LAHORE
A new district committee was elected at the second district congress of Awami Workers Party on Sunday.
According to a press release, AWP president Abid Hassan Minto, Punjab President Aasim Sajjad Akhtar and General Secretary Farooq Tariq attended the event. The top leadership of the AWP extended their congratulations and support to the newly-elected district leadership of AWP Lahore. In their remarks, AWP leaders lauded the party’s commitment to democracy in the country.
They said this commitment started with internal democracy within party structures. In his keynote address, AWP President Abid Hassan Minto said the congress had brought together the old and the new generation of left-wing political workers.
Addressing the younger generation of political workers, he said they should be clear about the aims and objectives of the party because they would be taking care of the day-to-day activities involving party organisation and public mobilisation about party’s manifesto. He said classical leftist politics considered class contradictions as the primary contradiction in the society. “With time, new issues and contradictions associated with them have emerged in the capitalist society that must be integrated into leftist politics in the 21st century,” he said.
“The party’s manifesto has given equal due importance to gender and environmental contradictions.” He also spoke on the dictatorship of the proletariat and the emerging discourse in the left on socialist democracy. “Party workers must figure out the place of electoral democracy in their politics,” he said.
He said the global capitalist system in the world today is still based on Western Europe and North America. “Countries in the global south were not the driving force behind this system,” he said. He discussed conflicts between countries with communist parties in power as well as factional struggles in the Pakistani left.
“Why has it been so different to unite the left, if unlike bourgeois parties the communists were not concerned with personal interests and motives?” he said. Addressing the new committee, he said, “It is an essential part of your work to reach out to leftists associated with other political organisations, to listen to their concerns over the party’s manifesto and try to settle these concerns.” he recalled that Lahore had once been integral to leftist political struggle in the country.
“Though there were just 500 workers in the Communist Party at that time, workers had developed a close working relationship with the labour movement through trade unions,” he said. He lamented that the relationship between the party and the trade unions in the city was not characterised by the same passion and solidarity.
On Anjuman Mazareen Punjab, he said it was the duty of the party to develop organic links with the movement. He said party activists had been engaging with the movement for quite some time now but they had yet to be successful in cultivating a breed of political workers in the movement who could also identify with the party’s manifesto and political struggle.
He also urged the new committee to be conscious of cultural sensibilities of the working people and their movements to be able to develop such organic linkages with them. Earlier, former AWP Lahore president Zahid Pervez presented a performance report of the outgoing committee during its two-year tenure to the house.
“The AWP, when it was formed in 2012, was a coalition of three left groups of the country. In the first congress, efforts were made to consolidate representatives of these groups in the district party,” he said. “Soon, we discovered that several leaders were unwilling to adhere to the constitution of the AWP.” Zahid Pervez discussed the problems faced by the committee in the early phase of party-building.