Pakistan: Workers Enraged over Bosses’ Nationalist Killing Machine

The hell of capitalism is intensifying for the working class of Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands of workers are demonstrating in the streets every day, opposing the bosses’ stranglehold on their lives. They are struggling against massive unemployment which has risen 43 percent since 1999. About 75% of the country’s population of 180 million — 6th largest on earth — earns no more than $2 a day. While Pakistan has the 7th largest standing army in the world and a nuclear arsenal, 110 million people are hard-pressed to even eat two meals a day.

Of its ten million industrial workers, half are controlled by fake, essentially company unions, puppets of the bosses while the other half are excluded from worker-led unions altogether. Eighteen million farm workers are completely unorganized. Child labor is spreading. There is no electricity from 14 to 22 hours a day and no natural gas for two to three days a week.

Industries are closing down and fleeing to even lower-wage levels in Bangladesh. Inflationary prices of essential commodities have climbed from between 300 to 500 percent.

Target Women

Women, who comprise half the population, are targeted for killing in the name of “honor” by the bosses’ religious and cultural customs and face acid attacks, torture, gang rape, forced marriages and forced prostitution. Fifty percent are physically abused, 15 percent sexually and 90 percent psychologically.

Kiln workers (brick producers) have no rights at all. Every family member is forced to work 12 to 18 hours a day and suffer virtual slavery, sold by one owner to another.

Whenever workers strike against many of these horrific conditions, to divert their struggle, the bosses raise non-issues such as “national security” or opening or closing NATO supply routes, as well as divide workers on a nationalist basis. 

Recently the government began a police operation, supposedly against target killers, gang warriors and ethnic/religious/nationalist terrorists. But they started it in Liyari, a poor working-class neighborhood. This reign of terror continued for ten days but the people fought back, strongly resisting the police oppression, bringing the operation to a halt. Now the police cannot even enter the neighborhood. 

Bosses Profit on Workers’ Backs

The Pakistani economy is crumbling and is becoming increasingly dependent on the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the USAID and Coalition Support Fund to run its murderous capitalist system. Its domestic debt is in the hundreds of billions, has the lowest foreign investment in 60 years and the highest inflation rates, all leading to Pakistan’s ruling class trying to sustain itself by intensifying the exploitation of the working class. Workers are forced to sell their children and body organs to escape a life of hunger and poverty and unfortunately many are driven to suicide.

Corruption, terrorism, ethnic cleansing and nepotism prevail on the soil of Pakistan while the bosses push a federal budget that only benefits the rich. A 20 percent “increase” in public-sector salaries is a wage-cut in the teeth of 300 percent inflation. It’s even worse for private-sector workers who do not even receive the government-announced minimum wage.

A Dictatorship of the Ruling Class

Various bosses’ electoral parties vie for power in order to grab more profit for each. Their elections use the working masses in the name of democracy but actually establish a dictatorship of the ruling class that exploits the working class even more vigorously. In several provinces the bosses are using nationalism as a major tool to divide our class in order to prevent rebellion:

   • Baluchistan — The rulers provoked an insurgency in which thousands of workers have been killed and/or “disappeared. This province is Pakistan’s largest in area, has immense resources and is of great geo-strategic importance for international imperialists, sharing borders with Iran and Afghanistan and has a newly built port. Since the fundamentalists’ presence is relatively low and the majority of people have a progressive outlook, the bosses are fueling the fire of nationalism to divide them.

   • Punjab — Pakistan’s most populous province will be divided by creating a new Saraiki province which has large numbers of extremist and fundamentalist groups, leading to even more destruction and chaos and badly affecting the country’s crumbling economy.

   • Sindh — This is Pakistan’s second largest in population. In the last five months, 880 people have been killed in Karachi, the province’s largest city. This is an outgrowth of rivalry between various ruling political parties that are trying to seize control of different parts of the city. They represent militant groups involved in land-grabbing, weapons dealing, drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping and ransom.

These bosses provoked a war between the Sindhi and Urdu-speaking populations. Nationalist parties are killing each other’s working-class activists. Many are losing their lives in an unholy combat between different ethnic groups. Karachi is a port city used by NATO to ship supplies. Interestingly, 7,000 containers have disappeared here.

   • Kyber Pukhtoonkhawa — Nationalism is at the root of fighting between two large ethnic groups, the Pukhtoons and Hazarawals. It suffers from terrorist attacks as well as U.S. drone bombings. The province borders Afghanistan and China and is a battleground for the “war against terror.” It is a safe haven for various terrorist groups fighting for or against U.S. imperialism, especially in the FATA territory.

Pakistan has fast become a laboratory for nationalism, racism, fundamentalism and sexism, the results of which can be applied worldwide. But it also provides increasing opportunities to build a base for PLP everywhere — in the factories, farms, offices, campuses, villages, kilns, among women and wage workers. The Party is striving to become more and more involved in class struggles in these areas, organizing PL clubs.

Amid this poverty, injustice, exploitation, mass unemployment and gender discrimination, only a PLP-led international communist revolution can free the working class from these capitalist evils.