Untitled woodcut by Wharton Esherick

In addition to her journalistic efforts, Marcy also demonstrated literary talent. She wrote a one-act play and at least two collections of poetry intended for children. One of these two, Rhymes of Early Jungle Folk (1922), was illustrated with woodcuts by artist Wharton Esherick. Esherick was an accomplished illustrator but is better know as a pionering modernist furniture maker.

Greeting the Sun

Rhymes of Early Jungle Folk is an example of the strain of didactic materialism prevalenent in certain quarters of the American socialist movement, made more interesting than similar trends in Europe because of the strong influence of Lewis Henry Morgan’s matriarchal ethnological theories. Marcy’s other collection of children’s poems, Stories of the Cave People (1917), is an explicit popularization of Morgan’s work. Interest in Morgan’s work was shared by Marx, who studied Ancient Society closely.

The HathiTrust Digital Library contains a scanned copy of Rhymes of Early Jungle Folk from the collection of the New York Public Library. Two of Esherick’s beautiful woodcuts are featured here.

Other scanned copies of Marcy’s work include Shop Talk on Economics (which should be recognized as a valuable American contribution to Marxism) and Women as Sex Vendors (1918) co-authored with R.B. Tobias. Both are available in the Internet Archive.

Edited by Kevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell

Lexington Books, 2012

Revolutionary and Hegelian-Marxist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya struggled throughout her life to win a hearing for her ideas, developed in decades of intense participation in the international Marxist movement. A new collection of correspondence between her and two more well-known radical thinkers—Critical Theorist Herbert Marcuse and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm—sheds light on Dunayevskaya’s Marxist-Humanism, permitting the reader access to the debates on dialectical philosophy, automation, and the structure of capitalist society she had with these two influential intellectuals.

Editors Kevin Anderson and Russell Rockwell situate the thinkers’ exchange of ideas in an introduction that helps to establish the contrast between Dunayevskaya, schooled not in the academy, but in the theoretical and political battles of the left, with Marcuse and Fromm, products of both the rigorous German university system and the Frankfurt School, although the two thinkers were estranged from the latter by the time their relationships with Dunayevskaya began.

It is to Marcuse’s enduring credit that he was open to the intellectual outreach from Dunayevskya to him in late 1954, facilitated by their common friend the art historian Meyer Schapiro (Dunayevskaya knew Schapiro from their mutual participation in the milieu of Trotskyism in New York). Marcuse had been in the consciousness of both Dunayeskaya and her then-co-thinker C.L.R. James since the publication of Reason and Revolution in 1941. Dunayevskaya and James were both highly impressed by this work and it spurred them on to creative engagement with Hegel’s dialectics, in participation with the philosophically trained Grace Lee. This effort, totally contrary to the theoretical stream of Trotskyism, was to provide the content of the Marcuse-Dunayevskaya dialogue after the interest in Hegel on the part of both James and Lee diminished substantially by 1951. This divergence of intellectual perspective was in large measure what precipitated the 1955 split between Dunayavskaya on one hand and James and Lee on the other.

Marcuse greeted with reserve a philosophic interpretation of Hegel’s Absolutes Dunayevskaya shared with him in 1955. Later in her life, Dunayevska came to regard these two texts, composed in May 1953 as letters to Grace Lee (available in The Power of Negativity, another collection of Dunayevskaya’s writings), as her most groundbreaking work, but Marcuse, although respectful, commented, “I still cannot get along with the direct translation of idealistic philosophy into politics.” He had sufficient confidence in her however, to lend assistance in bringing to publication a manuscript on Marx she had been working on in several forms since the 1940s. Marcuse contributed a preface to this work, Marxism and Freedom (1958), which is included in the collection. Anderson and Rockwell rightly draw attention to this text as an important one in which Marcuse, who had substantive disagreements with Dunayevskaya on the potential of the contemporary proletariat as a revolutionary subject, effectively established the position he was to amplify in his most influential work, One Dimensional Man (1961). Although brief, Marcuse’s text outlines the concept that was to become known as one-dimensionality more closely in the context of Marx’s thought than in his later influential book.

The same year Marxism and Freedom appeared, Marcuse published Soviet Marxism: a Critical Analysis, a work marked by a curiously equivocal attitude toward the social and political structure of the post-Stalin U.S.S.R. Dunayevskaya, who had long held that proletarian revolt within state-capitalist Russia was as inevitable as it was in the private capitalist West, refrained from commenting on the book until much later in the interest of preserving their dialogue, but its appearance effectively marked a turning point in Dunayevskaya’s attitude toward Marcuse.

