A day with the IS Pak comrades

A day with the comrades, half a dozen of them doing a mini day school. Riaz starts with a talk on left parties. With the ever worse corruption of the ruling parties, there are attempts to bring the left together (*). Riaz makes good use of Gramsci’s distinction between ‘good sense’ ands ‘common sense’. This comes, perhaps from reading and translating into Urdu the ‘Rebel’s Guide to Gramsci’ which I’ve brought together with other books. (**) I speak on imperialism. Bangash talks about Afghanistan and the systematic sabotage by the Karzai government to cultivate relationships with could be called the moderate Taliban and at the same time to persecute any left or secular politics. Malalai Joya, former Afghan woman MP, is the best known example here. Afterwards we go for an ice cream - awful flavours apart from vanilla and get some much needed exercise walking round a small park.
Riaz makes lunch: curried chickpeas cooked in an earthenware pot and yoghurt salad. Rather good. Despite being a men only day school in a men only flat, it is all very civilised even if we only go to bed very late.

(*)(**) National Workers Party, the Workers and Peasants Party and the Communist Workers and Peasants Party.With further developments more recently:
"16 progressive parties discuss merger"

(**) By mid December, the Rebel’s Guide to Lenin has also been translated http://issuu.com/ispakistan/docs/rebelguidelenin-final2009?mode=a_p

Lecture on imperialism, meeting Shahid and the Anti Imperialist Front

The morning starts at the Federal Urdu University, in the middle of the city, a poor area. Many of the students are from poor backgrounds and the university itself looks neglected. Young Asghar, ISP comrade, who invited me to speak here three years ago when he was a student, is now on the staff and has invited me again. Same topic: imperialism, and a similar sized audience, about 80 - 100 students and staff. After almost endless introductions by senior staff and students and two sung recitations from the Koran, rather well done I thought, I get to speak for about half an hour, trying to speak clearly but not to compress the argument too much. Hard to tell how it goes down, everyone here is so very polite, but there follows a flood of questions, about Afghanistan, Palestine, etc, mostly very good questions delivered in clear English. So the session as a whole has a certain buzz. At the end I’m presented with ‘The Etiquettes of Life in Islam’ by the right wing, sexist, anti-American, Jamaat-e-Islami student group. Then off to the Directors office for tea and cakes and chat with staff. I’m given another book and flowers.
Now to meet Shahid Hussein at the Press Club. a left wing journalist who was tortured by the army when he was a student activist in the 70s but now, like many on the left who see the Taliban as the main enemy, has supported the army attacks on Swat earlier this year and currently South Waziristan because they see it as impossible to leave people under the Taliban whatever the price. In Swat, the army offensive, though it did break the Taliban, also caused many deaths, destroyed a lot of property and created 2 million refugees. Shahid does a short interview for his paper http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=211140
At five Shahid walks me round the corner to a nearby hotel. A meeting of the Anti Imperialist Front, eventually twenty people, discussing the follow up to a successful seminar they organised recently with a hundred people http://www.ustream.tv/channel/anti-imperialist-front-nov-06-seminar The meeting has a positive feel, much better than I expected.

Course writing, Mian Kayyum and LQM

With a group of young staff - Aiman, Farhat, Humaira and Rafiq, who are going to help deliver the courses in Karachi and Hyderabad, we write a course for activists in the ‘informal sector’. This includes over 90% of all workers in Pakistan, working without any formal contracts, usually in workplaces with no inspection or controls of any kind. For women this is often their own homes, the putting out system or cottage industry. We expect to have a mix of people, including some from the brick kilns, often bonded labourers, garment workers – often women working at home, power loom workers and activists working against child labour.



