Daily Times

The Nazis not only replaced the Christian faith with Paganism but annihilated the values of Christian institutions as well, which called for equality, brotherhood and social justice. And for good reason since the prevalent?organisation of capital?found?no exchange value in this civilisation, hence it had to be interred. The advantage of this makeshift arrangement of replacing Christianity with folkish religion made them indifferent and hostile to the ‘others’ who believed in universal values or had adopted a different? lifestyle or? belonged to a different? race. Communists were the first to be exterminated since, for National Socialism, class had no natural existence. Gypsies and homosexuals were next since they were not contributing to the productive apparatus. In came the Jews,?a middle-class minority vulnerable to the devastated big middle-class Aryan majority, which Bordiga states sacrificed “one of its parts to the horrible economic pressure, to the threat of diffuse destruction that rendered uncertain the existence of each of its members, hoping in this way to save and ensure the existence of the others. Anti-Semitism came no more from a ‘Machiavellian plan’ that it did from ‘wicked ideas’. It directly resulted from economic constraints.” Why else were Oppenheim, a banker, and Field Marshal Erhard Milch, despite being Jews, honoured as “honorary Aryans”? The Nazis provoked the masses to fight against the vulnerable Jews and ‘capitalist plutocrats’ but the real motive behind?these exterminations was to strengthen the mighty industrial groups that were already dominating German society.

In the Pakistani milieu, an identical situation was created in the 1970s by a populist leader who had neither the will nor inclination to implement his manifesto of equality through which he sprang to power. Akin to the Nazis, he found an easy scapegoat and, through parliament, sacrificed a religious sect that was already vulnerable. Later, economic constraints gave impetus to this mortiferous psychology based on schizoid behaviour. In this affliction?an ever-threatened false outer self invariably tends to petrify the other?into a thing that makes it convenient to eliminate him?even in a most inhumane way. The Shias, Hazaras, other religious minorities or even dissidents of the same faith, the others, have to go through a similar ordeal before meeting the ultimate fate. In recent times the invention of ‘others’ has become a universal phenomenon. Muslims, refugees, the pigmented akin to the reds, Jews and blacks of the past are labelled as others. They are invented to reinvent European supremacy.

Coming back to the German masses, for them the neo-paganism of national socialism came with a very high price tag. The Nazis “invoked soul against soulless mechanisation, folkish solidarity against paternal authority, the open air against the smugness of the ‘bourgeois home’, the strong body against the pale intellect. The new liberties were duties; they were rewarded contributions to the campaign for a large supply of labour and war power, racial restrictions, the confinement and supervision of leisure, the abolition of privacy and the request for ‘purity’, diluted and regulated the permitted pleasure” (Marcuse).?

The minimum economic securities and freedom of repressed impulses turned the human being into?an appendage of a system that created scarcity and toil. The fear of insecurity?deprived the people of every freedom, leaving behind a subservient mass readily prepared to reproduce the very system based on its own exploitation. Consequently, it led them to a long, protracted war since productivity based on production of means of destruction could have led the Germans nowhere else.

In Pakistan, the cost is no less mean. Hundreds of thousands have lost their lives. The so-called “collateral damage” must have exceeded the benchmark of thousands. The economy is in tatters. The country has become hostage to religious bigotry. The?armed forces, the holiest?of cows, struck by the stigma of the Osama syndrome, have staged an apparently strong, unblemished comeback. The whole infrastructure of the state, if?any such thing remains, is in shambles. In this land of the pure, light rarely shines though it shimmers; the burners rarely lit though sometimes they gleam; people do not live their life, the life lives them!

Under national socialism another important reason for the anti-capitalist mentality?leads analysts?towards the more regressive?past of German history. It was the balance of forces that, for a long period, remained tilted in favour of?the Junkers. Unlike the capitalist mode of production, the landowning class neither had the need nor the will to?? integrate the middle class into society. Hence, the relationship between the ruling and middle class remained direct, personal and patriarchal. “There was a strong inclination,” Marcuse says, “to regard government as a natural rather than a social institution and to look upon it as something external to one’s own personal life, something to which the individual could unconditionally submit?without giving away his personality.” The big ‘machine’ of national socialism pulverised this personality. In the name of the Reich, the individual was left to fend for himself.

In Pakistan, the native bourgeoisie could not assert itself the way it did in Germany. But in the presence of the feudal mindset, it remained steadfastly loyal to the feudal relations of production. Even the bourgeoisie asserts its power by assimilating and conniving?with the feudals. The execution of social function even temporally has not been passed into the hands that do not own the means of production directly. Dynastic political hold in the political parties is one example but ever since?this plague has pervaded the political scene of the US, this example is beginning to lose its philosophical authenticity.

The middle class of big cities is quite developed. However, in the absence of a strong capitalist class, its two challenges to the army-feudal nexus were aborted. In 1971, under a populist leadership, it nearly?pulled off?a semi-bourgeois?revolution that was crushed by its own leader whose class interests lay with the old nexus. In 2013, another Caesar stepped in despite desperate economic conditions, yet again the class interests of this ‘man of destiny’ clashed with his objectives. To work within the four walls of the same system with some patchwork brought his nemesis. The hue and cry?reached its logical conclusion as a damp squib.

While analysing these two states it may well be worthwhile to have a cursory glance at their respective religions. The history of monotheistic religions dates back to the era of tribalism when a mercantile class threatened to overpower age-old equality, the hallmark of a tribal system. All religious movements dawned on the stage of history as a protest to these changing relations influenced by the unproductive capitalist class. Akin to old Christianity, Islam too strove for a classless society. Under (peripheral) capitalism this spirit was subjected to objective conditions where commodity fetishism dominated, hence religion could not make an exception to it. The market undermined its essence. The only enjoyment left open to the people was spiritual pleasure lacking any exchange value. For the suffering majority the pivot of material happiness was shifted to the hereafter. They were left, as Marx stated, with “a conceded existence having the concession of heaven”. Religion under capitalist accumulation or in capitalism invariably turns into the worship of a ‘golden calf’. The temptation was too great to be avoided in the lives of? great messiahs; how could it be avoided in their absence?

(To be continued)

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