Daily Times

On December 1, 1967, exactly 46 years ago, the founding conference of the newly formed Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) concluded with elation and optimism amongst the few hundred delegates who had gathered from all across the country. They defied all odds to reach a political assembly in their quest for a socialist revolution in Pakistan. Within weeks, this message of a socialist transformation reverberated throughout the country. The founding documents were unambiguous about the aims and the intentions of the new party. They clearly worded what the participants aspired to: “The ultimate objective of the party’s policy is the attainment of a classless society that is only possible through socialism in our times.”

Alas, almost half a century later, the PPP is not even a shadow of the revolutionary ideals its founders had envisaged. After decades of drifting away from the party’s socialist programme, the leadership has brought the party to this sorry state of affairs through their policies of ‘pragmatism’ expressed in the doctrine of ‘reconciliation’. These class collaborationist policies are not just the rejection of the party’s founding principles and ideology but, in reality, it was the refutation of Bhutto’s last testament in which he wrote from his death cell: “The class struggle is irreconcilable and that it must result in the victory of one class over the other. Obviously, whatever the temporary setbacks, the struggle can lead only to the victory of one class. This is the writing on the wall.”

Although the PPP was never a Bolshevik Leninist party, which could be a state within the state to replace it with a network of hardened and trained Marxist cadres, yet a vast majority of workers and youth that had rallied around the socialist programme did have such aspirations. The meteoric rise of the PPP and Z A Bhutto as the personification of the revolutionary upheaval in the late 1960s was a generalised phenomenon that swept across the neo-colonial world. In the absence of a party like the Bolsheviks, the masses came out into the arena of history to overthrow and transform capitalism, which was pulverising society. The traditional ‘communist’ parties failed to come up to the revolutionary challenges posed by these mass uprisings in those heady days.

In the initial days, a large number of left activists tried to organise the PPP on a revolutionary basis but with the dynamics of the movement and its sheer pace there was no time for this. In a period of relative lull, no serious efforts were made to forge a subjective factor that could direct and organise the movement on a revolutionary path. With diverse ideologies, from Maoism to left reformism of these activists and intellectuals who were in the leadership of the PPP, it was simply not possible to build a united party based on ideological unanimity. At least socialism was the symbolic expression that kept these diverse tendencies within the loose structures of the PPP. Without a socialist alternative it became a mass tradition of the toiling classes of Pakistan. However, without an organisational structure of democratic centralism and the relative primitiveness of the political culture in society, the role of the individual became so domineering that the word of the leader almost became the party policy. It was the ideological and organisational weakness of the PPP that it came into government in a bourgeois state. Most left leaders in the party must have read Lenin’s State and Revolution but when it came to its application in practice, they did not have a clue and went along with the flow.

However, due to the pressures of the revolutionary ferment, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s first PPP government introduced radical reforms in health, education and other sectors, along with vast nationalisation. Pakistani capitalism had no capacity for such reforms. The state bureaucracy in connivance with the national bourgeoisie and imperialism derailed these. This episode once again proved that even the basic tasks of the national democratic revolution cannot be carried out by the bourgeoisie of ex-colonial countries. The PPP government was deposed by a military coup in 1977 and Bhutto was assassinated on the gallows by the vicious Zia dictatorship at the behest of US imperialism. This was the revenge of the bourgeoisie and the state against the revolution of 1968-69.

Ever since, the pampered and exalted PPP leaders have been veering the party more and more to the right. They capitulated to imperialism and have tried to make the PPP a party of the status quo, subservient to the state. The state and the ruling elites have used the PPP time and again whenever they were faced with an impending mass revolt. The masses cannot wait for the creation of a revolutionary party when they enter mass movements. Without the subjective factor, such revolutions are taken over by accidental elements. As the tide of mass upheaval ebbs, the masses in their despair still have hopes in the political trend that was the unifying platform of the class struggle in stormy events. That is how mass traditions develop and can last for generations.

In Pakistan, this is a unique situation where the present PPP, its leadership, its structures and its politics are bourgeois and feudal, yet it has remained the tradition of the oppressed masses. The vital question is: how far and till when will the masses cling to their orientation towards the PPP? In reality, the PPP is less of a political party and more of a historical phenomenon. Election results in no way decide the fate of mass traditions. These are the reflections of the mass moods at a particular moment in time. The PPP lost the 1997 elections even more adversely than the results of the May 2013 elections. Yet it came back to power in 2008. Its five-year rule created immense disillusionment and this was the reason for the right-wing victory under the Sharifs.

The masses are still in a state of relative lull. The working class is atomised and the unions are weak and in disarray. This situation cannot last long. The resurgence of the class struggle is inevitable in a class society where exploitation and oppression have reached unprecedented levels. The real question is that once the mass revolt erupts, what political platform will it take to? The resurgence of the PPP cannot be ruled out, as there is no mass left alternative on the horizon. Sprouting artificial parties without the linkage to the level of mass consciousness and their orientation, especially in a period of stagnation, is futile and absurd. Paradoxically, mass traditions can also collapse but that will only be proved once the masses begin to move. Hence, it is decisive from a revolutionary perspective, in Lenin’s words, “to work patiently wherever the masses are to be found”.

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail.com