Guerrilla History - Disarming Empire + the Elections in Pakistan w/ Pawel Wargan

Episode Date: April 12, 2024

In this terrific and wide ranging episode of Guerrilla History, we bring on Pawel Wargan to discuss the recent elections in Pakistan, which he was an international observer for, as well as his excellent article Disarming Empire (which we HIGHLY recommend reading!).  We truly enjoyed this conversation, and are really looking forward to having Pawel back on again soon to discuss Western Sahara and the work he has done there.   Pawel Wargan is an activist, researcher, organizer, and coordinator of the Secretariat of the Progressive International, and has been published in many places. You can follow Pawel on twitter to keep up with his latest work @pawelwargan Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory                               

You don't remember den, Ben, who? The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a ranker. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare, but they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to Gorilla. Rila History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.

I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Hachimaki, joined as usual by my other co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Village and Equines University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing great, Henry. It's wonderful to be with you. Absolutely. Always a pleasure seeing you. We have a great guest in a very diverse conversation. coming up ahead of us. But before I introduce the guests and the topic,

I would like to remind listeners that you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by joining us on Patreon.com Patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. You can follow us on Twitter, keep up to date with everything

that we're putting out individually, as well as collectively, at Gorilla-U-S-Pod. Again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A underscore pod. We're joined today by an excellent guest and somebody who I've been in contact with for a couple of years and really it's long overdue that we bring him on. We're joined by Pavel Vorgan, an activist researcher and organizer, coordinator of the Secretariat at the Progress International, published in many, many places and a wealth of knowledge on a variety of topics.

So I'm really looking forward to the conversation ahead of us. Welcome, Pavel, to guerrilla history. It's nice to have you. Thank you so much for having me on. It's a great pleasure to be here with you. Absolutely. It's a, it's really a joy to have you on the show. Like I said, it's long overdue, and we've been trying to organize this for quite some time. I'm really happy that we were able to get together today. As I mentioned in the introduction, this is going to be a pretty wide-ranging conversation. I know we had highlighted three topics that we wanted to hit on in this conversation, and both geographically, as well as conceptual, These are rather disparate topics.

We've got Pakistan and the recent elections that took place there. We have Western Sahara and we have Palestine. So three very different topics. But I do want to start with Pakistan because we have not touched on Pakistan nearly as much in guerrilla history as we should have yet and that we will rectify that going forward. But, Pavel, you were in Pakistan for their recent elections. Can you tell us a little bit about what the context was for the hosting of these elections? I think that most of our listeners will be aware of the fact that Imran Khan, the former, you know, leader of Pakistan, was in prison for, you know, during this election cycle and was unable to run.

But I feel like the actual context of what was happening and why it was happening is not nearly as covered in the West as it should be. and therefore is probably a little bit fuzzy for even the most political junkie of political junkies amongst us. Sure. Why don't we take a step back and look at a slightly broader perspective on Pakistan? Because Pakistan is a very complicated country. And I struggled, at least in the first few days, when I was there to really make sense of what was happening because the election was profoundly chaotic, but the broader context in which

it took place is also chaotic and unpredictable and. And just as an example, the preferred candidate, and we'll get to this later, of the military states of the military dictatorship, was a person who had himself been overthrown on three separate occasions by that same military. And I've started to think about Pakistan in terms of something. Have you heard of the three body problem in physics, the end body problem? I come from science. So this is something that's good for me, but the listener is for sure, probably you should explain. And you can correct me if I'm wrong on this. But the way I understand the three-body problem, and this goes all the way back to Isaac Nute, is that where you have two gravitational masses in space,

they exert a certain force against each other. And you can create a general model, general mathematical model that will predict their movement over time, say two suns moving around each other. Now, when you introduce a third mass into the system, the mathematics becomes so complex that it becomes impossible to predict the trajectory of these bodies over time. And in fact, their movement becomes a lot more chaotic than it was with just two bodies. Now, how would we think about that kind of dialectical principle in the context of

society and in the context of history? Well, if you look at a traditional Marxist understanding of the state, you have the state as an instrument by which one class, oppresses another. So in a capitalist society, in a capitalist state, the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class oppresses the proletariat. And in a socialist state, the proletariat builds mechanisms to prevent the bourgeois counter-revolution from toppling worker power, basically. And you can more or less predict the dynamics, given the power, given the gravitational pull of either of the classes. You can predict what will happen. You can develop scientific models. Marxism is the science, or for determining, you know, the course of history and where we need to go.

Now, Pakistan is more complicated than that. There's a very fascinating piece, I've written, very important piece. I recommend everyone read it by a Marxist, a Pakistani, Marxist sociologist called Amza al-Avi, where it's called the State in Post-Capitalist Societies, I think. And he says that in Pakistan, you have not two classes. But in fact, you have three distinct exploiting classes. So you have what he calls the indigenous bourgeoisie, which is kind of the native industrial class,

the native industrial bourgeoisie. You have the metropolitan neo-colonialist bourgeoisies. These are the ruling classes that have built their power through collaboration with the former colonial powers. And then you have, in the dominant position, the landed classes, the feudal landlords affected. So you have three distinct ruling classes with competing interests. On top of them, you have a powerful military and bureaucratic apparatus that was bequeathed

on the state by the departing British colonial system. Because, of course, what they had to hone to extract resources was a powerful bureaucracy. And what they had to hone to prevent any kind of uprising was a powerful military. So that continued to exist, took on a character of its own. In fact, within the military itself, you also have these class dynamics reflected because you have generals who come from the feudal aristocracy, you have general also come from the industrial urban bourgeoisie and so on and so forth. And then below all of that, you have the urban working classes

and the kind of feudal peasantry. And they're also in a condition of constant flux because there's a massive, massive process of urbanization that's been happening with people abandoning subsistence farming and moving to slums in cities to work and effectively finding themselves in a position where the only way they can survive is to eke how to living through hyper exploited labor. So going back to this idea of the three-body problem, you have, in addition to the basic kind of arithmetic of class dynamics within a state, a whole bunch of other competing class interests, and what you get, and this is how I've been thinking about this, what you get in consequence is chaos. You get frequent elections. People told me all the time, don't worry, we'll have another election in one to three years. No one knows when they will come. No one knows why they will come. No one knows why they will come. No one knows. what the trigger will be, but the dynamics of the class system are so complicated that they create this really unstable political system, but which has also been able to kind of insulate itself against the interests of the working classes in peasantry, because it is so fixated on sustaining at least a modicum of stability within that complex tapestry of ruling class interests. Yeah, I just wanted to even further complicate the picture because I think you're

absolutely right to note the various vectors where it's very hard to analyze. It's an extremely unpredictable case. And I think as you're pointing out, the parliamentary and electoral politics very much sits as a kind of epiphypon over these larger structures and forces. and, you know, as unpredictable can be done, you know, can happen very quickly, but it also in some sense perhaps doesn't end up ever bringing very much change to these purduring kind of forces. And when there is any kind of change, it really, the volatility is by, you know, alliances made between these forces or different arrangements that take place.

But just on top of that, if we go further back in history, in terms of, of context is Pakistan is such a strange constructed state, as you're pointing out, a colonial construction that received two of its principal kind of institutional capacities of government from, you know, this important military and bureaucracy from the British, you know, colonial era, but that it is also, you know, a consequence of partition and a complicated decolonial situation where they managed to, or ethnic and religious kinds of tensions and contestations, you know, exacerbated by British policy, end up leading to this strange Muslim nationalism that led to fragmentation, you know, between Muslim majority areas on two separate sides of the Indian subcontinent. in what was called at the time East and West Pakistan, with West Pakistan, what is today Pakistan, the dominant kind of, you know, and oppressive lead in this bi-territorial sort of state, with the problem of a Muslim majority area that had had a Hindu governing class in Kashmir that was partly divided, but became the, you know, a problem of

contestation between these new states and led to several wars that have been very important in galvanizing a kind of Pakistani nationalism that is nonetheless also riven by the fact that despite some supposed coherence by this being a kind of Muslim majority country, of course, which led to expulsion essentially, it was voluntary, but it was seen as absolutely crucial and necessary to, you know, for these population transfer, the largest kind of population transfer that took place during partition. But despite the supposed fact that this is supposed to be a Muslim majority state and founded by, you know, its kind of identity under Islam, it's also driven by kind of subnational, ethno-national projects of liberation, you know, and division

between, you know, groups in, you know, the Patan Northwest Frontier area, Sindh province, Punjab, Balochistan, where there has been, and of course we know recently because there's been cross-border, you know, issues between Pakistan and Iran very recently, that there are, you know, national kind of of resistance movements taking place there as well, both sides of the border. And so that kind of complicates and fragments the ability of a kind of national project and a national politics to be very meaningful. You have something like, you know, very local patronage and client relations with these feudal landlords and so on in the countryside versus very different kinds of sets of interests and, you know, networks, you know, in these urban core and cross-cutting these family and class-oriented groupings and, you know, national, kind of ethno-linguistic ones vis-a-vis factions within the military that you alluded to, that even the military and the bureaucracy,

