Volume 7, No. 3, March 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
From 1968 to 1978, the Mazdoor Kisan Party (MKP) was arguably Pakistan’s “largest and most militant party with a Marxist orientation.”1 The party led the country’s most effective peasant rebellion, which erupted in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP or Frontier, now called Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) in 1970, resulting in de facto land and tenancy reforms, and subsequently expanded to South Punjab, where it confronted some of Pakistan’s largest and most notorious landlords. MKP-connected cadres also organised in key industrial areas in cities like Karachi, Faisalabad and Swat. We build on recent studies of the MKP by focusing on how party members grappled with Marxist theory to contend with the specificity of their conditions and in doing so both drew on and contributed to a worldly Marxism.2
By ‘worldly Marxism’, we identify a larger project to construct a Marxism that is neither Eurocentric nor simply postcolonial. Rather, it is a Marxism that is constantly renewed as it exceeds its origins in Europe to extend across settler colonies, (post)colonies and metropoles. As the Lebanese communist Mahdi Amel put it, while “the main Marxist conceptual apparatus [is]…a direct outcome of a specifically western historical experience,”3 the “very process of theoretically understanding” postcolonial reality necessitated a critique of “pre-formed” Marxist thought.4 This critique reinvents Marxist theory and contributes to Marxism’s universalisation. Even as early as the 1940s and 1950s, communists in South Asia, like Indian Dalit R B More, expressed uneasiness with how the region’s official communist parties adapted categories and strategies from European parties that did not adequately align with local realities. For More, the Communist Party of India failed to understand how class was coconstituted by caste and, as such, how anti-caste struggles were central to class struggle in India.5 As we show below, the founders of the MKP had an analogous critique of communist orthodoxy, insisting that “the revolution for which they were striving would be neither like Peking nor like Moscow, but purely Pakistani.”6 By the 1960s and 1970s, the MKP joined the Naxalites in India,7 militant intellectuals in the Arab world,8 indigenous activists in North America,9 Black radicals in the US,10 Maoists in France11 and revolutionaries in Cuba,12 among others, to create a worldly Marxist theory and practice, one that acquired universal significance precisely through its attention to particular contexts.
Importantly, the worldly Marxism of the time was grounded in producing theory that was appropriate to the political tasks of anti-imperialism. As Amel argued, revolting against postcolonial underdevelopment necessitated a theoretical critique of underdevelopment.13 Worldly Marxism thus entails theorising in the conjuncture, i.e., from a particular historical moment that poses a set of political problems.14 Rather than a complete and comprehensive synthesis, conjunctural theorising involves arranging multiple conceptual elements to clarify and understand the political task at hand. Not simply a philosophy, an economic or sociological theory, nor a historical method, worldly Marxism ultimately names that assembly of theoretical and practical tools required to “realise an egalitarian, rational figure of collective organisation for which the name is ‘communism’.”15
Worldly Marxism was also comparative, as political actors retheorised Marxism in explicit global dialogue. MKP members, for example, drew on the experiences of Chinese, Vietnamese and Indian (specifically, Naxalite) revolutionaries, as well as Indian modes of production debates (as we discuss below). Scholars like Aijaz Ahmad intervened in their debates and helped edit Urdu translations of the works of African revolutionaries like Amilcar Cabral. Meanwhile, some of the MKP’s writings were translated into English and circulated through journals like Pakistan Forum and the Journal of Contemporary Asia.16 Similar engagement was in evidence when indigenous activists allied with Third World Maoists in the belief that land reclamation was revolutionary,17 or when the Black Panther Party aligned with former colonised countries like Algeria on the theoretical understanding that African American communities, too, were a colony.18 We flag and group under the banner of worldly Marxism these revolutionary experiments, conducted for local conditions but in global dialogue. Ultimately, we show how the worldly Marxism of the 1960s and 1970s used its own tools to critique its limits and elaborate a Marxism always-in-the-making.
We situate the MKP’s theoretical production in the framework of such a worldly Marxism. The party considered the political task of its conjuncture to be the achievement of a People’s Democratic Revolution (which we elaborate on later). As the party organised workers and peasants, who had their own epistemologies and practices, it faced new questions that necessitated renewing Marxist theory for postcolonial realities. Whereas recent scholarship on postcolonial Marxisms focuses on the writings of intellectuals,19 we follow Faye V Harrison’s approach, which “shift[s] from a valorization of theory as textualised product to ‘theorising’ as a form of creative work performed in diverse dialogical contexts.”20 Central to this approach is the “concept of praxis”,21 which emphasises how theory is both immanent to and coconstitutive of practice. We pursue such an approach by supplementing written texts, drawn from previously unexplored state and party archives, with ethnography and oral history, conducted over a combined 36 months of fieldwork. We show how the dialogical and practical encounter of MKP leaders with workers and peasants opened up new theoretical possibilities that were not always written. While the party pursued some of these possibilities with greater rigour over others, they nonetheless connected the concrete struggles of workers and peasants in Pakistan to the global debates of a worldly Marxism.
In the following sections, we discuss how the MKP inhabited and developed this worldly Marxism through its engagement with agrarian transitions, religion and gender in two peripheral regions of Pakistan: the Frontier and South Punjab. As the party confronted these three issues, it led to theoretical openings for a multilineal, vernacularised and intersectional Marxism.22 In the first section, we explain why the MKP broke from previous communist practice to elaborate a Marxism specific to Pakistani conditions. The party thus focused on building a united front of workers and peasants in the countryside, but realised that doing so entailed confronting class and caste-like contradictions within the alliance. In the second section, we show how the party’s success in achieving land and tenancy reforms in parts of the Frontier enabled peasant upward mobility and a spatially uneven intensification of capitalism, sparking debates about agrarian transition out of “semi-feudalism.”23 Against teleological understandings of capitalist development, the party became open to the possibility of multiple paths of capitalist development, as well as multilineal logics of liberation, thus participating in global debates about transition that continue to this day.24 In the third section, we show how the party’s interaction with Islam, theoretically and in everyday practice, opened up the possibility for Marxism’s articulation with non-western ideologies and theories. In the fourth section, we consider how the MKP’s engagement with gender points to the contradictions of its worldly Marxism.25 In the 1970s conjuncture, the party leadership deprioritised gender because they believed concessions to patriarchy were necessary for the party’s political survival. Still, the MKP’s orientation to worldly Marxism did lay the foundation for some of its leaders to, in a different conjuncture, confront patriarchy more concertedly.
The Pakistani Marxism of the MKP
The MKP inhabited a worldly Marxism by practicing a specifically Pakistani Marxism. The party emerged as a critique of Marxisms that privileged the historical agency of the industrial proletariat and bourgeoisie in Third World anti-imperialist struggles. Instead, the party argued “that the People’s Democracy [in Pakistan] is neither bourgeois democracy, meaning a republic under bourgeois dictatorship, nor is it socialism, meaning a republic under proletarian dictatorship.”26 The People’s Democratic Revolution involved building a “multi-class united front” based on a worker-peasant alliance, supported by patriotic and revolutionary middle classes, in order to liberate the country from semi-feudalism and imperialism as a prerequisite to establishing socialism. Rather than focusing predominantly on the industrial proletariat, the party turned to the rural majority and a politics of land-to-the-tiller, most spectacularly in NWFP. Party activists learned that, despite common opposition to landlords, worker-peasant solidarity could not be assumed, but had to be sutured together by confronting class and caste-like contradictions. Ironically, the success of this solidarity in defeating landlordism in the Frontier led to the alliance unravelling as upwardly mobile tenants no longer saw its utility and returned to discriminatory, anti-landless practices. As we explore in the next section, this unravelling set the stage for the MKP’s debate on multilineal, regionally specific paths of capitalist development.
