The Struggle for Hegemony in Pakistan

Fear, Desire and Revolutionary Horizons

Aasim Sajjad Akhtar

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9780745346687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Economics

The collapse of neoliberal hegemony in the western world following the financial crash of 2007-8 and subsequent rise of right-wing authoritarian personalities has been described as a crisis of 'the political' in western societies. But the crisis must be seen as global, rather than focusing on the west alone.

Pakistan is experiencing rapid financialisation and rapacious capture of natural resources, overseen by the country's military establishment and state bureaucracy. Under their watch, trading and manufacturing interests, property developers and a plethora of mafias have monopolised the provision of basic needs like housing, water and food, whilst also feeding conspicuous consumption by a captive middle-class.

Aasim Sajjad-Akhtar explores neoliberal Pakistan, looking at digital technology in enhancing mass surveillance, commodification and atomisation, as well as resistance to the state and capital. Presenting a new interpretation of our global political-economic moment, he argues for an emancipatory political horizon embodied by the 'classless' subject.

1

The Integral State

[T]he State is the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the consent of those over whom it rules.

Antonio Gramsci, SPN 244, Q15, §10

Contra to mainstream historiography, what became the modern bourgeois state in the western heartlands of the capitalist world-system was decidedly undemocratic. Early modern state-making often resembled ‘organised crime’, militarised polities undergoing a gradual and conflict-ridden process of civilianisation.¹ The advent of ‘democracy’, then, owed itself as much to struggles against the bourgeoisie as it did to the latter’s wilful leadership.

It was to make sense of the contradictory dynamics and repercussions of the relatively novel phenomenon of mass representation in early 20th-century western Europe that Gramsci developed his complex conceptual apparatus, including egemonia (hegemony) and the Integral State.² In developing a theoretical language for the workings of organised power under the structural dictates of capital in the interwar years, Gramsci postulated that formal boundaries between ‘political society’ or ‘state’, on the one hand, and ‘civil society’, on the other hand, be conceptualised in dialectical, or boundary-traversing, ways.³ Gramsci’s multi-pronged theoretical arsenal was not devised to make sense of state formation and socio-political forms in Europe’s colonies. Still, his dialectical method, dialogical prose and attention to lived realities of uneven development and attendant political-cultural forms lend his theoretical concepts to fertile interrogation of the (post)colonial social formation.⁴ In this book, I deploy Gramscian concepts like hegemony and Integral State ‘as determinate abstraction[s] that remain linked to concrete historical referents’.⁵

Deciphering ‘the political’ in Pakistan – and, relatedly, transcending reductive lenses which dominate the mainstream – certainly calls for innovative methodological approaches. To innovate with Gramsci means devoting attention to the banal as much as the spectacular, and to foreground that working people – the most exploited toiling classes as well as those whom I have characterised as driven by middle-class aspiration – inhabit dynamic life worlds. The Gramscian dialectic conjoins analysis of the structural dictates within which political forms are shaped and subjective notions of self, community, society, state, and agency.

In the chapters to follow, I will attempt to draw out how political subjects conceive of themselves in the current conjuncture and the agentive practices they engage in accordingly, including in the rapidly expanding digital space. But it is necessary first to explicate the macro and meso level structures of power that condition subjectivation. On the one hand, these structures appear stable and, in fact, highly dynamic in their incorporation of ever-greater populations into circuits of capital, as contractors who seek to garner profits, labouring subjects enabling the generation of surplus, and consumers that facilitate the realisation of profit. On the other hand, these structures are undergirded by the violent dispossession of working masses and expropriation of natural environments, betraying their inherent volatility.

I focus on the exploitation of ethnic peripheries with rich deposits of natural resources as well as the rapid financialisation of land in peri-urban areas to elucidate historical processes of uneven development and how new spatial configurations are being produced in the current conjuncture. Whereas colonial capitalism in its classical incarnation treated the land as a primarily agrarian resource requiring forced settlement of nomadic populations, the development of complementary hydraulic resources and networks of transportation, neoliberalisation has increasingly transformed the land into a financial asset through (sub) urbanisation.

Additionally, previously ‘unproductive’ regions – especially geo-strategic imperial ‘frontiers’ subjected to tight territorial control – are now significant sites of accumulation. The ‘commons’ that represented the primary livelihood source of local communities are being rapidly enclosed by the nexus of state and capital. Mineral resources deep within the ground or ensconced in mountainous highlands are extracted, while virgin waters and coastlines are appropriated.⁶

The concept of the Integral State facilitates an interrogation of boundary-traversing logics of coercion and consent that undergird contemporary practices of accumulation, and, crucially, their increasingly globalised character. Global supply chains, financial flows, and technological fixes both embody the universalising pretensions of capital, and simultaneously express its fragility, as was so spectacularly demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

For Gramsci, explaining why working people actively consent to the rules of the game (or defy them) demands an interrogation of histories and geographies of the modern nation-state and wider relations of force.⁷ Hegemony in the contemporary period is conditioned by complex circuits of capital linking global and regional capitals to state functionaries, landed classes, big merchant-traders, manufacturers and a plethora of contractors ‘from below’. Thus new spatial logics are produced within and beyond the nation-state, even as actual political practice at the micro-level is articulated through deeply-rooted patronage ties. Consequently, practices of accumulation reflect and reproduce entrenched classed, racialised and gendered logics of power.

REPRODUCING THE ‘ELITE’

The rupture associated with the global political-economic crisis of 2006–2008 represented the greatest shock to middle-class hegemony in Euro-American societies for a generation. The slogan of the ‘1% vs the 99%’, which was popularised during the Occupy movements, subsequently animated the mass electoral campaigns of Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.

