Karachi: A capitalist hell

The new agreement with China

In the increasingly close synergies between Chinese imperialism and Pakistan, a memorandum of understanding was signed for the development of the Karachi port, Capital of Sindh province, in the south-east of the country, along the eastern coast of the Arabian sea. Chinese firms are to build new berths, a commercial area in the port and a bridge connecting the city to the nearby Manora Islands. These projects are part of the China-Pakistan Economic corridor (CPEC), which today represents the most important plan of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the new strategic Silk Road, vital for Chinese imperialism, an access point to the Indian Ocean which provides an alternative route circumventing that of Straits of Malacca and the Sunda, garrisoned by the United States. Chinese capital invested in the Pakistani metropolis would create the premises for a new route, which would add to or replace the current one, which today connects the Chinese region of Xinjiang to the area of Gwadar, in Balochistan, though today considered a region of problem by Beijing for having inadequate infrastructure and political instability.

In a message circulated on social media, the current prime minister Imran Khan commented: ‘’ This project will cleanup marine habitat for fisherman, develop low-income housing units, present opportunities for investors and bring Karachi on par with developed port cities’’. The truth is, if there will be benefits, it will be only for the bloodsuckers of capital, for the dominant Chinese and Pakistani classes, all on the backs of the exploited classes in a city that is already battered by the vicious effects of capitalism.

Capitalism dominates in Karachi

Karachi, Pakistan’s first port, is its largest city, among the most populous in the world. For decades, having a fairly well-developed industrial sector in various areas, which includes textile, automotive, energy, pharmaceutical and steel sectors.

In 1947, the year of the independence of the Islamic Republic and the division of the Indian Republic, the city had 450,000 inhabitants, a census conducted in 2017 revealed a population of 16 million, growing at a dramatic pace and today probably close to 20 million.

Ever-increasing skyscrapers and minarets are surrounded by an immense series of shanty-towns, about 600, which make up a large part of the city. According to a recent international study, more than half of Karachi’s inhabitants reside in katchi abadis, chaotic clusters of buildings, illegal, unauthorized by the local administrations, made up of bricks, rarely cement, which have partly replaced the Jhuggis, houses made with mud, make-shift materials, sheet-metal and plastic. Millions of people live in these slums, which cover a huge portion of the city, in overcrowded, suffocating circumstances, surrounded by violence and crime. Waste-water often flows openly, there is no access to sanitation services and drinking water. The water provided to these settlements is often contaminated with fecal matter, toxic agricultural chemicals and industrial waste. Every year water-borne diseases kill tens of thousands of people in Karachi alone, particularly infants and children, in extreme poverty and glaring malnutrition.

However, because the city is industrially developed, it continues to attract a great number of rural people in search of a salary. Arriving from nearby abandoned villages or the less capitalistically developed areas of the country. Those arriving in the city are often destined to magnify these shantytowns.

The problem of housing in the city was striking after the independence, with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees from the new India. But, especially during the 60’s the katchi abadis would skyrocket, when the Ayub Khan military regime sought to throw the working class to the periphery of the city.

Those who arrive in the city today and can’t find work, go to enlarge the lumpenproletariat, which survives by searching inside garbage that invades drainage channels, others by begging for rupees on pavements. But most join the ranks of proletarians, offering themselves as laborers for low-wages or in industry or the service sector. Some move to Gadani, a few kilometers from Karachi, where, in a hellish landscape, decommissioned ships from all over the world are demolished, pushed onto the shore, with mutilation and daily deaths.

Just as has happened in other Asian metropolises, which massively increased in size in the last three decades, Karachi has been incapable of solving the housing demand. Some studies estimate that the demand for housing in Karachi’s urban areas is three times the supply. The enormous growth in population has made building space scarce and very expensive. This is the scenario, filled with the internal contradictions of the capitalist system.

Expropriation

Some areas are expropriated to extract surplus value for the lucrative real-estate and infrastructure sector.

It is estimated, that in all of Pakistan half of the peasants are landless. The proletarianization of the peasant class is still progressing, in a slow process, as it has happened in various regions of India. Modern agriculture often exists next to enduring class relationships and archaic methods of working, peasants owning small lots, settlers, sharecroppers etc.

