Volume 7, No. 2, February 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
It is the work of Marxists to assign to the proletariat and revolutionary working class a quality essential to them that is distinct from their material and historical position (the latter being taken at any particular moment in history and not the span of history as a whole). The tendency in the approach of bourgeois political economy, which Marx has written about extensively, is a method that upholds capitalist ownership rather than challenges it, placing the worker as it does in the position of an extension of capital rather than an exploited value adder to capital assets. It is important to be clear that the essential position of the revolutionary working class or the proletariat is not defined by its socio-economic condition, its relative wealth, or its importance within the capitalist mode of production; it is defined by its relative position to capital as adder of labour value to capital assets and commodities. This constitutes the form of productive labour as opposed to unproductive labour. This creates the proposition that not all wage labourers, or indeed the poor masses as a whole, are members of the working class or the revolutionary proletariat.
This understanding has been modified at various times, most importantly by Mao in China, his analysis being that the real value of land as a capital asset in China came only from the productive capacity of agriculture, whereby the real labour expended by peasants created the labour use value of the land and therefore identified the peasantry as the revolutionary working class – a position rejected by Lenin during the Bolshevik Revolution for different reasons. However, in either case – that of Lenin or Mao, Russia or China – the underlying proposition that the revolutionary working class – the proletariat – was the class that valorised or otherwise extended capital and not simply those who worked or participated in wage labour, was the same. It was in their definition of capital assets, commodities, value and value addition that they differed. This should be seen as essential to the understanding and application of the analysis of capital, as applying the same definitions in all circumstances would be necessarily unscientific and ahistorical. This will become apparent as we proceed through our current analysis.
Let us put this proposition to the test, the time tested example of the coat and linen being the case. In the labour theory, the weaver and the coat maker both are addressed as adders of labour value while contrarily, the wage labourer who transports the linen from the weaver to the coat maker is not in effect adding value to the productive form of the commodity and therefore – while he may be toiling for a wage – the transporter cannot be said to constitute the proletariat or revolutionary working class (no matter how much we may empathise with his degraded position) since his part of the capitalist production process does not affect the use form of the commodity. That his labour may be used to increase the value of a capital asset owned by a transportation company is a separate proposition, i.e. if the value of a method of transportation is increased by his labour. The distinction here being that without the capital asset his labour has no productive value in the capitalist chain; however, in the case of the weaver and the coat maker, the commodity has no productive value without their labour. His labour then is simply a product of the capitalist mode and not its purpose.
Given this understanding, and examining the particular conditions of Pakistan as a capitalist economy in advanced modes of decay, how do we identify the revolutionary working class here? The first necessity is to identify the particular conditions of the economic mode of production, to establish the identity of the capitalist class, to analyse their methods of extraction of value, to examine the particularities of the Pakistani economy, to consider the historical background to this development, and to then use the understanding established thereby to identify the working class as a real group necessary for revolutionary change.
Pakistan’s history can be summarised in two phases: imperialism and fascism. As Lenin noted, imperialism is simply a form of capitalist monopolisation of productive means in a particular setting, reliant on financialisaton, which defines its extractive value by overwhelming and disproportionate control over the totality of economic life and the use of violence as the primary means of maintaining that dominance – as opposed to the legal and political mechanisms of so-called ‘civilised societies’. Whether it was the imperialism of the British, who established the capitalist form of production after engineering the deconstruction of the former feudal order, or the internal imperialism of the tiny bureaucratic and military elite that – from the onset of independence – collaborated with, or indeed were part of, the established and/or newly rising capitalist class in the independent country, both constitute a historical continuity.
Indeed there is for the purposes of our argument no substantive difference between any of these groups that have colluded or fought with each other at various times, but always to the detriment of the masses of the country, and always with a view to maintaining their dominance of economic life – whether through political or militaristic means. While shifts of power have occurred between these groups, their position as the dominant capitalist class has never been challenged and at no point was there a serious attempt at transforming the actual means or mode of production. The particularities of this group and the fact that there is ostensible division and argument between the civil and military, or in some forms the democratic and anti-democratic, is a fiction that has served nothing other than to perpetuate the stranglehold of this class on the economic process.
