Asia

The repolling at four polling stations in South Waziristan was blatantly rigged. Ali Wazir the Marxist candidate for Parliament had his victory stolen. But while the Parliament is the final goal for corrupt career politicians, for the Marxists the campaign was just a step in the struggle against the rotten Capitalist system.

Since the Pakistani general elections on 11 May this year, the forces of reaction have been manoeuvring to try to deny a democratically elected candidate his rightful place as an elected representative of the people of Pakistan. Tomorrow is an important day in this process as it will witness these reactionary forces doing everything they can to steal the victory of the Marxists.

The PML-N government will find itself in quicksand with so many adversaries fighting in so many directions on so many fronts

Pakistan is a country that is literally falling apart in every sense of these words. Its already weak infrastructure is in a state of decay, with power shortages, water shortages, a transport system in a state of collapse, unemployment ever rising and with widespread poverty. This generalised state of decay is now eating away at the state itself, with national and religious conflicts widespread. The ruling elite see no other way of holding on to power than to provoke division after division among the people in the hope of weakening the impoverished masses. It is within this nightmare situation that the Pakistani Marxists are building a force that can offer the masses a way out.

The campaign for the 2013 elections is perhaps the worst ever from the point of view of the oppressed classes of this country. There is hardly any party that addresses the most burning issue in society – the class contradiction and exploitation. Not even a single mainstream party claims to be a ‘party of the poor’.

Following the collapse of the nine-storey Rana Plaza at Savar near Dhaka last week, the death toll of workers killed in the disaster had reached 501 by the morning of Friday 3rd May. Many people fear that the death toll will rise above 1000. While a large number of workers are still missing and feared dead, their relatives have taken to the streets to protest against the brutality of the Capitalist economic system that caused this tragedy. This latest incident took place just five months after the Ashulia tragedy near Dhaka in which more than 110 garment workers were burnt to death in a Tazreen Fashions factory after a fire broke out. No-one has yet been held responsible, let

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More than 500,000 took to the streets on May Day in what was in effect the second largest general strike in the history of Indonesia. The working class of the 4th largest country in the world is starting to move in a very radical manner as the workers are imbued with confidence from their recent successes.

On the morning of Monday, 22 April, police attacked the protest camp of Unilever workers outside the factory gate in Rahim Yar Khan. Nine were arrested and tortured. They had been protesting for their reinstatement for the last nine days, a struggle that has been ongoing for the past few years.

There are many forgotten heroes of the Liberation movement against the British Raj in the Subcontinent. Bhagat Singh and his comrades were some of those who stood against imperialism on a programme of Socialist Revolution. On 23rd March 1931, Bhagat Singh along with his comrades Raj Guru and Sukh Dev were hanged by British Imperialism at the Central Jail in Lahore.

We bring to the attention of our readers an article written in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn about Malala Yousufzai and the work of the Marxists in the Swat area in Pakistan.

Pakistan Post Office Directorate General Employees Union elections were held on 11 March 2013. The revolutionary group of PTUDC comrades won a landslide victory and got 70% of the votes.

On the 23rd of March 1931, twenty-three year old Bhagat Singh, the legendary revolutionary icon in the struggle for liberation and emancipation of the masses in the Indian subcontinent and his comrades in arms, Sukhdev Thapar and Shivaram Rajguru, were hanged at Lahore’s central jail.