This is in part, a consequence of the conditions in which the bourgeoisie of the nascent independent States found themselves in after taking power, having primarily put financial resources to develop the national industrial sector. There was however a pressing need to provide subsistence for the enormous peasant population. In a delicate balancing act, the national bourgeoisie, if on the one hand issued reforms to the agricultural sector in order to modernize the countryside so as to make it attractive for capital, on the other could not attack the landed-aristocracy, which arose with the arrival of the British, as it kept the endless peasantry in submission and maintained social peace, thanks to the old but useful caste, ethnic, tribal, and religious superstructures.

The uncontrollable growth of Capitalism therefore poses increasingly contradictory issues, what we describe well in our article crisis and pandemic-ridden India- between peasant protests and workers strikes Nell’India flagellata dalla crisi e dalla pandemia – Tra proteste contadine e scioperi operai, in il Partito Comunista n.407, which describes the current peasant revolts in India.

As the city has continued to develop, recently, there has been an intensification in expropriation for real-estate development, of land that is already in agricultural use. For this, small land-owning peasants are forced to sell their lands, often by intimidation from thugs, but also with the complicity, and sometimes help of the local government and police. The landed-aristocracy which exploits and oppresses the peasant work force, controls The People’s Party, which today is in power in the city and all of Sindh. Most of these lands are villages destined to be demolished having been given the green light to evictions.

The composition of those that work on these lands is varied, there are seasonal laborers, often migrants, but especially middle-classes, share-croppers, settlers, tenants of landowners, who generally demand more than the 50/50 ratio: more than half of the harvest is delivered to the land-owner, with the tenant, hari, bearing the costs of providing the machinery, planting, irrigation and more, for which loans have to be taken, which are often taken from the land-owners themselves, putting them in a never-ending cycle of debt.

The usual scenario looks like this. The village is visited by officials and engineers from the real-estate companies, accompanied by squads and the police; the peasants are informed that their lands have been acquired and that they must leave; immediately they are threatened, any resistance is dealt with brutal violence, those who continue to resist are imprisoned and frequently killed. Soon the machinery arrives to flatten everything and make place for new construction. All taking place under the watchful eye of the local police.

One case of police brutality belongs to the name of Rao Anwar, ex-chief of police of the Malir district in Karachi, in cahoots with the real-estate companies, on the payroll of the underworld, accused of ordering the murder of 444 people between the period of 2011 and 2018 in 745 “interrogations” during which small salaried peasants and the petty-bourgeoisie were tortured and subsequently killed. All over Pakistan, workers and poor peasants are abducted by the police for the purposes of extortion, blackmail, intimidation or simply to restore class order.

Besides the destruction of entire rural villages, huge amounts of sand and gravel are taken from riverbeds for the construction of real-estate property units, transforming the surrounding lands into monstrous wastelands, with devastating effects on some “national parks” as that of Kirthar. These excavations have reduced the water-table, worsening the conditions of many peasants, dependent on the monsoon rains and tightly squeezed by debt.

It is in this situation, Sindhi nationalist parties have found fertile ground, managing to mask these needs of capital as a war between Sindhi locals and Mujahirs, the Urdu-speaking migrant population which arrived from India after the independence and the partition.

The destruction of proletarian neighborhoods

Urban areas are also destined to be expropriated, where not only the lumpen-proletariat and the petty-bourgeoisie live, but also the proletarians that work in large industry or service. The gutting of entire neighborhoods has been underway for several decades. Already in 1975 4,200 houses were demolished, with no compensation. In a suburb of Karachi – Bahria – the State had permitted the Bahria town society group to acquire 16,000 acres of land, but then “realized” that 46,000 acres of land had been occupied under “irregular” purchase conditions.

It is however; from the new millennium that this process has accelerated. From 2002 to 2008, 77,000 housings were destroyed to make space for the construction of the Lyari express-way, of which only 30,000 were compensated with the meagre sum of 30 thousand rupees. In 2014 more than 14,000 homes were demolished in Gujjar nala under the pretext of reducing risk of flooding.

Finally, the on-going demolishment of housing in the famous Orangi district. Formed during 1947 with the arrival of refugees from new India, when the government permitted groups of emigrants to settle freely on some State-land. Today, this massive informal settlement is a beehive in which over a million people live, extending to an area of 22 kilometers. It is Karachi’s largest slum, as well as Asia’s largest and most densely populated.

