History of Invaders and Gladiators

Dr Saulat Nagi

“The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening” – Rosa Luxemburg.

The history of India, Marx says, is the history of invaders. A brief and chequered history of Pakistan on the other hand, can be summed up by Hans Hellumut Kirst’s novel, a German writer who fascinated Hollywood for a couple of reasons. One, the story was thrilling; secondly it boosted the narcissistic ego of the western military-industrial complex. The magical artistry of both Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif turned “The Night of the Generals” into a classic movie. An untouchable but impotent General, a vigilant but overzealous police officer, slaughter of a helpless civilian woman by the General, referred to as a prostitute, culminated into a fantastic story. But to the sheer misfortune of the General the slaughtered woman not only turned out to be an agent of the general intelligence, to make matters worse an eyewitness, hiding in the lavatory – a place where the common people are confined – caught sight of the uniform worn only by the Weimar’s Generals, leading to the involvement of the military police in investigating the bestial murder. Except for an overzealous Captain of the military police – a rare phenomenon in Pakistan – a powerful General, a slaughtered woman, a working class eyewitness hiding in the hotel’s toilet tell the dismal story of today’s Pakistan.

The story dates back to occupied Poland of the 1940s, a country eager to play the role of a frontline state akin to Pakistan. The countries enduring the wrath of peripheral capitalism today are doubly occupied, not only by the Vichy-style regimes imposed upon them by metropolitan capitalism but by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, institutions created by the imperialist masters, which in the guise of bailing those countries out of the economic miseries imposed by their imperial designs, expropriate them. Everyone knows they are mercenaries disguised as saviours, but every regime maintaining the status quo crawls in front of these institutions to grab the fallen crumbs from the global North’s tables on the latter’s terms. After drinking the poisoned chalice from the IMF’s cup more than 23 times, today’s Pakistanis lack hope. Doomed to despair, Sartre’s observation of life living on the other side of despair has become an authentic reality for these victims. But no one knows how to leave the cursed shores of despair to embrace life.

The very question of Pakistan’s creation has lost its validity. No one asks or cares about it; the existential question of the remaining agonising duration of its survival is haunting people. Everyone, especially the educated youth, has realised that the hand that borrows money takes away the sovereignty that people have lost long ago. Hence, every member of the youth is prepared to burn his boats to risk his life to cross the uncharted shores and unpathed waters to reach the banks of economic safety.

The pale, long faces, the noisy squabbling among people, the life in motion without purposeful actions or meanings, reflect both aggression and helplessness. On the one hand economics, the simmering internal wound embedded in the souls of the majority keeps bleeding eternally, on the other the long big limousines are occupying the maximum social space on the very few fully maintained roads. Psychologically, it depicts the inherent unconscious fear of the ruling class to maintain distance from the aggressive ordinary citizens.

It is typical of the ruling class to be surrounded by armed guards to secure them from the public; the elite cock a snook at them by using huge automobiles, racing them on the roads. Racing itself indicates running away, either from the sick system or from those made sick by the inequality. The class divide is so vividly apparent that on the one hand the affluent class is dying to buy a cup of Tim Horton, an ordinary brand of a Canadian coffee for Rs 2,000, while a large majority is unable to buy warm clothes for its children in freezing temperatures. No one knows how many infants freeze to death or die of heat in the sizzling summer, simulating the tragic happenings of Gaza in the land of the pure.

With the yawning gap of unequal distribution of wealth in a few hands, the process of ghettoisation has become more prominent. The feeling of economic injustice is rife, but the absence of class consciousness and lack of a class-based party have nullified the possibility of an uprising against the unjust system imposed by the one percent upon the 99 percent. There exists a revolutionary situation but no revolutionary crisis.

For obvious reasons, there cannot be one. With the vanishing of whatever industry Pakistan had, the proletarian culture of the country has vanished and is replaced by the stylised barbarity of the lumpen. A large number of workers have been confined to cottage industry or home-based work where organisation and training of the worker as a proletarian is difficult, if not impossible. Historically, the proletariat emerges from its position in the organised productive process carried out under a common roof.

Despite massive subsidies lavished on the largely non-productive industrial class, high electricity and gas rates, inconsistent economic policies by the government, a large chunk of the exchequer moving to the non-productive sector, especially to defence, the emphasis on keeping a large security force in the age of technology where human power can be used for better ends, the stale and highly unskilled bureaucracy refusing to learn the latest technology and the control of the praetorian guards on all important posts requiring skilled, educated and relevant leaders for nation building, and above all the army’s demand to seize agrarian land for corporate farming, the Steel mill, which could have become the jugular vein of Pakistani engineering and industry to be used as real estate, all these phenomena have sunk the country into a state from where only a miracle such as another infiltration of the US in Afghanistan or Iran may prolong the duration of its death pangs. Ironically, this miracle too has already exhausted its possibilities.

