A capitalist crisis is ravaging Pakistan. The working class is fighting back against its devastating effects and against the bosses’ attacks as the latter tries to shift the crisis onto workers’ backs.
Almost daily workers are organizing demonstrations against the bosses across the country, including railroad and airline workers, and among teachers and women in the healthcare industry who’ve organized huge strikes. In Lahore, the Paramedical Association is waging a militant walkout to win a contract. They have no job security and work long hours at low wages.
Workers Beat Cops
In Faisalabad, during violent street protests against unemployment, the high cost of living and power cuts, workers smashed a government official’s car and badly beat police and private security guards.
Workers at the Karachi Electric Supply Company (KESC) have been battling the bosses’ thugs, police and army in street battles for two years. They’re continuing their protests against privatization and layoffs. KESC bosses appoint highly paid “executives,” relatives of current political leaders, to gain state support for their repressive tactics against workers, which includes torture.
Skyrocketing inflation and high prices of basic commodities are forcing many into poverty. Energy shortages, caused by wide-scale mismanagement in the state-owned energy companies, and soaring corruption, nepotism, bribery and favoritism hit hardest in the poor areas where electricity is cut by 70% daily. Only the national capital, Islamabad, and rich areas have power.
Capitalists without the right political connections can’t get energy for industrial production so they close factories, adding to the massive unemployment and bankruptcies. Financial institutions are moving money out of Pakistan, depleting foreign reserves, limiting imports of necessities.
The national debt has increased 52 percent since 2008, ($1,000/person). The economy is dependant on loans from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. It was weakened by the suspension of a yearly $150 billion fund last November after Pakistan closed U.S/ NATO supply lines to Afghanistan in retaliation for the killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers by U.S. Predator drones.
Obama Plots with Pakistan Rulers
Obama and Pakistani Prime Minister Galani have met as both governments seek to restore their mutually dependant relationship: the Pakistan ruling class gets U.S. military aid and development funds and the U.S has an essential ally for its imperialist designs in the region.
Meanwhile, U.S. drones continue to kill hundreds of Pakistani workers and their families and anger against the U.S. erupts in demonstrations nation-wide.
Rising Joblessness
The crisis is hitting workers hard: factory closings increasing unemployment, wage-cuts, unsafe working conditions, harassment of workers on the job, double oppression of women workers and exploitation of children. Five million workers lost their jobs in the last year. Nearly half of the labor force is unemployed or underemployed.
In Faisalabad, Pakistan’s industrial capital and third largest city, half a million workers have lost their jobs in the past two years as weekly power cuts halt production and bosses close factories, some moving to Bangladesh.
Because of the energy crisis, self-employed workers — tailors, masons, carpenters, mechanics and electricians and workers at CNG stations (Compressed Natural Gas) — cannot earn enough to support their families.
Women healthcare workers are denied contracts. In Sindh province they haven’t been paid for three months. Sindh teachers are denied status as permanent employees and therefore have no benefits or pensions.
People are dying from lack of basic health care. Suicide amongst the unemployed is becoming common. Recently a jobless man in a village close to Faisalabad, worried about feeding his family, committed suicide after killing his two daughters. A young man with a masters degree in business administration also committed suicide because of his failure to find a job over a year after graduating. His father had spent his life savings on his son’s education.
Poverty prevents four out of ten children from attending school. Eighty percent can’t get a proper education. Parents are forced to send them to work to help sustain the family. Ten million school-age children work collecting garbage.
Bosses’ Tools: Nationalism, Puppet Unions
The ruling class is using two weapons to combat workers’ militancy: nationalism to divide them and pro-boss puppet union misleaders to control them.
These unions are affiliated with the ruling party. They lead strikes but calm down workers’ anger with lies like “your demands have been accepted and you will be rid of these problems soon.” They help the ruling class to disperse crowds with tear gas and baton charges. They target activists for “disappearances,” imprisonment and assassinations.
Urdu is Pakistan’s national language, although the various regions have distinct languages. Until recently, for the most part, the population identified itself as Pakistani regardless of linguistic or territorial differences. Now the rulers are openly spreading nationalism, hoping to splinter the solidarity that workers in all sectors are developing. The President, one of the country’s wealthy landowners, with estates in Sindh province, joined in, calling for “the integrity of Sindh.” The Prime Minister announced that he would protect his language, Saraiki, by dissolving Punjab province if necessary.
Murderous riots broke out in Karachi (Pakistan’s largest city) during last year’s elections when both Sindhi and Urdu rival political parties employed thugs to attack workers, blaming other parties in order to influence workers to vote for their particular linguistic group.
To combat all this and give leadership to our class, PLP is always exposing the bosses’ divisive nationalism and the capitalist system as the cause of all the workers’ problems. We’re unmasking the dirty role of the phony trade union leadership by building the Party in the factories and workplaces and by spreading our communist literature.
Friends and members of the revolutionary international communist PLP are convinced that only worldwide communist revolution can uproot the profit system’s wars, exploitation, poverty and injustice. We’re confident as we try to convert the terror of this economic and political disaster into an opportunity to build a communist movement under the red banner of PLP.