologically and militarily motivated MKP cadres existed, but they did not form the nucleus of a people’s army. That is something that, for example, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and its precursors and Baloch nationalist insurgents have been able to do on some scale, much later starting from the late 1990s, and in the case of TTP did so in areas that adjoined or overlapped the MKP’s historic areas of influence. The MKP’s leaders instead flirted with other models of armed activity, but these amounted to little in practicality.
Overall, many of the MKP’s members became frustrated that despite having a significant national profile, the MKP did not have significant national political influence. Thus, a series of debates over the political direction of the MKP split the party apart by 1977, just as a military regime came to power. In the late 1960s, the MKP had taken a strong stance against participating in elections, focusing instead on channeling the upsurge of workers, students, and peasants toward revolution. But its model of revolution envisioned a relatively rapid upsurge, and did not fully anticipate the slowdown of both worker and peasant militancy—often a response to repression from the Pakistan People’s Party government—by 1972/1973. Some of the MKP’s leaders, particularly Sher Ali Bacha and Imtiaz Alam, thus encouraged participation in elections as a focal point for political education and, following Lenin, to have MKP members of parliament operating as tribunes of the people. For Major Ishaq and Bangash, however, electoral orientation would distort the revolutionary nature of the movement, aside from possibly succumbing to the same kinds of errors in the long run that Allende’s did. Bangash later acceded to participating in elections after 1977, when peasants in the Frontier bucked the MKP’s encouragement to boycott and voted in large numbers for the Pakistan People’s Party, which, ironically, was repressing MKP leaders and blamed by the party for facilitating their assassinations. The new military regime that overthrew PPP-leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (and eventually killed him in 1979) was promising elections, but Major Ishaq warned that this was a chimera. This debate contributed to the MKP falling apart in four directions, just when its unity and revolutionary commitment was necessary over a decade of martial law. What is important to note here, however, is that the debate over participating in elections was not a debate over abandoning the principle of armed struggle.
“A new culture is emerging.” From the MKP Circular no. 50.
Of Genocide and Barbarism
The experience of the MKP in the 1970s tells us that the debate about whether a people should or could use armed struggle in their pursuit of national liberation was not a moralistic one, but political, about how and under what conditions it was the right strategy. What were the class forces involved in any kind of conflict? Which class’s leadership prevailed in the national liberation struggle, and how did that shape its aims and strategies? What was the appropriate balance between technical aspects of military struggle and the politics of popular organization and mobilization? (Theorizing the latter was the signal contribution of Mao and the Chinese Communist Party.) In a country like Pakistan or Chile, was independence from formal metropolitan dominion enough to achieve genuine national liberation? If countries of the Third World remained semi-colonial, neo-colonial, dependent, then what strategic orientation was necessary to combat the ruling classes who sacrificed the development of their peoples at the altar of an imperialist political economy of venality?
If we trace a line today, from the blocking of popular movements to transform the constitution inherited from the military dictatorship in Chile, to the to the genocide of Palestinians and the Lebanese, to the crushing austerity imposed on the people of Pakistan, or Kenya, or Zambia, or Sri Lanka, we can better understand the contours of contemporary imperialism. Its violence takes many forms. Indeed, it can barely hide its fondness for Nazism. As Colombian president Gustavo Petro put it, “The unleash[ing] of genocide and barbarism on the Palestinian people is what awaits the exodus of the peoples of the South unleashed by the climate crisis.” Revisiting the debates of the 1970s, and how radicals studied and learned from each other’s struggles, can help us better consider not only how to resist imperialism, but how to establish new political orders where the working people of the neo-colonized nations are agents of their own destinies. We may well want to avoid violence, but we should be prepared for the violence that imperialism is all too happy to visit upon us.
Noaman G. Ali is Lecturer in International Development at the University of Bath (UK). He has also written for the Boston Review, Discourse, Tanqeed, and BASICS Community News Service. He also hosted the Introduction to Political Economy podcast. He tweets at @noamangali.