The security situation in Pakistan is terrible. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) is attacking the Pakistani security forces with the help and collaboration of the Afghan Taliban. The Baloch situation is dismal. One cannot travel safely from Quetta to Chaman without the army’s escort. In Balochistan, the highly educated Baloch women with death in one eye and honour in the other are committing suicidal attacks on the security forces and Chinese workers alike. For any observer it needs no Eureka moment to explain how precarious the situation has become. Once despair seizes the human mind it doesn’t take long for the oppressed to choose the path laid down by the people of Gaza.

In 2003 when the Pakistani banks started dishing out 25 percent profit to the depositors, which no business, barring private education, health and speculators, is likely to earn, those with disposable money deposited their earnings in the banks to grab profit without playing any productive role in the already non-productive economy. The capital turned into money-capital and the process of its realisation was halted. The capitalist solution of the so-called ‘overheated economy’ withdrew capital from the market, raising inflation further, which reduced the workers’ wages and buying power automatically. This reverse financialisation hurt the banks and the business class. The unsustainability of the idea was evident from day one but only dawned on the economic wizards after launching and maintaining it for nearly two years. Now the State Bank intends to drop the interest rate to a single digit. One can safely predict which course the accumulated money will take. It is bound to fall in the kitty of real estate sharks, eyeing it lustily.

Introduction of solar panels and other alternative energy producing resources adapted by the masses and the massive expropriation of the private energy producing companies (IPPs) have finally dented the hegemony of the vulture capitalists, local and foreigners both. Getting rid of the private energy producing plants was necessary to break through the yoke fastened over the necks of the masses. The anti-people, one-dimensional contracts with parasitic companies plundering the people appeared to be unending. “The evil that men do,” Shakespeare says, “lives after them.” The vulture capitalists are still clinging to the power structure, feeling no hesitation in peeling off the skin of Pakistanis with impunity. It is not that the coming lot is any better, but they have less time and relatively fewer resources to plunder Pakistan, stripping it to its bare bones.

General Ziaul Haq’s complete politicisation of an already politicised army has turned the institution into a political party. Akin to the Roman Praetorian Guards that habitually made and toppled rulers like Caligula by first elevating him to the stature of a god, only to assassinate him later to replace him with Claudius, our Legions and Tribune are engaged in the same circus, which must come to an end. Secondly, if the state wants to follow the disastrous recipe of privatisation stressed by the neocolonial financial institutions, then it must privatise all institutions regardless of their civil or military character. This has become essential since most of the public institutions have already been sold or distributed to the handful of capitalists, especially those close to the former premier Nawaz group.

Perseus using Medusa’s beautiful head petrified King Polydectes; the latter fell in love with Perseus’ mother. In Pakistan, depending on the intensity of the Stockholm syndrome the almighty Zeus, the emperor and the commander of the Olympian gods alternately played the game of petrifaction between Nawaz, Benazir and Imran. The tussle between two bourgeois parties, lacking economic prescription, is nothing beyond attaining the reins of power. Both are devoid of principles, programmes and self-esteem. Pakistan People’s Party, the third political party, is a feudal cadaver brought from the morgue as Lazarus to blow life in its stinking body to support Zeus’s favourite party.

When the civil bourgeoisie demands its share in the mass plunder, the religious parties are unleashed on them. The young generation, unaware of the achievements of the Soviet Union even doesn’t try to think about the success of the Chinese Communist Party, which through a command economy and state capitalism has turned the fate of the country in the last seven decades. For them implementation of religion devoid of any economic prescription is the only solution to all the ills inflicted on society while each of them is busy in a Herculean task of escaping from the country to greener pastures.

Our economic wizards are advising the government to limit its role by acting as mere facilitator instead of operator by creating a robust policy framework encouraging private-sector participation, avoiding direct operational control. It is bewildering that even the world’s largest capitalist economies are not only running their health, education, transport system, airports and even universities and research centres directly under state control but the Pakistani economists representing the interests of the dominant classes are blindly following the neoliberal prescription. How can a profit-based organisation provide relief to the common people? If the job of the state is to act merely as a felicitator and to privatise the non-profitable institutions, then following the footsteps of Rumsfeld would be ideal. The latter tried to privatise the US army, the most non-profitable institution for the state albeit a boon for the military-industrial complex.

For now, our only success, a baneful one, is managing to secure loans from China, Saudi Arabia, UAE and finally from the IMF to pay back the interest on the accumulated loans. The opportunism of the ruling class has gone to the extent that the people of Pakistan are not allowed to carry out a rally in favour of the Palestinians, where history’s live streaming genocide is taking place. To please the Western masters the rulers are waiting for crumbs. This shows the state of the Pakistani economy as being on a ventilator, but unfortunately our hackneyed modes of clinging to ad hocism and refusing to bring structural changes in the vital policy matters are the primary reasons of our doom. The country is ruled by corruption – an integral part of capitalism – coercion and consent. All three are recipes for an imminent disaster.

The writer is an Australian-based academic and has authored books on socialism and history. His Latest Work, God’s Republic: Making & Unmaking of Israel & Pakistan is available in Pakistan and on Amazon.com. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com