PAKISTAN, April 7 — Capitalism’s crisis here grows worse each day, with workers increasingly unable to meet their basic needs of survival. The bosses here are breeding more terrorism, sectarianism, racism, sexism, and nationalism to keep the working class divided. Meanwhile working people are on the streets demonstrating against shortages of electricity and natural gas, unemployment, terrorism, increasing prices, privatization and closure of factories. Capitalism is a catastrophe for the working class. In the midst of this, the Progressive Labor Party has been organizing in several industries and working steadily to spread our ideas among the masses.
Pakistan is the sixth largest country in the world, with 180 million people. The bosses here control the world’s seventh largest military, with arsenals of modern tanks, planes and nuclear weapons. It has nuclear power, but there is no electricity from 12 to 22 hours a day, which is helping the bosses to make excuses about needing to lay off workers because of lost “productivity” during these outages.
Capitalism Forces Youth into Terrorism
The unemployment rate is about 10 percent according to government sources, but actually it is far more. High unemployment is pushing the poor people who see no alternative from crime and, in some cases, capitalist-financed terrorist groups. Most of the young boys who carry out the suicide attacks are from very poor families — many confess over the television to killing for 1,000 Pakistani rupees (10-12 USD) which goes to their families.
PLP is fighting hard to organize these workers and youth into CHALLENGE study groups and, eventually, a mass fighting movement and a mass working-class Red Army that will smash the real terrorists: the capitalist class!
The Violence of Poverty
Capitalist-backed terrorism is the tip of the iceberg of the daily violence workers face here. The 18.5 million farmworkers start their work early in the morning and finish at night for the “wage” of one piece of bread. They cannot even see calorie-rich foods that contain oil, sugar, or meat. Due to lack of medical facilities, the national infant mortality rate is about 76 deaths out of 1,000 live births. Those children who survive their first few years are vanishing because of malnutrition and environmental contamination. In the Sindh province, every day an average of 50 children die from these conditions.
Over 40,000 children are in forced labor because their families have no other option to obtain food. These kids  work at workshops, brick kilns, hotels, loading docks and offices. For children who remain with their families, most do not have the natural gas needed to cook food because the available natural gas goes to the factories and into vehicles of rich people, driving up prices or creating a shortage.
Entrenched Sexism
In addition to the sexism of receiving lower wages with respect to male workers, women workers are routinely tortured, sexually harassed and abused, using the excuses of “religion” and “tradition.” According to a recent research article, 90 percent of women are psychologically abused, 50 percent are physically abused, and 15 percent sexually abused.
In Pakistan, a woman can be legally killed if she desires to marry someone without the consent of her family, and the killers will be protected by the same “justice” system that allows infants to die and sends the children who survive starvation into slavery. Pakistan is proof that capitalism can never provide a decent life for women, children or men.
PLP combats sexism. We fight for women workers to be leaders of mass movements and the Party. Only communism — a system without sexist wage differences and unpaid labor in the home — can provide a worthy life for women workers.
Slavery Without Wages
Out of a total population of 180 million people, only two million industrial workers are employed with a set work schedule, and are eligible for health insurance, social security, old age benefits, educational benefits, and the right to belong to a trade union. Seventy percent of workers work on an informal basis with bizarre schedules, are entirely at the disposal of their employers, and can be fired at any time without notice. If workers become sick or injured and cannot work, they do not receive wages and essentially face a death sentence.
Coal miners, transportation and construction workers as well as domestic and daily-wage workers are especially treated the worst, and not even considered as human beings by the bosses. Coal miners work without safety equipment and use outdated technology with unsafe methods designed to maximize coal production. When a miner is injured or killed, no investigation is launched, and company bosses try to keep it secret. In the southwestern Baluchistan province, Pakistan’s largest, the coal miners are targets for local capitalist-backed terrorist groups, and hundreds have been killed with not a single arrest made by the local or federal police. These terrorist groups kill workers to disrupt coal production and hurt the profits of the rival capitalists that own the coal mines.
Women Workers Must Lead
While working-class women can be legally killed for not consenting to marry, domestic workers are essentially chattel slaves expected to fulfill the sexual desires of their bosses. Every day boss-owned newspapers carry the stories of barbaric acts of torture and sexual assault against domestic workers. Yet workers will not find a single news article in the capitalist press about any punishment of these culprits, because under capitalism, the rich may do whatever they want to do with their “servants.”
This entire system is built around the exploitation of the working class, and none of these working-class women, or any of the millions of workers in Pakistan, will ever find justice under capitalism. PLP is making CHALLENGE the source of news for workers here, and the harder the bosses exploit us, the more of their own grave-diggers they make. Our steady growth is a sign that workers will not tolerate this forever, and our struggle to build a mass Party continues.