The relationship between Dunayevskaya and Marcuse deteriorated from this point, but she remained respectful of the effort Marcuse had exerted towards ensuring that she would not be, in her word, an intellectual “nonperson.” The extreme theoretical skepticism of One Dimensional Man, along with its analysis of the role of automation in both its existing capitalist form and its potential role in a non-capitalist society (centered on what the editors describe as Marcuse’s insistence upon “creativity outside of labor“), only served to widen the already existing gulf. Their intermittent correspondence after an explosive exchange in early 1961 over Dunayevskaya’s criticism of Marcuse’s friend Isaac Deutscher is polite, but obviously strained. Their intellectual relationship was effectively over long before Marcuse became the reluctant godfather figure to the New Left.

Dunayevskaya’s correspondence with another emigre German intellectual was equally substantive, but more congenial in tone. Psychoanalyst and social critic Erich Fromm contacted Dunayevskaya in 1959, asking her to provide translations of Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts for a book Fromm intended to publish. Dunayevskaya declined, clarifying that she did not know German and reminding him that the Marx translations that appeared in Marxism and Freedom (which Fromm had mentioned that he admired) were done from a Russian edition of Marx’s work.

The solicitation from Fromm’s must have been encouraging to Dunayevskaya. Fromm had an audience many times greater than Marcuse and had eked out the position of widely-read and respected social critic of the Eisenhower era with his books The Sane Society (1955) and The Art of Loving (1956). Anderson and Rockwell make the point in their introduction that Fromm’s increasing interest in Marx at this time was something of a leftward turn for him, and a fortuitous convergence of focus with Dunayevskya’s Marxist-Humanism. Fromm’s Marx’s Concept of Man (1961) won a mass audience for the Economic and Philosophic Essays of 1844 and represented belated recognition for Dunayevskya’s effort in drawing attention to their importance.

The Dunayevskaya-Fromm relationship proved to be a productive one. Fromm invited Dunayevskyaya to contribute an essay to his collection Socialist Humanism (1965), which also included a submission from Marcuse. Fromm was long-estranged from Marcuse and the other members of the Frankfurt School over sharp disagreements in interpretations of Freud’s thought. Fromm and Marcuse had exchanged criticisms over Freud in the pages of Dissent in the mid-1950s and as Dunyevskaya’s relationship with Marcuse deteriorated, Fromm increased in importance as a sympathetic thinker with influence in the academic and publishing world. Fromm was of assistance to her in publishing Philosophy and Revolution (1973) and helped secure the successful publication of a German translation of the book.

At least two themes of interest are present in the later Dunayevskaya-Fromm correspondence: the work of the Frankfurt School and the importance of the feminist dimension of Marx’s thought. The two frequently exchange critical views of Marcuse, Adorno, and Horkheimer, with Fromm delivering harsh criticisms based on the experience of his definitive rupture with the leading lights of the Institute for Social Research in the 1930s. Fromm even comments that the genesis of the idea of “Critical Theory” was an unprincipled tactical retreat from Marxism in the face of the political defeats of the era (see the editors’ summary of Fromm’s letters to Dunayevskaya of July 28, 1975 and October 2, 1976). Fromm is equally acerbic towards Marcuse, whose radicalism in the period of the New Left, Fromm believed, stemmed in part from a subjective desire “not to lose customers.” Fromm and Dunayevskya also exchange views on the resurgent women’s liberation movement of the 1970s and the potential for a mutually beneficial encounter between feminism and humanist Marxism. Both thinkers also shared an interest in Rosa Luxemburg, on whom Dunayevskaya published a book in 1981. Unfortunately, Fromm’s death in 1980 ended the lively intellectual relationship between the two.

The correspondence between Dunayevskaya and Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm provides a valuable supplementary view into the work of these three thinkers. While the Dunayevskaya-Marcuse relationship may be familiar to readers with knowledge of Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom, the sharp differences between the two revealed by their correspondence may contribute to a new understanding of both of their ideas. The lesser-known Dunayevskaya-Fromm relationship has even a greater potential to enrich our comprehension of the work of the two thinkers, in particular, previously unappreciated aspects of Fromm’s humanist Marxism. The respect shown by both Fromm and Marcuse towards Dunayevskaya’s work, while not without—especially in the case of Marcuse—its critical elements, may help to deepen interest in her substantial contribution to twentieth-century Marxism.