Pakistan’s early progression as a capitalist market economy, with elements of state planning and development, is a simple and incontestable fact until the period 1971. It is here that we see the internal imperialist regime fail to consolidate its position over the working class of the former East Pakistan, which was the more populated part of the country. I will not recount the very simple history but suffice it to say the actual aspirations of the working class in East and West Pakistan were hijacked by the aspirations of the same bourgeois class that exerted domination from the beginning, leading inevitably and tragically to brutal conflict and division.
This is where we find the ultimate condemnation of the so-called socialist regimes and parties of Pakistan, which have always perpetuated the growth of a ‘liberal’ order and not the extension of a working class consciousness. Most especially we can be critical of the Bhutto regime of the 1970s which – for all its whimsical lip service to the plight of the poor – actively dismantled the working class movement that had nascently begun taking shape and would have done so with or without him. Indeed, the development of a working class consciousness was a fact predating Bhutto. The imputation of class consciousness to the Bhutto regime of the 1970s is an example precisely of the ‘liberal’ underpinnings of his regime, which strove to stoke the anger of a mass of poor people against wealthy people rather than identify and exercise the power of a revolutionary working class towards socio-economic liberation. Like other secular institutions of a ‘liberal’ nature in our history, it eventually succumbed to a religious character, exemplified by the eponymous martyrdom of its founder.
The romantic associations of Islamic socialism aside, what are the actual facts that emerged post this development that have driven Pakistani society since? The continued hegemony of the bourgeois class via a liberal Constitution that nonetheless did not in practice uphold universal rights, the handover of bourgeois assets to a state capitalist elite, the persecution and political decimation of socialists of every extraction, the creation of a national security apparatus that facilitated this, the demagoguery of a single individual and his destruction by the very forces he unleashed, leading us from a nascent proto-fascism into complete militaristic fascism.
It is in the incontestable facts of the outcomes of this arrangement that the truth of the fascist regime becomes clear, in particular, the role of fascism as a retrograde factor in relation to the development of the productive forces. If the imperialist regime represented the first stage of capitalist decay, the fascist regime is known by its continuing monopolisation and the stifling of productive forces, essentially the fettering of productive forces rather than their advancement. It allows institutions of finance to determine commodity values of production inputs, i.e. the pricing mechanism by which state capitalist institutions and the fascist class can pass on the costs of debt to wage labourers. The exactitude and meanness by which these costs are offset by exploitation of the wage labouring classes – and the surplus labour of the productive classes – has led in other words to a concomitant attempt to prevent participation in the fascist hegemony. This results in a breakdown of legal mechanisms.
A similar situation was observed by R Palme Dutt in Great Britain when he noted that, “Within this period fascism represents the desperate attempt of the doomed capitalist class to maintain its power and overcome the contradictions by extreme violent means, and thus to maintain the existing social forms at the expense of the development of the forces of production, in particular: (1) to throttle the class struggle by suppression of all working class organisations; (2) to overcome the economic contradictions by active state intervention, so-called ‘planning’, subsidies, restrictions of production and trade, etc.; (3) to overcome the inner contradictions of the bourgeoisie by the unification of a single governmental party replacing the older political parties and divisions.”
Can there be a clearer description of the actual political and economic position of Pakistan in the present moment? Can this historical analysis be denied looking at the material conditions prevalent in a country of 220 million, that nonetheless has been denied the opportunity for economic development?
What we see is that it is not simply by symbolism or the authoritarian nature of the regime that we find its character, but in its relation to the means of production. Thereby, from what we have deduced before, in the case of Pakistan it is the relation of the state and political class to the means of production that defines the fascist nature of social inequality and the extraction of labour value.
It is here that we see that it is not particular parties, groupings or individuals who are fascist, but the character of the state itself and by extension those who participate in its perpetuation. Whether this is through adherence to an ostensibly liberal Constitution that is nonetheless dependant on militaristic force or the direct implementation of militaristic force is utterly irrelevant. What is salient is that shifts in power between fascist regimes do not negate the character of these regimes as fascist.
