The Pakistani ruling class has intensified its offensive against the working class under the familiar slogan of “economic reform.” The renewed push to privatize Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), electricity distribution companies, railways, energy assets, steel, ports, hospitals, schools, and public land is not about efficiency or national development. It is a direct attack on the working class. It is a deliberate transfer of wealth created by workers into the hands of capitalists.
In recent months, workers across Pakistan have repeatedly resisted these attacks through strikes, protests, and collective struggle. PIA workers have mobilized against repeated privatization attempts, recognizing that selloffs mean layoffs, wage cuts, and intensified exploitation. Spontaneous resistance alone is not enough. The ruling class is organized politically and economically to defend its power. Workers must also organize politically. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has consistently emphasized that only revolutionary organizations, under the red flag of PLP, rooted in the working class can defeat capitalism.
PLP is actively working to foster unity among workers across different trade unions, professional organizations, peasants, and students. We emphasize that privatization is not reform—it is class war. The state, acting in the interests of capitalist bosses, is dismantling public institutions built through decades of workers’ labor and sacrifice. What generations of workers collectively created is now being handed over to capitalists for profit. This is theft carried out under legal cover.
PLP is exposing the truth to the working class that Pakistan International Airlines was not built by investors. It was built by pilots, engineers, technicians, ground staff, and millions of workers whose labor funded and sustained it. Its planes, routes, infrastructure, and expertise are the accumulated products of social labor. Yet today, the ruling class claims that this collectively created wealth must be sold off to capitalist buyers.
Workers are fighting back!
Electricity workers have organized nationwide strikes against the privatization of distribution companies, understanding that privatization will destroy job security and raise costs for millions. Pakistan Steel Mills workers have waged determined struggles against closures and layoffs imposed to prepare privatization. Railway workers have resisted outsourcing and restructuring designed to benefit private capital. Healthcare and education workers have protested privatization and commercialization that deny access to the working class.
As PLP stresses in strikes and political work, workers cannot rely on the capitalist state to protect their interests. Workers must rely on their own strength and organization. Appeals to patriotism, or to parliament or reform cannot stop privatization. Only class struggle for a communist world can. Capitalists do not buy public institutions to serve society. They buy them to extract profit. This inevitably leads to layoffs, wage cuts, speed-ups, and profiteering. It leads to union repression and increased insecurity. It leads to higher prices and reduced access for workers and the poor.
This is not mismanagement — it is the normal functioning of capitalism.
Bosses “solve” self-inflicted problem
The bosses justify privatization by pointing to losses, inefficiency, and debt. But these conditions were not created by workers. They were created by the ruling class itself. For decades, political elites and bureaucrats looted public institutions. They imposed corrupt management, burdened institutions with debt, sabotaged operations, and diverted resources. After deliberately weakening these institutions, they now declare them “failures” and demand privatization.
We can see this clearly in the destruction of Pakistan Steel Mills, which threw thousands of workers into unemployment. Pakistan Railways has been weakened while profitable routes are opened to private operators. Electricity distribution companies are being prepared for privatization through layoffs, tax increases, and to get workers from private contractors. Public hospitals and schools are being commercialized, turning basic human rights into commodities. This proves that privatization is not a response to failure — it is the completion of the looting process.
Much more struggle is needed
Economic struggles must be linked to political struggle. Workers must build unity, class consciousness, and an organization capable of confronting the capitalist system itself. Without a revolutionary organization, resistance can be defeated, diverted, or absorbed. With revolutionary organization, workers can transform class struggle into class power.
The future belongs to the working class. The international communist revolution under the red banners of PLP requires our sharp class struggle against every injustice produced by capitalist bosses. Long live international communist revolution. Long live PLP.