The MKP emerged from a critique of the theory and practice of the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP, which operated officially from 1948 to 1954). Reflecting the CPP leadership’s priorities, a recent literature has unearthed the party’s activities in urban Pakistan, its engagement with the state and national culture, and its literary output through figures associated with the Progressive Writers’ Association.27 MKP founders, on the other hand, charted a distinctive theoretical and practical course from the CPP in three respects. First, as early as 1948, Eric Cyprian, a member of the CPP and later MKP founder who was inspired by the Chinese experience, argued that communists should focus more on the peasantry rather than the urban proletariat because the former were the “basis from which the most decisive blows can be struck at the ruling class.”28 Second, by focusing on the peasantry, Cyprian’s group also distanced themselves from prevailing communist practices of aligning with ‘progressive’ landlords and capitalists, whether in the mainstream Muslim League or in regional ethno-nationalist parties. The point, instead, was to organise “all the exploited sections of the people” under communist leadership, including those in peripheral parts of the country.29 Third, following this arc, MKP founders were critical of the elite literary focus of the CPP leadership, whom they understood as “culturally alienated from the people of the soil”,30 and sought instead to build a party oriented to the cultures and languages of the masses. Because the CPP was banned in 1954, these critiques could not be put into practice, and most communists sought refuge in the National Awami Party (NAP), which was an alliance between radicals and ethno-nationalist landlords. Nevertheless, by the early 1960s, communists influenced by Cyprian’s critiques began to coalesce into a ‘China-influenced’ consultative group in the NAP.
Indeed, over a decade later, Cyprian’s critiques informed the emergence of the MKP as a distinct political organisation. In the context of a popular movement that deposed military ruler Ayub Khan in 1969 and a sharpening of strategic splits between the Chinese- and Soviet-aligned communist parties, communists in Pakistan raised questions about class alliances and state power. As early as 1965, Major (retired) Ishaq Muhammad, a key figure in the NAP and a founder of the MKP, argued that the Soviet Union was compromising with Third World capitalists in struggling against western imperialism. Instead, he agreed with the Chinese Communist Party to argue that the “revolution must be led by the working class, supported by the great power of the peasantry, to travel the path of People’s Democratic Revolution and then establish a socialist system.”31 In the Frontier, proponents of the Chinese line, notably lawyer Muhammad Afzal Bangash, oriented NAP communists to work in the Frontier Kisan (Peasant) Committee from 1963 to 1968. Their work among tenants, particularly in the Peshawar valley, increasingly threatened the landlords, who allied with communist proponents of the Soviet line to encourage the expulsion of the ‘Maoists’ from the NAP. Thus, on May 1, 1968, led by Bangash and the lawyer Sher Ali Bacha, the erstwhile members of the Kisan Committee constituted a new political party, named the Mazdoor Kisan Party, which shifted from reticent collaboration to open confrontation with the landlords of the Frontier. Emerging student radicals like Imtiaz Alam soon joined the MKP, and led the expansion of the party to South Punjab, where peasants were also confronting the region’s ‘feudal’ landlords.
However, the MKP activists in the Frontier learned that, notwithstanding common strugles against the landlords, worker-peasant alliances were not given, but rather had to be sutured together by confronting class and caste-like contradictions. Tenants and agricultural labourers alike faced similar exactions from landlords – “begar [unpaid labour], [forced] guard duty, wedding taxes, evictions, extortion, coercion and tyranny, disrespect and desecration.”32 Indeed, until recently many of the agricultural labourers had been tenants, evicted because Green Revolution and mechanisation technologies encouraged landowners to manage the lands themselves. But despite facing landlord exploitation, tenants were structurally superordinate to labourers: tenants paid them low daily wages, confiscated the manure of cattle that labourers reared, took begar from them, and could even evict labourers from their homesteads located on lands leased by tenants. As Inzar Gul, an elder whose family used to be landless, put it in an interview, “If we were with the landlord, he would exploit us, and when the tenants came, they exploited us too.” These class distinctions were coconstituted by caste-like practices: in 1972, MKP president Major Ishaq noted in a speech: “I heard today that when the peasants fasted in memory of the martyrs of [the movement], farm labourers were not allowed to fast. I want to warn you that if you do not stop [your own] oppression, you will never be able to eradicate oppression.”33 The rural united front, therefore, had to be constructed by confronting these class and caste-like contradictions.
The MKP was able to negotiate a contingent alliance, not only because tenants and labourers had a common enemy in the landlords, but also because the tenants’ defence against evictions required the physical support of landless labourers. For example, in the village Ameerabad, only seven families out of 113 possessed land in 1968, while the remainder had been ejected.34 Landlords wanted to eject the remaining seven families but could not overcome the unity of the village community and so sought to create divisions by highlighting the low wages tenants paid to their labourers. To maintain the united front, the MKP negotiated labourers’ wage increases and rights over manure, as well as security of homesteads.35 The MKP’s open and collective meetings also undermined the cultural subordination of labourers, who could raise complaints about tenants. Soon, labourers demanded more than better wages and treatment, and wanted land. The MKP negotiated certain mechanisms of land redistribution; e.g., a tenant who possessed four to six acres was expected to give half an acre to a labourer.36 Henceforth, in any conflict with landlords, “the peasants and workers would collectively deal with [them]. The peasants also agreed in no uncertain terms that if the revolution succeeds, the land will again be redistributed and this time it will be an equal distribution.”37
However, the party’s line of ‘land-to-the-tiller’ inadvertently precluded egalitarian redistribution, exacerbating tensions within the worker-peasant alliance, especially as tenants found alternative mechanisms to secure their possession. By 1973, after three years of MKP-led strugle, landlords in the Frontier had been shaken, changing the balance of forces in the countryside. In large areas, especially northern Hashtnagar and Malakand, the movement had put an end to various forms of landlord dominance. Here, many tenants had not paid rent for three years, hanging on to the land through sheer force with the support of landless labourers. By November 1972, many richer peasants began negotiating secret deals with landlords, anxious about having to repay three years of unpaid rents if the movement ultimately failed.38 This left a more numerous poor peasantry vulnerable and undermined peasant unity.
When the Pakistan People’s Party-backed government took over the province in 1973 and implemented a ban on ejectments, tenants no longer had an incentive to concede to labourers. Farm labourers petitioned ‘Party Elders’, complaining that well-to-do peasants were no longer heeding the party’s line: “Although they agree with the rights of farm labourers, they keep delaying implementation in the same way that courts keep adjourning for later dates.”39 These better-off peasants were also increasing their overtures to mainstream parties, particularly the Pakistan People’s Party. MKP general secretary Sher Ali Bacha thus wrote: “One landlord was finished, but a hundred small landlords took birth and lost interest in the peasant movement.”40 He was also concerned that rich peasants were leveraging their dominant position in MKP units to extract more surplus from landless labourers. These proto-capitalist peasants were undermining the united front and, given their leading role, bringing the movement to a rolling lull. Thus, the very success of workers and peasants in defeating landlordism led to their alliance unravelling as upwardly mobile tenants no longer saw its utility and returned to discriminatory, anti-landless practices.
Agrarian Transitions and Multilineal Marxism
The slowdown in the Frontier movement sparked a debate in the party over agrarian transitions that echoed modes of production debates in the Indian communist movement of the 1960s and 1970s.41 Three questions were at stake: (1) was the countryside semi-feudal or capitalist? (2) which classes belonged in the united front? and (3) which class should lead the united front as the principal revolutionary agent? The party’s initial position presupposed widespread ‘feudal’ relations of production, the primary contradiction being between landlords and tenants, with the differentiation among the latter being of little immediate relevance. As a consequence, the party argued that “Pakistan’s [People’s] Democratic Revolution is fundamentally an agrarian revolution, meaning that the peasantry is its main force.”42 However, as proto-capitalists emerged in Hashtnagar with the success of the land-to-the-tiller movement, party leaders recognised that capitalism was developing in the countryside, but maintained that it would lead to, following Lenin, increasing peasant differentiation, not displacement. Further, they also recognised that these processes would be regionally specific, thus also prefiguring more recent theorisations of the agrarian question, which emphasise “several different agrarian questions, driven by regionally disparate class constellations and development trajectories.”43 For the party, what accounted for this regional specificity was how capitalist development was coconstituted by caste-like practices and ‘feudal’ begar.