What are the symptoms of this decay? We have them before us: extraction of commodity labour value by every legal and illegal mechanism, a breakdown in social order, the extreme centralisation of political power, subversion of the existing social contract by way of class collusion, the complete inability and inefficiency of the state and its concomitants to impart the basic necessities of life, violent confrontation between the newly created class and the old parasitism, the growth of the rentier and rentier-state, restriction of production where it does not serve the fascist accumulation of wealth, increased resistance to technical development except in the military sphere, widespread ideological hostility to inventiveness beginning to find expression in governmental, scientific, business and economic circles, development of anti-scientific and anti-cultural campaigns, cutting down of education – also a form of destruction of the productive forces – chronic large-scale mass unemployment of a type previously unknown – again a deterioration and destruction of the productive forces – and devotion of an increasing proportion of the productive forces to non-productive purposes.
Here the inefficiencies and petty corruptions of the parasitic elements of this structure are revealed not as the root but as a symptom of the disease of capitalist extraction and decay. The point is clear that it is not the element of elite capture of the economic wealth of the country that is the cause of the problem (this is a liberal fantasy), but that the very nature of capitalist production in this mode is criminal in essence.
Where then do we find ourselves? It is at the tipping point between the decaying fascist order and the creation of a new order, in which class consciousness has been submerged and made subject to the illusions of economic liberalism and reform. It is within the changing and shaping productive forces that fascism is strangling then that we must look to answer the question proposed at the beginning of this essay: and what are they? Primarily, we have to note the developments in capitalism and in the productive forces to answer this question.
We must first recognise here that Pakistan is not and has never been an industrialised economy, in the sense that we understand industrial production to be mass manufacturing in the traditional sense. It has lagged behind in the creation of mechanical additions to the value chain and relied on debt to sustain the shortfall between value produced and value extracted. The extraction of value has always been predicated on the tyrannical association of the capitalists with the state and the bureaucratic and military elite who are in themselves the owners of capital. That is to say in Pakistan there is no distinction to be made between the capitalists and the state, and this defines the fascist nature of the state.
However, the fact that Pakistan has never been industrialised does not mean there is no industry. In fact there exist vast quantities of production by artisans, merchants, artists and small business owners who do not precisely rise to the level of the petit bourgeoisie and whose development to this level has been utterly stifled. This is the historical mode of production in Pakistan, which has for centuries distinguished the objects of productivity in this region. Geography also plays its role and trade has been long accepted as a mechanism for creating – as an action in itself – part of the value inherent in the commodity. However, we do not mean by this trade in the markets, rather, trade as a mechanism for negotiation in acquiring the necessary inputs for the productive process.
This is important as here we are diverging from the European Marxist tradition and finding that identifiable mode of production that constitutes the productive working class in Pakistan. In Marx’s view, the class of artisans and small business effectively remained a free-rider on the actions of the formally industrialised proletarian working class, but the revolutionary potential of this class of workers was not immediately apprehended in the context of European modes of production, having moved as they did without colonial imperialism into mass production. Reassessing this potential in the context of a parallel but divergent model of economic development results in the following observations:
First, participation in and dependence on a global market system has meant the departure of manufacturing processes, eviscerating industrial workers and making mass manufacture inefficient and unprofitable, but simultaneously leading to the rise of a petit bourgeoisie predicated on the development now of the digital economy (i.e. free from traditional methods of value extraction), a development that leads to constant tension between the productive forces of the new class and attempts by the capitalists to subsume the labour value inherent in this class into the decaying economic order. The result of digitisation and the loss of manufacturing has been a return, in effect, to traditional, accepted, understood and widely respected forms of production outside of the industrial mechanical, and to distinguish the object of production precisely by its labour value. As always, the mechanisms created to shackle and extract value from productivity have in fact become a tool for bypassing the mechanisms of extraction and have in themselves become the agents of change. In other words, the inability of the capitalist monopolisers to maintain their monopoly by force has become a reality in the face of the very mechanisms they deployed to try and sustain that hegemony.
