Volume 7, No. 1, January 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
Much of contemporary literature on Third World revolutions is focused on the role of the peasantry in such upheavals. It examines the specific grievances and motivations for peasant rebellion and support for revolutionary guerrilla movements. The received wisdom from these theoretical interventions is that certain types (classes?) of peasants, not always the poorest, are more willing and/or able to rebel. Although this literature on peasants and revolution has deepened our understanding of agrarian production relations and the peasantry’s political outlook derived from historically received culture and belief systems, it has tended to ignore two of the critical factors in the success of Third World revolutionary struggles, as historical precedent and example indicates. One, no purely peasantry-based revolutionary struggle has ever achieved victory without the formation of broad revolutionary coalitions consisting, apart from the revolutionary sections (classes) of the peasantry, other oppressed classes (e.g. workers, the petty bourgeoisie), genders (e.g. women), national/ethnic and religious minorities, and the revolutionary sections of the intelligentsia (which tend to be drawn from the elite and middle classes’ educated elements). Second, the differing vulnerability of disparate regimes to overthrow by such broad revolutionary coalitions (of the oppressed).
Although the peasantry has been as central to most Third World insurgencies as it was to the classical social revolutions (e.g. the English, French and American bourgeois revolutions), the characterization of the former as peasant wars or agrarian revolutions, which sometimes gets interpreted (wrongly) as homogeneous peasant communities rebelling spontaneously, has tended to obscure the role of other classes and actors in these struggles. Revolutionary upsurges and seizures of power are often (if not usually) carried out by coalitions, alliances, or conjunctures of struggle that cut across the divide between rural and urban areas and among different classes and ethnic/national groups. By and large, the literature emphasizing the role of the peasantry in Third World revolutions tends to ignore the role of professional revolutionary organisations/parties, whose composition tends to be largely middle class (the educated element). This role is a necessary one, based on Marxist theory and the practical experience of revolutions. In pre-revolutionary France, Russia and Mexico, the peasants lived in relatively autonomous and solitary (self-contained) villages. In these cases the autonomous village dwellers proved capable of mounting a successful revolution. Barring such examples, rural communities usually lack the political consciousness and organizational wherewithal to mount rebellions in the absence of outside cadres who bring these missing ingredients into the otherwise undisturbed existence of the village.
In the Subcontinent too, the village in our history was self-contained and autonomous, except at the point where it paid taxes and revenue to the sovereign in our version of the Asiatic mode of production. Neither in the contemporary states of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, etc., nor in large parts of the Third World today can such conditions be found. The autonomous village has long ago, during colonial times to begin with, accelerating after Independence, been linked with the cities and the market. Self-sufficient production for use (cultivation integrated with handicrafts), with a small surplus available for trade with neighbouring villages/communities, which was the overriding characteristic of our ancient, traditional village existence, has long ago passed into the annals of historiography. What has replaced it is the present moment of our rural areas being fully linked with the market, and the increasing transformation of tenant cultivation into capitalist farming by big landholders. This has spawned a larger (and growing) rural proletariat, working on daily (or even seasonal, e.g. harvest time) wages. Agriculture in Pakistan (as in most of South Asia) is being transformed before our very eyes by the advent of modern mechanized farming into its capitalist avatar. So while this incremental transformation along capitalist lines in agriculture has profound implications for revolutionary struggles, it implies a re-examination of the possibility of rural based guerrilla warfare. While this strategy is still feasible in remote tribal areas where the writ of the state is not so strong, it needs reformulation in peasant areas.
Professional revolutionaries in the Third World in the past (post WWII) revolutionary struggles have been successful to the extent they were able to work with various sorts (classes) of rural folk. This implies, at the present conjuncture, winning the support not just of poor or middle peasants, but also of landless and migrant labourers, rural artisans, rich peasants, and even, to the extent possible, landlords. Such a rural coalition nevertheless cannot afford to ignore the urban areas, mobilizing and organizing the working class, students, women, professionals, religious minorities, the urban poor and, again, to the extent possible, business people. In Pakistan, such a broad-based coalition faces the dictatorial rule of the military behind a façade of civilian rule composed of the collaborator political class (with those out of favour at a particular moment vying for the favours of the military to return to power). Despite the fact that about 60 percent of Pakistan’s population is still rural, the trend towards accelerating urbanization is manifest.
How then, are professional revolutionaries (and their parties) to put together such a broad-based coalition? Based on historical experience, such revolutionary coalitions tend to form around pre-existing nationalist, progressive discourses that make the case for the legitimacy of resistance to tyranny and, critically, are capable of aggregating a broad array of classes and strata. Nationalism in particular has proved to be a more inclusive and powerful force for revolutionary mobilisation than class struggle alone. Revolutionaries have fared best where they have been able to harness nationalist sentiments. This has particular resonance in Pakistan, a multi-national state in which the military-bureaucratic oligarchy and its satraps in the political class cling to a narrative of denial of the existence of multiple nationalities or, at best, pay lip service to their rights in the garb of provincial autonomy while in practice hollowing it out to the extent of forging a narrative of a single nation (Pakistan) with a single national language (Urdu) and a single faith (Islam). Ground reality is the opposite, exemplified by the existence of historically received multi-nationalities, Punjabi, Pashtun, Sindhi, Baloch, to name the four most prominent, while other ethnic, nationalist groups exist in the periphery (e.g. Seraiki, Hazara, etc.). Ironically, Marxist revolutionaries in the Third World have been most successful when they did not emphasise class struggle alone but stressed instead the goal of national liberation (anti-imperialist), or when they mobilized different sections of the people through the selective use of nationalist and class appeals.
It should be underlined that revolutionary movements are much more than simply ideological movements. They have won broad popular support by establishing liberated areas relatively secure from attack by the incumbent regime, whose repressive actions could ensure popular support for armed revolutionaries even if they are only able to provide little more than a modicum of protection. Such liberated areas allow the revolutionaries to provide education, health services, land reform, etc. The big looming question today in countries such as Pakistan is whether such liberated areas, relatively beyond the control of the state, are possible. If not, what would be the form and mode of functioning of the armed revolutionary mini-state or guerrilla government?
Third world activists schooled in classical Marxist theory, and this certainly applies (with a few honourable exceptions) to Pakistan, have more often than not focused on organizing the urban working class, however small, and never come even close to contemplating armed struggle, even in the face of extremely repressive regimes. With the rollback if not defeat of the once mighty working class movement, this has left such orthodox Marxists floundering in confusion and disillusionment. Especially after the shock of the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern European socialism in 1989-91, the historic defeat left most orthodox Marxist groups struggling to cope with the challenge of reformulating their ideological, theoretical, practical path. That remains the overwhelming task even today.
(To be continued)
The writer is the Editor, Pakistan Monthly Review (PMR).