The party’s initial position that Pakistan was semi-feudal corresponded to the realities that its activists observed in South Punjab. Here, despite the importance of agrarian labourers, the vast estates of the landlords meant that even when they began to evict tenants to manage the land themselves, tenancy remained dominant. Compared to tenants, “the proportion of other classes – farm labourers and various artisanal classes – is very low”:44 a situation quite different to that in Hashtnagar by the end of the 1960s. In South Punjab, despite some resistance, the landlord as a class had not been weakened. In other words, unlike in Hashtnagar, limitations on the upward mobility of tenants were still in place. For the party, the primary contradiction here was between the ‘feudal’ landlords and the tenants.
Further, the party also interpreted the presence of begar in South Punjab as evidence of ‘feudal’ relations. In an interview, the then Punjab provincial general secretary, Imtiaz Alam, argued that begar was a sign of “feudal bondage” – an “extra-economic form of surplus accumulation”. Landlords made widespread use of begar, for example, by forcing tenants to do unpaid construction work on their factories.45 Local MKP leaders like Sufi Sibghatullah Mazari organised begar refusals. Landlords responded by besieging villages with the Border Military Police,46 an official landlord-controlled paramilitary, and marshalling scab labour, whom Sibghatullah referred to as gunday (goons).47 One landlord, for instance, dispatched around 500-600 of his gunday with tractor-trolleys to forcibly retrieve the tenants’ crop.48 These gunday consisted of both tenants and landless labourers, and were used by the landlord to fracture the MKP’s attempts at building a united front. Whereas initially Sibghatullah viewed scab labour as effectively coerced and organised to stop it, he increasingly came to see these labourers as wilful agents actively aligning with landlords to undermine the tenant movement. Alongside the prevalence of ‘feudal’ landlord-tenant relations, this landlord-labour alliance led Sibghatullah to not prioritise organising labour in South Punjab.
Bacha and his supporters, on the other hand, argued that, in the Frontier at least, the peasant movement had intensified capitalist relations of production, and this necessitated organising labour separately. Capitalism was developing from above, as landlords and merchants invested in industry and cash crops, and from below, as limited land reforms (official and unofficial) and the rent freeze achieved by the movement enabled richer tenants to accumulate capital by investing in machinery and land.49 If tenants and labourers continued in the same organisation then it would be the interests of the now-dominant rich peasants that would be pursued over those of labourers.50 Although Bacha cited Lenin’s and Mao’s emphasis on separate organisations of labourers, he drew more extensively on the Indian experience, where “peasant activists and leaders were often Brahmins or belonged to upper castes, and therefore did not give emphasis to a separate organisation of landless labourers. The Kisan Sabhas were captured only by tenants and rich peasants, and these became Kulak Sabhas that were dominated by Congress’s influence, and the revolutionary activists’ influence was extinguished.”51 The reference to upper castes implied that pre-capitalist modes of domination were not incompatible with the intensification of capitalist relations. And if the party was to continue to prioritise peasants over labourers, it was prioritising the “capitalist road and [abandoning] the socialist road, whose axis is the proletariat”,52 for agrarian labourers were part of the latter. Bacha, cognizant of the dynamics in areas like South Punjab, recognised that the broader social formation remained characterised by landed power, and so rich peasants would still be part of the united front. But given the intensification of capitalist relations, agricultural labourers – not peasants – would increasingly be leading the united front.
Bangash and his supporters, on the other hand, argued that capitalism had simply not developed, either in industry or in agriculture, to the point that warranted making agricultural labourers the leading class – a position appropriate for a direct socialist revolution, not for the prerequisite People’s Democratic Revolution. They argued that the intensification of capitalist relations in a few areas did not reflect broader changes in the mode of production. Even tenants who had legally become labourers had not been freed from feudal relations as in western Europe: “They often use their own means of production and rather than cash wages they are remunerated in kind. In some cases, they are even subjected to begar. What kind of capitalism is this?”53 They argued that the “Trotskyite” line of capitalist development in Pakistan would confuse labourers, who would mistake a manufactured enemy, the peasants, for the real enemy, the landlords, and that this line would also alienate the peasants from any possible united front.54 To Bangash, rich and middle-class tenants would play a leading role in the success of the revolution.
By 1976, the party arrived at an official compromise position, one that hinged on the possibility of multiple and regionally specific paths to agrarian transition and liberatory struggle. When Bacha initially published his concerns in 1974, the party maintained its position to not form separate organisations for labourers, but to keep them in the same units and committees as peasants. Overall, party members were directed to keep the rural poor united and prevent peasants and workers from fighting each other.55 However, Bacha’s interventions influenced the party’s Punjab leaders. In 1975, Alam argued that increasing mechanisation and evictions indicated an “increase of capitalism in agriculture”, due to which “the contradiction in the rural population, between farm labourers and a rural bourgeoisie, is increasing.”56 He argued: “We need to advance the leadership of farm labourers and poor peasants…Without this, we can’t ignite the People’s Democratic politics.”57 That said, he noted the regionally uneven development of agrarian capitalism in Punjab: “In central Punjab, [capitalist production] has been intensifying for quite a while whereas in feudal areas [i.e. South Punjab] this process has intensified [only recently] as a consequence of the peasant movement.” This called for what Alam termed class geographies (tabqati jaghrafiyah): “A class analysis and collect[ion] [of] clear facts, so that the party’s work will be on correct foundations.”58 In 1976 the party thus arrived at an understanding of regional specificity: only in Hashtnagar and Malakand were agricultural labourers to be organised separately, so that “the opportunities wrested from landlords are received by agricultural labourers and poor peasants rather than rich peasants.”59
That said, the specificity of capitalist development was also coconstituted by the logics of liberation: whereas the success of the tenant movements in the Frontier led to a proto-capitalism ‘from below’, in South Punjab, the movement, though not successful, led landlords to intensify capitalism ‘from above’ as a deterrent. This called for regionally specific and differentiated political tactics, whereby the united front would have different and evolving organisational forms in different areas, all within a strategic unity oriented toward the People’s Democratic Revolution. In essence, the debate pointed toward the possibility not only of multiple paths of capitalist development but also multilineal logics of liberation – a non-teleological and thus worldly Marxism.60
Theories and Theologies of Liberation
The MKP’s engagement with local cultures, including over questions of Islam, also provided an opening to imagine complementary paths toward liberation. The party’s engagement with Islam demonstrates a commitment to a vernacularised and worldly Marxism, one that took seriously non-western ideas and practices. While central party leaders made the two ideologies compatible in practice, local leaders like Sufi Sibghatullah Mazari, who would eventually become the vice president of the MKP’s Punjab branch, equated them in theory as well. He did so through the very struggle and categories of analysis that the party popularised. Indeed, unlike Pakistan’s other communists, the MKP did not view Islam merely as a preformed tool for ruling class hegemony but conceived of it as a religion open to other ideologies, including, implicitly, Marxism. The liberatory nature of Islam, however, had to be realised through organised class struggle on the terrain of both political economy and ideology.