these are fragmented by these other kinds of class alliances. they're also then complicated by the way in which, you know, there are resentments and so on, characterized and framed within these kind of ethnic, linguistic divisions and so on. So it is such a very complicated and strange country that has been, you know, has these democratic institutions, but, you know, you see discourses around the independent. of the courts and the judiciary and law and so on that have a sophistication to them. But, you know, by the same token, so much of the history of Pakistan has been rulership under military dictatorship. There have been coups constantly. And even when you have purportedly

civilian rule, it always seems inherently unstable because it depends on what faction within the military is dominant and what they decide to do you. mentioned that the, you know, the Pakistan Muslim League party, the Sharif, you know, family-dominated political party, has been overturned three times in the last 20-odd years by, you know, military coup, you know, General Mushadraf, you know, who then became president and so on. So my question for you out of this. Let me add one quick thing before you ask the question, Adnan, just it's not anything that you didn't already say, but I think one of the things that you raised was an incredibly important thing regarding this conversation. I just want to put a little bit of a finer point on it before we turn to the question for Pavel. And then Pavel, feel free to take as long as you want and answering all of these threats that Adnan is putting out. But, you know, you had mentioned that the decolonization process was not entirely in the hands of the people that were pushing for decolonization. This is going to inherently leave unresolved contradictions. Colonization is a process that inherently is going to create contradictions and over time is going to create incredibly an increasing amount of contradictions over time and particularly as that system becomes more and more oppressive

and is exploiting the people in that area even more. But then if you have a process in which you have some, national liberation struggle, which is won by the people who are trying to decolonize their area, that process is going to resolve many of the contradictions that were at place. Of course, there is still going to be many contradictions in place after decolonization and independence are achieved, even with the most liberatory of struggle. But if the process is not within the hands of the decolonized, the people who are decolonizing their land, the people who are pushing for independence.

If the impetus for this movement is not completely within their hands, you are going to leave many other contradictions, which could have been resolved in a truly national liberatory way. If you had a true national liberation movement that was at the barrel of a gun fighting the colonialists, those unresolved contradictions are then going to be present at the inception of an independent state, or in this case, independent states. and that is going to then put in place structures that are going to perpetuate those contradictions within the resulting societies. And we've seen that perpetuate itself throughout time. I know that that's maybe a little bit of an esoteric point, but I just wanted to put that line out there since you were touching on that. Oh, yeah. So feel free to go ahead with your question. Well, I mean, you know, I guess what I'm curious about is whether you think the last couple of years and no doubt you'll want to go into.

maybe the background behind, you know, PTI and, you know, how they came into this election in the circumstances that have been alluded to here with, you know, Imran Khan, its leader in a former prime minister in jail and so on, whether this kind of confusing set of very disparate sort of forces, which led to, you have to say, domination of military control, even though, of course that can be fragmented, but there was like the, you know, whether the electoral kinds of issues that have been happening in the parliamentary issues for the last couple of years in Pakistan, whether they point to some kind of mass movement that is potentially breaking that system of relations and class, you know, kind of alignments that you mentioned about the

sort of tripartite forces of exploitation, you know, under, you know, under this kind of state form that has, you know, got this ruling military and, you know, kind of entrenched bureaucracy. What do you think are the possibilities? Like, why is, well, was what's been happening in Pakistan the last couple of years significant or important? And if so, in what ways, vis-a-vis that context we've been talking about. I'm glad you asked that. And maybe, again, to answer this question, too, we should go back a little bit. And look at, you know, what was the liberatory potential in post-colonial Pakistan?

If we go back to the 1960s, you had a very powerful communist party. You had a Pakistani People's Party, which, although it was founded by the scion of a wealthy, feudal family, did take up socialist slogans and made, major commitments to implement socialist policies. Of course, this was largely because of the influence of the powerful communist party, which had organized large sections of the working class. So you had a kind of liberatory current, which was crushed by the military. In I think it was 1979, so this would have been a little over a decade after the Pakistani People's Party was founded. you had a general, General Zia, who came to power.

He hung Bhutto, who was the leader of the PPP. He came to power and he ruled with an iron fist for about 11 years with, and we come here to another factor that's essential in understanding Pakistan with the overwhelming support of the United States, which weaponized Pakistan in its war against the Soviet Union in its proxy war in Afghanistan. And in that time, tremendous amounts of money flowed into Pakistan, some of which ended up being used towards the creation of this kind of Islamic,

radical Islamic identity towards the establishment of Islamic schools. So a lot of this was bequeathed on the country by British colonialism, but really reinforced by U.S. imperialism and taken to an entirely new level. There's another really fantastic book by Asim Sajad Akhtar. It's also a Pakistani scholar. The book is called The Book is called The Politics of Common Sense. And he talks about the kind of political modes that emerged under the Zia regime. So the left was destroyed.

the people were effectively removed from the equation of political power of political decision making and what was constructed in their place is what he calls a patronage machine a really sophisticated kind of machine of cooperation where across the class divide and across the ethnic divide

you basically create a politics that depends on who you know and whom you can bail. And that mode of political, of doing politics became hegemonic. So again, the left was crushed in crushing the left and in developing this kind of system of patronage, of client patron relationships,

Zia secured what Akhtar calls the passive consent of the people. So the passive consent of the entire political structure for this system. And so let's fast forward in time. Now, today, you know, okay, between now and then, you also have to follow the Soviet Union, another crushing blow to the aspirations of the left. But really, there hasn't been any mass movement of the working class in Pakistan since the Communist Party, since before the military dictatorship. I mean, there have been, I understand there are pretty significant exceptions.

But in terms of a project that tries to organize and mobilize the working class is towards seizing state power, that's not something that has made you know it's at a project that has had much hope in the country looking at elections in which leftist candidates have taken part in the last few decades you're looking at people who would get 200 300 400 votes maybe 600 maybe a few more but you know never achieving anything significant now why did i go to pakistan one of the member organizations of the progressive international called the Hekfuk-Halb Party, which is based in the city of Lahore, and emerged from a student movement, a very long-standing student movement,

decided to try to revive precisely the kinds of politics that the Pakistani Communist Party used to do. They started about a year ago, basically by entering one of the poorest, or perhaps the poorest neighborhood in Lahore, a place called Chungi, a place where there is sewage that flows open. through the streets, where 70% of children have dysentery, where the water is contaminated with lead and fecal matter from the sewage, where, you know, just extremely, extremely, extremely

poor place. And they started by walking door to door and having conversations with working people in the neighborhood. Within about half a year, maybe a little bit longer, they opened a health clinic, a free health clinic for the working people of the neighborhood. And by the end of the year, they had two or three vocational schools in which they taught computer literacy. They taught the English language. They taught especially young girls who would otherwise not have opportunities to get jobs. They taught them how to run and open a nail salon or something of this sort.

you know, really practical skills to push people who don't have the opportunity to do so into the workforce. And at one point, they decided to run in the election. When I was there, they had 15 electoral offices, about 600 maybe more volunteers. And part of the campaign was led by 17-year-old girls who had gone through their vocational schools, you know, in positions that in Pakistan wouldn't be available to someone without a higher education. So, you know, have this remarkable process unseen for a very long time in the country of a political force trying to organize the working class and trying really to build the working class power. This isn't a kind of bourgeois left project that comes to the working people and dictates

the terms of their politics to them. It's a politics that tries to bring the people into power with them. a really, really remarkable process to watch and really remarkable to see, I don't think I'd ever seen anything like it since I got to see briefly Evo Morales in Latin America, the kind of affinity that they had built with the people in the community and the kind of reactions that the leaders of the party got just when they were walking down the street. Really beautiful to see. Now, how did they do in the elections? Not very well. I think they expected 10,000 votes, maybe a few more, which would have been a major breakthrough, they got just under 2000,

which was far more than anyone had, you know, a far better outcome than anyone had achieved in that area for a very long time. But a pretty shocking disappointment to some people. And again, they took a while for them to, and it took a couple of days for them to get back on their feet and actually kind of get back into the streets. But what did that say about the political situation? what comrades in Pakistan told me that they realized very soon after the election was that the election wasn't really about voting for the party that you feel best represents you. It was a referendum on Imran Khan, because Imran Khan is a leader who, I mean,

we can talk more about him as a person later. It's a very complicated story, but he's a person who was very popular, and I think was made more popular by the very obvious repression. against him, right? He was thrown in jail, I think, on quite nasty charges in quite a nasty way for, I think, a term of 20 years or something. He was basically locked away. His party was effectively disbanded by the state for the duration of the election, or even thereafter, where the PTI candidates were not allowed to run as the PTI. They had to run as independence. Now, one problem in working class neighborhoods like chungi is that there are many people who are

illiterate and so the way that you vote when you go into a polling station is you have the name of the party but also you have the symbol of the pardon now if instead of a party that's immediately recognizable to everyone you have all of a sudden a range of new symbols that you have to remember you uh you know you dilute uh the ability you dilute the vote basically of the of the of the Pardon. There were very clever workarounds to this. Actually, it was quite fascinating to see where they would have these posters with a picture of Imran Khan and a picture of the local candidate for Imran Khan and in between them a massive clock or I don't know, a spoon or something. So, you know, quite easy to memorize. But yeah, Imran Khan was repressed. We saw on the way to Chungi one morning, one of the candidates of the PTI, my comrade recognized his house, being. arrested by the police. So again, during the elections, they were pretty significant. And in the run-up to the elections, it was pretty significant repression against the PTI. On election day itself from about 9 in the morning, the internet was choked off. We had no internet connectivity.

