Someone on Pakistani Reddit asked: capitalism or communism? Here’s my answer.

The question

A few days ago, someone on r/Pakistan posted nine questions. He said he was getting into Marxism and writing a political pamphlet. He had seen, up close, what our economy does to the lower and middle class, and how unevenly wealth and electricity are shared across the country. His last question was the simplest one: communism, capitalism, anarchism or corporatism, which way is right for the common Pakistani?

I answered him in the comments. This is the longer version, because the question deserves more than a comment box.

I understand why he asked. Most of us know a family whose electricity bill is bigger than its grocery bill. Most of us know a salaried man whose tax is cut before his pay even lands, while a plot down the road changes hands for crores and the state barely notices. When that is normal, the word “system” starts to sound like a polite word for theft. And Marx starts to sound like he is describing your street.

The short answer

Pakistan does not suffer from too much capitalism. It runs capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich.

The poor get the full market: prices set by whoever has more power, wages set by whoever is more desperate, and no safety net when either goes wrong. The rich get the state: subsidies, tax breaks, cheap land and protection from competition.

This isn’t a slogan. In 2021 the UN Development Programme added up the perks that go to big business, feudal landlords, politicians and the military. The total was about $17.4 billion a year, roughly 6% of the whole economy (Al Jazeera). The same report found the richest 1% of Pakistanis took 9% of national income, while the poorest 1% took 0.15% (The News).

Taxes tell the same story. In July and August this year, salaried workers paid Rs91 billion in income tax. The entire real estate sector paid Rs28 billion (ProPakistani). The man with a payslip pays more than three times what the property business pays.

So when someone says capitalism has failed Pakistan, I’d say we have never really tried the honest version. We have tried the crony version, where the market is for you and the state is for them.

Why “socialist” is a dirty word here

Say “socialist” in a Pakistani drawing room and watch the room change. For a lot of people the word means godless, foreign, maybe dangerous. That reaction didn’t appear by itself. It was built, one step at a time.

1951. The government announced a plot to overthrow Liaquat Ali Khan, the Rawalpindi conspiracy. Communists, including the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, were arrested and jailed after a secret trial (Wikipedia).
1954. The Communist Party of Pakistan was banned, with the conspiracy as the stated reason (Geo). The same year, Pakistan joined the US-led SEATO pact, and the Baghdad Pact a year later. On America’s side of the Cold War, the left looked like the other team.
1960. Hassan Nasir, secretary general of the banned party, died in a cell in Lahore Fort under Ayub Khan’s martial law. Police said he hanged himself. Many believed he was tortured to death, and his body ended up in an unknown grave (Wikipedia).
1970. Jamaat-e-Islami got over a hundred ulema to declare the PPP’s socialism atheistic and anti-Islam (Dawn). The PPP’s founding creed had said “Islam is our faith… socialism is our economy” (Library of Congress). West Pakistan voted the PPP in anyway.
1984. General Zia banned student unions to stop campus protests (Dawn). Universities, where most young people first meet politics, went quiet. Parliament repealed Zia’s order in 1989, but 42 years later no government has kept its promise to bring the unions back (The News).

Seventy years of arrests, bans and fatwas taught us to flinch at a word. They never settled the argument underneath it. Islam has plenty to say about who holds wealth: zakat is compulsory and interest is forbidden. Scholars have argued for decades about whether that points left or right, and neither side owns the scripture.

The taboo matters for one practical reason. It stops us from talking about who gets what. And you can’t fix a country whose biggest problem is distribution if you’re not allowed to say the word.

We already tried the core of it

Now the uncomfortable part for my friend with the pamphlet. Pakistan has already tried the heart of socialism, which is the state owning the economy.

In January 1972, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto nationalised about 30 major firms, and the banks followed in 1974 (Dawn). Growth slowed. Of 54 state-run units, only 15 stayed profitable (Express Tribune). By 1992 the state was selling them back (Library of Congress). Further away, Venezuela went all in, and its economy shrank by about 65% between 2013 and 2019, according to the IMF (AP).

We don’t even need history. Look at your electricity bill. The companies that deliver your power are already owned by the state. In FY25 they lost Rs397 billion to theft, waste and unpaid bills (Profit). The same year we paid Rs1.8 trillion in capacity payments, money owed to power plants whether they run or not (Minute Mirror). By one estimate, nearly half of those payments go to plants the government itself owns (Business Recorder).