Though the MKP’s manifesto makes a case for Islam’s articulation with socialist politics, as we further elaborate below, much of it is devoted to tackling the hegemonic misuse of Islam by ruling classes:
“Pakistan…has a semi-feudal culture…This includes all those fatwa mongers who use the name of Islam to throttle the throats of toiling classes, and search for justifications for capitalism and feudalism in the name of Islam…They conceal the presence of American imperialism in Asia while condemning wars and struggles of national liberation throughout the world, and seek to turn time backward and stop the evolution of history.”61
The party believed that this misused Islam was upheld by American imperialism: “Semi-colonial culture and semi-feudal culture…have formed a reactionary cultural alliance against Pakistan’s new culture, in which the former plays a leading role.”62 For the MKP, Marxism-Leninism provided a space to critique the coconstitution of capitalist-imperialism and hegemonic Islam. This coconstitution was evident from the party’s practical engagement in the countryside. Religious figures were not outside the class system: they could be tenants and landless labourers dependent on landlords, or they could be the landlords themselves. One MKP activist in the Frontier explained in an interview that maulvis (or mullahs, broad terms for religious leaders and instructors) were the lackeys of the landlords because many of them received funds from the latter. Another said that the party’s revolutionary land-to-the-tiller slogan initially faced ridicule: “We would tell people that God didn’t give these lands [to the landlords], the English did. We will take it from them…[But] the maulvis would [cite the Qur’an to defend the landlords], ‘Wa tu‘izzu man tasha’u wa tudhillu man tasha’ – if Allah wishes He will honour someone and if not He will dishonour them…We had fatwas of kufr [disbelief ] passed about us.” In some cases, the landlord himself was the religious figure, a phenomenon that appeared to be far more politically consequential in South Punjab. There, Makhdoom landlords claimed common descent from Prophet Muhammad, using this genealogical assertion – the ideology of “Syedism”63 – and their patronage of local Sufi shrines to legitimise their immense landholdings. Many peasants even “consider[ed] the Makhdoom alongside Allah”.64 Given these articulations of Islam with landlordism in both the Frontier and South Punjab, the party had to develop its own articulation.
Starting from its manifesto, the party put forward an alternative understanding of Islam as inherently open to transformation. One source for that change could be class struggle, and the manifesto narrates the fictional story of a proto-typical Pakistani village in which initially conservative maulvis come to accept and endorse radical social change, believing that young activists are “practicing the sunnat [model] of Muhammad (PBUH) of Arabia and his companions.”65 Moreover, the manifesto stresses Islam’s long tradition of learning from multiple cultures, citing a Hadith (saying of Prophet Muhammad) that states, “Seek knowledge even if it is in China.” Those who opposed “foreign ideologies and thinking” in the name of religion, the manifesto declares, actually go against Islam: “Their philosophy and attitude to life is a remnant of the zamana-e-jahiliat” (“the age of ignorance”, a reference to pre-Islamic Arabia). Ultimately, the party’s manifesto conceived of an Islam whose “inquisitive and creative nature” made it amenable to the “absorption” of foreign ideologies, including, implicitly, Marxism, and whose religious leaders could politically realign with escalating class struggle.66
One way the party put these ideas into practice was through ‘cultural positioning’, i.e. the strategic deployment of “symbolic resources…for purposes of political persuasion.”67 These practices must have struck renowned Pakistani Trotskyist Tariq Ali, who disparaged the party at the time for “begin[ning] its private and public meetings with recitations from the Koran!”68 Major Ishaq even begins the MKP’s manifesto with 786, the numerical form of the Bismillah, and a quotation from the Quran: “Say, ‘Truth has come, and falsehood has vanished. Truly falsehood is ever vanishing’” (17:81).69 He goes on to imply that the working classes and the patriotic middle classes are the army of divine Truth (Haq, which as Al Haq is a name for God) engaged in ‘jihad’ against the capitalists and landlords, who are the army of falsehood.70 Party reports document other similar practices in passing: conducting a jum’at alwida’ (Friday of farewell) for comrades killed in the struggle,71 commemorating the fortieth day of the deaths of comrades, taking breaks to allow people to conduct their prayers, and raising “Allah-o-Akbar” chants at rallies.72 In one speech in South Punjab, Major Ishaq repeated themes from the manifesto, likening the peasant struggle against landlords to Prophet Muhammad’s fight against his enemies: “The people who scare us, and who martyr us, they are all Abu Jahal and Abu Lahab [the Prophet’s enemies].”73 But the party’s engagement with Islam went beyond such subtle cultural positioning as they tried to actively engage and recruit religious figures.
Indeed, as the peasant movement exploded and came to saturate social life in the Frontier and South Punjab, the class struggle itself changed the opinions of some maulvis and everyday Muslims, just as the manifesto captured. In other words, many maulvis themselves stood to gain materially and symbolically from joining the struggle and saw no contradiction between Islam and confronting landlords. Inamullah Jan explained in an interview that although his family was one of mullahs, as tenants they joined the Frontier’s peasant movement – and were known as the peasant mullahs. Hidayatullah, a landless labourer from a family also associated with the mullahs, explained how enthusiastic they were about the MKP’s role in discouraging discrimination against landless labourers like themselves. Indeed, one of the MKP’s founders in the Frontier was Maulvi Muhammad Sadiq, a small landowner and trained Islamic scholar who considered “Islam to be the religion of the poor oppressed.”74 The MKP bulletin notes that he strongly refuted the false fatwas of the right-wing mullahs, whom he considered the agents of capitalists and landlords.75
Several religious supporters of the MKP, including Maulvi Sadiq, drew inspiration from a revolutionary socialist strain of Deobandi Islam, whose origins lay in the writings of Shah WaliUllah.76 One of the early propagators of this Deobandi socialism in the Frontier was Maulana Abdur Raheem Popalzai, the ‘Mufti of the Frontier’, who led tenant struggles against landlordism and colonialism in the same areas the MKP would later organise.77 Maulvi Sadiq was inspired by Popalzai, as well as his religious studies in pre-partition Delhi, where he was exposed to Deobandi socialism and anti-colonial revolutionary ideas. In South Punjab, Sibghatullah Mazari also took inspiration from major figures of Deobandi socialism, especially Ubaidullah Sindhi, the ‘Imam of the Revolution’, 78 who grew up in South Punjab and had many followers there,79 and Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, who, as president of the NAP, was a major influence on MKP founders and toured South Punjab as well.80
By aligning themselves with Deobandi socialism, Sibghatullah and his cadres were able to widen their movements. They recruited many mullahs and established insurgent Islamic institutions that rivalled the Makhdooms’ Islamic landlordism. As they began their engagement, one maulvi was reported to have said: “Your party’s work is good – and the sawab [divine blessing] you will get from this is more than from namaz [obligatory prayers].”81 The MKP even defended peasants as they built their own mosques, independent from those patronised by landlords, which the latter tried to tear down. Reporting on the event, the party’s circular noted, “The landlord’s injustice has extended from the peasant’s home to the house of God, but those days aren’t far when, with the power of God, the peasant will destroy the landlord’s home.”82 The culmination of these efforts were annual mullah congregations, held during Eid-i-Milad-un-Nabi celebrations, where, as Alam recalled, mullahs “delivered fatwas against feudalism, quoting the Quran and Hadith. These were peasant mullahs, from the Ubaidullah Sindhi tradition, and over a thousand would come.” These engagements undermined the landlords’ grip on Islam and pointed to the class struggle in religion. When one Makhdoom landlord demanded that Sibghatullah change his name (which literally meant ‘colour of God’) so that the landlord could use it for his own grandson, peasants sided with Sibghatullah, insisting that “In our Sufi, ‘the colour of God’ is pure.”83
Although the MKP engaged with this Deobandi socialism as part of its revolutionary practice, it never officially synthesised it in its theory because many of its leading members were areligious. Nevertheless, the party created the space for a plurality of approaches to Marxism, both religious and areligious, without siding with either. This enabled Sibghatullah, for instance, to theoretically bridge Marxism with Islam. His comrade Malik Akbar said in an interview: “When [Sibghatullah] understood Maoist philosophy…he became Sufi Sibghatullah, a Truth seeker (Haqiqat-pasand).” Contained within this aspiration for Truth, the comrade continued, was “a love for humanity, on feeling their pain”, which was equivalent to a love for God. But this Truth could only be arrived at through understanding class society, which caused human pain.
In his script for a play revolving around a fictional landlord’s efforts to clear a jungle for cultivation, Sibghatullah equated theological and theoretical poverty.84 The landlord entices poor pastoralists to clear the land by promising them land and other monetary rewards, saying that, as their pir (spiritual guide), he cares about them. While villagers praise the landlord’s benevolence and generosity, one character, named “the revolutionary”, insists that the landlord is actually deceiving them. “There is the Quran in [the landlord’s] hand,” he says, “but a knife hidden under his arm.” Indeed, the landlord refuses to keep his promise once the land is reclaimed, expelling the farmers and replacing them with tractors and a few hired hands. The play concludes with villagers, now aware of the landlord’s deception, joining the revolution and launching a successful land-to-the-tiller movement. Theory enables the revolutionary to see past the apparent benevolence of the landlord to arrive at the Truth of class society: exploitation, undergirded by violence and covered up by the misuse of Islam.