We had no mobile connectivity at all for about 24 hours. So we have no connection with any of the polling stations. The PMLN had stationed massive jeeps with tinted windows outside every single polling station until the lawyer from the HKP had raved the alarm and made a complaint and almost got into a fight with an officer, the police officer at one of the polling stations and they had the PMLN cars withdrawn. But it was so obviously rigged that it's very, you know, It was very difficult to call it a democratic process, not all. The results started trickling in the following day, and they suggested that the independence,

which had been split up into two separate categories, had won a sizable victory. So the Electoral Commission stopped the count, and the following day, when the next batch of results was announced, the PMLN was slightly in the lead. And both the PTI and the PMLN had declared themselves to be victorious. So this was the context in which I left the country. I hope in a very roundabout way that answers the question.

Yeah, absolutely. Adnan, do you have a follow-up? I have a follow-up, but then also another question. Okay, well, I just wanted to point out that the PTI result was still incredibly impressive, given what you've described, and also to put into context that it wasn't just in the immediate run-up to the election that the party and many of its leading politicians and officials had been suppressed. There have been a period where protesting the failure to have more immediate elections after the parliamentary process that accomplished the ousting of Imran Khan from power. which, as we understand from some reporting and leaked documents, seems to have at least fulfilled the wishes and mandates of the U.S. State Department's kind of instructions to the military

that, you know, there would be many benefits for, you know, for Pakistan if it actually got rid of Imran Khan through this parliamentary no-confidence process. That subsequent to that, there was massive, like organizing and protests, very popular protests resisting this, you know, kind of seemingly democratic, undemocratic outcome and process. And that during that period of the last year or so, when many of these cases were then put against him, Ron Khan, to, you know, entrap him in a whole legal process and ultimately convicted. him. And as you pointed out, Powell, you know, ended up with like very long, you know, prison term is that during that period, they also targeted PTI politicians, activists, put pressure on them

to either abandon politics or switch parties as they had in order to accomplish the vote. They needed some defections from his majority, you know, coalition, but that subsequently, you know, they jailed a lot of people, tortured people, hundreds and thousands of people were jailed during this period, and, you know, used quite a lot of violence to suppress organizing marches that were taking place and so on. So it was months and months, you might say, of concerted political persecution to weaken PTI, and many of its top leaders were removed. And yet, nevertheless, despite that process for months and the immediate run-up, attempts to rig the elections and suppress the vote and confuse people and make them, you know, have to make

those who would stand after outlawing the party would stand as independent. I think they were surprised by how many people decided still to run as independent. after, you know, top leaders had been already removed. A new cadre of people came up to take over those positions. And I think you're right that principally it was some kind of reaction to the very obvious political suppression. That even if you didn't necessarily know what the PTI's platform was, even if you didn't necessarily agree with certain aspects of it, maybe you had critiques of it.

In fact, there were critiques of his. rule earlier. I mean, he became more popular, I think, as a result of this repression and the way in which it was enforced, that there was a kind of natural reaction to kind of the dignity of the people's vote being respected, you know, that led to that reaction. So that seems to be very significant aspect of what changed the character of the nature of the election, basically. Yeah. And I, and I, I, I, I, just like to add to that. I think, you know, this is a very important point in the context of your previous question about whether there is a some kind of new movement emerging that might have the ability to transform the system in Pakistan or it's something more just.

I'm not talking about a revolution yet. And it, what, what I, the impression I got from my time there is that every single party that was running in that election with, you know, the exception of the Hakwuka-Halg party does operate within the framework of this system of patronage, which is so obscene that the way it operates is you have a neighborhood like Chungi, or you have a particular constituency, countries divided into a fairly large number of constituencies. And you'll have several candidates. The leading candidate will be a wealthy industrialist or a feudal landlord of some sort. who has never set foot in the constituency, not once.

What they do is they send around cars with tinted windows to drive around the constituency. They'll meet with the local feudal lord, someone who owns the sizable chunk of that lamb in that constituency. They'll effectively buy their loyalty and then in turn instruct that person to use the very local structures of patronage to buy out individual families.

And a family might get, you know, an individual might get $5 for a vote, enough to buy food for a couple of days, maybe a little bit more, maybe a little bit less. But when you've bought off the regional kingmaker, you've bought up the local constituency level kingmaker, that person can buy off the market leaders, can buy off the family elders, and very quickly you have this web that's activated. And that kicks in, you know, that kicks in depending on what the imperatives of each party are and depending on the amount of money that's thrown on the problem, Fred. And every party throws a lot of money at this problem. This is how political, electoral questions are resolved. And then, of course, the day after the election, you don't see these parties in those neighborhoods ever again. They never come.

So there is a sense in which the struggle, the support for Imran Khan was an expression of, I kind of, it was anger, it was anger at the indignity of having had even these basic electoral rights taken away. But at the same time, a victory for Imran Khan wouldn't have fundamentally changed that patron client structure within a political system. And the only way I see that system ever changing is precisely in the slow, impatient work of building a worker party from the ground up, in which people don't see themselves as voting for a candidate to go into office, but see themselves as putting themselves in power and building the kinds of institutions that they need to generate political power in their communities and their regions,

and building the confidence ultimately to be able to govern. And that's a long-term revolutionary project. And so, you know, the reason I think the HKP that is badly as it did is precisely because this election was a referendum not only on Imran Khan, but also a protest vote by people who felt that their rights had been, had been, and who rightly felt that their rights had been taken away from them. Yeah, so I'm going to zoom in and hyper-focus on one specific thing, and I'm going to give you a huge conceptual question afterwards.

And, you know, they're kind of semi-related, but I think you'll have fun with a very specific and then a very broad question. The super specific question is regarding this vote rigging that essentially took place after the election. So as we have described and as you can find much more about online listeners, and I highly recommend that you do a lot more reading because there's a lot more reading that needs to be done than we can cover in an episode of this show.

But the hallmarks of rigging of the election were taking place from the moment that Imrahun was ousted from Osses from office, right? And then all of the moves that had been taking place since then, under the stewardship of parties that were opposed to the PTI, were in pursuit of rigging an upcoming election, which is why when we were looking, going into the election, nobody was really expecting the results to come out anywhere near as positive as they did. Because all of these moves had been made to completely rig the election in favor of the PMLN. What then happened is that, as you had described, when the results first started to come in,

the first results that were coming through were incredibly in favor of these PTI independent candidates, much more so than anybody was really expecting until the vote stopped being counted and then these later waves of results that came in kind of swung the balance of results around again although again with the PTI having way more vote coming in you know their independent candidates quote unquote having way more vote coming in and people would have expected going into the election but the way in which this vote rigging after the votes had already been cast is particularly interesting to me because Pakistan despite having a kind of of convoluted system in terms of all of these different forms that go through and in terms of

tabulating votes here and there, it actually is a system that should allow for fairly transparent counting of the votes. And so I'm going to throw out some numbers. Listeners, you don't really have to pay attention to the numbers, but just the process is kind of interesting. So at each polling location, the parties that are contesting the election in that polling location are allowed to have a polling officer who is present to observe the election at that location. There is then a polling agent who observes it, and what happens is they generate what's called a Form 45. Again, the number isn't important, but there's a lot of different forms. A Form 45 is generated at that polling station, which shows the number of votes for each party

that happened at that polling location. Each polling official from each of the contesting parties who is present is then receives a copy of that Form 45, which shows the vote total at that location. These Form 45s are then given to a returning officer who consolidates

all of the Form 45s from the polling locations within a constituency, and those Form 45 results are tabulated into a Form 47 as a provisional result and a Form 48 as a final result for that constituency. And then by

combining those constituencies, they are then able to get, you know, broader and broader scale of vote counts. But, you know, the constituency level is really the important one here. But having those Form 45 copies available to all of the polling officials from the varying parties pretty much guarantees that if you were going to rig the vote, you would have to rig the vote at every single polling location, or at least many individual polling locations, because all of the polling agents from opposing parties are going to be getting results of the vote at that specific location. And so what we saw is that the results that were coming out very early on were pretty much in line with the form 45s that were being reported on from those individual polling locations.

