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........

© The Nation