As the years passed, a part of this area was recognized as an administrative district. With the arrival of refugees from Bangladesh in 1971, year of independence of the former East Pakistan, and the subsequent uncontrolled growth of the city, Orangi town grew astronomically, with no administrative approval. Today, many workers live there, providing cheap-labor to the industrial districts of the city.

The whole city is suffering

Real-estate development is currently underway on a hilly part, in the north of the city. Reckless demolitions have attacked geological formations crossed by natural drainage canals, channels and water collection depressions. When it rains, downstream areas, like the district of Saadi, are flooded by the water that runs off the hills and, in the event of heavy-rainfall, is channeled into the precarious sewage system, flooding the streets with sewage. Last year in August, three days of monsoon rains flooded majority of the metropolis, cars and houses were carried away by flood water, there were many landslides, over a hundred drowned or electrocuted, thousands displaced. Protests were carried out in various parts of the city.

In 2003, 484 died throughout the province. These tragedies occur in various neighborhoods but particularly where the poor-classes reside, where outlets to the sea for water to dispose have been interrupted or greatly reduced.

A city as huge as Karachi only has two authorized landfills operated by the city administration. The greater part of garbage is thus placed in numerous areas of unofficial garbage collection, which have supplied a recycling industry where contractors hire youth, primarily of Afghan origin, for collecting all recyclable material. The rest is either burned or abandoned waiting for the next flood.

All the bourgeoisie parties nested in the local administrations, territorial appendages of the administrative structure of the State, if they are ever occupied with the floods affecting the metropolis for decades, it is only during elections, with lies and phony promises.

Partial urban reforms, even if put into practice, would solve little; being unable to confront the root of the problem: The social relation of capital with terrain. Capitalism will never be able to definitively solve problems of such magnitude, which are obviously not only exclusive to metropolises.

The necessity of Communism

Capitalism is a catastrophe for a large part of humanity and Karachi is a crystalline example. A senseless capitalist urbanism where overcrowding and the impossibility of living are a given, a constant general for this social system which no longer has any progressive role for history, a tentacular monster that suffocates mankind in an oppressive grip.

Karachi, like other metropolises, expresses the urgent need of the post-revolutionary communist program, which will provide for the gradual elimination of the antagonism between the city and countryside by creating a uniform network of connections on a world level with a re-distribution of the population throughout all territory. Certainly, not a simple work, it will be up to the future generations, which will however be made easier for them by living in a world free from profit, permanently restoring a healthy and organic equilibrium between land, water, animals and man, today widely altered and violated.

This is how we concluded our article – Space versus cement – which appeared in our journal then, the Communist Program (Il Programma Comunista), n.1 of 1953:

“Urban and productive agglomeration thus persists not for the sake of the best possible way of producing things, but to maintain the profit economy and the social dictatorship of capital. When it will be possible, after having forcibly crushed this dictatorship which becomes more obscene by the day, in order to subordinate every solution and every plan to the improvement of the conditions of living labor, creating for this purpose what is dead labor, constant capital, the furnishings that the human species has given over the centuries and continues to give to the crust of the earth, then the vulgar verticalism of the concrete monstrosities will be derided and forcibly repressed, and for the immense horizontal expanses of space, once the gigantic cities have been dispersed, the strength and intelligence of the man-animal will progressively tend to make the density of life and the density of work uniform on less hospitable lands as well, as they would then be equals and not, as in today’s deformed civilization, fiercely hostile to one another and only held together by the specter of servitude and hunger”.

Karachi is there to describe to us that in the world of capital, there exists no limit to the exploitation of man on man and that in the kingdom of the market, useless and harmful abuse of natural resources is a cornerstone of the structure of capitalism and its blind drive for profit.

But it will not be the men of good conscience who can solve these terrible infamies. Only the proletarian class, united above religions and races, will have the possibility of standing against the ruling classes. Only the proletarian classes of Pakistan and India, China and America, standing above nationalities, can prevent the course which today is heading towards a new world war catastrophe. Only the proletariat of the entire world, directed by their revolutionary party, will be able to fight for a new form of social organization – Communism – a classless society, without the separation between means of production and land from work, a society of the species, actually capable of solving the needs of man.

But the proletariat can never be ready for this final goal without adequate training in the struggle between the classes. Becoming more and more autonomous, it will have to go back to recognizing itself as a distinct social class, equipping itself with sincere and combative trade union organizations, the only ones which will be able to start defending it from the continuous attacks of the bosses and all their States.