To one side of the villa is the town of Nau Dero itself; to the other, the family's expansive estates, mirroring the separation between Pakistan's political elite and the country's teeming millions. Today, under the portraits of her hanged father and dead brothers, her testament will be read by Bilawal, her grieving 19-year-old son.
The family's franchise on political leadership will be handed on. The will's contents will determine the future not simply of her party, the Pakistan People's Party, but of Pakistan. But whether it contains enough to stop the violence is, perhaps, out of the Bhutto family's hands as the nation teeters on the edge of perhaps the worst bloodletting since Partition in 1947.
TIME reports that Benazir Bhutto’s son will likely be named on Sunday as new Pakistan People’s Party leader
As Georg Luckas points out in History and Class Consciousness, his seminal ultra left text which should be mandatory reading for all who claim a revolutionary class struggle perspective , this is the political reification of feudalism, that the poor and oppressed identify not with their class interests but with the landlord class.
It is difficult to imagine any good coming out of this tragedy, but there is one possibility. Pakistan desperately needs a political party that can speak for the social needs of a bulk of the people. The People's party founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was built by the activists of the only popular mass movement the country has known: students, peasants and workers who fought for three months in 1968-69 to topple the country's first military dictator. They saw it as their party, and that feeling persists in some parts of the country to this day, despite everything.
In effect there has been no bourgeois revolution in Pakistan that would allow it to evolve a modern capitalist democratic state. The creation of modern Pakistan sixty years ago was a still born bourgeois state.
The coming civil war is the failure of the bourgeois class struggle in Pakistan, to create the conditions for a modern capitalist state. Class War Not Civil War!
See:
Pakistan A Fascist State
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