“Predictably, despite shows of international solidarity displayed in slogans on banners and signs visible in recent spontaneous anti-austerity demonstrations, there has been no significant attempt at building a united front among the official trade unions and left parties of France, Italy, Greece, Spain, and Portugal. As a result, the workers and general populations of these once-proud nations stand disarmed and disunited in the face of a united adversary: the creditors’ “Europe” of the Troika. Meanwhile, the near-total lack of international solidarity in a European Union that has abolished national borders and currencies is shocking to a U.S. observer. One hopes that in the next phase of this struggle, which will likely intensify as the inflated capital markets careen toward another, more devastating Crash of 2008, the peoples of Europe will be able to form their own horizontal solidarity networks, perhaps with the help of the Internet and social media as during the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements of 2011.”

Greeman’s latest translation is Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary, making available the entirety of the text in English for the first time.

Knabb has very little criticism to offer of the movement. In our opinion, the chief weakness of his analysis is revealed by his response to this question, “Would you agree that Occupy has changed the perception of the social question in the States?” Knabb’s reply: “Yes. First and most obviously, the “99% versus 1%” theme refocused people’s attention to the increasingly extreme economic divisions. Second, the form of the movement gave a hint of how such divisions can and must be overcome—by participatory collective action, as opposed to relying on politicians or other leaders to act for us.”

The problem lies in the ambiguity of his phrase “extreme economic divisions.” If Knabb defines these divisions—as Occupy Wall Street did—as the disparity in the distribution of income in the U.S., then the problem is a political one which may possibly be remedied by the “participatory collective action” of politics and workplace organization.

But what if the problem is a more profound one? The capitalism of 2013 is a state of affairs in which the human being is becoming an increasingly smaller part of the production process relative to any previous point in the history of humanity. Can “participatory collective action” reorganize a society in which the material production of commodities (the production of value and surplus value) has become almost totally automated? Will it be possible to satisfy the “human wants of some sort or another” that have arisen in the course of humanity’s existence under the conditions of centuries of capitalist society in a reorganized regime of production, that is, without the production of value? These are open questions, but neither Knabb, nor in our opinion, the Occupy movement as a whole, came close to raising them.

by Alan M. Wald

University of North Carolina Press, 2012

Historian Alan Wald brings to a close his three-part study of the literary output of the American left from the 1920s through the 1950s with American Night: the Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War. Wald presents a diverse spectrum of poets and novelists sharing in common a committment to what Wald calls “late antifascism”, the Communist Party line that held that the multi-class alliance of World War II that contributed to the defeat of Nazi Germany had been betrayed by the American right and that the supposedly-vanquished fascism had become incorporated into the domestic political structure.

Wald adopts fellow historian Lizabeth Cohen’s thesis of the Consumer’s Republic—her term for the social and political framework of the postwar economic boom—to contrast the writers’ political sympathies with the countervailing winds of the Truman-Eisenhower era.

The fact that the writers Wald selects—among them the obscure novelist Kenneth Fearing, the apostate Communist Richard Wright, and the poet Thomas McGrath—have little in common other than their baseline political postions gives the book a somewhat formless feel. The reader is forced to navigate by the historic signposts of the period, such as Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential campaign, the Smith Act trials and convictions, and Khrushchev’s 1956 semi-repentence speech, to see Wald’s subjects in a coherent relationship to one another.

Perhaps the book’s biggest contribution is Wald’s material on homosexuality in the CP and its milieu, in which he examines the related prejudices of the party line and the society it supposedly stood in opposition to. The chapter on the dire philosophical limitations of social realism is also strong, although the multiple passing references to Adorno’s negative dialectics are not developed enough to warrant inclusion in the argument.

Although almost all of Wald’s subjects have far more historical than literary merit, the thoroughgoing excavation work he has undertaken retrieves a generation of writers all but lost to obscurity. Ultimately, the party’s writer members and sympathizers were doomed by the impossibility of reconciling Stalin and his cultural lieutenant Zhadanov with their own interpretations of the relationship of the artist to the liberatory potential of U.S. society—however committed they were to that very project.

