Women and Class Struggle: A Marxist Study of Pakistan’s Trade Union and Women’s Movements
In my book Women and Class Struggle (English translation forthcoming December 2025), I explore the historical, social, and class-based connections between Pakistan’s trade union movement and women’s rights activism. At first glance, these two areas may appear separate: trade unions are largely male-dominated, while women’s movements, often led by elite women, focus on patriarchal and gender-based oppression. My work situates these movements within a unified Marxist-class framework, particularly highlighting the struggles of women working in the informal sector home-based and domestic workers whose labor is often invisible in mainstream accounts.
Liberal and descriptive research often addresses these issues superficially. NGO-produced literature, while methodologically sophisticated and attentive to women’s voices, frequently reflects global agendas and funding priorities. Meanwhile, traditional trade union research in Pakistan remains rudimentary, rarely moving beyond basic documentation of male-dominated labor struggles. I sought to fill this gap through a Marxist lens, combining historical data and dozens of interviews to show that women’s underrepresentation is not simply a result of male dominance in unions but also deeply rooted in patriarchal, religious, and cultural structures.
I argue that women’s engagement in the informal labor sector emerged precisely because traditional trade unions failed to […]
Workers’ Political Consciousness in Demobilized Class Societies: Redistribution, Recognition and Representation
How are we to understand working-class consciousness under current conditions? We argue that in this conjuncture, the dominant form of workers’ consciousness is a moral sense of injustice, a protest against violations of an implicit social contract. The reactive scandalization of broken promises and violated expectations, rather than systematic ideological edifices, dominate as a modus operandi of workers’ political consciousness today.
Slush of Chicago: Winter Parking at the Cross-streets of Public-Private Predation
Meet John Biggs. On December 1, 2022, he awoke to discover his car gone. As a carpenter who keeps tools in the trunk, no wheels meant no work. No work meant no income. No income meant problems. Later Biggs would learn his car towed on the 1st day of the winter ban. The restriction’s supposed to keep snow off the roads. There was no accumulation. There were no signs on the block that said parking was prohibited. Even the closest one a block away was no help. The words were unreadable, faded from the elements. It’s a typical sight to see in Chicago.
The thing is there’s not just one John Biggs in Chicago. There are many. More than 9,000 cars are towed every year for snow-related restrictions. Less than 1-in-4 occur on days of actual accumulation. About 1% of these tows are never reclaimed. In other words, what happened to John Biggs is hardly unique. It’s a common experience that provides a lens for interrogating one of Chicago’s first attempts at privatization, theorizing how racialized hardships result from draining neighborhood resources and quantifying which communities are subject to debt and dispossession. […]
Science, Marxism, and the Critique of Positivism
Today we face dire and escalating crises, not least of which is the looming climate threat. Following the French critic Gilles Dauvé, we can say the prospect of climate catastrophe poses not just a social crisis but a civilizational one.
The peril of the climate crisis has been enhanced by the denial of climate science by the political right. Many were alarmed by talk of “alternative facts” by the first Trump administration, which signaled a careless disregard for truth. Climate action, already under threat by right-wing science denial, would surely be further devastated under such an irrationalist regime.
These fears have continued to be confirmed. Since returning to office, Trump has attacked institutions of science and knowledge directly. He has repeatedly threatened Harvard and other universities, and has made serious cuts to federal science funding.
Any attempt to offer a “critique of science” may seem absurd in the face of this right-wing offensive. The late sociologist Bruno Latour reoriented his earlier criticisms of science and its ideology for this reason. Latour worried that excessive academic focus on critiquing the ideology of science missed the more important task of defending science against attacks from […]
Control, Sex and Monopoly – AI’s Reification of Social Interaction as Next Frontier for Capitalism
Late on a work night, after a few drinks, I just wanted to text my partner back before a good night’s sleep. It might have been the fun energy of my partner’s texts, or the drinks, but in either case I was motivated to playfully use the AI bot on WhatsApp in our chat. Next thing I remember is that I found myself in a protracted argument about AI, philosophy of science, and political economy – with the chatbot. This cost me another hour of sleep and evoked little more than a confused “wtf” from my partner the next morning.
Just like the WhatsApp chatbot had a tight grip on my attention that night, social media corporations are tightening their grip around consumers across their platforms. This is more than a new gimmick for business, as it actually represents a qualitative leap in the use of AI in capitalism to subordinate new areas of social life for profit-making. This leap is the commodification of social interaction itself. It allows the opening of a new frontier for social media corporations for a new push to accumulate capital. A process that has already begun, and from which we can […]