Volume 7, No. 2, February 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
Rebuilding the Left
May Day 2019 came and went this year with the usual labour rallies throughout the country. However, as has been the case for several years now, the rallies were relatively small (especially when compared to the mammoth rallies of the working class..
Rashed Rahman
Global capitalist imperialism has transformed its production structures/systems in such radical ways today that much of the earlier analyses relying on an examination of the aggregation of separate national economies and the trade and capital flows between them ..
Dr. Nicolas Martin
Akhtar, Aasim Sajjad. The Politics of Common Sense: State, Society and Culture in Pakistan (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
Dr Akhtar’s new book on Pakistan is an ambitious and ultimately a pessimistic one. Its central argument is that ever since Ziaul Haq, the Pakistani public sphere has been mostly devoid of any socially progressive impulses. Collective action, and class-based collective..
Precarious straits
Pakistan has suffered throughout its existence from ‘experiments’ foisted on the polity. The common thrust of these ‘experiments’ was to prevent the emergence and consolidation of, at a minimum, a democratic state and society..
Reza Ali
In our article How Urban is Pakistan published in 1999, we analysed the preliminary results of the 1998 census, particularly regarding urban population. We noted that city populations were higher than what official data was prepared to reflect, pointing to the issue of definition..
Babar Ayaz
The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) government came into power riding the high horse of an anti-corruption campaign and gave the impression that once they are in the government, they would offer solutions to all the problems, including the economic situation..
Dr. Saulat Nagi
Eric Hobsbawm, one of the greatest Marxist historians, described the crash of 2008 as a “sort of right-wing equivalent to the fall of the Berlin Wall” (Seumas Milne: The Revenge Of History). The crash, according to Joseph Stiglitz, forced the capitalist cat to clamber up a tree and..
The shape of things, extant and to come
Seven months into the tenure of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) government led by Prime Minister Imran Khan, Pakistan’s people have had any and all illusions about what this government would deliver stripped away in brutal fashion..
M Auwn Gurmani
It was late September 2018 when I along with some friends travelled from Lahore to Taunsa Barrage to attend the Sindh Saghar Sath (Indus People’s Tribunal) organised by Sindhu Bachao Tarla (Save Indus Plea), which is a small organisation of local fisherfolk..
Two Essays on Urbanisation in Pakistan
Reza Ali
In transitional societies, urbanisation and its key characteristics are major determinants of the political process. Independence, historically significant areas of poverty and social deprivation with their societal structures and explicit economic policies adopted by governments have contributed to the shaping of the urban systems and hierarchies in Pakistan..