See also:  Alan Wald on the literature of the Browder era

Open Library record

See also: Margaret Ellingham, An American Marxist in Italy

Central to Stone’s thesis is now-forgotten Iowa farmer-turned-New Deal politician-turned fellow-traveling third-party presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace. Stone polishes up an old image of Wallace as the true inheritor of Rooseveltian democratic state-capitalism who was shoved aside as the post-war bipolar world began to take shape. In this tale, Wallace’s 1948 presidential run was perhaps the great lost chance for U.S. democracy. In the Stone and Kuznick “What If?” theory of history, “We’ll never know.”

The reality is that Wallace’s program and vision was nothing less than the continuation of the New Deal’s state intervention into the era of a world divided between two competing poles of world capital. Setting aside Wallace’s foreign policy, the true measure of Wallace is his tenure as Roosevelt’s Secretary of Agriculture, particularly his conduct during the struggle of the sharecroppers of Arkansas—organized in the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union—against their landlords. We’ll spare the reader a mention of Wallace’s penchant for esoterism and  the relationship with Nicholas Roerich here.

Perhaps the best contemporary critic of Wallace was Dwight Macdonald, the highly individualistic political writer and cultural critic who made his way from journalism to the Fourth International, then on to a pacifistic anarchism developed in the pages of his short-lived but important little magazine, Politics, and finally to a somewhat curmudgeonly position of the defense of high culture in the face of the cultural popularization of U.S. society.

As a radical, Macdonald managed to antagonize in turn James P. Cannon, Max Shachtman, Leon Trotsky, and the Johnson-Forest Tendency (Macdonald is mentioned in passing in Trotskyism in the United States, 1940-1947: Balance Sheet, the JFT’s departure document from the Workers Party—Macdonald adhered to the bureaucratic collectivist position on the U.S.S.R.). Quite a feat.

Ironically , Stone and Kuznick quote Macdonald on the militarization of the mind during this period—a focus of  Macdonald and the Politics school.

Below is a representative excerpt from Macdonald’s book Henry Wallace: the Man and the Myth, published in 1948, before Wallace announced his third-party candidacy. The text of the book amplifies articles from Politics.

A preview of the Stone and Kuznick book is available in Google Books.

•  •  •

Henry Wallace: the Man and the Myth (excerpt)

by Dwight Macdonald

Vanguard Press, [1948]

from Chapter 3: Prophet of the People’s Century (1941-1946)

The “Free World” Speech

Wallace’s most celebrated wartime oration, an effort he never surpassed and one which made him overnight into the spokesman for the “people’s century,” was the speech he delivered to the Free World Assocation in New York City on May 8, 1942. Political speeches do not withstand the passage of time very well, but few have dated so rapidly in five years. Rereading it today, with the outlines of the postwar-prewar world taking grim shape about us, is a peculiar experience. One wonders about the psychology of the speaker and of the many educated, idealistic citizens who mistook for reality a hallucinatory vision.

“This is a fight between a free world and a slave world,” Wallace began in clarion tones. “Just as the United States in 1862 could not remain half slave and half free, so in 1942 the world must make its decision for a complete victory one way or the other.

“As we begin the final stages of this fight to the death…it is worth while to refresh our minds about the march of freedom for the common man. The idea of freedom—that we in the United States know and love so well—is derived from the Bible with its extraordinary emphasis on the dignity of the individual. Democracy is the only true political expression of Christianity…

“The people are on the march toward even fuller freedom than the most fortunate peoples of the world have hitherto enjoyed. No Nazi counter-revolutionist will stop it…The people’s revolution is on the march, and the devil and all his angels cannot prevail against it. They cannot prevail, for on the side of the people is the Lord.”

This encouraging view of the future, long since punctured by postwar events, was possible to Wallace because his is a Victorian optimisim of progress, based on a belief in the automatic beneficence of industrialization plus popular education: “Down the years, the people of hte United States have moved steadily forward in the practice of democracy. Through universal education, they can now read and write and form opinions of their own…Everywhere, reading and writing are accompanied by industrial progress, and industrial progress sooner or later brings a strong labor movement.”

That universal literacy, with all media of communication in the hands of the dominant class—whether the Soviet politburo or our own hucksters—has become a means of preventing people from having “opinions of thier own”—this in no clearer to Wallace today than it was to Herbert Spencer in the last century. Nor is there any place in his antiquated cosmology for the two great historical developments of our time: the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the growth of Nazism. For the industrialization of Russia and the well-publicized reduction of illiteracy by the Soviet regime have been accompanied by a contraction of the area of political freedom; while Hitler came to power precisely in that European country which was the most heavily industrialized and had the finest system of public education, as well as the strongest labor movement. Wallace attempted to meet these objections by asserting (1) that “in the process” of abolishing illiteracy “Russia’s appreciation of freedom was tremendously increased,” which simply is not true (unless in the sense that one values what one hasn’t got); and (2) that Germany lacks a tradition of self-government, which merely raises the question as to why so industrialized and well-educated a nation failed to develop a democratic tradition.