So nationalising more won’t end load-shedding. A state that can’t collect an electricity bill won’t run a factory better than its owner did. Ownership was never the real bottleneck. Capture was: who the state actually works for.

What worked elsewhere

If you want to know what pulls people out of poverty, look at the countries that actually did it.

Vietnam is run by a Communist Party, yet in 1986 it opened up to markets. Between 1993 and 2014, the share of Vietnamese living in poverty fell from almost 60% to 14% (IMF). The red flag stayed. The planning office stopped deciding what every factory made.

Bangladesh, the country we were told could never make it, grew on garment exports while spending on girls’ education and health. Its income per person passed ours in 2016 (Prothom Alo).

Neither got there through pure capitalism or pure communism. Both let markets create wealth, and both used the state to spread the gains to people who needed them.

Then there are our children. About 40% of Pakistani children under five are stunted, which means too short for their age because they didn’t get enough nutrition early on. A study from Aga Khan University found the strongest links are the mother’s education, sanitation and household income (AKU study). Cash for mothers, clean water and girls’ schools fix that under any flag. None of it needs a revolution. All of it needs a budget.

My answer

Not communism, and not the capitalism we have. Social democracy: let markets make the money, and build a strong, clean state that shares it. For Pakistan, that means five moves.

Tax land, property and shops the way we tax salaries. Our tax take is only 10.3% of the economy (ProPakistani). The salaried class is not where the missing money is.
Cut the elite perks. Start with the slices of that $17.4 billion that nobody would dare defend on live TV.
Fix power from the top. Renegotiate the capacity contracts and collect the bills, before anyone talks about who owns the plants.
Spend on mothers, children and schools. Stunting is the clearest sign of a country eating its own future.
Protect the workers who keep us afloat. Saudi Arabia alone sent $9.78 billion of a record $41.6 billion in remittances last year (Gulf News). Many of those workers live under the kafala system, where the visa is tied to the employer, and wage theft and seized passports are still common (HRW). We can’t afford to lose that money, so the fix is practical: police our own recruiters and write worker protections into every labour agreement we sign.

It’s the boring middle. It’s also roughly where Vietnam and Bangladesh ended up.

Don’t be an armchair socialist

This is the part I care about most, and it applies to every ideology, not just the left.

Reddit is a great place to sharpen an argument and a terrible place to finish one. A thread with 400 upvotes changes nothing in a budget. The people who write budgets know exactly who shows up and who only posts.

And young Pakistanis mostly don’t show up. Across the 2013 and 2018 elections, an estimated 31.5% of young voters turned out, against 53% overall. In a survey of young people in PILDAT’s Youth Parliament, 42% blamed low trust in political parties (PILDAT). I understand that. But a party you don’t trust and don’t join stays exactly as untrustworthy as it was.

So if you’ve found an ideology, test it. Pick a party whose manifesto you could defend out loud, and join it. If you’re on the left, the options exist, small as they are. The Haqooq-e-Khalq Party, registered in 2022 and openly socialist, fielded three candidates in 2024 and won no seats (Wikipedia). If you’re not on the left, the big parties take members too. What matters is that you’re inside one.

Then do the unglamorous things:

Read the manifestos of three parties, including one you dislike.
Go to one local meeting, and count how many people under 30 are in the room.
Volunteer on election day, or sit at a polling station as an agent.
Join whatever union, association or student society you’re allowed to.
Vote every time, including in local government elections.

An ideology you never test is just a mood. A party is where ideas meet people who disagree, money that runs short and voters who want results by Friday. That is where you find out whether your pamphlet holds up.

Back to the pamphlet

So, to the man writing it: keep writing. Your anger is pointed at something real. Just aim it at the right target. The enemy isn’t the market, and it isn’t the state. It’s the deal between the few people who own both.

Then print a few copies and take one to a party office. Ask them what they’d do about salaried workers paying Rs91 billion while property paid Rs28 billion. Watch who squirms.

To be fair to both sides of this argument: socialists will say Vietnam’s land reform and party control did the heavy lifting, and that decades of pro-market policy are what built our elite in the first place. Free-market voices will say our problem is too much state, not too little, and that every new tax just becomes a new perk. Both deserve a hearing. That’s the debate worth having, in a room full of people, not just in a comment box.