Daily Times

To some it was a rude shock, a whack that left them gobsmacked, but to others it was a moment of ecstatic delight — as their opponents were seemingly pulverised or at least bewildered — when in Lahore, Imran Khan, seizing the moment, gathered a significant number of disgruntled urban middle class at his public meeting. Nonetheless, spectacles similar to this middle class frenzy are not uncommon. Many other non-entities fascinated this class in the past as well. Even the Cimmerian rule of General Zia found a soft corner amongst the same people. This merely reflects the failure of this class to elevate itself from mediocrity and malaise. Searching for a quick fix in personalities rather than altering the system stems from the same mindset, which tends to seek satisfaction in shallow and superficial remedies. Failure — the inevitable outcome of such an approach — invariably manifests itself in one kind of fascism or another. Religious fanaticism is by far the most common and contagious one. The nation has faced one tide of dissatisfaction after another ever since the betrayal of a populist leadership in the 70s. Consequently, the majority of the people have developed a sense of powerlessness — an indifference that has led to self-abnegation.

Dissatisfaction with oneself can be of two types. It is either a dissatisfaction that takes place within the framework of a definite condition (the social circumstance) that determines the whole personality, e.g. dissatisfaction with oneself as a worker, which actually represents dissatisfaction due to the existing relations. The other one is moral dissatisfaction, which is an ideological expression of these relations; it does not at all go beyond them, but belongs wholly to them. No matter how many ‘divinely’ powers a Goliath is blessed with, history has time and again proved these to be insufficient to redeem a system that has outlived its utility. The concept of a superman is illusive and hypothetical; so is the concept of indispensability of any person. Man is not an abstraction but an ensemble of social relations and his relations are determined by capital. The flow of money affects his relations with other persons, with the world, and nature. Even an individual’s thoughts and goals are the product of the same property relations. Since man already finds himself born in a process independent of his will — bonded by specific social relations that are beyond his control — he can merely seek to understand this process and relations and guide his actions accordingly. Therefore, the supposition that in the process of changing a system, an individual with all his good intentions has a defining role is based on naivety. According to Karl Kautsky, “[an individual is] merely an outer ornament which strikes the eye first in a building but says nothing about its foundations. But it is the foundations that determine the character of the structure and its permanence.”

To change the destiny of any nation, the old means of production need to be cast off and not merely the individual. In a given system with an inert mode of production, even a saint is just a second fiddle, its mere protégé. An overthrow of the system — a cataclysm of this proportion — is beyond the capacity of an individual but not of a society since it is the productive forces of a society that come into conflict with the existing relations of production. These relations at a certain stage of historical development become redundant. Instead of developing the productive forces any further, they turn into their fetters. This is the pre-condition of social change or revolution.

Have we, the people, set ourselves the apocalyptical task of changing the system? Perhaps, yes. Marx rightly suggests that “the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation”. For the Left, the lack of a vanguard party is a real dilemma. The capitalist’s response for a social change is western democracy. As regards the American and western democracy, Noam Chomsky notes that it is merely about manufacturing consent to rule. This perfectly captures the purpose of democracy. It is the hegemony of the ruling class over the people through consent, with or without coercion. The consent serves to maintain the property relations and the capitalist mode of production. Marx points out that “[the ruling class] is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interests as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.” Democracy is a system of rule in which people choose their rulers for the classes that have been ruling them from time immemorial but under a different mode of production and in a different guise. Had democracy been a solution to any economic problem under capitalism, it would have been declared an unconstitutional affair long ago. However, the options at this stage are limited, as there appears to be no immediate viable alternative in sight. Hence, it is important to remain engaged with the prevalent system while continuing our struggle against this mode of production and being watchful of its guiles.

Political parties are the nomenclature of social classes and every social class has its party (Gramsci). In the present scenario, one only needs to unmask the social class disguised behind a personality. The ruling PPP and the Quisling League represent, in large part, the feudal class. The PML-N belongs to a mixed sack of the feudal-comprador class, whereas the MQM and the PTI are advancing the interests of the urban middle classes of Sindh and Punjab respectively. The ‘salariat’ class of Hamza Alavi is nothing but a desire of the middle class for embourgeoisement. The covert backing of the establishment in their case is not a matter for mere conjecture. As always, one can smell a rat, the stench of which goes as far as the corridors of the ‘invisible’ power are stretched. For the people of the third world in general, and Pakistan in particular, who are used to seeing fly-by-night messiahs from the IMF, this madness with method is nothing new. Imran Khan, who is being promoted as a dark horse, is as clueless as the other parties associated with the landed aristocracy. His movement, if accepted at face value, lacks three basic elements: a well-defined manifesto; knowledge about the physical composition of society; and an understanding about the historical need to resolve the intrinsic contradiction between capital and labour. There seems to be hardly any willingness to promote land reforms, industrialisation of the state and redistribution of the accumulated wealth expropriated by the specific elite, especially the coercive agent of the state, i.e. the army, which is always instrumental in maintaining the hegemony of the ruling classes.

Pakistan appears to be heading towards another hung parliament with new pressure groups emerging as the forces of the status quo. However, in the words of Shakespeare, “The time is out of joint.” The indifference of the people resembles a rumbling calm before a deluge. One cannot insult their intellect without consequences.

The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com