If such phenomena simply refused to fit into Wallace’s historical scheme, so did the fact that for the second time in a generation the world was at war. The sins of capitalism he loaded onto the scapegoat HItler, “the curse of the modern world,” such as Hitler loaded them onto the Jews. Instead of seeing Hitlerism as the terrible result of the decadence of both capitalism and the 1917 Revolution, Wallace presented it as a monstrosity which in some way had arisen entirely outside history—a kind of pure diabolism. The speech referred to Hitler as “Satan” no fewer than seven times.

Against the black picture of Satan-Hitler, Wallace set a bright lantern-slide of the situatino on the Anglo-American-Russian side of the battle-lines: a steady, inevitable forward-march by the common people toward ever-increasing democracy and security: “The march of freedom of the past 150 years has been a long-drawn-out people’s revolution…The people’s revolution aims at peach and not at violence, but if the rights of the common man are attacked, it unleashes the ferocity of a she-bear who has lost a cub…The people, in their millenial and revolutionary march toward manifesting here on earth the dignity that is in every human soul, hold as their credo the Four Freedoms ennunciated by President Roosevelt. These Four Freedoms are the very core of the revolution for which the United Nations have taken their stand.” It was characteristic of Wallace that an advertising slogan like the Four Freedoms (Love Those Freedoms!), which are now as mercifully forgotten as Phoebe Snow and the Sapolio jingles, should have appeared to him as the “core” of a “people’s revolution.” Also characteristic was the notion of a revolution whose Navy was commanded by a Knox, whose army was led by a Stimson, and whose foreign policy was conducted by a Hull.

This cartoon accompanied the article “Where Is Russia Going?”

Dunayevskaya was less impressed by the campaign to lose the Stalinist baggage than the efforts to impose the will of the bureaucracy (Khrushchev, Bulganin, Zhukov, et al) on the Russian working class. She had a strong focus during this period on the revolt of the Russian workers, which formed a central part of her Marxism and Freedom, published in 1957.

Note in this piece the emphasis on the hope placed in technology as a means of control, identical to its use in the west. She wrote, “The bureaucracy hopes to overcome workers’ resistance by automation. No private property capitalist has ever dreamed more fantastic dreams of push-button factories without workers, than the present dreams of the Russian state capitalists.”

• • •

21st Century Socialism in Pakistan? (excerpts)

Economic and Political Weekly (Mumbai, India)

November 10, 2012

by Aasim Sajjad Akhtar (Workers Party Pakistan)

It is rare for Pakistan to be in the news for something other than suicide bombs, Hindu and Jew-hating mullahs and a very peculiar (and vulnerable) type of postcolonial democracy. A plethora of institutions, classes, ethnic groups and prominent individuals animates narratives of Pakistani modernity, most notably the omnipresent military and those who would challenge the men in khaki, including ethno-nationalists like those presently leading an insurgency in Balochistan.

Conspicuous by its absence in almost all such accounts is the Pakistani left. Even informed observers of Pakistan might have little or no knowledge of leftist forces in the country, at least in the contemporary period. Students of history will know that the Pakistani ruling class visited a great deal of repression upon leftists during the cold war when the country was the frontline against the Soviet bloc. Despite having to operate in extremely dire circumstances, the Pakistani left exercised not insignificant influence on the polity, and society more generally, until the 1980s.

Since the end of the cold war, however, the little space that the left previously garnered has, more or less, frittered away. Of course this has been the fate of the left in many countries. With the exception of the experiments in “21st century socialism” being effected in Latin America, the left continues to suffer from a crisis of identity in the face of changes in the global political economy associated with neo-liberalism.

The retreat of the Pakistani left has arguably been more damning and sustained than most, even if one limits the comparative frame to south Asia. It is, for instance, an uncomfortable truth that a majority of the more than 100 million Pakistanis below the age of 25 do not even know that there is a political left in its country, or indeed even that there is a competing ideology to the left of the dominant intellectual mainstream. The common sense notions that do exist are carry-overs from the cold war inasmuch as the term “communist” in Pakistan still connotes an irreligious world view.

