Revival of the Left
Rashed Rahman
The task of reviving the Left to once again become an
effective player in the polity has been exercising minds in the surviving Left
parties and groups for long but the achievement of this goal has proved
difficult. It is therefore heartening to note the follow-up of the meeting of
10 Left parties and groups in Lahore on December 29, 2017 by the formation of a
17-parties/groups’ platform dubbed Lahore Left Front (LLF).
Even a cursory perusal of the minimum programmatic pronouncements
of these two meetings plus the composition of these brotherly platforms will be
enough to prove that the LLF is inspired at least partially by the December
2017 moot. That 10-parties/groups platform agreed on what it considered the main
or crucial tasks before it. These included the recovery of missing persons and
their being charged through due process if there is any evidence of wrongdoing
against them; deportation to their countries of origin of illegal immigrants; halting
forced conversions and marriages of minority girls (particularly Hindu);
regulation of the sugar mafia; restoration of tenancy rights in Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa’s protected forest lands; withdrawal of unjust and false criminal
cases against the Hashtnagar and Okara Military Farms’ peasants, and the
restoration of banned students unions. The 10-party/groups’ meeting characterised
the current narrative dominating politics of corruption as the main if not only
problem afflicting society as a phenomenon integral to the bourgeois
(capitalist) system, the only solution/alternative to which is provided by
socialism. The meeting also dilated on the persistence of feudalism and the
need for land reforms. The participants vowed to wage a concerted struggle
against fundamentalism, extremism, intolerance and fanaticism. In their struggle
against feudalism they committed themselves to support the workers, farmers and
tenants; work for the supremacy of parliament over the national security state;
establish Pakistan as a multi-cultural country where every nationality would
have full control over its resources; struggle for gender equality, the
separation of the state and religion and the creation of a socialist economy in
which there would be no class distinction in education and opportunity;
implementation of the constitutional guarantees of shelter, employment,
education, healthcare, and adherence to a non-aligned foreign policy while
promoting friendly relations with all Pakistan’s neighbours on the principle of
non-interference.
The follow-up meeting of 17 parties/groups in Lahore on March
24, 2018 adopted a declaration focusing on four main issues to be tackled by
the newly formed LLF: fight the growing tide of fundamentalism and terrorism;
help develop class-based organisations of the working class; preserve
democratic norms, and tackle the missing persons conundrum. While the
10-parties/groups session on December 29, 2017 set up an eight-member committee
to take the process of a dialogue and coming together of the Left forward, the
LLF has set up a 17-member organising committee to implement its programme.
These two streams, national and local, will hopefully merge as the process
plays itself out. The LLF has kept its doors open to non-Left forces desirous
of being part of the endeavour to counter religious radicalism. It also critiqued
the current dominant national narrative about corruption as certainly an issue
but which fails to challenge the existing system based on exploitation,
inequality and injustice.
While the undeniable dearth in numbers on the Left means it
has its work cut out for it, the apathy of the intelligentsia, including the
progressive intelligentsia, underlines the deep psychological effects of the
collapse of the Pakistani Left around 1980-81 and the decade later collapse of
the Soviet Union in 1991. Since the latter event and the consequent end of the
Cold War, the world (and in its wake Pakistan) has changed almost beyond
recognition. In this brave new world of the internalisation of the inevitability
of unfettered capitalism and so-called liberal (bourgeois) democracy, the Left
worldwide struggles to re-establish a coherent and credible narrative based on
a penetrating in depth analysis and critique of the workings of the system, how
this has changed in the last three decades, and what are the effects on state
and society of these developments.
In the case of Pakistan, such a narrative cannot escape our
early or recent history, which by now has mired us in international isolation
(read ‘conflict’ with the west), at odds with all our neighbours, and
internally veering towards a new form of fascism allegedly backed by the
ubiquitous establishment and representing a new chapter in the control and
manipulation of the polity.
Perhaps the only reason (explicitly stated or implicitly
internalised) for the Left to support the struggle for a genuine (bourgeois)
democracy over the last 70 years, a struggle still in progress, is because they
believed this provided the space for articulation of and struggle for their
aims and objectives, central amongst them, and to which all other issues were
linked but subordinate, being the establishment of a socialist state. How far
in practice that hope has transpired is there for students of our history to peruse.
Currently, such is the crisis of state and society and the consequent
insecurity of the establishment despite no serious challenge to its hegemony
that it now seeks (and to a considerable extent has silenced) the smothering
through all possible means of the voices of dissent and criticism, whether in
the mainstream or social media or in society at large.
The hoped for ‘advantage’ therefore of democratic
liberties, including freedom of expression, remains an elusive will o’ the
wisp. That merely serves to underline the formidable challenges for the Left,
ranging from evolving and being allowed to disseminate its message/narrative to
confronting the risks to life and limb emanating from such activism. And of
course this does not even compare to the greater risks to safety that is the
inevitable outcome of practical organisation and struggle of the masses.
Is history on the side of socialism in the 21st
century, as its advocates still are convinced of, or is the dream of a just
world passé, as capitalist and pre-capitalist advocates would have us believe? Only
time will tell, but it would not be out of place to insert a word of caution
about premature triumphalism regarding capitalism’s ‘victory’ and the lack of
any alternative. History has a habit of surprising us when least expected.
rashed-rahman.blogspot.com
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