‘The Left is not dead’

Karachi

The 21st Century is the century of the Left. 

With these words, Javed Qazi set the tone at the launch of the book ‘Apni Jang Jaari Rahegi’, authored by noted lawyer, Abid Hasan Minto, president of the Awami Workers Party, that was held at the Karachi Arts Council on Friday evening.

“We socialists should confer with the federal government to enforce our egalitarian policies,” he said. “Today, when there is no visible leftist activity, this book is most timely in outlining the history and the egalitarian ideals of the socialist movement.”

Dr Riaz Shaikh, head of Social Sciences at Syed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology (Szabist), mentioned the year 1979 when the capitalist world tried to stab socialism in the back by giving unlimited license to obscurantism.  

He said that in the United States today, every sphere of activity was based on lobbying and the interest system. Dr Shaikh said that an amount of 123 trillion dollars had been wasted in the capitalist world on lobbying international orders and anti-communist gimmicks.

Talking about the book, Dr Riaz Shaikh took a dig at feudalism and said that the so-called people’s democracy in the country was not actually a democracy of the people but a “democracy of the feudals”.

He said that Europe took around 600 years to achieve genuine democracy, but the US achieved the same objective in two centuries just because there was no feudalism there. He upheld Minto for advocating electoral reforms and the setting up of a welfare state.

Advocate Akhtar Hussain said that our struggle was against the exploitative education system of Lord McCaulay. He said that we needed unity of organisation to keep the socialist struggle going.

Dr Jaffer Ahmed, director of the Pakistan Study Centre at University of Karachi, said that socialist movements may not have reached their goals but that they had done a lot to bring about awareness. 

Referring to the upcoming private TV channels, he said that self-criticism was essential but constant criticism was uncalled for. He cited many books that had been published in this regard and mentioned ‘In search of solutions’ by Ghous Bakhsh Bizenjo. 

He said that the mind-boggling advances in science and technology would have to make us revise our views in the field of ideology. In his tribute to Minto, Advocate Muslim Shamim said that Minto was a genuine Marxist who analysed issues within the ambit of socialism. 

He said that the so-called demise of the USSR had not mitigated the struggle for socialism and against capitalist exploitation.

In his reply address, Minto said that it was happy augury that there were so many educated people present today which may not have been so in 1949-54. 

However, he said that all trade unions and workers’ movements were affiliated with the Communist Party of Pakistan. He cited the Toba Tek Singh peasants’ conference of 1970 which attracted hundreds of thousands of not only peasants but academicians, political leaders, and artistes, including Faiz Ahmed Faiz. 

This moot, he said, was instrumental in Bhutto’s land reforms of 1972 and later 1977. He said that the communist slogan was ‘workers of the world unite’. 

There, he said, was no mention of religion race or creed in the slogan. In this context, he mentioned the speech of the Quaid-e-Azam to the first legislative assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947 wherein the leader had said, “You all are free to go to your temples, your mosques, and other places of worship.”

Others who spoke were Yusuf Masti Khan, AWP’s Sindh president, who said that modern technology had facilitated the exploitative activities of the present-day capitalist.

Despite the over two-decades old slogan perpetrated by the West to the effect that socialism was dead, it was every bit there, when viewed in light of the global struggle for egalitarianism.