The post-Cold War political, cultural and intellectual hegemony of global capitalism has entrenched neoliberalism and given an inherent legitimising logic to the diminishing nature of the state, privatisation of public enterprises and a shift from a people-centric state to a market-facilitating one. While it would be a mistake to say that world capitalism is in its death throes, what is certain is that the Golden Age of capital is long over. With protests against top-down imposed austerity rocking Greece and Portugal, uprisings in the so-called ’Arab Spring’ continuing and the rise of left-wing forces in Latin America (of which the re-election of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela is but one of many manifestations), it is clear that a vast proportion of humanity is actively expressing its discontent with the current global order. Not since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s has capitalism faced such a serious crisis of legitimacy.

In Pakistan, the discourse of liberal democracy posited against the threat of our ever-present saviour institutions has often restricted the pubic imaginary whereby politics and political discourse is stuck at the level of institution-building, institutional adjustment and tussles between different arms of the state. This restriction of the public imaginary was painfully evident in the aftermath of the factory inferno in Karachi this September which took the life of over 300 workers. The horrific incident, which is now conveniently out of our public discourse thanks to the Army Chief’s barbed statements, elicited a response merely of compensation to the workers’ families by the parent company in Germany, a token suo-moto notice by the higher judiciary and a few symbolic resignations from the provincial cabinet and bureaucracy. Before the (apparent) clash between GHQ and Supreme Court/media captured the headlines, there was a rush to ascertain which individuals and/or departments were responsible for the negligence and lack of law enforcement leading to such a tragedy. As pointed out earlier, the narrative in the mainstream media seemed stuck at the level of people, events and institutions while failing to point out or even hint at the overarching structures of power and capital (characterised by inequality) which make such exploitation of the working classes possible.

The case of the Karachi factory workers is not the only one where a dearth of imagination prevents us from carrying out a holistic analysis of the situation that we find ourselves in today and charting a way out accordingly. The delinking of imperialism from so-called Islamic extremism is another pervasive contemporary trend of mainstream political discourse. State-backed right wing parties have increasingly posited themselves as avatars of ’revolutionary’, ’anti-imperialist’ politics. While such forces have a long, and continuing, history of being intimately linked to the global capitalist order (especially through the American and Saudi states), the general anti-intellectual inquiry and depoliticised polity actively shaped by our military-dominated state has ingrained the false binary of America versus Islamist violence in the public imaginary. Thus, our mainstream discourse has failed to make the enduring link between imperialism, its local mediators and the rise of Islamist outfits of various hues and colors.

Such honest and critical analyses of the state, historically the vocation of the Left, are impeded and prevented in Pakistan due to the weakness, especially in the post-Cold War era, of progressive political forces in the country. While the Left itself has often been divided over issues of ideological purity and revolutionary practice, state repression during successive military and civilian regimes has played no small part in suppressing and fragmenting Left forces in Pakistan. However, this is by no means an excuse for the failure of progressive forces to make a dent in the Pakistani polity since the end of the Cold War. Often it has been disputes over theory and practice and a refusal to move beyond the ossifications of Cold War-era politics that has seen the Left fail miserably at building a united front against the marching (and interlinked) forces of neoliberal capital, Islamist extremism and a repressive state apparatus violently disinclined towards any challenge to its political, cultural and intellectual hegemony.

With the rise of a new Left movement in Latin America, the substantial mandate received by Syriza in Greece and various other pockets of resistance in different parts of the world emerging as a response to the onward march of capital, a mass-based, genuine anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist force is also the need of the hour in Pakistan. It is in the rise of such alternative progressive movements, quite different in their practice of revolutionary politics compared to Soviet-era left parties, that there is hope for countering the political and cultural hegemony of the right in Pakistan and re-introducing the discourse of class in popular politics.

It is thus that the recent merger of three prominent left parties in Pakistan to form the Awami Workers’ Party (AWP) offers hope for a re-emergence of progressive ideas in mainstream Pakistani politics. The Left has to navigate through a myriad of problems not the least of which include a massively de-unionised workforce, a vast undocumented informal economy, enduring patterns of patron-client relationships, increasingly important issues of power devolution (and concomitant, militant ethno-nationalist movements) and the state’s hegemony in the realm of political discourse. However, it has to be noted that the recent merger comes on the heels of, and is organically linked to, the rejuvenation of the long defunct National Students’ Federation (NSF), a historical flag-bearer of progressive campus politics. This, in my opinion, is indicative of the emergence of a new generation of activists, party workers and scholars who are not only aware of the importance of fighting for space in the oft-shunned battleground of popular politics but also critically cognizant of the fact that it is among the youth of the country that the long-forgotten ideals of social justice, equality and fraternity through mass mobilisation have to be rekindled. While the recent merger is just cause for celebration, we should hope and work towards moving away from the ossified divisions of previous years and rethinking revolutionary practice in a context adapted to the multi-national entity that is Pakistan and with an eye towards the revolutions of the 21^st century. As Iqbal would have said, abhi ishq ke imtehaan aur bhi hain...

Ayyaz Mallick