And again, I apologize listening to that there's so many numbers and this is a very minute point. But the point is that we have a paper trail that is a fairly extensive paper trail with a lot of a lot of duplicate poppies from every single polling location that was showing that PTI was getting way more votes than we would have expected. And it was only after they had this stopping of the count and the count numbers stopped going up and then all of a sudden a wave of results came in without really accounting for where the votes were coming from. Only then did we see that the vote count had swung in favor of the PMLN. Now, the reason I bring this up, and I apologize that my you know, preamble to the question is so huge and lengthy. The reason I bring this up is that

it's very funny in a way. You know, Adnan had, I think, said that it was in many, you might have said it, Popul, that it was a victory in many ways for the PTI, despite the fact that there was this rigging that took place and they didn't end up with as many, you know, members as they thought that they would when the results started to come through. But what this shows is that the PMLN, despite the moves at rigging this election from the moment that Imran Hahn was removed from office. And up until the day of the election, despite all of that rigging, that entire process that had taken place, they still had to completely muddy the waters and leave a ridiculously long paper trail to really swing the results that were coming out

on the day of the election, which I find quite amusing. So I'm going to stop this point there, because it looked like you wanted to say, Pavel, before I asked the broader conceptual questions. So feel free to add anything that you want to as somebody who was actually there to witness, you know, these sorts of things happening. Well, Henry, all of this stuff is extremely boring and extremely tedious. And it's extremely boring. That's my middle name, my friend, boring and tedious. It's extremely boring and extremely tedious, I think, by design. Because what the state has done in implementing all of these processes, it is that it's effectively outsource certain key functions in the electoral process to political parties.

So there's the process of verifying the votes and, you know, getting all the right forms that have the right vote counts, which happens after the votes have been counted. There's another process, which happens before the vote takes place, which is that you collect the registration details of the voters who are committed to voting for you. you set up outside of every polling station a little booth or a little tent that has all the all the files, all the registration files of every single person that you expect will be voting for you in that in that polling station so that they can get the documents they need directly from you without needing to access a computer or the internet which was off or you know the printed page which isn't that widely available in many parts of of Pakistan. you hand those documents out to voters as they enter the polling station. You have voting agents, polling agents who are in the polling stations monitoring the whole process. And then as you said, the results are delivered to these polling agents who then report them back

and they're written down on these forms. Now, a few interesting things happened on the day of the election. One is that every single political party except the PMLN realized that they had been given the wrong voter lists. so they didn't actually have the correct names and the correct locations of the people who were meant to be voting for them. So that was one potentially significant stumbling block to getting votes. Another was that some polling agents were simply not allowed into the polling stations by the police. So we had a situation where the fact that I was present as a foreigner created enough tension

for the police, enough anxiety for the police that they let the polling agents from the from the party into the polling station but if it wasn't for me they wouldn't have been allowed in they were they were denied entry um so you have on one hand the creation of a system which which puts the burden on running the election in key respects on political parties which clearly is to the disadvantage of smaller parties because the level of paperwork is insane I spent six hours a day before helping the party, you know, put together little folders of documents and checking numbers against other numbers and making sure that everything was in the right place on the day, which ended up not mattering anyway because we had the wrong voter lists.

But, you know, this is the kind of bureaucracy and these are the administrative burdens that parties face. And if you don't have a huge party bureaucracy, you're all already at a disadvantage. So again, extremely boring and tedious stuff. But in this boring and tedious stuff and all of these details, you find additional mechanisms of manipulation that erode the ability of any newcomer to really have a shot at doing well in the elections. Now, I'm going to take a step back now. I know that we have two other topics that we want to hit. We could end up with a 10-hour-long episode here if we don't get moving. But I want to take a step back from Pakistan and add a little more conceptual.

question, which is something that we've covered on the show before, and it's an episode that we're going to be remastering in advance of the November elections in the United States, which is the entire premise of electoralism for people on the revolutionary left. Now, I know that when we're talking about Pakistan, we're not talking about the revolutionary left. But as somebody who is looking at it, as an external observer, both, you know, literally in your case and figuratively in the case of us who are looking at things from literally abroad and seeing how things are unfolding. How do we view these attempts at electoralism within Pakistan as an effort for the left to build some momentum and build some power within their communities?

Because as we've talked about on the show before, and of course just bringing up this point is going to invite debate. But listeners, just wait for the other episode to come out. that way we can have that debate later. You know, we've talked about what the role of elections are for revolutionary, you know, communists to put not to fight a point on it. You know, using elections as a means to an end, but not seeing that as a mode of actually achieving and attaining power and real power within communities that are going to change systems.

So again, I know that on the ground in Pakistan, we're not talking about the revolutionary left and we're not talking about building power for communists, but how should somebody who is a communist that is viewing this election view the electoral process, particularly given that in the case of facts, then you have this labyrinthin system that you have just laid out in your previous answer, and all of the rigging that is taking place,

which I had alluded to, you have alluded to, what non has alluded to, everybody knows about. You know, the entire premise of elections, both more broadly, as well as in the case of this system that is very difficult to manage, especially for smaller parties in the first place, as well as the fact that, you know, again, this rigging is taking place to ensure that particularly smaller, more revolutionary parties are not going to be able to build any sort of power through these electoral processes. You know, it's really, it's a really hard question to think about.

I think you see as a revolutionary party, as a party that's committed to, overthrowing a particular system, you see elections as an amplifier. In fact, the, the symbol of the HKP, which I was in Pakistan to visit, was a loudspeaker, as in we give voice to the working class. Now, going all the way back to the beginning of this discussion and the concept of the state, right? Most of us live in states that are bourgeois dictatorships. The bourgeoisie owns the means of communication, the bourgeoisie owns the parliaments, the bourgeoisie owns all the industry, the bourgeoisie owns the systems of education and exchange. Now, to what extent do we use Twitter? To what extent do we use, you know, podcasting platforms? To what extent do we use

parliaments? I think that the utility of an electoral strategy ultimately depends on the kind of rigorous discipline that you apply to your political work. I think there are a lot of political forces that, for one reason or another, come to see the electoral as an end in itself, which is the position of bourgeois politics, right? If you're a liberal, the most that you can possibly hope for is a victory in the election. And the most that you can possibly hope for in the next election is a bigger victory than the previous victory. And if by chance, At one point, you come to, I don't know, have the majority of the votes and the presidency of a country, then you'll be satisfied and you'll have achieved your aim because your aim is to precisely to propagate the system, to reproduce the system. You don't need to do anything beyond that. If you're a revolutionary party and you decide to enter an electoral contest, winning the election is the bare minimum, it's the starting point of a month broader strategy.

And the case of the HKP was really interesting, is that they were able through the electoral campaign to magnify and accelerate processes that had been underway before it. They became more widely known in the community. They had many more people who were willing to work with them. So their ranks swelled. They had many more people reaching out to their vocational schools, which created new opportunities for building consciousness, for mobilizing working people. they entered the unions and built very tight relationships with the unions. So for them, the election was an accelerator, an accelerator that opened the possibility for strengthening the process of institutionalization and effectively socialist construction,

which they had undertaken before the election. Now, one thing I think is missing when we talk about electoralism in the West, in the global north, is that we don't institutionalize the power of the movements that we build. So we might build a massive movement that powers the candidacy of a progressive candidate. But then we have nothing to channel that mass movement into. We don't build institutions or organization through which that movement can exercise power. There are some exceptions to this, I think a really powerful exception. is the Workers Party of Belgium, which precisely uses the electoral to advance the broader project

of construction, right? They cap the salaries of their members of parliament. They channeled the remaining salaries back into the party. They use the money to build health clinics. They use the health clinics to bring more people into the party. And I met a woman from the PTB, who was a cashier in a supermarket, had developed repetitive strain injury, went to one of the clinics, to get support because she didn't have insurance, and now she's a member of parliament because she went through the whole process of political activation. So elections, of course, are not an end.

And especially for revolutionary parties, we have to be very wary of the possibility that our politics will be corrupted or co-opted by our accession into bourgeois institutions. But if we understand the limits of those institutions, if we fear right the limits of those institutions, and if we use bourgeois parliaments, much as we would use any other bourgeois tool,

which is to amplify our work, to accelerate our work, to make ourselves more widely known, to give ourselves a bigger platform through which to advance our aims, then in principle I see nothing wrong with participating in elections. And I think that's especially true in a country like Pakistan, where there is a real need for working class representation.

because there's no one pretends even to represent the working class seriously. Now, do I think that that strategy currently makes sense in a place like the United States? Maybe not, but that's a different conversation. Right. Well, there's so much more one could talk about, of course, Pakistan. It's an important and largely uncovered country, despite the fact that it's a populist nation, you know, undergoing a lot of people. political transition and contestation and so forth. But I think we'll have to see now that they've

settled on a government, you know, where things head. And I very much agree with you that, you know, the grassroots efforts that are being built are going to take some time in order to break through a very entrenched kind of system of network of a network of partisan client politics. you know, that's definitely going to require patient organizing and struggle. And it's so great that you had the opportunity to work with and observe what Hukuki Khalka is doing in Lahore. And we hope that we'll be able to hear more as things continue to progress. But I did want to actually transition to a different topic because this whole question of Pakistan sometimes is being situated, you know, like the original hostility towards Imran Khan's government is sometimes

put down to the fact that he wanted an independent sort of foreign policy outside the dictates of U.S. Empire. You know, I don't know how far to take that and so on, but of course there is a narrative more broadly on geopolitics that sees contestation with a declining U.S. empires unipolar control over the world after the end of the Cold War. And it's an unpredictable period of history that we're involved in, just as Pakistan's politics very complex. And there's always a clear ideological orientation from which to analyze things. Likewise, the emerging multipolar world is one that has a lot of promise of possibility, but also a lot of, you know, pitfalls and difficulties in this very unpredictable, which way we're headed.