However, Sibghatullah also juxtaposes this misuse of Islam with the Truth of Islam, one which necessitated overturning this class society. Villagers in the play justify their land claims in Islamic terms, saying: “For Muslims, tenancy is actually makruh (an Islamically disliked act) or possibly forbidden entirely (haram).” Right next to the script, Sibghatullah clarifies the villagers’ reasoning and, more generally, discusses his views on the relationship between Islam and land. He makes two main and somewhat contradictory arguments, citing his conversations with “people’s imams” (a reference to Deobandi socialists). In one set of arguments, Sibghatullah asserts the right of the direct cultivator to possess land, claiming “[Prophet Muhammad] once said that whoever gives life to dead land, that land is theirs.” However this sort of argument was conventionally used by Hanafi scholars in reference to gentries not tillers, and Sibghatullah was rethinking Hanafi thought to favour the latter over the former.85 Yet later, he goes on to challenge landed private property entirely, arguing that “most of Pakistan’s land belongs to the public treasury”, echoing the ambivalence of Deobandi socialists like Ubaidullah Sindhi and Maulana Bhashani.86 Either way, for Sibghatullah, to overturn the class system – either by giving land back to the tiller or nationalising landed property entirely – was to instantiate a set of relations that affirmed Haqiqat, that combined love for God and His reflections (humanity). As Malik Akbar put it, “The Sufism of Sufi [Sibghatullah] – which was about Truth and the love of humanity – ultimately found its expression in the class struggle.”
In addition to his prose, this imbrication of theory and theology was also evident in Sibghatullah’s practice at his mechanic repair shop, where he was the teacher (ustad) to many apprentices (shagirds). However, he expanded the pedagogical possibilities of the conventional teacher-student relation in a way that resembled the pir-murid relationship of Sufi orders, where pirs guide their disciples (murids) on a path toward the Truth that is God. While socialist Sufis in neighbouring Sindh rejected the pir-murid relation, seeing it as inherently unequal,87 Sibghatullah repurposed this relation for revolutionary socialism. He resembled Bhashani, who required his disciples to affirm a belief in socialism (alongside God and the Prophet) as part of his bay’ah (oath of allegiance).88 Sibghatullah’s students were also encouraged, as part of their political training, to compose ‘revolutionary essays’ and ‘revolutionary poems’, which were recited at local MKP meetings, prefacing their performances with recitations from the Quran.89 His students would in turn go back to their villages to teach and organise others, establishing over 40 peasant committees in the area.90 Ata Muhammad Khalti (d. 2005), a peasant who joined the MKP in 1975 “under the leadership of Sufi Sibghatullah”, once described his training by one of Sibghatullah’s disciples: “He trained me politically. He was my guide (murshid). He was a very faithful person. Very truthful. Being close to him, I learnt a lot.”91 Through these practices, which combined Islam and revolutionary socialism, Sibghatullah ultimately affirmed that everything reflects a deeper Truth that is God Himself.
Though the MKP as a whole did not officially pursue a theological and theoretical reconciliation of Islam and Marxism, Sibghatullah’s own equivalence was made possible by the very struggle and categories of analysis that the party popularised. More broadly, the MKP’s engagement with Islam demonstrates a commitment to a vernacularised Marxism, one that took seriously non-western ideas and practices. The liberatory nature of Islam had to be realised through organised class struggle on the terrain of both political economy and ideology.
An Intersectional Insurgency?
Though the party’s worldly Marxism led to a sophisticated engagement with agrarian transitions and Islam, which opened the door for a multilineal and non-Eurocentric Marxism, it also meant the party did not develop a theory for confronting patriarchy. This was because, in the 1970s, the party prioritised the contradictions between landlords and peasants, as we discussed above, and consequently worried that tackling gender head on would alienate male peasants from the movement. Thus, the party’s very concern with practicing a worldly Marxism, one oriented toward building a united front rooted in local conditions, also led it, in one conjuncture, to deprioritising gender. Yet as we show below, the proliferation of women’s activism in the 1980s, the continuing coconstitution of patriarchy and landlordism in South Punjab (unlike in Hashtnagar), and ironically the collapse of the MKP itself, altered the conjuncture in ways that enabled Sibghatullah to confront patriarchy directly. He did so, however, by deploying the party’s concepts, thus continuing on the tracks of a worldly Marxism.
Though the party made scattered observations about gendered labour, it did not fully theorise or organise around this issue, in part because of its orientation toward building a united front against landlords. In 1972, MKP president Major Ishaq discussed landlords’ exploitation and oppression of (basically male) tenants in South Punjab but mentioned only in passing the gendered division of agricultural labour: “It is women who exclusively do the [cotton] picking.”92 These women were likely paid by male tenants, which would raise questions about the fairness of gendered wages and working conditions. But he does not consider the full implications of these contradictions, probably because if landlords, who paid tenants in cash, did not pay in a full and timely manner, tenants would not be able to pay these women workers. Moreover, many women agricultural labourers were also in a direct contradiction with landlords, as Sibghatullah noted in 1973: for the past three years, “The landlord is neither giving the share due to tenants, nor paying women cash for picking cotton.”93 As a consequence, the party prioritised the contradiction between landlords, on one side, and tenants and labourers on the other, but minimised the contradictions between tenants and labourers and thus postponed a reckoning with gendered agricultural labour.
The subsumption of the women’s question into a generalised united front against landlordism took a slightly different form in the Frontier. Here, men and women, tenants and labourers alike, were frustrated by the particular form of patriarchy under what they called khanism, i.e., the petty sovereignty of the landlords. In addition to their role in agricultural production and domestic labour, women were obligated to do the landlord’s begar, thus facing not a double but a triple burden. “They would work in the home, work in the fields, and work for the landlord,” a male tenant noted in an interview. Begar was also gender-specific: “They would clean the wheat crop, or clean the rooms of the landlord’s bungalow.” Landlords specifically required female labour for these tasks because they observed purdah – that is, they didn’t want women of their own household to interact with unrelated men, an important marker of honour – but in doing so, they violated the purdah of their tenants and labourers. Begar was frustrating for men, because it prevented them from allocating not only their own labour but also that of women in their households, cutting through questions of purdah and honour.
Landlords also oversaw, if only nominally, the marriage exchange of women among tenants and labourers and thus asserted their authority over reproduction. They required tenants to alert them upon weddings and pay a tax. As Charles Lindholm has noted for nearby Swat, landlords levied this marriage tax “as a surety against the [landlord] taking the girl for himself”.94 Landlords, he further noted, frequently took “poor girls as their mistresses”. While we do not have evidence of this sexual abuse happening in Hashtnagar, the comparison with Swat is indicative of how degrading such taxation could be. It’s also possible that landlords presided over the practice of swara – also known as wata-sata in South Punjab – where jirgas (councils) decide to exchange women in place of blood money after a murder.95 Landlords thus not only contributed to the triple labour burden of women, but also regulated the control of reproduction more generally by restricting dependent males’ control of women’s bodies and labour. Thus, men and women, tenants and labourers alike, were frustrated by patriarchy under khanism.
When the peasant movement successfully ended begar, stopped evictions, withheld rent, and more generally undermined the petty sovereignty of landlords, the party recognised that the “peasant movement has had a pretty good effect on women”, albeit with limitations. Many women also subscribed to the normative Pakhtun ideal of purdah and were pleased that their upward mobility allowed them to replace their own field labour with hired hands. For others who did not experience the same level of prosperity, at least they were freed from the landlord’s begar. However, the party also recognised important limitations.
