Destituting the Party: The Crisis of the Pakistani Left
A critique of party-centric tendencies within the Pakistani Left’s debate on the India-Pakistan conflict
Illustration: Jamhoor
The ongoing debate within Pakistan’s Left reveals how thoroughly its dominant frameworks have hardened into habits of thought incapable of grasping contemporary political reality. The recent interventions by Ammar Ali Jan, Syed Azeem and Muhammad Umar Ali, and Ayyaz Mallick seek strategic clarity in the aftermath of the latest confrontation between India and Pakistan, but each relies on conceptual reflexes inherited from an earlier moment. These reflexes presume that the state remains a coherent vessel of political possibility, that sovereignty can be retrieved through correct geopolitical alignment, and that the masses exist as a latent unity waiting to be summoned. Against this imaginary, it is necessary to describe how the Pakistani state and global capital actually operate through differentiated extraction, coercion and abandonment, how movements emerge from specific sites of exposure and endurance, and why leadership that continually invokes unity cannot meet the conditions it claims to diagnose.
“Treating China as non-imperial because it does not mirror the base infrastructure of the United States misunderstands how present day imperial relations operate through combinations of financialisation, extraction and mediated governance rather than simple conquest.”
Ammar Ali Jan’s intervention is built on the assumption that the Pakistani state, though compromised, can reorganise society if a sovereign project is articulated with sufficient clarity. His argument turns on the claim that postcolonial states retain a legitimate right to self defence against external aggression and that the Left must acknowledge this right. This framing depends on abstracting Pakistan from the material architecture that constitutes it. Pakistan does not confront imperialism as a unified political subject. It is organised through overlapping networks of militarised development, financial dependency and bureaucratic governance that distribute protection and exposure unevenly. Frantz Fanon’s account of how postcolonial states inherit racialised, gendered and classed hierarchies helps to clarify this structure.Identification systems, welfare schemes, development and security projects, policing and land grabs sort people into those whose lives the state protects and those it treats as expendable.
Uneven Masses
Seen from this perspective, the social terrain that Jan calls “the people” or “the masses” is not a single formation awaiting ideological coherence. It is an uneven field composed of precarious urban workers pushed through unstable labour markets, rural households trapped in debt and dispossession, women whose labour remains elastic and unrecognised, migrants whose remittances uphold the economy while their own lives remain peripheral to state’s concerns, climate displaced families navigating repeated loss, caste marked communities living under permanent suspicion, and queer and trans collectivities who absorb overlapping forms of policing and social violence. These differentiated conditions do not signal ideological confusion. They express the patterned effects of how power distributes vulnerability and privilege.
Work on contemporary imperialism, including Samir Amin’s analysis of unequal exchange and dependent accumulation, helps to clarify this structure. For Amin, global capital subordinates peripheral economies through debt, extraction and political disciplining. Pakistan’s integration into circuits of accumulation follows this logic. Negotiation does not occur from a position of sovereign choice. It takes place from within relations already organised by dependency. Jan’s claim that Pakistan can reclaim sovereignty by pivoting toward Asia rests on ignoring how Chinese investment, debt restructuring and corridor projects reproduce forms of dependency that are imperial in their effects. Credit arrangements, mineral concessions and logistical integration discipline domestic politics through financial imperatives and security commitments. The fact that these processes do not rely on a dense network of bases does not make them neutral.
“The question becomes whether Pakistan “retains the right to defend itself,” instead of whether it possesses the material capacity to act independently within a global hierarchy structured by debt, security rents, military patronage, IMF supervision and corridor based integration into Chinese and Gulf capital. ”
Jan also misreads contemporary imperial relations when he draws a sharp line between the violent architecture of the United States and the supposedly benign rise of China. Peripheral states do not step outside imperial hierarchies by changing patrons. Debt and resource capture fold them back into the same order through different channels. Financial power can operate without overt military domination and reorganise life through economic capture rather than territorial conquest. Extractive power now often functions through dispersed arrangements that rely on corridors, security enclosures, debt relations and flexible appropriation of territories and bodies. These dynamics are embedded in development schemes, remittance economies, labour mobility regimes and the infrastructures of corridor projects that reconfigure space without formal occupation. Treating China as non-imperial because it does not mirror the base infrastructure of the United States misunderstands how present day imperial relations operate through combinations of financialisation, extraction and mediated governance rather than simple conquest.
Pakistani Prime Minister on official state visit to China in 2024
Jan frames disagreement as a failure of others to “decide,” accusing them of retreating into “safe scholarship” and avoiding the tragic choices demanded by history. The decision he advances is not grounded in the material conditions under which the state operates. It is grounded in moral affirmation. The question becomes whether Pakistan “retains the right to defend itself,” instead of whether it possesses the material capacity to act independently within a global hierarchy structured by debt, security rents, military patronage, IMF supervision and corridor based integration into Chinese and Gulf capital. In this configuration, sovereignty is invoked as a moral claim rather than examined as a material condition. Dependency is treated as a matter of attitude rather than architecture. This is exactly the trap that Amin describes when nationalist discourse invokes sovereignty as if it were held in reserve, while the actual position of the state in the world economy has already been organised by collective imperial power.
