Daily Times

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice. — Theodor Adorno

The human body contains a criss-cross mesh of blood vessels, the stream of gushing blood makes them throb and pulsate as they traverse each other. On occasion it is not impossible to overlook a tiny, benign ooze, in fact, a spurter that escapes a cursory glance or unscrupulous attention of a scrutiniser. This internal haemorrhage continues unnoticed and unabated, which ultimately proves lethal for human life. An identical process can initiate on a large canvas in a society where one lives, causing a monumental loss. At this particular level this seething stream of blood can be compared to muted queues of the youngsters, who for one reason or another keep bidding farewell to their country of origin. This external haemorrhage, a brain drain of highly skilled individuals, poses a serious threat to economies of developing countries, and Pakistan remains no exception. According to one English daily, in the last five years alone, nearly 2.7 million people have left Pakistan for safe shores. Contrary to the crisis-ridden Middle East, in this case safety of life — otherwise a serious existential threat — wasn’t the dominant concern. The shadow of Hades lurks in every nook and corner yet ‘custom hath made in’ people ‘a property of easiness’ to live with this gruesome reality. It is the economic rationale that has tilted the balance and prompted this migration.

In a much hyped ‘globalised village’ where world has shrunk to a so-called community the beneficiaries remain the old hegemonic powers that control the means (of production). The relation of labour and capital remains integral and decisive. No slogan of blood and soil, of religion and Ummah, of ethnicity and nationhood has proved attractive enough to charm the people to hold their ground for a mere ‘love of the land’. It’s about time that the state began reflecting upon its policies. People neither need wizards capable of turning Lahore into a caricature of Paris nor do they want ‘bullet trains’ without wheels whizzing past their heels with speed of a snail or a snake.

The wretched of this state demand their basic rights enshrined in the constitution of Pakistan: the right to earn a dignified livelihood, and free and convenient access to at least two basic facilities — health and education. And of course nothing is dearer than one’s life. A Prometheus bound is after all better than Prometheus dead. To a majority the idea of death may look terrible yet for the wretched of the earth not infrequently it turns out to be liberation, from maiming maladies, commercialised messiahs and horrors of economic disasters. Another privilege, a unique prerogative of the dead, is that they do not need to die again. But living with the horror of death looming large has no parallel. It’s an unending perdition of uncommitted sins. The living cadavers of this land have suffered more from human-induced afflictions than natural calamities. The people have gone indifferent to the totalitarianism, democratic or otherwise, imposed by thoroughly corrupt politicians, invisible bureaucrats, necrophlic theocrats and the much-pampered Praetorian guards. Sick of violence of opinion and tyranny of market-oriented justice they are vying for freedom and peace — peace that is not synonymous with death that every living being inevitably has to taste, but the one in which they can be able to taste life itself. A life unsoiled by the curse of toil and misery, and a death transcending horrors of both, the uncertainty and the agony of living in fear.

If things do not change for the better, no patriotic pill or religious opiate or moral high ground could force the people to live in this life of misery. What will hold them with their mother/fatherland where a few families are gobbling every comfort of life while the majority is left to die out in the cold or, more precisely, in scorching heat? The recent years in particular are witness to this human tragedy, especially in the biggest metropolis. If the affluent have not noticed it their victims definitely have.

Most western societies are affluent, and their welfare is consequent upon a system based on warfare. The concept of universal health and education is winding down. For the one living in such a society does not need acumen of Einstein to know the gradual process of farewell that is being offered to the concept of welfare. Leaving the example of the Scandinavian countries aside, which too are steeping into recession, the majority of the western states are introducing massive social cuts. Even pensioners are not being spared, yet one scarcely fears to die with hunger, with hot/cold weather or with fear of an uncertain demise.

In Pakistan, the fuzzy civil-military bureaucrats, the self-styled addled analysts and the political dunces swarm about media screens as ‘coachman flies’. They have either no inkling about this ‘haemorrhage’ or else they tend to overlook it by design. They only rhyme about the ‘dignity of labour’, which through persistent dedication and unyielding endurance can help regain the lost paradise, which beyond dreams had never existed. These replicas of Faustus with Mephistophelian motives themselves live off other’s labour. Snugged in cosy lounges they expect the people wallowing in squalour to toil. It’s their labour that brings laurels to the nation and perks for these ‘untouchables’. Labour as an end in itself cannot be dignified unless it is carried out as a means to an end, which means freedom from alienated labour. In given conditions, labour can never become a pleasure unless it’s creative, done without indoctrination and/or coercion. For this the whole dynamic of the system would need a complete transformation. The struggle for existence has to be replaced with pacification of the existence, which is the primary condition for this transformation. This certainly will not be understood by someone ‘clothed with power, to whom it does not fit’.

(To be concluded)

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