Aside from the feudal landlords, peasant proprietors and rich peasants of the Frontier, all the women of peasant households take equal part in work and labour with their men, but their problems are greater than those of men. Often a peasant marries solely with the intention that he not only receives a free agricultural labourer who can produce more hands and arms for him, but through her can also get comfort.96
In other words, the party recognised that tenants had their own form of patriarchy that, in effect, treated women as unpaid agricultural, domestic and sexual labour. This realisation could have opened up the possibility for a more intersectional analysis, one that explicitly recognised that tenant and labourer males’ frustrations with patriarchy under khanism had much to do with the fact that it was not their patriarchy.
However, the party did not pursue such an intersectional approach in its analysis: while the MKP recognised how the movement’s success could lead to class polarisation and capitalism ‘from below’, it did not consider the gendered implications of these processes. First, de facto land reform allocated no specific land rights to women, and even those who had lost their husbands in battles had not received anything. This meant that women would continue to be dependent on men for income and status. Second, as tenants now held onto their surplus and some could increasingly afford to replace women’s field labour with male hired labour, women’s labour outside the home became less socially acceptable. As one male tenant noted in an interview, “[women’s farm labour] wasn’t even considered inappropriate back then because everyone in the village had their women out working with them. Nowadays, people consider it somewhat inappropriate.” Although only some households could afford to replace women’s labour with male hired hands, the morality of the richer ones came to predominate. In essence, the morality once presided over by landlords – a morality that hinged on the regulation of women’s bodies and the protection of honour – increasingly came to be adjudicated and exemplified by richer peasants. In Hashtnagar, richer peasants now presided over practices like swara (the exchange of women in place of blood money) instead of landlords. Thus, worldly Marxism’s achievements in this conjuncture led, not to the weakening of patriarchy, but its rearticulation into a peasant patriarchy.97
Although the party did acknowledge that it had not raised “the class and political consciousness” of women in any significant way, it exteriorised the reasons for its failure to peasant culture and did not fully reckon with its own members’ patriarchy: “[Women] continue to take an indirect part in the struggle, but until now the party has not been able to organise them. Due to the particular social conditions in the Frontier, due to the cultural underdevelopment of the peasants, and due to the lack of women activists to do this work amongst women, this task has not yet been achieved.”98 Further, implicit in the party’s view was a worry that, if it placed too much emphasis on women’s issues, male peasants would stop supporting the party. Indeed, it might even provoke open antagonisation, which, as we’ll see, Sibghatullah later faced in South Punjab. However, the fact that, in the quotation above, the party characterised women’s role in the movement as “indirect”, even though scattered reports point to the centrality of their contributions,99 hints at the prevalence of patriarchy among its own leadership.
This patriarchy also stifled women in the MKP who were actively trying to develop a theoretical and practical approach to women’s liberation. As early as 1970, the party’s newspaper Sanobar published an article by Kaneez Rasheed that analysed the coconstitution of gender and class, arguing that women’s labour is crucial to both production and reproduction and is exploited by both landlords and husbands. She stressed the impossibility of revolution without women’s liberation.100 She also criticised working class men for treating women like private property and preventing their participation in political work. However, the MKP did not take up this critique and in 1977, female leader Shamim Akhtar echoed Rasheed in criticising male comrades for controlling women’s mobility and preventing political work:
“No doubt, in our absence, you are troubled: you don’t get your food on time, or people question you as to where your wife goes every day. So, comrades, we say that if you also want to destroy the oppressive, violent and exploitative system in our country, then you have to destroy your feudal thinking.”101 That is, she pointed to how male comrades (husbands) practiced patriarchy to guarantee their social reproduction (e.g. food) and uphold their notions of honour. She also criticised the party itself for not doing more to push men in the correct direction. Damningly, she writes, “The party educates its activists concerning working amongst workers and peasants…but has not till today even written a single word concerning women.” Indeed, Amina Zaman, another female MKP leader, elaborated in an interview that although MKP president Major Ishaq encouraged her to form a women’s wing, male party leaders did not focus on training, strategising, or follow-up. Although she and other women did organise initial discussion groups on women’s problems, these were restricted to the wives and daughters of educated families and did not reach the grassroots. Rasheed, Akhtar and Zaman drew attention to how the patriarchy of male leaders led to the movement’s theoretical and practical poverty on the gender question. The party’s fragmentation in 1977 prevented any further possible development along these lines.
That said, Sibghatullah confronted patriarchy at the grassroots years later by tackling its coconstitution with landlordism. In 1991, he founded the Anjuman Banu Mazari, a clan-based organisation whose most significant campaign centred on oppressive gender relations. His decision to create this organisation was shaped by the honour killing of his first wife by his brother, the wider proliferation of women’s activism in Pakistan in the 1980s,102 and, ironically, the very failure of the 1970s land-to-the-tiller movement in South Punjab. That is, in the region’s tribal politics, patriarchal control not only subjugated women, but also, unlike in Hashtnagar, remained coconstitutive of landlord power, which in turn subordinated all tribal members, men and women alike. Land and women (zameen and zan) were central to most tribal disputes in South Punjab because, not unlike the Frontier, these were considered constitutive of a tribe’s integrity and honour, and could be subject to violations by others. Women’s sexuality was one site of potential transgression, whereby any extramarital sex led to women being labelled kali (dishonoured) and punished through murder, being sold into slavery, or being exchanged (wata-sata), all in accordance with the kali qanun (honour codes). The kali qanun were adjudicated through a jirga headed by landlords who are also chiefs of the tribes and who legitimised the application of these codes through Islam. To confront these codes, as Sibghatullah would do, was, in effect, to challenge landlord authority.
Anjuman Banu Mazari bore traces of Sibghatullah’s earlier experience with the MKP. The organisation was not meant to be a parochial clan-centred one, but drew on communist concepts, aiming to form a ‘united front’ with other tribes to improve the conditions of all through social investigation or ‘census[es]’, ‘criticism and self-criticism’, and democratic centralism.103 “He gave tribal politics a revolutionary direction,” his comrade Malik Akbar said in an interview. “The language may have shifted, but at heart he was still a communist. By making this organisation, Sibghatullah was ultimately still challenging tribal chiefs.”
However, Sibghatullah’s critique of the kali qanun was also driven by a broader commitment to Truth, which meant confronting the code’s use anywhere, including among his own fellow peasants. He condemned how “under the cover of the kali qanun” men committed all sorts of violence against women: from murdering disliked wives in order to marry again, to punishing disobedient daughters.104 He also condemned the fact that women did not even “have a right to provide explanation or have an investigation conducted”, and argued that these practices have a place neither “in democracy nor in Islam,” but belonged instead to the “zamana-e-jahiliat” (age of ignorance). In opposing these honour codes, and thereby challenging both landed authority and patriarchy, Sibghatullah ultimately aimed to restore Truth.
By challenging patriarchy in the countryside, Sibghatullah did something the MKP’s male leaders feared to do. In fact, one former MKP leader continued to advise Sibghatullah not to confront this issue, for the consequences, he warned, could be severe. Indeed, Sibghatullah ended up paying for this campaign against the kali qanun with his own life. In 2000, after defending a woman whose husband accused her of being kali, Sibghatullah was hacked to death in broad daylight outside his home. Tribal chiefs were widely believed to be behind the murder, as they worried that his confrontation with patriarchy would challenge their tribal and landed authority.
Ultimately, while the MKP recognised gendered labour and its women leaders supplied theoretical resources to confront patriarchy, the party as a whole did not take up this issue in the 1970s because it wanted to maintain (male) worker-peasant unity and because of its own internal patriarchy. However, this recognition and these resources did shape leaders like Sibghatullah, who later confronted patriarchy because he understood that it coconstituted and reproduced landed power. Thus, the party’s overall approach to gender exposed the contradictions of its worldly Marxism: in one conjuncture, it was led to sideline gender; in another, a Marxism understood as always-in-the-making enabled an intersectional insurgency.