There are, however, glimmers of hope amidst the relative gloom. On 11 November, three existing parties of the left – Labour Party Pakistan, Awami Party P­akistan and Workers Party Pakistan – will come together to form a new party with the goal of building a viable alternative to mainstream parties. This merger reflects recognition within leftist circles, both of the growing contradictions ­within the prevailing structure of power and the need for unity and maturity so as to take advantage of these contradictions.

Unity is of course a favourite slogan of the left. The Leninist tradition has, alongside unity, also emphasised ideological purity which, in far too many cases, has translated into sectarianism of the worst kind and continuous organisational divisions. The present merger is, in this regard at least, a first in Pakistan insofar as the three parties represent different Marxist traditions which have historically been distinctly opposed to one another.

Indeed, the merger process was ­impelled by younger activists within these three parties, and some outside of them, that do not carry the baggage of cold war sectarian conflicts (read: Stalinists, Trotskyites, Maoists, etc). It is also amongst the more recent entrants to the left fray that there is a greater critical ref­lection about the failings of 20th ­century socialist experiments, and a willingness to think in dynamic terms about the s­ocialist project in the present century.

While there has been resistance from a segment of the older cadre, the imperative of unity, especially in the face of the inadequacies of the existing parties, appears to have won through. The most obvious manifestation of the left’s r­etreat over the past two decades is in the composition of existing formations: a majority of the left’s existing leadership and rank-and-file is the same as it was at the end of the cold war. In short, the left has, since the late 1980s, struggled to induct young people into its fold, or at the very least retain those who have joined the ranks. The latter failing is an indicator of the lack of dynamism in the left’s analysis and political work, as young people, otherwise attracted to leftist ideas, are quickly alienated by its actual practices on the ground.

• • •

Notwithstanding the obsession of the world’s news media with the supposedly existential threat posed to Pakistan by the religious right, the left’s arguably biggest immediate challenge will be to bridge the growing ethnic divide in the country. The Pakistani ruling classes’ visceral mistrust of the democratic process and their undying commitment to a unitary nationalist ideology emphasising Islam and Urdu directly resulted in the secession of the eastern wing in 1971, and the deepening of conflicts within and across existing provincial boundaries since then.

The left has had to contend with the regionalisation of politics across south Asia and much of the world, so the challenge facing Pakistani leftists is not necessarily unique. Nevertheless, given the distinct rise of parochial trends in recent times, projecting a sensitive and nuanced politics of class that foregrounds Pakistan’s multinational character is, in the contemporary climate, a truly revolutionary task.

There are, at present, highly contrasting imperatives of doing politics in different regions of the country. The new party will likely try, as the left has done throughout Pakistan’s history, to build alliances with ethno-nationalists who stand opposed to the Pakistani centre. But it will do so in a trying context – many ethno-nationalists, particularly in Sindh and Balochistan, now view the western powers, and the United States in particular, as the guarantor of their right to self-determination, a perspective that flies in the face of the anti-­imperialist foundations of a left programme.

Imperialism remains a major impediment to the long-term democratisation of state and society, and here it is important to consider not just the role of the US, but also the states of the Arabian Gulf and China, multinational capital, and the international financial institutions (IFIs). The new party must move beyond sloganeering and develop a substantial understanding of the complex and contradictory ways in which imperialist influence is exercised. Further, and of particular importance is to develop an understanding of the extent to which an emergent middle class addicted to the neo-liberal economy and globalised cultural forms is a friend or foe of the subordinate classes.

This is a particularly pertinent question in light of the increasing polarisation between segments of the left and liberals who are inclined to view western governments and intervention in Pakistan and the wider region as necessary, desirable even, in the struggle to clip the wings of the religious right. In short, the struggle for secularism is all too often seen as an end in itself, rather than linked to the left’s historic tasks of securing national liberation and class equality.

As in many postcolonial countries of Asia and Africa, in Pakistan too the fragmentation of progressive discourse and politics is explained in part by the rise of the non-governmental organisation (NGO). While there is merit to the argument that NGOs – donor funding more generally – have undermined radical political praxis, it is just as true that they have exposed some of the left’s major failings. NGOs in Pakistan have, for instance, proven to be a vehicle for women’s mobility, whereas the left, especially in its current incarnation, cannot claim to have made any meaningful contribution to the struggle against patriarchy. If nothing else, the new party must dedicate substantial time and effort to increasing the number of women activists among its ranks.