And you recently wrote an article that I think pulled together quite a few different strands of the current geopolitical situation by observing what's happening in the Gaza assault and genocide, Israeli genocide in Gaza, but putting that in the frame of this as having larger significance and pointing to these larger processes in order to call for. for the revival of a peace movement, which I think is a really important feature, I would say, of the politics of the left traditionally that for the last period of time has not been so emphasized. So this seems to me a really salutary and important call. So I wanted to get into some of the specific historical examples that you use in it. this is a history podcast, and so I very much appreciated the way you were trying to situate this moment and the need for a peace movement and a global international collaboration to disarm empire, how you look back at some of these other moments. And you looked at, you know, angles, observing changes starting to take place late 19th, you know, and into the early 20th century. World War I and the immediately after the Hague Peace Conference and the Soviet delegation,

you talked about Carol Radek's kind of remarks there, trying to encourage, you know, a certain orientation for peace. And it seems that so many of those discussions are apropos to challenges that we're facing in new different kind of constellations, perhaps. But some of his remarks that you pointed out left an impact on me. which were about the demons of nationalism, which I see as the populist, far-right nationalist forces that seem to be emerging with a difference, and I would be interested in what you think about this,

with a difference that in some ways it isn't only about nation-state nationalism, but a kind of civilizational nationalism, if we want to think about it, but it's sort of this Euro-Atlantic alliance maybe, although, you know, you've got your oceanic settler colonial countries that, you know, you could say the West. And it's held together in some ways by these discourses of Islamophobia, of latent, you know,

kind of white supremacy, this, you know, kind of attempt to reassert despite the fragmenting and the global situation changing, trying to reassert, you know, as these imperial structures are being challenged, you know, to reassert them in some ways. And I wondered if there was another moment that might also make sense to think about in this context of multipolarity. And it's one that listeners of our show will probably remember. Here he goes again. He's talking about the Bandung Conference and the Bandung moment. Because one of the key demands of this Afro-Asian,

conference that was trying to chart some sort of independent line in, you know, the post-World war period was a plea for peace and nuclear disarmament. And, you know, this was one of the key principles that they announced, you know, in the conclusions of the conference. And I wonder if you could perhaps reflect a little bit more about where do you see the challenges and opportunities, and the necessity of resurrecting a peace movement for this time. And on what sorts of bases do you see us working going forward as a project, both principally of the global south, but with its allies and its constituencies in the left, in the global north?

Very big question. And I think really it comes down to how we understand. the orientation of our anti-imperialism and the extent the depth of our anti-imperialism at this specific historic moment. Now, I like to go back to the deliberations of the third international for guidance on these questions sometimes. There was a period in which, after the October revolution in Russia, it became clear that revolution was not coming to Europe, as many had expect right the hopes of the communist movement was that germany would be next after germany after the german and proletariat is victorious um a a peace would be secured with the nascent

soviet union a bridge would be formed across that landmass potentially calming some of the reactionary currents that were that were information around those uh around that region and ultimately in meeting the way towards a worldwide revolution. Now, that didn't happen, and the analysis of why that didn't happen was really developed by Lenin in his theory of imperialism, but also by many of the delegates who came from the third world, what we now call the third world, to the congresses of the third international. And I'm thinking in particular of the second Congress, where there was an Indian communist revolutionary called M. N. Roy, who would end up founding the Communist Party of Mexico, I think,

who set out this really remarkable document called the supplementary Theses on the National and Colonial Question, which said that until the arteries of colonial extraction are severed, which underpin the power of the European ruling classes, right, both their power to wade war and to oppress people outside their borders, and their power to both oppress and buy out the working class within their borders. Until those arteries are severed, we can't expect a revolutionary moment to arise in these countries. And there was a big churn in Lenin's thinking at around that same time where he looked east. And he said, actually, the potential is not in the industrialized west, as Marx had anticipated.

but it's in the colonized east. And so the third international set itself the task of organizing these various forces that were opposing European colonialism. Some of them were pan-Arab groups. Some of them were Islamist groups. You know, some of them were peasant movements. They were of all kinds. They weren't proletariat because in many of these colonial holdings,

there was no proletariat to speak up. So they began organizing these groups. They hosted this, the Congress of the Toilers of the Far East in Baku, which had several thousand delegates from mostly Central Asia, but also further east. And the idea is that we need to build and unite a force that is capable of unseeding the dominance of the colonial powers in the international system because the primary contradiction is imperialism. So now we look to the present moment today

and we look in fact at the period in time between then and now and we look at projects like the non-aligned movement. We look at various revolutions that have been destroyed across the global south. Why haven't these projects come to fruition?

Why haven't the demands for a new international economic order advanced 50 years ago, in fact this year, 50 years ago, by the nations of the global self, why were those never implemented? Why, despite the UN declaration that would immediately grant the rights to sovereignty and self-determination to all colonies back in, when was it, 1980, I think, why did it take so long for liberation to happen? Well, because

the world remained in the grips of imperial domination. Now, one key thing that has changed since the period of the two world wars, which actually led how Domenico Lassurdo talks about them. He calls them the second 30-year war because really it was a continuum of violence. And it was a continuum of a very particular kind of violence which is inter-imperialist rivalry, which was really sparked by the scramble for resources

in the colonies. It was an explosion of the contradictions of a system which had many centers of power. Each center of power bent on capturing greater shares of the world resources for itself. That system collapsed after the Second World War with the weakening of great empires like Britain, like Great Britain, and the killing off of what may be called the last kind of a major European colonial project, which was Nazi Germany, right? They had the same kind of ambitions as the British Empire that's capture the whole world for ourselves and

enslave some people here and steal some resources there and exterminate some undesirable people elsewhere. This had been done before. They were defeated by the Soviet Union. Europe was weakened. Great Britain's colonies were divided. Some of them were abandoned. It was financially in Tatters itself. and the U.S. emerged very strong. And it began to build institutions that consolidated power around its interests. And what emerged is what Samir Amin described as collective imperialism. A new kind of imperialism in which the old rivalries

were contained within the infrastructures of what we now call globalization. So you have institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. You have institutions like NATO, you have other military formations like Ocus and the Five Eyes Alliance, or however many eyes it is now, it keeps growing. You have the G7, you have all these different groupings that have found ways to exercise power collectively, whether that's through these international institutions, whether it's by exerting military force. and they've also been able to reap the benefits of that global exploitation collectively. So there's a very important narrative now in Europe and in debate about European sovereignty vis-à-vis the United States, right? There are people on the left who say Europe has become a vassal, we need to fight for Europe's sovereignty. Do we?

Is Europe pretty vassalized or is it a subordinate part of a U.S.-led imperialist system? I would argue that it's the latter. that it is still benefiting from the plunder of Africa, from the plunder of Latin America, from the plunder of the entirety of the so-called third world. And the last thing we need is a sovereign Europe that would rekindle the inter-imperialist rivalries of the past century. So it's very important to kind of get into the dynamics of imperial power

as a way of formulating left strategy today. Now, back to your question of the importance of a peace movement. there is a kind of, there's a lot of confusion, I think, on the left when it comes to the question of peace, and in particular when it comes to identifying the sources of violence. The United States has been very effective in obscuring its role in searing up various conflicts around the world. I was reading in The Intercept a few months ago that between, well, anyway, in a three-year period in the last five years, the U.S. launched something like 21 military interventions on the African continent. I could name a handful of them, but I couldn't name all 21, and most people couldn't name a single one.