Second, there is the collaboration between wage labour and the petit bourgeoisie against the decaying order, not as a function of the development of class consciousness but rather the opposite, i.e. the negative results of decay have become so advanced that all productive forces have stagnated and therefore class consciousness is subsumed into the Manichean distinctions of the parasite and the producer. This manifests precisely in the use of the liberal order to break the shackles of the decaying capitalist order that has used liberalism to oppress rather than liberate (since it is impossible for liberalism to do this in a meaningful sense). If we examine this prospect in the context of current political events, we can see that the resultant popularity of one party that has at times been part of the fascist economy and at times opposed to it is not predicated on sound policy, social uplift, or indeed the personality of its leadership. It is that this party has in a rudimentary manner – and without meaning to – tapped into the class antagonism of the petit bourgeoisie and its corollary labour, the former identified in the language of political economy as the urban middle class.
Third, and perhaps most important, is the unveiling of the capitalist class as agents of global capitalism and not as members of society. As noted in Marx’s Economic Manuscripts, “As the conscious representative of this movement, the possessor of money becomes a capitalist. His person, or rather his pocket, is the point from which the money starts and to which it returns…and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will.”
Apply these considerations to the developing historical moment of the last decade within Pakistan and it becomes clear that the rise of a petit bourgeois consciousness that seeks to overturn the extractive methods of the fascist capitalists in fact produces and accelerates the resultant decline of the social, economic and political order. It is not therefore the result of change, but the agent of change. This proposition finds itself in direct accordance with the development of the process of working class consciousness.
If the movement from the fascist capitalism of decay into the petit bourgeois capitalism of regeneration is any indicator, then from this point it should not be difficult for us to determine who is in fact the revolutionary working class and who isn’t: clearly it is the value adders to the products of petit bourgeois economic production, that is to say the class of labour whose labour value generates the commodity value inherent to the specific productive process at it exists and whose benefit the fascist class seeks to extract through rents applied to their own unproductive mass manufacturing processes. It is in fact those classes of labour that in Pakistan exist as a mass of manufacturers rather than as part of mass manufacturing. Therefore it is in the taxation of real industry and the reapplication of the receipts of this extraction to the unproductive processes of capitalist mass manufacturing that we see the derived value of labour being siphoned off into the pockets of the fascists. The value of commoditised labour to the fascist class is therefore not found in their engagement in the productive process as with capitalist production, but only in their subjection to the predation of the fascist state on all processes of production to sustain its own inefficiency.
This fact finds recognition in Marx’s statement: “The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things.” It is in expanding on this statement that we find the final proof of our discourse, i.e. the manner in which the worker is estranged from the products of his labour identifies that worker as part of the productive working class. We should recognise that the view of work not only as a productive process but as a social and creative process, a method by which humans maximise their talent and creativity without exploitation is fundamental to an understanding of productive and alienated labour. In the specific case of Pakistan, we should recognise that this understanding of work is fundamental to the cohesion of social and productive forces.
As Marx noted: “For labour, life activity, productive life itself, appears to man in the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need – the need to maintain physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life…and free, conscious activity is man’s species-character…Estranged labour reverses the relationship, so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence.” It is in the distance between the joy of productive and creative labour in the absolute sense and the violent disenfranchisement from the products of that labour that we can find the value of labour and thereby the identity of the revolutionary working class and their necessity to the decaying fascist order.
What then does this mean for the future of socialist activism in Pakistan? Pakistani socialism’s defining feature it appears is in fact its lack of definition. The elevation of class consciousness cannot by its very nature be applied to the unproductive labour participating in the retrograde unprofitable manufacturing process of fascist capitalism. It can, by its very definition, only be found in the productive labour of the working class, and thereby turn them into the revolutionary working class. This cannot happen without the extant application and continued engagement of will, the attempt to create the necessary awareness of their class position among the working class, their relation to the productive process, and their revolutionary content. But it requires – first and foremost – recognition of them as the progenitors of class consciousness. It requires engagement of their class faculties; it requires validation of their part in the productive process. It requires, first and foremost, for Pakistani socialism to adapt theoretical constructs to the prevailing economic conditions contingent on current modes of production and break itself free from the analytical limitations of European Marxism, recognising that to do otherwise would be ahistorical. As Lenin noted: “Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old institution, however barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes.” Only by recognising this can the remnants of socialism in Pakistan be rescued from being submerged into idealistic bourgeois posturing and mass populism masquerading as reformist politics.