KARACHI: Thinkers and intellectuals belonging to the Left politics on Sunday said socialism and communism were as relevant for the world as they had been before the fall of the Soviet Union since the poor still, and more maliciously, were being exploited.

“The Soviet Union was the main reason which forged the concept of a welfare state and forced the capitalist countries to offer it to their people,” said Prof Riaz Shaikh, dean of the faculty of social sciences of the Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology, at a seminar organised to mark 150 years of philosopher Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and 100 years of the foundation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [USSR].

The seminar was organised by the Awami Workers Party [AWP] at the Arts Council of Pakistan Karachi as a part of its countrywide programme to celebrate the two great events of the history.

Seminar marks 150 years of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital

Dr Shaikh said terrorism and fundamentalism had spiked to great proportions after the fall of the USSR.

“The dismantling of the USSR was a huge tragic event in the history that largely ended the ideological politics,” said Dr Shaikh.

He said the Soviet philosophy based on the principles of the 19th century philosopher Karl Marx had inspired the whole world, including the Indian Subcontinent. It motivated the young minds and encouraged writers and intellectuals to produce progressive literature.

The vanishing of the socialist bloc, he added, negatively affected the progressive literature, spawned extremism and made the youth apolitical.

“It is the need of the hour to bring the young people back to the fold of the progressive thought, because the uni-polar world presided over by the United States strengthened the forces of the Right only to stem the possible bouncing back of the declining Left politics,” said Dr Shaikh.

The USSR’s fall made the world uni-polar and inflicted huge harm to the human development, he added.

Dr Jaffar Ahmed, teacher and progressive thinker, said no matter the Soviet Union had fallen after being a reality for more than seven decades as it was a spectacular human attempt to forge a system of equality and could not stop the humankind to make another better shot in future.

“It is not necessary that every human attempt to attain better life gets succeeded. It still did for several decades and the doors for another effort, better than that one, are wide open for us.”

Dr Ahmed said socialism gifted a political system which the world was not aware of in the past.

“Socialism forged a balance in the world politics; and, what was highly important was that it highlighted and addressed the class question.”

He said until its formal demise in the beginning of 1990s, the Soviet Union unequivocally supported the movements for self-determination across the globe, which included the one during the British Raj on Indian Subcontinent.

Advocate Akhtar Hussain, secretary general of the AWP, said the relevance of the progressive politics had never died down. The Left politics still needed it and it would remain until inequality was there to divide humans, he added.

Najmul Hasan Ata, economist and journalist, said socialism was the best system of self-rule, which was designed to offer life on equality to all people.

He said all problems that the world had faced and was still enduring were created by capitalism.

Published in Dawn, October 23rd, 2017