Last night I met Mian Qayyum, leader of the power loom workers in Faisalabad, called the Manchester of Pakistan, centre of Pakistan’s huge textile industry. He tells the story of the many thousand strong march to the HQ of the power company last December to protest the power cuts - load shedding as it is called here -which stop them, as piece rate workers, from earning a proper wage. They succeeded in forcing the minister to guarantee 20 hours power a day for the looms and 16 hours for domestic supplies. There were all kinds of threats and provocations on the march, including being shot at and, since then, attempts to buy off the leadership. The union, the Labour Qaumi Movement, LQM, has 20,000 members and is one of very few examples of workers in the so-called informal sector successfully organising.



P.S. A few days later, working out with Mian Qayyum the course we will do in Faisalabad in ten days time. I ask: ‘Having won recognition from the employer, pay rises etc, what does the LQM want next?’ He replies: ‘Political representation.’ Which is fine, quite logical. But it scares me, given what the political elite here does to those who threaten their power.

Awami Tehrik rally and IS Pakistan meeting

With a small group from PILER, we set off to Saddar, the old commercial centre of Karachi, where overlooked by some rare, fine stone buildings, there is a rally of a thousand greeting the People’s Movement’s marchers. It’s very colourful as there are lots of Sindhi women wearing bright reds and yellows and greens. Two of the speeches are by women. After it’s over, I’m briefly introduced to Palejo, the tall, elderly, austere leader. As I understand, they are on the radical wing of the Sindhi nationalist movement, fighting for provincial autonomy but not fighting for the full land reform which would mean confronting the Sindhi landlord class, often called ‘feudals’, a brutal bunch.
From the rally to the regular International Socialists branch meeting. Ten comrades. After the meeting proper we talk about Afghanistan and much else. Almost two before I get to bed. Fortunately these sessions are alcohol free. Two comrades had just come back from a few days in Quetta, capital of Balochistan, the largest and poorest province, always oppressed. There is an ongoing low intensity insurrection against government rule. Not a safe place to talk socialist politics I thought but it becomes clear I’m wrong. One of the new IS comrades worked for a couple of years in a street market in Moscow. We manage to converse a bit in Russian, his being better than mine.
People are fairly amazed to see me. Not surprisingly, foreigners seem to have largely stopped coming though most places aren’t any more violent than before. Peshawar, capital of NWFP, and Swat and Waziristan, NWFP, where the army is in occupation, definitely are but they seem to be the exception.
Everywhere people talk about the Taliban whose cruelty is extreme. There is a lot of support for the army attacks on the Taliban strongholds in Swat in early summer and now in Waziristan. But there is no support for the closer and closer relations with the US. On the contrary, there is a real fear of becoming a neo-colony. Quite a paradox as the attacks on Swat and Waziristan were effectively following orders from Hillary Clinton. The widespread fear of ‘Talibanisation’ is strange as the polls show consistently the great majority of Pakistanis have no time at all for the mullahs.

Arriving in Karachi and off to the Fisherfolk

I begin with an informal political briefing from Kutty, PILER’s (Pakistan Institute of Labour Education & Research) most senior member who is now working on the final draft of his memoirs covering all sixty two years since independence.

The situation is unsustainable, chaotic and sometimes extremely grim with the frequent bombings in Peshawar, capital of North West Frontier Province and other big cities in the Punjab including the capital, Islamabad. There is a palpable sense of crisis. Not for the first time but now with suicide bombs, a military offensive in South Waziristan, huge pressure from the US for Pakistan to be a “front-line” ally in what was called “the war of terror”, a low intensity war in Balochistan, Pakistan’s biggest province, food prices rocketing, a return to the clutches of the IMF, poverty and corruption, it looks worse than ever. A couple of months ago there was a national alert and Pakistan’s entire education system shut down for a week but, for the moment, life is as normal here as it gets. Karachi, despite it’s at some times hideous history of ethnic strife, is peaceful. The main political parties here have agreed they have too much to lose if they carry on in the old way of violent turf wars. Nevertheless there is real fear the violence in NWFP and elsewhere will spread here.