Conclusion
In this article, we showed how the MKP’s practice of Marxism in the periphery produced a worldly Marxism, i.e., a theory that is inherently open to the possibility of its own retheorisation: a Marxism always-in-the-making. Specifically, our study shows that the encounter of Marxist theory with questions of agrarian transition, religion and gender in Pakistan led to openings for a multilineal, vernacularised and inter-sectional Marxism – a worldly Marxism.
The party arrived at a multilineal Marxism because of its own practical interventions in the conjuncture, which changed the balance of forces and necessitated a critique and renewal of their previous categories of analysis. Specifically, as the party successfully defeated landlordism in the Frontier and saw the exacerbation of contradictions within the peasantry, its members grappled with the nature of the revolution they were pursuing. As the party drew comparisons with South Punjab and engaged with globally circulating theoretical debates on agrarian transition, it was propelled to renew its Marxism to make it more attentive to regional specificities, multilineal paths of capitalist development and multilineal logics of liberation.
Moreover, the party’s intervention in the conjuncture meant engaging in the cultural field, which raised epistemological questions about Marxism’s relationship to other ideologies. The party contested the elite mobilisation of Islam by rearticulating the religion with revolutionary socialism. While the MKP’s central leaders forged a practical compatibility of Islam and Marxism through the use of Islamic idioms and the recruitment of religious leaders, local activists like Sibghatullah aimed for a theoretical equivalence. In pursuing such articulations, the party not only reimagined the boundaries and political possibilities of Islam, but also showcased how Marxism could engage with non-western ideologies and practices.
However, the party’s worldly Marxism failed to pursue certain possibilities: the balance of forces between contesting ideologies and material interests shaped which concepts became subject to theorisation and retheorisation in certain conjunctures. Because of patriarchy within and outside its own ranks, the party largely avoided confronting inegalitarian gender relations. This was despite the fact that women leaders began theorising the coconstitution of class and gender, criticising the chauvinism of male members, and insisting that revolution was impossible without women’s liberation. What this sugests is that the availability of theoretical resources is not sufficient for them to be taken up for further development and practice. As women’s activism in Pakistan became more salient in the 1980s, and as landlordism remained coconstituted by patriarchy, a new conjuncture enabled Sibghatullah to theorise and confront patriarchy in the country’s peripheries. Ultimately, worldly Marxism is not an autonomous theoretical space but is shaped by the encounter between the forces of the conjuncture and the agency of the theorists.
Despite the MKP’s contradictions, the conjunctures in which its party activists organised did energise them to treat Marxism in an unbounded way, whose core remained that of assembling theoretical and practical resources for subaltern emancipation. What the party’s practice implies is that a different conjuncture, like that of today, would necessitate another retheorisation of Marxism. Further, worldly Marxism also invites a rethinking of revolution itself. For if we understand revolution to be another conjuncture, one with its own political problems, struggles and contradictions, then its arrival would mean not utopia but another point of departure necessitating, yet again, a renewal of Marxism.
Noaman G Ali is assistant professor of political economy at the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan. His research and teaching concern the political economy of underdevelopment, particularly the relationship between rural movements, institutions, and agrarian change. Noaman has published in the Journal of Agrarian Change and Rethinking Marxism, and he has also written for Tanqeed.
Shozab Raza is a postdoctoral associate in the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. His research focuses on imperialism, agrarian change, and radical politics in the global South, especially Pakistan. He has research articles published in Comparative Studies in Society and History and Ethnography. He is also a founding editor of Jamhoor, a critical Left magazine on South Asia.
Notes
References
Ahmed, Feroz: “Afzal Bangash: A Life Dedicated to Militant Struggle”, Economic and Political Weekly 21, no. 51 (1986): 2219.
Ahmed, Feroz: “Kia Zara’at Men Sarmayah Dari Arahi Hai?” (“Is Capitalism Developing in Agriculture?”). In Daktar Fairoz Ahmad Ke Mazamin (Articles of Dr Feroz Ahmed), edited by Sayyid Ja’far Ahmad, 311-19, Karachi: Pakistan Study Centre, Jamiʻah-i Karachi, 2009.
“Aj Shahid Ke Zinda Hone Ka Din Hai” (“Today’s the Day that Martyrs Come Alive”), Circular, no. 70 (n.d.): 21-24.
Akhtar, Shamim: “Tanqidi Khat Banam-i-Sathiyan” (“A Critical Letter Addressed to Comrades”), Circular, no. 87 (1977): 11-12.
Alam, Imtiaz: “Kisan Tahrik Ka Masla Awami Jumhuri Inqilab Ka Bunyadi Masla He” (“The Issue of the Peasant Movement Is a Fundamental Issue of the People’s Democratic Revolution”), Circular, no. 49 (1974): 6.
Alam, Imtiaz: “Report: Dusri Punjab Council”, Circular, no. 62 (1975): 5-7.
Ali, Kamran Asdar: Communism in Pakistan: Politics and Class Activism, 1947-1972, New York: I. B. Taurus, 2015.
Ali, M Anwar: The Communist Party of West Pakistan in Action, 2 vols. Lahore: Criminal Investigation Department, 1952.
Ali, Noaman G: “Agrarian Class Struggle and State Formation in Post-colonial Pakistan, 1959-1974: Contingencies of Mazdoor Kisan Raj”, Journal of Agrarian Change 20, no. 2 (2020): 270-88.
Ali, Tariq: “Pakistan and Bangladesh: From Bad to Worse”, Inprecor, August 3, 1974.
Althusser, Louis: Machiavelli and Us, London: Verso, 1999.
Amel, Mahdi: Arab Marxism and National Liberation: Selected Writings of Mahdi Amel, edited by Hicham Safieddine, translated by Angela Giordani, Leiden: Brill, 2020.
Anjum, Tanvir: “A Voice from the Margins: An Appraisal of Ubaid Allah Sindhi’s Mahabharat Sarvrajia Party and Its Constitution”, Journal of Political Science 20, no. 1 (2013): 159-77.
Bacha, Sher Ali: “Ijarah Ya Batai Ki Bandish – Fa’ide Aur Nuqsanat – Aik Tajziyah” (“The Mitigation of Leases and Sharecropping – Benefits and Costs – An Analysis”), Circular, no. 56 (1974): 14-15.
Bacha, Sher Ali: “Inqilab Keliye Mazdur Tabqe Ki Qiyadat Zaruri Shart Hai” (“The Leadership of the Working Class Is a Necessary Condition for Revolution”), Circular, no. 54 (1974): 1-12.
Bacha, Sher Ali: Kisan Daftar (Peasant Record), Peshawar: University Book Agency, 2017.
Badiou, Alain: The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings, London: Verso, 2012.
Bangash, Afzal: “Afzal Bangash Speaks: Class Struggle, Not a Tribal War”, Pakistan Forum 2, nos. 9-10 (1972): 14-18.
Bardawil, Fadi A: Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.
Bloom, Joshua and Waldo E Martin, Jr: Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
Campbell, Stephen: “Dialectics over Positivism for an Intersectional Marxism”, Dialectical Anthropology 45, no. 3 (2021): 321-28.
Coulthard, Glen Sean: “Once Were Maoists: Third World Currents in Fourth World Anti-colonialism, Vancouver, 1967–1975”, In Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, edited by Brendan Hokowhitu, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Linda Tuhi-wai-Smith, Chris Andersen and Steve Larkin, 378-91, London: Routledge, 2020.
Farber, Samuel: Cuba since the Revolution of 1959: A Critical Assessment, Chicago, IL: Haymarket, 2011.
Haroon, Sana: “The Rise of Deobandi Islam in the North-West Frontier Province and Its Implications in Colonial India and Pakistan 1914-1996”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 18, no. 1 (2008): 47-70.
Harrison, Faye V: “Theorizing in Ex-Centric Sites”, Anthropological Theory 16, nos. 2-3 (2016): 160-76.
“Jagirdar-Police Gathjor” (“Landlord-Police Nexus”), Circular, no. 62 (1975): 16.
Kalra, Virinder S and Waqas M Butt: “‘In One Hand a Pen in the Other a Gun’: Punjabi Language Radicalism in Punjab, Pakistan”, South Asian History and Culture 4, no. 4 (2013): 538-53.
