Pakistan - Awami Workers Party founded: Will it sustain itself?

2012-12-19 · first published in International Viewpoint · 189 words

This was not a Socialist Resistance publication. marxsite was Phil Hearse’s own long-form site, run alongside the paper he helped edit. It is kept here with his agreement, recovered from the Internet Archive after the domain lapsed and was taken over by someone else; nothing here links to the address it now points at.

As credited on the page: “link to internationalviewpoint.org”

Only part of this piece survives. The capture it was recovered from is truncated, so the text below stops before the article did.

---

Tuesday 11 December 2012, by Farooq Tariq

The merger of three left wing parties — Awami Party, Labour Party Pakistan, and Workers Party Pakistan — has generated a lot of discussion among the political intelligentsia and activists. While it has been hailed as a trend setting exercise by many in and outside Pakistan, there are quite a few asking the question: will it sustain itself? The merger undoubtedly has lifted many aspirations of those wanting a just and equitable society. It has been welcomed all over despite a few relating sarcastically and instinctively with some of the failed attempts of the Left to forge unity among organizations over the past 30 years.

Four articles within a week of merger were printed in the editorial pages of commercial media including Dawn, Pakistan Today and Daily Times, written by well respected writers like I. A. Rehman and Professor Aziz-ud-din Ahmad, welcoming the merger on the theme of the “Left reborn”. Several Urdu papers also followed the English papers to welcome the most intelligent move by the Left in decades to expand its social basis in a society dominated by political Islam.