The potential growth of Pakistan’s economy highlighted by the World Bank and the IMF has been seized by the PML (N) regime as international recognition and proof of its economic success. A recent article in the Washington Post said that “Looking beyond the headlines Pakistan today boasts the best stock market in Asia in 2016and its economy is forecast for a healthy 5.2 percent growth rate in 2017… Pakistan’s middle class may have reached a tipping point at more than half the population and is attracting foreign investment…” Earlier the Prime minister Nawaz Sharif had acclaimed that, “Pakistan will join top 25 economies by 2025.”
The Washington Post attributed relative political stability and a growing middle class for Pakistan’s economic advancement. Another Washington think-tank, The Brookings Institution’s scholar Homi Kharas argues that, “Pakistan’s consumer middle-class market could hit $1 trillion by 2030.” However the size of the middle class and the alleviation of poverty figures in Pakistan are grossly exaggerated by the state and imperialist institutions.
Perhaps these creatures of incredulous optimism are a species from another planet. The rising inequality and the economic hardships have escalated for the vast sections of the society. The so-called middle class itself has many layers with huge disparities in living standards, consumption and incomes. Vast sections of the ‘middle classes’ are struggling to meet their daily needs and those on the top layers spend their obscene wealth lavishly and are aspiring to join the ruling class — a minute minority of the population — the notorious one percent!
Expansion of the middle classes is an intended by product of the neo liberal economic model. The old capitalist model of trickle down economics was reinstated as a worldwide Monetarist model during the 1980’s and aped by Thatcherism and Reganomics with wholesale privatisations including the basic services such as health and education to extract maximum profits for the ruling classes. This resulted in destruction of large swathes of productive capacity and a permanent army of the unemployed.
However the crumbs from the capitalist profits that trickled down did expand the middle classes to some extent particularly in the so-called developing world. This led to a certain expansion of the markets and created more space for consumption. But all that happened at the cost of a harrowing increase in the poverty, deprivation and misery for the large swathes of the population. However this strategy was also short lived as the elite’s mad rush for more profitability led to the ballooning of the banking and state debts that burst into the crash of 2007-2008. Most world economies since have failed to recover. According to the progressive and Marxist economists Pakistan’s middle classes are at the most 50 million — about twenty-five percent of the population. This pushed over 150 million people into an even greater destitution. But the methods of analysing poverty levels are flawed and deceptive by design. The methodology of defining those with a daily income of three dollars a day (PKR 9,000 per month) living above the poverty line is despicable as this income is still six thousand rupeesless than the official minimum wage. This exposes the disingenuousness of imperialist institutions much cherished by capitalist economic experts terming them as the divine saviours of our economic woes. In reality these sacred institutions are more vicious and crooked than the gangster extortionists of Karachi and Pakistan’s other cities.
This middle class acts as a buffer to any economic meltdown from a shrivelled consumption. It is also insecure and in a frantic rush to get rich by hook or crook. Their erratic character and socio-psychological instability swings their political leanings from one extreme to another. With the worsening financial crisis their frustrations lead them into the abyss of religious, ethnic and racial fanaticisms providing certain basis to the forces of black reaction. The poverty of soul of this economically unstable petit bourgeois leads them into lumpenism, male chauvinism, religious obscurantism and semi fascist mind-sets. In a period of social inertia these elements are raw fodder of the violent reaction that the bourgeois promotes to create fissions in the class unity of the toilers.
It’s true that the economy will grow by about five percent in 2017-18mainly due to growth in real estate and speculative nature of business within Pakistan. But this fragile growth doesn’t reflect development of society or rises in the living conditions of the masses. The cases of Brazil, China and particularly India are explicit of this phenomenon. In Pakistan these growth patterns are no different. Paradoxically under this corrupt capitalist ruling class this growth exacerbates the combined and uneven nature of socio-economic development.
Today’s Pakistani society is speckled with islands modern infrastructure projects and advanced technology scattered in a vast ocean of primitiveness. Instead of evolving a harmonious socio economic growth and development these patterns of growth and development end up in exploding the sharp contradictions provoking chaos and anarchy or more likely a revolutionary mass upheavals that could overthrow the system itself and transform society with a Marxist leadership and a Leninist party. With highest growth rates of Pakistan’s history in those years we witnessed a mass revolt. The 1968-69 revolution, with a socialist character, challenged the bourgeois property relations in this very Islamic republic.
A similar prospect looms large in the stormy period ahead where the relatively higher economic growth rates could explode the seething contradictions in the womb of society. The present social inertia reflects a contemptuous indifference to elite’s exclusive politics alienating society and the reactionary nature of the ruling political edifice corrupt to the core. This contradictory nature of the socio-economic growth has created an unprecedented deprivation while its uneven modernity has sparsely introduced the working classes to the most advanced gadgets radicalising their consciousness in the process. The main mission of those who want to put an end to this ongoing orgy of drudgery, misery and deprivation should be to arouse that advanced sections of this class-consciousness instead of churning out stale analysis in seclusion from the masses. Karl Marx put it appropriately, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world; point is to change it.”
The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail