Irtiza Shafaat Bokharee
There is a common tendency among groups both oppositional and sympathetic to Marxism to treat it as a uniform ideology. For many critics in Pakistan, Marxism begins with Karl Marx and ends with Leninism, Stalinism, and the Soviet Union, its vocabulary confined to class struggle, atheism, revolution, and the abolition of private property. This association with atheism and secularism has, since the state’s earliest years, given governments a ready vocabulary for treating the left as a threat to be contained. The Communist Party of Pakistan was banned in 1954, ostensibly over the Rawalpindi Conspiracy, not irreligion. But as the state’s self-definition hardened over the following decades, culminating in the Islamisation drive of the Zia years, opposition to the left came to be argued openly in religious terms, and “communist” and “godless” erroneously became functionally interchangeable. Among some of Marxism’s admirers, criticism of the tradition is often dismissed, not engaged with: dissenting variants are waved away as lackeys of Western imperialism or intellectual lightweights, and critique of orthodox Marxism itself is treated as little more than a defence of capitalism. Both postures obscure a tradition that has spent its existence arguing with itself, whose adherents, though left parties carry negligible weight in parliament, remain disproportionately influential in Pakistan’s universities, literary circles, and urban intelligentsia.
Marxism developed into competing schools over questions Marx himself never settled: reform or revolution, parliamentary democracy or rupture, economics or culture, Europe or elsewhere. One of the earliest splits concerned reform and revolution. Eduard Bernstein’s revisionism, arguing that socialism could advance through gradual democratic reform, provoked a major dispute within European socialism. Britain’s Fabian Society, founded in 1884, built a related gradualist tradition, favouring devolution, trade unionism, and parliamentary politics over upheaval, and later shaped Labour. Its influence reached South Asia too: both the Muslim League and Congress leadership were influenced by Fabian gradualism and egalitarianism, to varying degrees.
Lenin took Marxism in a different direction. Marx expected capitalism to collapse from its own contradictions, a process rooted in industrial Western Europe. Lenin argued imperialism had altered this: by extracting capital and resources from the colonised world, advanced capitalist powers postponed their own collapse while opening revolutionary possibilities elsewhere. Societies that had not industrialised could bypass that stage, provided a vanguard party seized power on their behalf. This emphasis on organisation and the seizure of power proved enormously influential across the twentieth century, particularly in the colonised world, but the Soviet experience also fused Marxism with one-party authoritarianism in the popular imagination.
Early-twentieth-century texts such as Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1923) and the Frankfurt School’s critical theory, including Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) and later Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964), moved beyond crude economic explanations, analysing how systems survive through consent as much as coercion. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, developed across his Prison Notebooks (1929–35), captured this shift most influentially, arguing that ruling classes secure power less through coercion than by winning consent through civil society and everyday culture, so that their worldview comes to be accepted as common sense. The tradition also travelled into uncharted territories. Liberation Theology, notably Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation (1971), fused Marxist social analysis with Christian ethics, centring the poor. In Pakistan, Sibte Hasan’s Musa se Marx Tak (From Moses to Marx) (1977) traced continuities between the Abrahamic prophetic tradition of egalitarianism and socialism. Yet by the mid-twentieth century, formal communist organisations had hardened around orthodox Marxism-Leninism or Stalinism so thoroughly that dissenters who pursued these directions often found themselves marginalised or expelled rather than absorbed.
Pakistan illustrates this plurality clearly. The Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s split the Pakistani Left itself: the National Awami Party divided in 1967, with Maulana Bhashani leading a pro-China Maoist faction favouring peasant mobilisation and revolutionary politics, and Wali Khan heading a pro-Soviet faction pursuing a more parliamentary path alongside provincial autonomy and socialism. Student politics reproduced these divisions. The National Students Federation split along similar lines, Maoist organisations grew prominent within the student Left, and NSF factions were active in the anti-Ayub movement. The Mazdoor Kissan Party later pursued an explicitly Maoist, peasant-centred strategy. The Pakistan Peoples Party added further complexity: its 1967 manifesto placed socialism and Pakistani nationalism at its centre, figures like Miraj Muhammad Khan brought Maoist influences into the party after the split, and many left-wing student activists gravitated towards it, making the PPP an important home for the Left without being synonymous with Maoism. Future Punjab Chief Minister Hanif Ramay coined the term “Islamic Socialism”, later folded into the PPP’s manifesto, and which remains fiercely debated even today.
This history matters because Pakistan’s contemporary political vocabulary often compresses all these traditions into a single word: communist. A Maoist organiser, a Soviet-aligned Marxist, a Fabian socialist, and a liberation theologian may share a critique of capitalism while disagreeing over religion, democracy, and the route to change. None of these excuses the serious epistemological blind spots within orthodox Marxist thought or the mixed record of regimes that governed in its name. Economic determinism has been repeatedly challenged, revolutionary politics produced authoritarian outcomes, and the concentration of power within party structures cannot be waved away as mere anti-communist propaganda. Yet this history is why Marxism resists reduction to those examples, its influence extending into democratic socialism, anti-colonial thought, cultural theory, religious thought, and avant-garde art. Cherishing that plurality should come naturally to academics, who can sit with contradiction and distinguish Marx from Lenin, Leninism from Maoism, revolutionary socialism from Fabian reformism. Unfortunately, practical politicians, who must build coalitions, rarely have that luxury. The bigger problem emerges when social science educators become doctrinaire. The history of Marxism is itself an argument over what an essentially contested term should mean. Perhaps the discipline lies not in settling that argument, but in refusing to stop having it.
The writer is a freelance columnist and a social scientist.