In Gaza, they are effectively operating through their proxy Israel, and we'll get to that later. In Ukraine, they're operating through their proxy, the Ukrainians, and have built a very powerful propaganda apparatus, just like they did in Afghanistan. which puts the proxy war on par on equal footing with a war of national liberation. They are constructing a similar narrative around Taiwan and have tried to around Hong Kong and, you know, Tibet and other parts of the world. And so, and they've constructed a very powerful social apparatus of control where the social cost and also the political cost, and sometimes, you know, a country like, Germany where I lived for four years, potentially the financial cost or the cost to your time

in terms of criminal liability and criminal penalties for saying the wrong thing is significant and makes people think twice before articulating clear anti-imperialist politics. And so we have a left, which has become very afraid of putting their finger on exactly what the source of violence is. I think it's incredibly important to rebuild a peace movement, but it's not a universal peace movement, and it can't be a universal peace movement. It has to be a peace movement which recognizes the role of the collective imperialism of the West, exercised through institutions like NATO, exercised primarily through the U.S.

military globally, in support of a global economic system that supports the extraction of wealth from the majority of humanity to the former colonial powers, and fights to overcome specifically that system. So it's not a pacifism. It's not a let's disarm everyone, because we understand that within a system that is, in which one power holds hegemonic force, the demands to disarm everyone will apply asymmetrically to those without hegemonic power.

And so it's very important before talking about a global movement for disarmament or a global movement for peace to identify the kind of anti-imperialism that we want that movement to advance. And the big debate here, I think, and I'll wrap up in a moment, but I think the big debate is, and this has been very clear in the communist movement, it has actually been quite destructive to the communist movement, is whether it is sufficient. to have anti-imperialism as a horizon today without having socialist revolution also as a necessary kind of first step. And so there are a lot of communists who would say, well, you know, of course, there is a kind of anti-hegemonic movement, a tectonic shifting of power happening.

But the forces that are leading that movement are also kind of bad. And we wouldn't want those to exercise hegemony over us either, so we went. The other side says, no, we are facing a moment. like in the analysis of the Third International, in which there is a diversity of opponents to imperialism, there is a diversity of motivations, there is a diversity of strategies, but the net effect of their actions

is the chiseling away at the power of empire, which has been the fundamental obstacle towards articulating any kind of sovereign project over the past century, whether, in fact, all the way back to the Haitian revolution, over the past two centuries ever since the first kind of major anti-colonial revolutionary movement emerged. So we're, you know, seeing potentially today the gradual withdrawal of a hegemonic force which has held the majority of humanity in its grip for the better part of five centuries.

And my argument would be that it's our obligation to help beat those forces down in their moment of weakness, rather than kind of waiting around or hoping for a better moment to come or waiting until the social cost of taking action lessons or the clarity of the masses increases to a point where these ideas become acceptable. That's what we call opportunism. And they're unfortunately still today, even in the case of the Gaza genocide, far too many people who wait, far too many people who fail to speak out, far too many people whose political horizon for Gaza is not one of anti-colonial

liberation and anti-imperialism, but, you know, one of a ceasefire, a humanitarian aid or whatever the case might be. I agree entirely with that. I do want to turn back to a couple of things that you had said earlier. So I know that one of the things that you talked about was how the Nazis were Europe's last imperialist venture. And I was going to hop in at that moment, but you actually hit more or less what I was going to say, which is that when you look at it, what you're looking at it is them as the leaders of the imperialist system. And that's also excluding other, you know, oppressive and exploitative systems that they, that they partake in like neocolonialism.

I mean, just look at what France does in the Sahel region and has them in the Sahel region, although that's hopefully, you know, continuing to come to an end as we have more movements coming up in the Sahel. But even the existence of the CFA Franca's neo-colonial currency is evident. that France is still highly involved in the imperialist world system and its outgrowth, neo-colonialism. And as you correctly said, there has been this debate within Europe. And it was in Europe.

It has been for years. I know that it was something that was debated on the left when I was living in Germany several years ago. And even today, it's much more strong as a result of increased energy prices, cost of living crises, etc., etc. and the politicians in Western European countries towing the line that the United States is setting out for them, the debate has become, well, look, this is evidence that we are vassals of the United States

and that if we were able to strike out on our own things would be better. You correctly state, in my opinion, that, again, they are just playing a role within the imperialist system. We have to have systemic thinking here. And that just by breaking free of the chains of the United States, if the United States was overthrown in a revolution, that doesn't mean that imperialism is ending. That just opens up the door for European imperialism to expand. I know I'm just reiterating what you said here. But I wanted to also touch on something that I have talked about on the show

previously, and it's related to something that you brought up in the article. Of course, you quoted Emma Caesar, the famous quote, fascism is colonialism turned inwards. I always have a, you know, obviously I agree with this this quote to a certain extent, but there's always something that comes up into my mind, which is the question of settler colonialism, which is, of course, inherently inwards if you're looking at the society that is practicing it. And by extension, I think that, you know, if you take this quote to its logical conclusion by analyzing settler colonialism, you would say that any settler colonial state would inherently be fascist. And I would agree with that. I will point out that and I'm sure that many listeners who are in the settler colonies are

not going to be happy with me, but too bad. Suck it up. The reason I point this out is that something I've talked about is that a lot of people are always confused about why there is so much solidarity between states like the United States and Israel. And there is many reasons. We've talked about these reasons. We have a dozen episodes out on Palestine. on the so-called state of Israel, et cetera. But one of the things that always comes up is that there is solidarity at play. We always talk about solidarity in terms of having solidarity with, you know, anti-imperialist forces, anti-capitalist forces if they exist.

But regardless, having solidarity with forces that are against oppression and exploitation of people, regardless of their specific ideology, which is something, that you touched on, you know, we can't wait until there's some perfect agent that we agree with on its ideological grounds entirely. We can't just say, well, the PFLP is not the leader of the Palestinian liberation movement right now and the resistance against the genocide and Gaza. They are not the foremost leader of that movement at this moment. We can't just say, well, they are the group that I ideologically align with the most that is there. And therefore, since they are not the leaders of this movement, I'm going to withhold my support.

court? Of course not. You know, ideologically, Hamas is not, they're not communists. I think that everybody who knows anything knows that that's quite true. But we are talking about throwing off the shackles of oppression, throwing off the shackles of settler colonialism, resisting genocide that obviously deserves support, even if the group that is leading it is not one that we align with ideologically. That is what solidarity means. But we are not the only ones that can express solidarity. It is not only those of us that are on the anti-imperialist left that can express solidarity with other agents. And frequently what we see is that states that are within the imperialist system one and settler colonial states too, and particularly states that are at the

nexus of that, settler colonial states that operate within the imperialist system, they particularly express solidarity with one another, particularly in times of crisis. And so what we see is that if you look at the last 70 years, there have been moments at which the settler colonial United States has criticized the settler colonial so-called state of Israel over certain things that have been done, but has never been in an actual quote-unquote crisis moment at which there is actual calls for decolonization of that area, at least a loud call for decolonization of that area. When there is those sorts of calls, because people are turning their eye onto the oppression and the brutality of the settler colonial system, that is when settler colonial states that

operate within the imperialist system show the utmost solidarity and are willing to turn a blind eye to any action by other states operating within that system. We have to analyze settler colonialism as a form of fascism, in my opinion. And that by doing so, we are able to more fully understand the relationships that take place between these settler colonial states. Now, the reason that I also bring this up, and I'm sorry that I'm talking so much, you're the guest, Bob, so I'll try to wrap it up here. But many people will listen to what I've just been saying and say,

well, you know, those European states aren't settler colonial states. Well, one, the settler colonial states in existence right now are in existence because those European states set them up, first of all. But secondly, again, they're operating within a settler colonial-led imperialist system right now. So even if those Western European states are not in settler colonies themselves, they are benefiting from operating in an imperialist system. led by a settler colonial, fascist state, and they are operating in solidarity with

settler colonies, both in terms of the United States and in Israel, which is where I turn back to the article that you wrote on Israel. I know you wanted to pick up on talking about an anti-war movement in this case specifically. So I know that there was no real question in what I said. I just wanted to pull out some of those threads that you had mentioned earlier. And I hope that I was somewhat coherent despite the fact that I'm quite sick right now. absolutely Henry I'm floored by how how coherent you are even when sick I couldn't pull that off so you know the listeners would disagree because you were far more coherent than I was just now so you know listeners you make your own judgment but Pavel I appreciate the kind words feel free to

carry on so you know maybe let's let's focus briefly on the question of settler colonialism as fascism because I think it's worth unpacking that a little bit and Gassan kind of found in his text on the 1936-1939 revolt in Palestine, talks about the class basis of settler-colonial Zionist fascism. He talks about the idea that when the Zionist movement picked up steam, it was led to a large extent by the kind of Jewish big bourgeoisie, which brought along with it certain industrial capacities and began a process of really rapid industrialization within historic Palestine. But what they also brought, is their own proletary, creating a system of industrialized development with labor excluded for Jews' own.

And he said that that planted the seed for the fascist tendencies within that movement, which, you know, a lot of people had illusions about Zionism early on, that there was a progressive seed in it. There were undoubtedly sections of that movement, you know, especially after the Second World War, who went in with naive illusions of building, you know, kibbutzis and so on. But at its core, the structure, the material basis of the state, again, in creating a new class of employment exclusively reserved to one group of people on the basis of ethnicity, sewed the basis of fascism. So we have a fascist state.