“Jan’s repeated appeals to “the people,” “the nation,” “sovereignty” and a “national popular project” are not grounded in institutional capacity or social formation. They cover the gap between the world he describes and the world he wants to summon. ”
Fanon is instructive here for another reason. When postcolonial elites invoke unity or national destiny, they often mobilise universals to suppress antagonisms rooted in class, gender, caste and racialised exposure. Jan follows this trajectory. He insists that the Left must suspend its analysis of internal repression and national oppression in order to affirm the state’s right to self defence. The distinction between external sovereignty and internal justice is presented as a matter of sequence. One must come before the other. Fanon’s warning was that such sequencing allows the postcolonial bourgeoisie to consolidate its position while postponing the transformation of the conditions that shape everyday life. Jan repeats that operation by asking movements confronting dispossession, disappearances and militarised policing to treat their own struggles as secondary to a national project that has consistently organised itself against them. Shortly after this debate, the aftermath of the India-Pakistan exchange made that sequencing concrete. Appeals to national defence moved alongside the establishment of a new federal court, proposals for a twenty seventh amendment and an intensified clampdown on dissent. The language of sovereignty travelled with institutional changes that extend state power and narrow avenues of contestation. In that context, Jan’s framework does more than misdescribe the terrain. It normalises the expectation that those already living with dispossession and militarised control should set aside their own struggles in order to preserve a state that continues to govern them as expendable.
Maurizio Lazzarato helps to name the language that accompanies this movement. In his account of the impasses of critical thought after the 1970s, he traces how universals such as “the people,” “sovereignty,” “nation,” “unity” and “decision” persist as rhetorical anchors long after the material bases of collective political agency have been eroded by financialisation, debt governance, militarised globalisation and logistical rationalisation. These terms no longer correspond to organised subjects. They operate as stand- ins for strategies that no longer exist. They appear when the Left cannot account for the mechanisms of domination and instead invokes abstract cohesion. Jan’s repeated appeals to “the people,” “the nation,” “sovereignty” and a “national popular project” are not grounded in institutional capacity or social formation. They cover the gap between the world he describes and the world he wants to summon.
“When Jan asserts that Pakistan’s right to self defence must be affirmed, he speaks in the register of universality while leaving these internal divisions intact. ”
Universal language smooths over differentiation and presents unity as a starting point rather than a problem. The more differentiated the social terrain becomes, the more Jan leans on universal terms. The more diminished the state’s capacity, the more he insists on its necessity. Amin’s account of how nationalist discourse slides from opposition into the management of dependency sits in the background here, marking the point where invocations of sovereignty no longer confront the global order but help to administer it.
Pakistan’s governance architecture, including documentation regimes, counterterror finance, securitised development and colonial policing, organises distinctions along lines of region, sect, ethnicity, class and race. When Jan asserts that Pakistan’s right to self defence must be affirmed, he speaks in the register of universality while leaving these internal divisions intact. The state does not defend an undifferentiated “people.” It defends an order built on hierarchical distributions of security and exposure.
“Their reliance on older Leninist and Maoist categories assumes a mass subject capable of consolidation through a vanguard party, even though the unified industrial proletariat that underwrote those strategies no longer exists.”
Jan’s reading of Mao reinforces these problems. He presents Mao’s temporary collaboration with the Kuomintang as a precedent for supporting Pakistan’s military under conditions of external threat. The analogy extracts the tactic and leaves behind the strategy. Mao’s alliances were subordinated to mass mobilisation, land reform, armed organisation and the construction of counter power. They presumed a capacity to analyse the coordination of imperial forces and to intervene at points of rupture. Jan keeps the image of alliance and abandons the work that made it meaningful. Mao becomes a justification for trusting a military that remains central to Pakistan’s rentier order, rather than a figure for building antagonistic capacity against it.
Azeem and Umar Ali appear, at first, to stand at the opposite pole. They reject what they see as HKP’s capitulation to national defence and call for “revolutionary militant people’s struggles” against Western, Indian and Chinese imperialism. Their identification of Hindutva fascism, intensified repression in Kashmir and expanding resource grabs is important. Their wider history of Left alignments across South Asia traces real debates. But their diagnosis repeats the same abstraction. Imperialism is condensed into a single axis along which all actors can be placed. Differentiated movements across Pakistan are treated as distractions from a unified people’s war that exists only on paper. Their proposal does not confront the constraints imposed by debt, border regimes, logistical corridors and security infrastructures. It imagines a subject capable of fighting multiple fronts without considering how that subject is fragmented by the very conditions they name.
Their reliance on older Leninist and Maoist categories assumes a mass subject capable of consolidation through a vanguard party, even though the unified industrial proletariat that underwrote those strategies no longer exists. The landscape is fractured by financialisation, caste and gendered violence, ecological precarity, migration and militarised borders. Invoking a people’s war across this terrain does not answer the question of organisation. It relocates it into a horizon that cannot be reached. The party form becomes a shell that claims authority without demonstrating capacity.