Mid afternoon, with Zulfiqar Shah, PILER joint director, and others, half a dozen of us set off in a minibus across Karachi to Ibrahim Hydari on the coast where we join the Pakistan Fisher Folk’s (PFF) celebration of International Fisheries Day. On the way we stop for twenty minutes to meet a couple of hundred marchers from the Sindhi People’s Movement, Awami Tehrik. They are sitting on the well watered lawn outside the elegant Aga Khan Hospital about to have lunch. They’ve been marching over six weeks across the province of Sindh, something like 700km. Everyone looks cheerful and not at all worn out by the trek. We are introduced to the men; some are old with leathery skins from life time working in the fields. Many are wearing the Sindhi shawl with intricate claret, white and black designs and the distinctive cap the topi. Walking 50 yards, we say hello to about eighty women also part of the march, sitting with their biryani lunch.

Another half hour and we get to Ibrahim Hydari, a fishing port - the smell gives it away. Well over a thousand are in a giant, carpeted, tent, sitting cross legged for three hours listening to speeches with occasional singing or dancing, a very loyal and disciplined audience, especially towards the end as various big wig politicians who we can see take the Fisher Folk seriously, speak at length. The PFF is a mass organisation with tens of thousands of members and a track record of mobilising in defence of the fishing communities, including mass sit downs to force the Rangers, paramilitary police, to stop stealing traditional fishing rights.

The Crisis of Working Class Representation

Most places these days the mood is of anger. Fighting the bullies we see the solidity of the post strikes, the all out strike of the Leeds refuse workers. Underlying these is the recognition that there is no one to look to for help, we have to do it ourselves.

So it makes sense to draw political conclusions about what is going on and argue that something has to be done about next year's general election. It's already late but the prospect of doing nothing is unacceptable. The old slogans 'Vote Labour without illusions, vote Labour and prepare to fight’ are simply not acceptable. We have to do something ourselves.

The conference title says it. There is a crisis of working class representation. Mark Serwotka's superb speech to the Manchester Industrial Relations Society last month spelt it out with particular clarity. Coming to his conclusion, he showed how the ‘Make Your Vote Count’ campaign, impressive as it has been in many ways, doesn't work if all three main parties give the same answers to the key questions. Mark's answer to this is to put it to the members of PCS that they vote on whether to put up their own candidates. Though it looks as if PCS is moving too slowly on this for an election that will have to be in May 2010 at the latest, the method of going to members, using the democracy of the union, is exactly what socialists should argue for.

But can the left get itself together? It isn't going to be done quickly. Labour has dominated working class politics for a century. It was 1891 when the Independent Labour Party was founded, 1900 when the Labour Representation Committee was established, 1906 when Labour made a break though in a general election, getting 29 MPs and calling itself 'The Labour Party' for the first time. And it was 1909 when the largest of the unions, a quarter of the TUC’s membership, the Miners' Federation finally decided to affiliate to Labour. The replacement of the Liberals by Labour as the main party to get working class votes at the ballot box took 20 years.

Today’s world is very different. Building a left alternative to Labour is a huge task and there will be many reverses on the way. Five years ago we thought we had made a solid start with Respect. Today it looks very uncertain whether there will be any nationally visible set of candidates putting a left alternative to Labour. Some things, though, don't seem too difficult. Judging by what people were saying at the conference, it may not be too hard to write the manifesto: no to war and privatisation, make the bankers pay. The name might be a problem. While there were some at the conference who wanted to argue that the EU should be a central target of any socialist campaign and hence the first - and most quoted half - of the name 'No2EU, Yes to democracy', the majority of speakers didn't mention the EU.

To put this alternative together is the task and it looks too big in the time available. As Joe Higgins from Dublin explained, you need six months. The degree of unity, the willingness to make real commitments of time and money, the numbers involved will make a real difference. Can we achieve these in time? If we move quick enough, in Manchester and Salford, it should be possible to have campaigns against Kaufman and Blears. From the conference, it was clear that local groups are getting together in quite a number of places. At a guess, I think we might have 30 or 40 candidates with good campaigns. Not as good as we want, but not the worst start. It has to be done. If not us, then who? If not now, then when?