State formation in post‐colonial societies is often explained with reference to the roles of elites. In Pakistan, landed elites continue to dominate the rural political economy through informal and formal institutions, but the history of its largest peasant movement shows how agrarian class struggle can change the institutional forms and functions of power. The Hashtnagar peasant movement achieved lasting de facto land and tenancy reforms in north‐western Pakistan in the 1970s through forcible land occupations that were regularized by state intervention. I argue that although divisions among elites were important, the state intervened in favour of peasants due to the rising organizational power of tenants and landless labourers under the centralized leadership of the radical Mazdoor Kisan Party. Agrarian class struggle weakened the informal power of landed elites and gave rise to institutions of peasant power. However, other fractions of the ruling class sought to undermine their landed opponents while co‐opting the militancy of the peasant movement by strengthening state institutions to intervene in favour of upwardly mobile tenants. The latter were separated from poorer peasants and the landless, thus demobilizing the movement.

Activists and scholars have debated whether “agrarian populisms” premised on multiple classes and groups can pursue progressive objectives if exploiters and exploited are in the same movements. In Pakistan, the militant Pakistan Kissan Ittehad emerged in 2012 by uniting different classes of owner‐cultivators who are largely not in direct relations of exploitation with each other. We argue that the PKI nevertheless advances the interests of a “second tier” of rural capitalists, who exploit rural labourers, while underplaying the interests of owner‐peasant farmers. This divergence of interests has contributed to the fragmentation of PKI along class and political lines, including attempts by peasant farmers to independently organize around issues particular to them. We suggest that progressive agrarian populism must hinge on the interests of rural labourers and peasant farmers and that second‐tier capitalist farmers may be tactical allies as they oppose neoliberal globalization. However, rural labourers and peasants are ideologically and organizationally weak, and thus, the possibility of left‐wing agrarian populism requires much legwork.

How can Marxism, a theory and practice that emerged from the European experience, speak to contexts outside that experience? Recent scholarship has returned to the moment of the 1960s and 1970s to examine how political movements in the global South that embraced Marxism grappled with this question, aiming to reformulate Marxist theories and categories of analysis for postcolonial realities. Whereas this scholarship focuses on the writings of intellectuals, in this article, the authors supplement prose with oral history and ethnography to also identify the theory immanent in practice. They show how the translation of Marxist theory for political practice in the peripheries instantiated what the authors call a worldly Marxism: that is, a Marxism that is constantly renewed as it exceeds its origins in Europe and attends to the specificities of settler-colonies, (post-)colonies and metropoles. Worldly Marxism thus entails theorizing in the conjuncture, that is, from a particular historical moment, and involves arranging multiple conceptual elements to clarify and understand the political task at hand. The authors illustrate how such worldly Marxism was produced in Pakistan by examining the Mazdoor Kisan Party (MKP), the country's historically largest communist party, as it engaged with agrarian transitions, religion, and gender.

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