Daily Times

As the creeping price hike intensifies the burdens on an already impoverished populace, the ruling classes and their imperialist bosses are all praise for the present capitalist regime. In spite of the praises of the economic policies of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government, food inflation steeply increased to 5.5 percent up from June’s 2.3 percent. On a year-on-year basis, gas prices increased by up to 10 percent, water supply charges by nine percent, and exorbitant electricity bills monthly shock ordinary households. The toiling classes and the poor end up spending the bulk of their income on food intake, while for the upper strata this expenditure is small change. The low oil prices mainly benefitted the regime by increased taxation but had minimal effects on the budgets of the ordinary people of Pakistan. The merciless privatisation of health and education, depriving the masses from this necessity for human existence, is a crime
against civilisation.

The elite’s macroeconomic reality is not rosy either. The massive national debt and balance of payments has alarmingly shot up. The State Bank’s report says, “The federal government borrowed an unprecedented Rs 2.1 trillion in the last fiscal year increasing national debt from Rs 16.96 trillion to Rs 19.1 trillion by the end of the fiscal year 2015-16.” This is the highest-ever increase in country’s debt in a single year. Paradoxically, during the last 30 years, hundreds of private companies had their bank loans, exceeding Rs 50 million — waived while in the last three years of this government, banks have written off loans of more than Rs 280 billion. Irrespective whether Pakistani regimes were military or democratic, they continued to pamper the ruling elite and carried through policies of aggressive neoliberal economics crushing the workers and the poor of this land. Finance Minister Ishaq Dar confessed in the Senate that 400 corporate enterprises had their loans written off in the last 30 years. These amounts are in dozens of billions of dollars.

The state officialdom and political rulers of the elite beg, borrow and steal to accrue finance capital to squander it amongst the dominant sections of the ruling class, mainly through loans write-offs and tax exemptions. The heavy burden of foreign and domestic loans is pushed to the working classes. The economic failures of the corrupt comprador bourgeois are increasingly dependent on political power to keep up its rates of profit, obscene luxury and social stature by plundering state and society. This glaringly lays bare the class bias of the political rulers and the state bureaucracy. Miniscule loans of the ordinary people smother them for life.

The subservience of these crony capitalist politicians to imperialist interests and foreign corporate capital is even more pathetic. Apart from shameful concessions to foreign corporate firms and the privatisations such as that of the telecommunications giant, PTCL, is graphic evidence. The $800 million owed by the Dubai-based Etisalat, buyer of the PTCL are not mentioned in 2016-17 budget books, suggesting the government may have foregone the debt in favour of the Dubai-based buyer. In July 2005, Etisalat bought 26 percent shares in PTCL with management control at a price of $2.6 billion. After getting leaks from its paid agents in the finance bureaucracy that the second lowest bid was actually only $1.4 billion, the UAE-based firm backtracked from the offer. But it still owes 800 million dollars from the reduced rate. The story of usurping in the IPPs and other sectors privatised and imperialists’ investments is an open secret.

On the other hand, the failure of the national bourgeois to create a modern industrialised society has led to the criminalisation of the economy, society and politics and institutions of the state. The so-called informal or the black economy has swollen from about five percent in 1978 at the advent of Zia-ul-Haq’s military dictatorship to about 73 percent of economy today. It is like a malignant tumour that has metastasised to a size larger than Pakistan’s total economy. The bourgeois experts have adopted this menace, and are now trying to integrate this black economy into the mainstream just to sustain their profits and the existent state. Now huge concessions are being granted to property tycoons to “whiten” more than nine billion dollars of black capital without any state oversight providing a free rein to these extortionists.

This cruel saga of plunder and economic exploitation exacerbates the acute and worsening socioeconomic suffering of the teeming millions. The rich are becoming richer and the poor even poorer. Almost all mainstream parties subscribe to these brutal economic doctrines. The masses are in a state of apathy and alienation with a generalised revulsion towards the incumbent politics. The present elite considers this to be a permanent feature. That’s the folly for which they will be sorry for themselves in not-so-distant future. It comes from their empirical approach and philosophy. Stormy period impends. This is a rapidly changing society seething with detestation of the whole system.

The mass movement might be in a temporary phase of inertia but the simmering revolt underneath is very much palpable. This orgy of plunder by the elite cannot go for long. The distractions fabricated to prevent a mass uprising are withering away. The concentration of the so-called civil society on secondary issues ends up undermining the real issues tormenting the lives of the working classes. It adds to the political gimmickry of the elite while the real burning issues afflicting ordinary people are becoming unbearable.

The fact is that the ruling elite and its system that is choking and oppressing Pakistan’s society cannot solve any of the basic issues even if they wanted to. It becomes a crime against the people to create illusions of reforming a system that is forced to brutalise class oppression every passing day for its own survival. For the survival of the oppressed classes this socioeconomic system has to be transformed. Nothing less than a socialist revolution, can accomplish this historic task.

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at lalkhan1956@gmail.com