It was really created at the behest of the European colonial powers, as you said. we have a new system in which those European former colonial powers exercise a collective imperialism and Israel operates in some respects as a kind of vanguard and testing route I mean in a very real sense right a lot of the weapons that end up on

in all kinds of war zones around the world that end up policing borders that end up in the hands of various repressive regimes they are first tested on the Palestinians so you have a peripheral state within the imperialist system system, which is, you know, a testing ground, a critical outlet for investment. It's a tool to prevent the integration of the Arab states within a kind of more solid anti-imperious block.

It's an instrument of routine violence against its neighbors, right? Every, more or less every week over the past couple of years, we would hear of a bombing either in Syria or in Lebanon or somewhere else. Unfortunately, you know, most liberals have the memory of a plant, of a house plant. And so we don't remember that all of these things were happening on a daily basis. But you have a force that is so central to the exercise of that collective imperialism and to its geopolitical position in that in the region of West Asia, that the loss of Israel would be one of the decisive blows, one of the historic decisive blows against the broader imperialist system. And so when we talk about fascism as colonialism turned inwards in that context, We're not talking about the kind of thing we saw in a lot of European colonial states where, you know, the moment the colonies were threatened and a mass movement against the national ruling classes emerged, the state tightened its grip and began, you know, builds horrendous infrastructures of repression. We're talking about other states like Germany implementing repressive structures at home and the U.S. and Great Britain and so on. on in order to protect another country, which is itself fascist and colonial, from criticism and from attack, because they understand that functionally Israel performs the same kind of role

for them as their colonial outposted in the past. And that's a very interesting kind of modulation of the historical trajectory of the historical threat. It's the same story, more or less the same story, but it's modulate. But when you talk about, you know, the U.S. never, occasionally criticizing Israel. Of course, the U.S. occasionally criticizes Israel, but really, and even now, it has voiced concerns. And apparently, you know, whenever the U.S., what's his name, Lloyd Austin, whenever Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary meets with Minister Gallant, the human animals minister in the Zionist, state. He reminds him of the obligation to, you know, take greatest care not to hurt civilian

targets or whatever bullshit like that. But we know because those warnings have no material basis, that they're empty. We know that as long as the U.S. continues to funnel tens of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars into the Israeli military, any kind of criticism is baseless. And the U.S. will continue to funnel money into Israel as long as until the material balance of forces doesn't shift. And one of the critical things going back to the need to show solidarity with the Palestinian resistance, with the Yemeni resistance, with the Lebanese resistance is precisely because it is those groups that are changing the material balance of forces on the ground. It's not protests in Brooklyn. You know, they have, they have an important function. It's not protests, verbal protests

on the United Nations. It's not even a decision by the ICJ. It's the changing of the material circumstances of the conflict, of the economic basis of the conflict for Israel by the regional resistance that is making everything else possible. And so if Israel is a vanguard for the collective imperialism of the West, then the regional resistance is our vanguard, and we have to be led by its demands, and we have to be led and inspired by its actions. I'm so glad that you... Adnan, let me announce a couple, sorry, we have a couple episodes that recently have come out that will be relevant to things that Babel said.

I'll just mention those episodes for listeners to check out, and then you can hop in with your question. So you mentioned regional actors, Yemen and Lebanon. We have recent episodes on both of these topics on Yemen. have an episode with Shirin al-Adini and Runa Ayahu's talking about recent history of Yemen and their actions against the genocide in Gaza that just came out at the time of this release probably about a month ago at this point. We have an episode on Lebanon versus Zionist imperialism with Rania Halik and our friend Ali Qadri. And then also a couple of other things

that you had mentioned in your answer are also relevant to some episodes which have already been released and some episodes which will be released by the time this episode comes out. But unfortunately, you wouldn't have seen them yet, Pabel, because they're still being edited. But one, you mentioned that weapons are tested by Israel, which are then, you know, transmitted across the globe to oppress people elsewhere. We have an excellent episode with Alex Avenia talking about Israel in Latin America. And one of those points that we talk about in that episode is how these battle-tested weapons that are tested by Israel against the Palestinian people are then also used on the southern border of the United States, how Elbit Systems operates very

heavily on militarizing the border of the southern part of the United States. And of course, Elbit is the biggest defense contractor for Israel. And then we have two episodes, which, again, you wouldn't have heard yet because they haven't come out at the time of recording, but they will be out by the time you hear this listener. So go back and listen. There'll be two of the most recent episodes. We have an episode with Patrick Higgins on the history of Palestinian communism. Part of that conversation is talking about these kind of left movements within Zionism

in the early days pre-state of Israel. I think that that will be quite interesting for people to listen to. And then we also have an episode with Louis All Day where we talk about, I guess I'm kind of funny quite a bit. And again, I appreciate you bringing up Kenneth in this conversation and listeners, if you want to hear more about that. You should check out any of those five episodes that I just listed. So now that I've got that housekeeping out of the way, Adnan, I am sorry. Oh, no, no. Well, I just was so enthusiastic about Pavel's analysis there and the fact that he's, you know,

coming to the point really of identifying where the vanguard, you know, of resistance is vis-à-vis, you know, the vanguard of imperialism. And that is definitely the way one needs to understand what's at stake in the situation in Gaza and the nature of the, you know, Israeli project and the role that it plays in the imperial system. And of course, this is exactly what they themselves advertise themselves, you know, as. Of course, they don't say, we're the vanguard of the imperialist project, but they say we are the frontier frontline state of the West, right, of the Western civilizations. And so they frame it within this kind of clash of civilizations and culture talk of, you know, that this is, you know, we're defending essentially the West here in this region against, you know, the barbaric, you know. Arab-Muslim, you know, hordes and so on. And there is, exactly, the children of darkness was the children of light. And, you know, what it means is that we're helping you drain the $45 trillion from the global south.

But, you know, that's not the way we want to frame it. We want to frame it as this, you know, contest of culture and civilization. But it does bring up the question, as you said, like, since it is the regional resistance, the Yemenis, Lebanese, and so on, who are material. contesting the conditions there, the Palestinians, of course, you know, that we've seen that millions of people can come out onto the streets over the last four or five months across where they're allowed to, across, you know, Europe and North America and so on. And of course, millions, many, many millions more in the global south, often constrained by, you know, governments

that don't intend to actually do anything, despite the overwhelming majority of people supporting solidarity with Palestinians and doing something to stop their slaughter. The question then is, you know, what is the role for the imperial, you know, left us in the imperial core? And I like to go back to the point that you were making that this kind of system of collective imperialism has organized. itself through these international organizations and institutions that were created in the post-World War two period and, you know, and institutions like the International Court of Justice dependent upon the UN, the ICC International Criminal Court, and so on, as well as, of course, you know, that you see the, you see the, I guess, the mirage of how they operate with this universalistic language in order to, you know, implement the interests and dictates of this collective Imperial West formation in the same way that are political and democratic rights to protest and so on. This seems to me what's really become significant is that on the one hand, these massive protests have not led to being able to even constrain one's government's complicity and support for arming and supporting Israel's genocide in Gaza.

They haven't accomplished the political purpose. it's really the resistance in the, you know, in the region, as you pointed out, that has the power to make those changes. But what it has done is exposed that, you know, these are not really democracies or that liberal democracy is, you know, not going to confront imperialism simply because the will of the people, you know, would have it otherwise. And that quite apart from that is that instead, you know, political rights domestically are. under threat, greater repression, simply because of the annoyance of these, you know, large-scale representations of dissent from the dictates of the political governing class.

So I'm wondering, how do you see and, you know, what do you think should be the orientation and tactics of the left in Europe, North America, the West, how best to show that solidarity? What is the sort of political project that could be most effective and useful, given these contradictions that you've been pointing out, that it's not here, you know, protests in Brooklyn or, you know, at the ICJ. These have the effect, perhaps, of unmasking those mechanisms for what they really are and the functions that they actually serve. But so what would you recommend, what do you call for as the most effective role to play in helping undermine the imperial system. What can, you know, what is the role of the left in the imperial core at this time? I want to maybe unpack two dimensions to that question. Are these two dimensions to what you talked about? One is the kind of level of international institutions, which also play a role here, and the other is the level of national political, of social movements.

Now, I know I dismissed the ICJ decision as toothless and to an extent it is, but I think what it represents is a pretty significant victory in a long process by which the nations of the third world try to reconfigure the institutions of, the international institutions to work in the way that they were designed in their favor. A lot of these institutions like the ICJ, like the United Nations, all these institutions emerged after the Second World War, but many of them also in the context of the struggle against colonialism as instruments by which to guarantee justice in the international system, a justice that has always been denied.

