Pakistan: Searching for an alternative

The mayhem and human slaughter that has been prevalent in Karachi for more than three decades intensifies periodically. Another such wave of this dreadful violence has been unleashed in the recent weeks. However, this gruesome spate of killings and devastation is not the cause but a symptom of the severely diseased social and economic system, the harrowing crisis of which is now nudging society into the throes of barbarism.

Those at the helm of the political pyramid of this system and in the echelons of power seem to be clueless about how to put an end to this violence and forge a lasting peace. Or perhaps the political and the state structures are themselves embroiled in this mayhem and the conflicts that are exploding are a clash between different sections of finance capital representing their vested interests in the different belligerent factions of the political and state institutions.

As the price hikes, poverty, misery, destitution, deprivation and disease continue to pillage society, the ruling elites, indifferent and callous to the plight of the masses, indulge in even more haggling and farcical absurdities that mock the gruesome realities of life in Pakistan. One thing they never forgo is their insatiable lust for plundering of the state and society. The nauseating political wrangling, trading affiliations, prostituting principles and the ideological betrayals and treachery, and the sinister politics of reconciliation have thrown the masses into an even greater morass of despair and indignation.

The conflicts within the state are further aggravating the terror and trauma in society. The relationship of mutual deception between US imperialism and the military high command has entered a crucial phase of antagonism. The military chain of command set up by the British Raj has been eroded and is in an appalling condition. The political and the state structures built by the imperialists to impose the rule of capitalist exploitation and plunder is teetering on the brink. Society is stagnant yet it has become more volatile and turbulent than ever before. This situation cannot last for long.

The masses in their sufferings and desperate conditions of life may be politically dormant and have not yet embarked onto the path of a mass movement, but they are yearning for change. Life and even human existence have become intolerable. The political alternatives that are available, although with many names and parties, are in reality all the same, single economic programme, i.e. capitalism. Their differences are superfluous and their alliances and their conflicts are hypocritical and deceptive. Hence, the changing of loyalties and betrayals for material gains has become the hallmark of today’s politics. When ideology takes a back seat then crime, corruption and vigilantism comes to the fore and its cancerous outgrowths tear apart the social fabric of the country.

It is a stark reality that the political parties that dominate Pakistan today are the instruments of coercion and vandalism of the drug mafias, land and property grabbers and those involved in heinous crimes. The Pakistani ruling classes have to indulge in crime and corruption, extortion and theft, evade taxes, steal electricity, gas and other infrastructural facilities, viciously attack and exploit the workers and the peasants and regularly get their massive loans written off to maintain their economic and political status. And state power covers up and sustains this Mafia capitalism and the plunder that is the basis of existence of their class. This compradore bourgeoisie is subservient to the imperialists as they have failed to build a modern bourgeois state that they had envisaged at the time of partition. Therefore their pretence of any national sovereignty is a farce designed to deceive the oppressed masses.

The theory of reconciliation that was devised in connivance with imperialism was to amicably divide up the loot and plunder between the different warring sections of the ruling classes who had bought their way up through the structures of the so called political parties. This pathetic reconciliation has aggravated the conflicts between these factions even more. Although most political parties in this capitalist superstructure have held state power in one way or another, the dearth of economic resources and their lust for more has blown these coalitions apart. The Americans want the most corrupt at the top as they are more pliant and subservient.

In the last period, however, this political gimmickry has been exposed and the masses are in a state of political disillusionment. For three generations they had espoused and relished the PPP as their political tradition. The intrusion of capitalists and landlords into the leadership has dashed those hopes and aspirations. In spite of all this, he masses will probably rally once again towards their political tradition in the next wave of struggle, but it will be one that transforms the PPP and the incumbent leadership which in any case does not have any real allegiance to the party and would thus be sidelined. It also cannot be ruled out, however, that the PPP might collapse as a tradition before the next mass upsurge. It will depend on the intensity of events and the course the objective situation takes. The right wing is weak and has a narrow if any real social base. The religious fundamentalists have been fatally exposed. The MQM originated from a narrow ethnic base. Its rise was a serious setback for the class unity of the workers and the oppressed masses, especially in Karachi. Its long stints in power with all sorts of parties and regimes has severely eroded its base even amongst the ‘mohajirs’. Its endeavours’ to become a national force are already fizzling out.

Certain sections of the ruling classes are working to build up Imran Khan as a “new” political alternative. But what alternative economic model does he present? None. His appeasement of  Western Democracy with a tint of national chauvinism is too absurd a policy to pull out the masses from this horrifying condition that capitalism has plunged them into. The masses have experienced the fruits of the independence of the judiciary. Justice has become exorbitantly more expensive after such “independence”.

Political alternatives that transform societies and change the course of history are not highlighted by different sections of the state and the elites, nor does the bourgeois media ever present them as a political force. It is not easy for a revolutionary organization to become a mass force within a reactionary milieu. It is the turning of the tide, the change in the objective situation, when the masses shed their prejudices and chains and enter the arena, that a revolutionary organization in a dialectical interaction with the objective situation can become that instrument that is necessary for the class struggle to transform society.