Daily Times

The power is speaking for its powerlessness since no sadism is without masochism.

“Love the day,” Camus said, “that escapes injustice, and return to combat having won that light.”

Yet, traversing the long dark tunnel of the history of Pakistan, one can question both Camus’s hope of winning light and Leonard Cohen’s authenticity about “everything having a crack from where the light gets in,” since there seems none in this case.

People groping in the dark are gnawing under the coercive laws of an atrocious state that refuses to give respite for barring coercion it has left with little or no alternative to maintaining its spurious hegemony.

Behind the facade of democracy, people are suffering the horrors of a monstrous state beholden to the praetorian guards. When totalitarianism and scientific propaganda influencing the public opinion to an extent that it becomes an instrument for obscure forces, both the intellectual substance of democracy and its authenticity are consumed. Thus, democracy goes to the war with itself. It becomes a tool in the hands of hegemonic forces as they obtain a spurious legitimacy bludgeon over the masses with “people’s stick.”

Through this perspective alone, the farce of an election and overt civilian support to the oppressive state institutions while maintaining large sums for the means of destruction, despite mass pauperisation, can be explained.

The exchange society has turned everything into numbers. During the electoral process, it is not the welfare of people but their heads as voters that counts. “People,” Eric Hobsbawm said, “become a theoretical concept rather than a real body of human beings, an assembly of self-contained individuals whose vote add up to arithmetic majorities and minorities which translated into elected assemblies as majority governments and minority oppositions.”

Brecht once pointed out, “Why do we need murderers when we have bailiffs?”

Prior to the naked barbaric resurgence of imperialism overtly surfacing after the demise of the Soviet Union, the intellectuals thought that modern warfare against the people would not require further Auschwitz.

Yet, Gaza and Kashmir have proved them wrong. The outdated models of annihilation are still in vogue. The capitalist society needs both murderers and bailiffs to sustain itself.

The structuring of a security-state constantly threatened by internal and external enemies provides fertile soil for the growth of religious/nationalist plague. Further, overt or covert support of the power to the unproductive parasitic element of the society, which are hostile to enlightenment, helps keep people in permanent subjugation. The slogans of making the country great again invariably help the ruling class demand the sacrifices, which people would otherwise refuse to offer.

Turned into eternal consumers, people are prepared to buy anything; an idea or a life based on exploitation. However, soon the scant buying power pushes them to the wall. Massive markets are piled up with commodities but little or no disposable income leaves not only the individual but also the system based on exchange in anarchy. The chaos has no solution. Even outright coercion has a limited effect. The Roman emperors were familiar with this chaos though nature was different. They arranged for bread and circus to keep the people under control. In modern times, the ruling class does not promise bread but arranges a political circus; frequently providing a diversion for the people and a breathing space for itself.

This organised amusement, in reality, is organised cruelty, perpetrated on the people by the masters. In an antagonist society, every amusement has only one purpose: to divert the attention of people from the real problems, to enforce the power of capital on their terror-stricken heart so that the last glimmer of resistance can be sapped from their minds.

A human without mind is what the rulers want if they can get it by enacting cheap dramas by engineering a new political party within the house or outside by staging blood-curdling tragedy in a street.

In both India and Pakistan, these diversions have become a routine affair; a culture of a stylised barbarity. A culture that spells out the guilt of the ruling classes since they are the ones depriving the people of the wealth they create. Such a culture prevails only because social justice does not. The political jugglery in the senate elections in Pakistan and the latest terror campaign in Kashmir by the Indian ruling class demonstrate the absolute failure of its domination through consent. The power is speaking for its powerlessness since no sadism is without masochism and the sadist merely perpetuates his objective despair on the vulnerable segment of society.

People living under fear and coercion have two options: to integrate and lose or revolt against the system. In western societies, where the ruling class seeks the hegemony through consent by falsely aligning people’s interests with its own, the former path is trodden. There is a pre-established harmony between the institutions and those serving them; the latter eagerly follows commands’ domination imposes upon them. Karoshi, or overwork death, is not infrequent in Japan, where a man died after working 110 hours a week [ILO, 23 April 2013]. In underdeveloped countries, people are controlled through overt coercion and fascist tendencies.

“Pressure,” Adorno said, believes to “produce counter-pressure. Yet if the formal becomes powerful enough, then the latter disappears, and society appears to contribute considerably to entropy, by a deadly equilibrium of tensions. The scientific enterprise has its equivalent in the kind of minds which it harnesses.”

Japan’s “Z” generation suffers from “celibacy syndrome” that refuses sexuality (Guardian, 20 Oct 2013).

For the workaholics of the west, life is a mere competition to excel in wasteful commodities; an indoctrinated majority whose brains were created before its jobs, are content with self-preservation, unconcerned with politics, art or aesthetics and, hence, contribute to the entropy.

Exploitation does not disappear if it is not felt. People move with their fetters because they consider them natural. Nevertheless, the inherent flaw of the system is relentless. In 2008, the recession or the cyclic anarchy of capitalism hits this atomised class catastrophically; a large number became unemployed and homeless. The current state of fascism rearing its head in the western world is a continuation of the same phenomenon.

Barring Yellow Vest movement in France, there is no significant resistance apparent in the developed world where material conditions for a better world are rife. Despite having scarce material resources, the underdeveloped countries have always strived eagerly for the development of a just system. Barring Cuba, the nexus of native capitalism, army and the US subverted most of the progressive movements. One important factor of Cuban success was the liquidation of its old army by Castro; proving that how inimical the static bureaucracy of the past could become for a society creating a just system.

The crisis of capitalism has hit the subcontinent having feudal-capitalist relations with the most regressive tool of religious fanaticism. The vivisection the part of imperialism’s design, which cleaved it into two belligerent halves instead of becoming a remedy turned out to be the reason for a permanent conflict; to the benefit of imperialism, both countries are at each other’s throats. During the process, Pakistan has become the biggest casualty. In the dark tunnel of ignorance and apathy, is there any hope?

In the dark times, Brecht inquired, “Will there be singing, yes there will also be singing, about the dark times.”

For those who are prematurely rejoicing their victory, he said, “He who laughs last has not yet heard the bad news.”

The writer is a freelancer