In the Pakistani context, Rosita Armytage posits that the ‘1%’ is both closely integrated with global financial networks and local patronage networks that belie orthodox conceptualisations of capitalism as an impersonal socio-economic order. Her ‘ethnography of the micro-politics of elite lives’ – the ‘elite’ defined as those generating more than US$100 million in revenue annually – reveals a secretive but highly insular set of marital and other social networks that bridge traditional categories of class and state power in Pakistan such as civil–military and centre–periphery.⁸

She writes:

Most of my informants derived the largest proportion of their profits from large-scale industrial projects, many in manufacturing. Others had made their fortunes in developing large-scale infrastructure projects. The enormous profits they have generated have emerged from the opportunities inherent in the classic industrialising society where workers’ salaries and political representation are commensurately low. In achieving their high level of profits, many have focused on providing commodities to the domestic market, or on producing high demand export commodities for which they hold a monopoly or equivalent advantage in the world market.⁹

This otherwise useful and intriguing investigation of the ‘elite’ offers neither specification of the sectors and projects in which these windfall profits are generated, nor elaboration on the exploitative class relations therein. Armytage concurs that capitalist development has brought to the fore newer moneyed classes – what she calls ‘navay raje’ – to compete with an ‘established khandaani elite’, the latter with lineages traceable to the colonial educated classes. She further demonstrates how tensions between these dominant factions do not preclude inter-marriages and consolidation of the 1% on the whole. Yet, she also makes the somewhat contradictory assertion that there have been few entrants ‘from below’ into the ruling coalition over time, suggesting a distinct lack of change within an insular structure of power.

Lyon also presents an argument that accords centrality to kinship ties in the structuring of power relations within society at large. While his empirical focus is rural Punjab, he argues that ‘waves of elites’ from pre-modern times have been sustained via their inheritance (or what he calls descent) and marriage alliances. In modern Pakistan, both entrenched landed elites and more recent ‘industrialist and populist challengers’ both rely on and reinforce kinship-based power relations.¹⁰

More nuanced scholarship about Pakistan’s structure of power emphasises that propertied class lineages have evolved alongside social change, particularly urbanisation, and that these lineages are directly connected to the Pakistani military’s overarching political, economic, and ideological power.¹¹

In contrast to the relatively narrow focus of such work on the structure of power ‘from above’, a Gramscian exploration of the ‘entire complex of practical and theoretical activities’ that undergird the dominant hegemonic order demands engagement with everyday articulations of class, ethnic, gendered, caste and state power beyond a narrow ‘elite’ stratum. This includes investigating practices of often violent accumulation across uneven historical-geographical terrain. Delving into how the state, capital, and other social forces constitute and reproduce the structure of power throws into sharp relief what many scholars proffer to be a ubiquitous logic of kinship ties and unchanging ‘cultural norms’.

THE NEW COLONIALISM¹²

[T]he now indigenous South Asian term ‘mafia’ is commonly used to refer to business enterprises with political protection that seek to monopolise particular trades, sectors and localities through extra-legal and violent means (as in the ‘alcohol mafia’, ‘water mafia’, ‘oil mafia’, ‘coal mafia’ or a variety of ‘land grabbing’ practices by the ‘land mafia’). Such syndicates protect clients and cronies and work both against and in tandem with local politicians, the justice system and the bureaucracy.

Michelutti and Harriss-White¹³

The dialectic of state and capital established under European colonial rule in much of Asia and Africa engendered commodification of land, water and forests alongside a proprietary regime objectified as ‘rule of law’ so that ‘ownership’ of these said resources was arrogated by the state. There were many modalities through which the latter enfranchised itself and propertied class allies while subjugating indigenous populations. But the emphasis was on creating new forms of a social order based on ‘legal’ property, further mediated by gradations of caste, tribe, religion and gender.

To establish order often required the use of brute force. Enshrining the ‘civilised’ practices of commodity production and exchange, the state – and its prized allies – assumed a mandate to engage in ‘primitive’ accumulation, sanctified by various types of legal exceptionalism.¹⁴ The particular – colonial capitalism – was constitutive of the universal: an imperialised political economy spanning the globe.¹⁵

The scientific knowledge and requisite technological prowess mobilised by the British Raj facilitated the creation and sustenance of an agrarian economy in the landed plains of Punjab and northern Sindh through the mobilisation of water resources. Far more securitised logics of control were enforced over ‘frontier’ regions comprising most of contemporary Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The Indus Basin region, which became the developed heartland of western India – and later Pakistan – was transformed through perennial irrigation systems and associated mega-infrastructure, constructed by the British from the late 19th century onwards.¹⁶ This agrarian heartland – upstream Punjab far more so than the lower riparian, Sindh – not only became the breadbasket for all of British India, but crucially also became the major recruiting ground for the British Indian Army. As India’s main repository of agricultural commodity production, the so-called canal colonies of Punjab were also well-integrated into the global imperial economy fashioned under the Raj. Crucially, this developmental regime was accompanied by the cultivation of widespread consent which explains Punjab’s centrality to the hegemonic order in Pakistan.¹⁷

Whereas a delimited logic of capital was wilfully stimulated in colonial Punjab, territorial imperatives informed statecraft in the non-Punjabi peripheries. Pashtun and Baloch pastoral tribes in northwest India were subjected to various iterations of indirect rule. What ideologues of Empire viewed as ‘unruly’ subjects unsuited to the modern, civilised world were disciplined through the stick. Meanwhile, ‘...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction: Middle-class hegemonies in theory and history
• 1 The Integral State
• 2 Fear and desire
• 3 The digital lifeworld
• 4 The classless subject
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index