And so the fact that a nation that had once been ripped by a hard hide, a system that had the full support and financial backing of the entire West, a system, you know, the U.S. considered Nelson Mandela a terrorist, I think, until 2008, that that state is now able to bring the vanguard of the imperialist system before a world court and have a decent shot at waiting. I think that's a very significant symptom of the very deep change in the structure of power in the international system. And so, you know, there's a big question. I think a lot of states hold on to the belief that it's possible within some of the international structures like the United Nations, which are essentially just containers for the balance of powers that exist in the world, that it's possible as the balance of power ships to reconfigure those institutions in the image of the people of the third world and of

the vast majority of humanity. So that process seems to be underway. Some institutions have to be discarded, of course. The IMF, World Bank, Irredeemable, NATO irredeemable, never designed as consensus institutions, never designed as vehicles for justice. But there's a sense and an open question as to whether it's possible to salvage these spaces, these neutral spaces of consensus, from which the West, the imperialist states are having to retreat, right? The invention of the category of the rules-based international order is precisely a retreat from consensus-based international law and from international institutions.

And so that's one battleground, which is very interesting and I think which also deserves our support because it's another expression of the same kind of tendencies that we're talking about, the same kind of tendencies, is the kind of second anti-colonial mood, you might call it. When it comes to left strategy, I don't feel that I'm one to dictate, in part because the national context... You could just recommend. I don't think it's in my position to even recommend because the national context is so different.

And my sense is that any strategy, any political strategy is limited first by, the theories underpinning it and second and most importantly by the degree of organization within movements right you can have great ideas but if you're not organized if you're not capable of absorbing those ideas into a structure which can continuously build power and institutionalize that power and reinforce that power then you um really have very little footing to stand on right one way of thinking about this is look at some of the successful movements in the U.S. that have stopped arms shipments to Israel. There's a group called the Arab Resource Organizing Center, which is also a member of the Progressive International, which stopped a shipment by Zim from leaving its port, and they had to get a whole military export for the ship.

Anyway, they, you know, it was a very effective operation within the capacities of that organization. Now compare that to the capacities that Yemen to stop Zim and other shipping companies from providing resources to Israel. And Yemen, you know, is a national liberation movement spanning almost the territory of an entire country. So the degree through which we're able to exercise power with the, exercise solidarity with the people of Palestine

is limited by the amount of organizational power that we have and the organizational capacities that we build. And so my sense is that it's imperative not only now, but at all happens, for the left to get serious about winning, to abandon what Domenico Lucerto calls. And I love it. This is one of my favorite phrases of his, the self-flagellation of the vanquished, you know, the tendency of the left to punish itself for its own defeats to see, to kind of take pride in its weakness and its martyrdom. No, our job is to win. our job is to mobilize, organize the working classes, and sees power. And so one thing we have to overcome is the kind of theoretical and strategic obstacles to

building that kind of power. Now, in the short term, there is a very active debate on the left about what we do now. I think at a very minimum, we've learned that the strategies of the Iraq war protests, which brought millions of people into the streets, the strategies of the Black Lives Matter movement, both of which, by the way, were very important in terms of raising consciousness about imperialism and imperialist violence and the kind of, you know, inherit evil of the Western countries and so on. Those failed to make a material dent in both the military adventurism of the U.S. in the case of the Iraq war protest and the kind of just inherent racial injustice

in the U.S. and in the Westmore broad. So as a minimum, we need to draw strategic lessons from those failures. But also my sense now is that if we see the resistance in the region, the regional resistance, the Yemenis, the Lebanese and the Palestinians as our vanguard that is fighting on the front line of an anti-imperialist war, then we in nations that are. funding that war that are building the drones and the bombs and the weapons that fuel that war, we are fighting in its rear, or not in its front lines, we're in its rear. And so there is a tremendous role for groups like Palestine action to play and, you know, various blockades of ports and so on to play in actively disrupting the material flows of goods to the Israeli regime.

I think, you know, on its own, as a long-term strategy, that needs, that is insufficient because it needs to be accompanied by institutionalization, by party building, by, especially by the organization of the working class, which has really the bulk of the power of the disruptive power, as we've seen in Spain and Belgium and elsewhere when it comes to blocking shipments and arteries of trade. But it's a very important strategy, given that now there is a genocide happening. People are being exterminated. Hundreds of thousands are starting to debt. And no one is in the countries that are responsible for this absolute cataclysm, absolute crime against humanity, is lifting a finger to stop it. So it is up to the movements to stop it. And one thing that's been really frightening to see is the spread of these strategies back in December last year, we organized together with Palestine Action, what was the first global

Day of Action against Elbit Systems. We had 11 countries take part, including a trade union in Japan, a movement in Brasilia where a big subsidiary of Elbit operates, groups in Sweden and Belgium, the UK, of course, the US and other places. After that, we saw the emergence of Palestine Action, France. Just last week, we saw the launch of Palestine Action Belgium, which is a coalition of activists that had already been organizing in Elbit Systems subsidiaries in the country. So there is a powerful movement emerging, which has the capacities to disrupt, again, to change the material balance of powers, material balance of power, in a way that can at least, limit to the capacity of the Zionist war to inflict the kind of damage that it's

inflicting on the Palestinian people. And I think that's a strategy that needs to be cultivated. Now, am I saying that it's a universal strategy? No, you look at a place like Germany, probably the most repressive of the European countries. I, you know, I myself was arrested for being in the street at the wrong time, basically. I was accused of attending the legal protest. There were no protests. I think a strategy like the Palestine action strategy will just land you in jail for three decades in Germany.

There's very little chance of building up any kind of infrastructure that can support that kind of work there. So maybe the strategy there is different. I trust comrades in Germany to know what that strategy is. So again, to sum up, my sense is that we need to figure out in each national context to how we learn from the lessons of the past and how we abandon this kind of politics of supplication which still entreats the Labour Party Kier Starber to support a ceasefire knowing full well that they won't

and how we learn from the failure of the Iraq war protests and the other big protest that took up that strategy and the other is that we try out new things in places where we think they're possible to take immediate action that can have a material impact on this situation, which is urgent, which can't wait, right? The starving can't wait. The bombed can't wait.

They can't wait for us to build a party. They can't wait for us to seize power. So these aren't quite prescriptions, but these are tendencies that I've seen in certain places that I think are interesting to study and are important to amplify. Yeah, I think that that's a great note to end on today. I know that we had talked about discussing Western Sahara in this episode, but if you'd be up for it, Babel, I'd like to bring you back on for a future conversation to discuss just Western Sahara at some point. You up for that? Western Sahara is a very big topic, so I think having a dedicated episode to Western Sahara would be very welcome. Excellent. Adnan and I would both love to have you for that. So now that we've got you on the record saying that you'll come back on, you have no choice.

great. Now you're locked then. Pavel Worgan, again, is an activist, researcher, organizer, coordinator of the Secretariat at the Progressive International and has been published in numerous places. We'll link to the article Disarming Empire, which we've been discussing for the second half of the conversation in the show notes. So listeners, be sure to check that out and read it. It's a small read, but a very excellent one. And Pavel, thanks for coming on the show. Can you tell the listeners how they can find you and your word? Thanks so much for having me on. You can find me on Twitter, now known as X. You can find me on Instagram.

I think my handle in both is at Pavel Vargan, P-A-W-E-L-W-A-R-G-A-N. I might be wrong, but you'll find me. And of course, we'll link to it in the show notes as well. So listeners, if you don't want to type it, just scroll down and click. Adnan, how can the listeners find you and your other excellent podcast? Well, you can find me on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N, and do check out the M-A-L-L-I-S podcast about Middle East Islamic World, Muslim diaspora, culture, and so forth. And we do have an episode coming up fairly soon on kind of culture, Arab culture, post-1967. by a literary critic and theorist

named Nuri Ghana. So look out for that coming soon. And if it's out before this episode comes out, I'll have it linked in the show notes as well. Listeners, as for me, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995. Since Pavel mentioned Lassurdo twice in this episode, I'm going to pitch the Stalin book one more time.

Iskerbooks.org can get the PDF for free or a print copy. I know Pavel has a print copy. with him. So another reason. Yeah. Really, can I just take a moment to congratulate you on this effort? And I'm not done with the book yet. I started reading it recently, but it strikes me that this isn't really a book even about Stalin. It's a book about... It's not at all. A book about the way that we understand history and about the way that we understand revolutionary

processes. And so as a kind of philosophical guide through moments of great change in history, I think it's invaluable and it's a very useful thing to have at hand. So thank you for the work that you put into this. I'm happy to hear that you're finding it useful. And listeners to mention another episode that we've done, we have an almost three-hour-long episode of the show about that book. And of course, we also have been on other, by we, I mean, myself and Salvatore Engel de Mauro, my co-translator of the book.

We've been on other shows, including revolutionary left radio, and millennials are killing capitalism, the East's a podcast. actually existing socialism. So if you do want to hear more about the book and you don't want to commit to reading it yet until you hear more about it, you can check out any of those episodes. But the PDF is available for free at IskerBooks.org.

We worked for a year and a half on it just to make it for free. You can help support the show and allow us to continue running and doing what we do by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can follow the show, keep up to date with everything that we're doing individually and collectively at Gorilla underscore pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-R-I-L-A-U-L-A-U-Score pod. And until next time, listeners, solidarity. You know, I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.