April 18, 2004

Only industrial bourgeoisie can save us from sinking out of view. The computer, so a la mode these days, can help, but it cannot be a substitute for the creation of useful material goods. While machines increase labour productivity, they cannot replace

The “basic democracy” system was the army’s alliance with the bourgeoisie while the “Nazim” system represents the army-wadera alliance. The first alliance oversaw our primary industrialization, the textile mill stage. It even aspired to the second stage, that of the heavy industry. However, the absence of effective land reforms created blockage of the expansion of the internal market, without which further industrialization was not possible. Pakistan People’s Party not only prevented real land reforms but, by destroying our weak industrial bourgeoisie, eliminated all prospects of industrialisation and, therefore, of development.

The officer corps is not a class. It has some features of a stratum. But only a part of it stands in a direct relationship to the means of production, mainly land. More ownership of land does not make the owner feudal. It depends upon his relationship to the peasants on the land. Most of the former officer landowners operate their farms on capitalist lines with hired labour, which places them among the bourgeoisie. However, the industrial bourgeoisie, with whom they could ally themselves, together with other capitalist farmers, is wobbly, as it never recovered from the mauling it received from Z.A. Bhutto. Therefore, the only properly constituted class in Pakistan, which can claim power, is the feudal one, supported by the rich peasants and a section of the lower civil bureaucracy, issuing mainly from the latter stratum.

The officer crops or the military bureaucracy desires to hold state power. But it cannot do so on its own, as it is neither a class nor a stratum. It can exercise it only as an autocracy, i.e ruling in the interest of the ruling class but controlling the instruments of power and, consequently, assuming privileges within the state apparatus. The ruling class can only be the feudal one. Hence, the army-wadera alliance.

Under the alliance, the army holds the power but shares the government with the waderas. The latter have also been handed the countryside. The district collector, who represented the bourgeois values and exercised some check on their arbitrariness, has been rendered powerless.

The financial experts imported from abroad (the army administrations, for some reason, always get “experts” from outside to manage our finances) are, more or less, autonomous. Their job is to ensure that we do not default on the servicing of our foreign debt. If the concomitant lowering of our import tariffs leads to a steady de-industrialization of the country, it cannot, one supposes, be laid at their door.

Even more, we are to specialize in certain industries. There is nothing wrong with specialization in theory. The question is: what point of technology does one specialize in? It was specialization that carried Asia and Africa to backwardness and pauperism. India was the most industrialized country of the world in the 18th century. It was de-industrialized after Plassey and made to specialize in raw cotton, while England took to textile industry. The more complex labour, of course, carried more value. Similarly, England gave up making wine, developing its textiles. Portugal went the other way and ended up as the most backward country of Europe. The African countries, which are today the most impoverished, almost moribund, are the ones which had specialized the most. Of course, they did not choose specialization. It was thrust upon them by Europe, which not only chose the most advanced production techniques for itself, but had self-centred growth. Production at a high level of technology gives one a higher value in exchange as it is complex labour. But development comes from integrated growth centred on the home market. France produces wine, mirages and silk sarees.

The backward countries, on the other hand, are linked to the world market sector-wise. Mangoes are denied to the children of our poor only to be exported.

The money thus earned is used to buy silk neck-ties from Italy and French goods. The hunger, the blood of the poor man’s child is still converted into silk ties and Dior perfume through the mediation of the world market.

We need only one kind of specialization, that of integrating the various sectors of the economy through the home market and entering the world market with the surplus only. Secondly, the specialization aimed at should be at as high a level of technology as possible, with constant effort to go up. But underneath, the backward linkages should go down to the ground, as far as possible.

We sing of globalization but out of tune. It is not meant to industrialize the Third World, only to intensify its exploitation and widen the scissors by removing all barriers to the movement of monopoly capital at will, so it reproduces itself over the entire globe. It snaps the last links that had still lingered between this import of capital and “development”. This capital reproduces itself not by creating the conditions of production, but by using up the existing conditions and moving on. Even where it may create the conditions of production, they suit the needs of the globalized capital and are rarely of any use to the host economy. In fact, they mostly have no local linkages.

We talk of the “global village” as if in one go, all barriers have collapsed, all discrimination ended. The concept combines two images. One is that of everyone being within every other persons’s ear-shot, because of the facility of instant communication. The other is that of all humanity merging into one big family. But behind the two images is the unspoken premise that not only are all inter-dependent now but, in fact, equal. Lords have ceased to be lords and serfs have ceased to be serfs. As usual, this premise has been grasped at more readily by the serfs than by the lords. But in which actual village have the lords and the serfs ever become equal? Whatever the new image is, their real relationship has not changed.

Autarky has been turned into a bad word by the countries which have protected their industry ferociously when they were laying the basis of world supremacy. Indian built ocean-going vessels were not permitted in British harbours. No one could be buried in Henry VIII’s England unless it was certified that he was wearing an English-made shirt. The US has never been apologetic about its high protectionism. We were all the time practising “free trade”. Today, we are preached free trade, nay it is imposed on us by the IMF-WB-WTO combine. But entry into advanced countries of industrial goods in which we have an advantage is restricted.

Let us not be carried away by slogans, as Mao used to say. There is nothing inherently virtuous about either protectionism or free trade. It depends on one’s needs. But the fact is that no country can develop without industrialization. And industrialization is not possible without protection for a long period after its inception. Only those dominating the world market can think of modifying it, and that too selectively.

There is nothing embarrassing about wanting to develop, about wanting to remove the poverty of the Pakistani people. However, this can be done only by a class in whose own interest it is to develop, to industrialize the economy. The feudal class is not that class. Since it overthrew the industrial bourgeoisie in 1973, Pakistan has not ceased to regress. Today, we are burdened by foreign debt, the industry is being closed down, the state itself has undertaken the export of manpower, education is so retarded that we have to import teachers as was done before the First World War, unemployment and pauperism are up and driving youth to suicide. Foreign exchange also accumulates as the grip of the IMF on us hardens.

Only industrial bourgeoisie can save us from sinking out of view. The computer, so a la mode these days, can help. But it cannot be a substitute for the creation of useful material goods, the only wealth. Only human labour, whether applied to the industry or to agriculture, can create goods. Machines increase labour productivity, but cannot replace it. The industrial bourgeois class has to acquire power and carry us forward. And genuine land reforms are the starting point for the process, as was the case with Japan, China, the Koreas, etc. But, in its present situation, the industrial bourgeoisie cannot acquire state power. It is the task of the army leadership to carry out land reforms by decree, ally itself with industrial bourgeoisie and aid it with the creation of a self-centred economy. The army will not have to intervene in day-to-day politics, as these acts would give it the kind of legitimacy it craves under the slogan of “Turkish solution”.

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