Kamran, Tahir: “Ubaidullah Sindhi as a Revolutionary: A Study of Socialist Activism in Deobandi Islam”, In Muslims and Capitalism, edited by Béatrice Hendrich, 151-70, Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag, 2018.
Khalti, Ata Muhammad: “Personal Diaries”, Sonmiani, Pakistan, n.d., Ata Muhammad Khalti Papers.
“Kisano Ka Ghar Dhane Wale Khuda Ka Ghar Bhi Mismar Kar Rahe Hain” (“Those Who Are Destroying Peasants’ Homes Are Also Tearing down the House of God”), Circular, no. 44 (1973): 8.
Leghari, Iqbal: “The Socialist Movement in Pakistan: An Historical Survey, 1940-1974”, PhD diss., Université Laval, 1979.
Lerche, Jens, Alpa Shah and Barbara Harriss-White: “Introduction: Agrarian Questions and Left Politics in India”, Journal of Agrarian Change 13, no. 3 (2013): 337-50.
Li, Tania Murray: “To Make Live or Let Die? Rural Dispossession and the Protection of Surplus Populations”, Antipode 41 (2010): 66-93.
Lindholm, Charles: Generosity and Jealousy: The Swat Pukhtun of Northern Pakistan, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Malik, Anushay: “Alternative Politics and Dominant Narratives: Communists and the Pakistani State in the Early 1950s”, South Asian History and Culture 4, no. 4 (2013): 520-37.
Mazari, Sibghatullah: “Kisano ke Shab-o-Roz” (“Nights and Days of Peasants”), Circular, no. 76 (1976): 23.
Mazari, Sibghatullah: “Nasb Al’ain Anjuman Banu Mazari” (“Objectives of the Anjuman Banu Mazari”), Sadiqabad, Pakistan, 1991, Sibghatullah Mazari Papers.
Mazari, Sibghatullah: “Personal Notebooks”, Sadiqabad, Pakistan, 1974, Sibghatullah Mazari Papers.
Mazari, Sibghatullah; “Tuman Mazari Main Khawatin Par Zulm Ki Intiha” (“Extreme Oppression against Women in Tuman Mazari”), Sadiqabad, Pakistan, 1991, Sibghatullah Mazari Papers.
Mazari, Sibghatullah: “Zulm Ki Tarik Wadio Main Safar” (“A Journey through the Dark Valleys of Oppression”), Circular, no. 41 (1973): 4.
“Mazdoor Kisan Party aur Sarhad Kisan Tahrik” (“The Mazdoor Kisan Party and Frontier Peasant Movement”), Circular, no. 46 (1973): 3-4.
Mian, Muhammad: “Punjab Ke Bete Betian Jag Ga’e Hain” (“Punjab’s Boys and Girls Have Awakened”), Circular, no. 79 (1976): 27-28.
More, Satyendra: Memoirs of a Dalit Communist: The Many Worlds of R. B. More, edited by Anupama Rao, translated by Wandana Sonalkar, New Delhi, India: LeftWord, 2020.
Muhammad, Ishaq: “Inqilab Keliye Mazdur Tabqe Ki Qiyadat Zaruri Shart Hai (Introduction)” (“The Leadership of the Working Class Is a Necessary Condition for Revolution”), Circular, no. 54 (1974): 1.
Muhammad, Ishaq: Jaddojahad Ke Panch Sal (Five Years of Struggle), Lahore: Pakistan Mazdoor Kisan Party, 1973.
Muhammad, Ishaq: “Jhokan Thesan Abadol (Kisan Bastiyan Phir Se Abad Hon Gi)” (“The Peasants’ Settlements Will Be Inhabited Again”), Circular, no. 49 (1973): 1-4.
Muhammad, Ishaq: Manshur (Manifesto), Karachi: Mazdoor Kisan Party, 1972.
Muhammad, Ishaq: “Matun Taqrir” (“Speech Transcript”), Naubahar Press Multan Shehr, January 12, 1972.
Muhammad, Ishaq: “Pakistan Ke Tarik-Tarin Alaqe Punjab Main Hain” (‘The Darkest Areas of Pakistan Are in Punjab”), Circular, no. 38 (1972).
Muhammad, Ishaq: “Pakistan: Statement by Ishaq Mohammad, Chairman, Mazdoor Kisan Party (Workers’ Peasants’ Party)”, Journal of Contemporary Asia 8 (1978): 303-6.
Muhammad, Ishaq: “A Preliminary Analysis of Land Reforms”, Pakistan Forum 3, no. 3 (1972): 6-8.
Muhammad, Tala: “Zar’ai Sarmayah Dari Aur Kisan Tahrik” (“Capitalist Agriculture and the Peasant Movement”), Pakistan Forum 1, no. 4 (1978): 27-30.
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, Caner K Dagli, Maria Massi Dakake, Joseph E B Lumbard and Mohammed Rustom, eds: The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary, 2015, repr., New York: Harper-One, 2017.
Pakistan Mazdoor Kisan Party: Dastur (Constitution), Karachi: Anjuman Press, 1973.
Pakistan Mazdoor Party: “Pakistan Mazdoor Party Ki Markazi Kamiti Ki Report” (“Pakistan Mazdoor Party’s Central Committee Report”), Central Committee Report, Pakistan Mazdoor Party, 1975, Sher Ali Bacha Papers.
Patnaik, Utsa: Agrarian Relations and Accumulation: The “Mode of Production” Debate in India, Bombay: Sameeksha Trust, 1990.
“Pehla Ijlas Markazi ’amlah Pakistan Mazdoor Kisan Party: 13, 14, September 74 Lahore” (“The First Meeting of the Central Executive of the Pakistan Mazdoor Kisan Party: 13, 14, September 74 Lahore”), Circular, no. 56 (1974): 3-4.
Perry, Elizabeth J: Anyuan: Mining China’s Revolutionary Tradition, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
Rasheed, Kaneez: “Aurat Aur Siyasi Bedari” (“Women and Political Awareness”), Sanober 1, no. 7 (1970): 1, 12, 15.
Raza, Shozab: “The Sufi and the Sickle: Theorizing Mystical Marxism in Rural Pakistan”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 64, no. 2 (2022).
“Sarhad Kisan Tahrik Aur Hamari Parṭy” (“The Frontier Peasant Movement and Our Party”), Circular, no. 72 (1976): 8-17.
Shah, Alpa: Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.
Shah, Alpa and Barbara Harriss-White: “Resurrecting Scholarship on Agrarian Transformations”, Economic and Political Weekly 46, no. 39 (2011): 13-18.
“Somiani ki Tahqiqati Report” (“Investigative Report of Somiani”), Circular, no. 94 (1979): 24.
Toor, Saadia: “Moral Regulation in a Postcolonial Nation-State”, Interventions 9, no. 2 (2007): 255-75.
Toor, Saadia: The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan, New York: Pluto Press, 2011.
Uddin, Layli: “Mao-Lana Bhashani: Maoism and the Unmaking of Pakistan”, Jamhoor, May 25, 2018, www.jamhoor.org/read/2018/5/25/mao-lana-bhashani-maoism-and-the-unmaking-of-pakistan.
Varoufakis, Yanis: “Techno-Feudalism Is Taking Over”, Project Syndicate, June 28, 2021, www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/techno-feudalism-replacing-market-capitalism-by-yanis-varoufakis-2021-06.
Verkaaik, Oskar: “Reforming Mysticism: Sindhi Separatist Intellectuals in Pakistan”, International Review of Social History 49 (2004): 65-86.
Wolin, Richard: The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s, 2nd ed, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.
Yusuf, Muhammad: “Mera Lahu Jo Shararon Ka Rup Le Lega” (“My Blood that Will Take the Form of a Spark”), Circular, no. 56 (1974): 1, 2, 10.
Zaman, Muhammad Qasim: Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age: Religious Authority and Internal Criticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Zeleke, Elleni Centime: Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016. Leiden: Brill, 2019.
(Courtesy: Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East).