PAKISTAN, July 8—From the steel mills to the hospitals and farms, the Progressive Labor Party is fighting shoulder to shoulder with workers and striving to win them closer to communism.
The Pakistani ruling class is
assaulting workers on every front. They are raising the prices of basic necessities of life and imposing heavy taxes on poor workers as they give tax breaks to capitalists. They are increasing unemployment by privatizing the big industries as they use terrorism to keep us passive against all these anti-working class attacks.
PLP is gaining strength by exposing the rulers’ and misleaders’ lies. We are involved in many struggles while the misleadership of the puppet trade unions continually sells out the workers. The anti-privatization protests at
Pakistan International Airlines and the Pakistan Steel Mill were strong: thousands of workers took the streets and morale was high. The union misleaders promised we would succeed if workers sacrifice their time and resources. Some workers fell for these lies. Then as usual, the union collaborated with the bosses and sold out our class.
Yet the working class advanced as PLP struggled with workers to see that only communist revolution can bring systemic change in their lives.
All Sectors of Working Class in Battle
While the bosses try to crush pro-communist ideas, we are struggling to bring the workers closer to communist ideas under the red banner of PLP. We are fighting back in the teachers’ movement against privatization and within the landless farmers’ movement against landowning bosses. Healthcare workers, including young doctors, nurses, and women’s health specialists, held a work stoppage in demand for higher wages and service structure. Domestic workers are protesting against cops at their work places and for better pay and working conditions. Power loom workers and railway workers are organizing struggles against the bosses instead of
following their union’s puppet leadership.
PLP keeps these struggles alive, while being clear that only a communist revolution can foster a world run by the working class to provide the working and living conditions that workers deserve. Society will be run by and for the international working class.
Terror and Diversions
Bosses have divided the world into many so-called nationalities and religious sects. Different bosses’ political parties and sections of the ruling class are at each other’s throats. They try to divert working-class anger to serve their own profit interests and capitalist
political parties, convincing workers to fight along national and religious lines.
While the bosses are always in competition with one another, they are all united in exploiting and attacking the working class.
The working class in Pakistan is passing through an awful phase of history. On the one hand, the bosses’ parties are misleading them. On the other hand, boss-protected terrorists are killing them. Unemployment is rising and workers are also being used by nationalist, fundamentalist, sexist and racist groups to kill each other in the name of nation, religion and race.
Women workers are subject to vicious sexism. They are threatened and harassed at the work places and streets. The so called “Sharia Council” of the parliamentarians is creating more problems for them by introducing new theological laws that say women can be beaten and tortured if they ignore the orders of male family members. The leadership of women workers in the health and domestic industry, in the homes and streets, countering these sexist attacks.
Taking Leadership
Party members and workers worldwide should follow the example of the working class and comrades in Pakistan. Fight the bosses everywhere; in every factory, school or community. Fight racism, sexism and all divisions as we organize for higher wages or against police killings. But in every battle raise the red flag of communist revolution. There really is no other road for the workers of the world. Join the international Progressive Labor Party and fight for communism!