IT started off as a whisper, but the campaign of Bernie Sanders to become the nominee of the Democratic Party for US president well and truly took off this week with his defeat of Hilary Clinton in the New Hampshire primaries. That Sanders is challenging the Washington establishment is one thing; that he is doing it while explicitly calling himself a socialist is quite another.
Young people, especially on college and university campuses, are flocking to Sanders’ campaign in heaps and droves. Remember that socialism — let alone communism — has been a taboo in American society for most of the country’s existence. The new generation’s proclivity to leftist ideas and politics indicates that the world has indeed changed.
It is a marker of just how much things have changed that today’s socialists — which include Corbyn in the UK, Syriza and Podemos in southern Europe, and the many representatives of the so-called pink tide in Latin America — are themselves trying to come to terms with a world that looks very different to that which existed in the left’s heyday of the 1960s and 1970s.
PML-N’s disdain for basic rights shows in its tactics against unions.
Perhaps most significantly, the industrial working class is no longer the behemoth that threatened to topple ruling classes in the 20th century. Class structures in what are commonly known as the ‘advanced’ countries have been transformed by de-industrialisation and the outsourcing of production to low-wage regions like east and south Asia.
This did not happen by chance, of course. It was to contain the political left that the establishment in North America and Western Europe mounted an all-out assault on organised labour from the middle of the 1970s. Margaret Thatcher’s crowning glory as prime minister of Britain was her crushing of the famous coal miners’ strike in 1984-5. By the latter half of that decade, the proletarian power that Marx had envisaged would bring the capitalist order to its knees had suffered a decisive defeat.
While the explicit union-busting tactics of conservative governments were a major factor in the decline of working-class politics, arguably as important was the mobilisation of public opinion against trade unions and left-wing parties. The latter were decried as self-serving, unconcerned with economic development and generally anathema to the public interest. Meanwhile, the individual and market were eulogised as the harbingers of peace and prosperity.
The emergence of Sanders and others like him is significant precisely because the one-way ideological traffic of the past three decades is being challenged. While trade unions might not exercise the influence that they once did, class inequality and the need to protect the environment are being brought into the political mainstream while big business and state militarism are being relegated from the status of sacred cow. This is no small feat.
Of course, we in Pakistan should not get ahead of ourselves. I have written previously about the complete lack of debate in this country about economic and social policy, and particularly our penchant for ‘foreign investment’, no strings attached. Then came the strike of PIA employees, the reactions to which confirmed just how long a road we still have to traverse before progressives can come to play a significant role in the political mainstream.
I need not dwell too much on the democratic posture — or lack thereof — of the ruling party. Its contempt for basic rights including association and assembly was amply demonstrated by its levying of the Essential Services Act, its decision to fire on striking PIA workers and various other union-busting tactics over the course of the eight-day closure of the airline. Not to be outdone, the PTI has also announced the imposition of the ESA in KP hospitals, confirming that dictatorial attitudes are not a monopoly of the PML-N.
Yet what is arguably even more telling than our mainstream parties’ stance vis-à-vis the working class is how our intelligentsia and educated middle-class in urban areas responded to the strike. Most raised a hue and cry about the ‘inconvenience’ caused by the striking workers to the general public (how many members of the general public travel by air is itself a question worth asking). At a broader level the chattering classes dismiss the public sector as a lost cause, and therefore think that anyone protesting privatisation is wasting time and resources.
These attitudes are not surprising, but they indicate just the myopia of our enlightened middle classes. Khurram Husain’s column yesterday confirmed how misleading most of the propaganda against PIA and its workers is. But who wants to engage in substantive debate when our minds are already made up?
As for the wider working masses — they at least can sympathise with the PIA workers’ fears for their jobs, even if working-class solidarity is still largely conspicuous by its absence. The strike was eventually called off after eight heroic days — eight days that brought us a little bit closer towards our own Bernie Sanders moment.
The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
Published in Dawn, February 12th, 2016