Pakistan: Cunning Privatisation

The sitting minister for privatisation, Naveed Qamar, has announced 12% ownership shares to half a million workers in the privatisation of 80 nationally owned institutions. Deceiving the working class into becoming owners is a condemnable conspiracy to paralyse the workers and to drive them away from the class struggle, which is the only path to their emancipation.

The rulers of the present “People’s Party” government have launched an open attack against the basic manifesto and fundamental ideology of the party. Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani has publicly denounced the nationalisation policy of Chairman Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

But hasn’t this always been true - when has Gillani not been an enemy of Bhutto? When the barbarous Zia overthrew the PPP government, subjected Bhutto to physical agonies in torture cells and hanged him in 1979, it was Gillani who was at the forefront in the right wing’s celebrations of the murder of Chairman Bhutto.

Zia Ul Haq killed Bhutto physically but he remained alive in the hearts and minds of the working masses. This tradition and legacy of Bhutto prevailed from one generation to the next because of his program and slogans of revolutionary socialism.

It is a tragedy that the present government is determined to destroy this very legacy of Chairman Bhutto. The People’s Party has maintained the glorious traditions of giving befitting responses to the attacks of the reactionary politicians of the state. Today, the feudal and imperialist agents at the top of the party want to obliterate those traditions.

The sitting minister for privatisation, Naveed Qamar, has announced 12% ownership shares to half a million workers in the privatisation of 80 nationally owned institutions and stated that these measures were “revolutionary”.

But in reality this is the most brutal form of privatisation. First of all, it is a vicious ideological attack against the working class. Deceiving the working class into becoming owners is a condemnable conspiracy to paralyse the workers and to drive them away from the class struggle, which is the only path to their emancipation.

One can ask the numerous self-employed middle-class shopkeepers and small traders about the misery of their exploitation and the pain that they experience. This is nothing more than a deplorable plot to turn a small minority of workers, out of a population of 170 million, into a worker aristocracy.

Furthermore, the shares that have been announced for the workers can only be traded on the stock exchange. The stock exchanges are the largest casinos in any capitalist country. At present, the richest people in Pakistan, and the world over, are the seasoned heavyweight gamblers of these casinos. They don’t have any role or even invest in the process of production. All the wealth that has been accumulated is through gambling on shares. This gambling on the stock exchange leaves most of the players bankrupt, and only the experienced criminal gamblers win because the greater the amount is, the bigger the bet gets. The big players devour the smaller ones like a black hole. Often, the share prices in particular industries are artificially raised so sharply so as to create a voracious desire to buy them, driving the small gamblers to start buying them hastily. Then a slump is brought about. The price falls so much that the value of these shares is reduced to mere shreds of paper. Then the big gamblers buy these shares at scrap value and the price begins to rise once again.

This 12% policy of the present government will bankrupt the workers by turning them into that small gambler who looses everything. Then the same workers will be told that the industry is experiencing losses, the share price has fallen, and in order to steer it out of the loss, it is necessary to lay off the workers! The workers who own the industry will be forced out of work. This is the very game of capitalism. Poverty, price hikes, unemployment, corruption, violence, illiteracy, unavailability of health care, exploitation of workers’ blood, sweat and tears, the lack of electricity, water and other necessities and this plundering by way of stock market gambling are a necessary part and a requirement of the capitalist system. Eliminating this system through a socialist revolution is the only way by which the working masses can get rid of these miseries.

The irony is that the PPP government is playing the ferocious game of making popular the inhuman policy of privatisation. The party’s founding document (1967) and basic manifesto (1970) clearly state that the objective in founding the party was to nationalise the heavy industry owned by the imperialists and local capitalists, and that it should gradually be handed over to the collective democratic ownership of the workers. The party which was to take the whole economy into collective ownership, today stands against that policy and is trying to promote privatisation. This is a venomous attack against the basic ideology of the party. History and the working class will never absolve it.

The rulers have imagined that the apparent calm and lull in the class struggle are eternal. They believe they can do whatever they desire. They wonder whether there is anyone who will question this. But this assumption shows their narrowness, not to mention their historical and economic ignorance.

The working class does not mobilise every day. But as long as class exploitation exists, the class struggle will continue. Its very existence is a testimony to its repetitive explosions. It will explode yet again. This is the most important judgment of history. Today, in spite of a temporary lull in the movement, the contradictions, allegations, conspiracies, and unfolding of different scandals are deepening the conflicts between them, which are in fact a testimony to the burning lava building up deep inside society. The heat of this crisis is turning the contradictions between the rulers into conflicts.

Their system cannot show the way forward nor can these rulers show one. For this very reason these rulers are exhuming the dead from the past and are exposed before the people. The working class is becoming more and more aware of how criminal the ruling class is. The anxiety and anger in society, as well as the severity of the crisis, will at a certain point cause an eruption of the volcano of public rebellion. The working class will rise in the form of a revolutionary storm which will be far more intense than the one during 1968-69. The 1968-69 revolution turned the PPP into the largest party in the history of this country overnight, which started taking steps toward nationalisation and socialism. The coming revolution will sweep away the present feudal and capitalist leadership and will give rise to a People’s Party that will surely complete the socialist revolution.