“While commentators debated principles in Lahore and Karachi, residents of Rawalakot and surrounding areas endured nightly shelling, blackouts and the disruption of daily life.”
Ayyaz Mallick seeks to escape these closures through a call for a pluri-national consciousness. He criticises metropolitan sections of the Lahore Left for collapsing into nationalist sentiment and for drawing simplistic analogies between Pakistan and Palestine. He points to the fusion of external dependency with internal regimes of national oppression. His critique of convivial nationalist rhetoric and of the Lahore based convergence around war patriotism is necessary. His proposal still returns to the expectation that unity can be reconstructed at the level of a national popular project. Contradictions that have material origins are redirected into a question of a proper ideological frame. The assumption that consciousness at the scale of the nation can be recalibrated to hold together divergent experiences of dispossession reduces the problem to one of naming rather than organisation.
In this situation, the language used against social movements does a particular job. When Jan sneers at “social movementism,” or Azeem and Ali reduce decades of struggle to MRD/NGO pipelines, they are not really describing movements. They are defending the right of parties to remain central even when they are peripheral. They are protecting their own position as interpreters of a landscape they do not organise. The more a social movement demonstrates the capacity to think, act and endure without party leadership, the more vicious the labels become. Calling movements “messianic,” “sectarian,” “liberal,” “NGO,” “safe” does not further analysis. It polices the boundary of who is allowed to speak as the Left.
“A Left committed to transformation would start from this recognition, stop demanding that movements subordinate themselves to national projects that cannot hold them”
A Left Removed
Leadership in the Left has withdrawn from the terrains where people confront extraction, abandonment and coercion. C. L. R. James described how leadership often substitutes proclamation for movement, confusing analysis with organisation and commentary with presence. This distance was exposed during the recent India–Pakistan exchange. While commentators debated principles in Lahore and Karachi, residents of Rawalakot and surrounding areas endured nightly shelling, blackouts and the disruption of daily life. Conversations with activists from Azad Kashmir revealed how artillery fire reorganised everyday routines in ways absent from metropolitan Left discourse. Leadership continues to speak from afar, avoiding the difficult, necessary work of building infrastructures of protection, mutual aid and organisation in the places where people live under fire.
Across Pakistan, people craft forms of coordination where the state withdraws or intensifies coercion. Neighbourhood protection networks, feminist, queer and trans collectivities, women’s groups, student solidarities, anti displacement committees, informal care infrastructures, debt sharing practices and climate relief efforts arise from necessity, not from ideological permission. These formations are prefigurative in the sense that Benjamin Raekstad and others describe. They emerge from improvisational practices through which people survive in hostile conditions and experiment with forms of collective life that do not wait for sanction from centralised organisations. They materialise in the ways displaced families share risk, in solidarities forged at sites of extraction, in relationships of care that move across caste and class divisions during crisis, and in refusal practices that interrupt the smooth reproduction of domination. They inhabit contradiction rather than resolve it and show that political invention arises from shared exposure rather than from the command of leadership.
Dr Mahrang Baloch, the leader of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), addresses the crowd in Gwadar. Image: The Guardian
This is the terrain of destituent politics that Mario Tronti and others have analysed. Destitution does not mean simple destruction of institutions. It names the process by which people withdraw adherence from forms that no longer hold political possibility and build relations elsewhere. In Pakistan, this appears when movements bypass party structures to organise legal defence, mutual aid, strike funds and protest camps, when they refuse to recognise courts, commissions or negotiations that function only to delay and deflect, and when they create their own protocols for protection and accountability. The party form is not abolished by decree. It is left behind in practice.
The crisis of Pakistan’s Left does not begin with theoretical confusion. It begins with the distance between where people build political capacity and where leadership situates itself. Movements confronting land extraction, debt, disappearances, policing, ecological destruction, queer and trans precarity and gendered violence already produce analyses that exceed metropolitan commentary. They do not need to be folded into pre-existing lines. They need organisations willing to stand inside them. A Left committed to transformation would start from this recognition, stop demanding that movements subordinate themselves to national projects that cannot hold them, and join the plebeian terrain where people are already organising against dispossession and repression, allowing those struggles to reorder what leadership imagines politics to be.
The Pakistani state organises life through extraction, coercion and abandonment. Movements organise life through care, refusal and invention. A Left serious about transformation would begin from this distinction. It would step into the exposures where struggle unfolds, confront its own distance from the terrain and abandon exhausted organisational forms. Pakistan is already undergoing this reconfiguration. The question is whether those who speak in the name of the Left are prepared to catch up.
Sher Ali Khan is a researcher, journalist, and organizer whose work examines how crisis, capital, and state power shape differentiated life in Pakistan and the broader Global South. He is also the creator and host of the Organic Filaments Network, a platform for rigorous political and theoretical conversations with scholars, organizers, and movements.