ECONOMISTS and public policy buffs agree that the budget announcement is amongst the most important responsibilities of government. So, obviously, does the media, as evidenced by the coverage that the finance minister’s speech garners every year. Yet only a cursory look at media reporting of the budget over successive years confirms that it is almost always a case of much ado about nothing.

Contemporary fashion has it that budgets have to be ‘growth-oriented’ and ‘business/investment-friendly’. It is also necessary to note the widening of the tax net, and announce some populist development initiatives along with a 10-15pc increase in salaries (never sufficient to offset inflation) of public-sector employees.

Indeed, aside from the fact that actual figures change every year, everything else is pretty much the same as what came before. To be fair, Finance Minister Dar acknowledged in his speech that ‘policymaking is nothing more than signalling’, although I’m sure this was another attempt to conform to development-speak as mandated by the IFIs, and not an admission of how powerless supposedly democratic governments have become in the era of neoliberalism.

As happens every year, this time too, the media was quick to assert that, sloganeering aside, the budget offers no relief to the poor. What this means is more regressive taxation, further reduction of public welfare provisions, and marginalisation of small growers in agriculture. The fact that neo-liberal dictates intensify every year is by the by; the real question is why there’s such little resistance to them.

Subordinate classes are not organised politically.

The short answer is that the subordinate classes are not organised politically to withstand the neo-liberal onslaught. This is the case here, and in much of the world. But this should not simply be taken to mean that mobilising workers and peasants is a straightforward task and just needs to be undertaken. We must think critically about forms of organisation symbolising anti-capitalist resistance in the past, namely trade unions in the industrial/government sector and peasant associations in rural areas.

These organisational forms fragmented only in part because of repression by the state and big capital. The other side of this decline of organised working class power has to do with the transformation in class and social structures that has taken place over the past few decades.

Workers in formal industry and public sector enterprises and the classical peasantry may still be necessary components of a broad-based movement of the poor, but are no longer sufficient if such a movement is to really put a spanner in the neo-liberal works, ie the most vulnerable categories of workers in the contemporary period are conspicuous by their absence in our analyses, policies and, more crucially, politics.

For instance, where in the budget is there any reflection of the realities of the ‘informal’ sector where the vast majority of Pakistanis live and work? More damningly, the formal trade union movement takes up concerns only of the formal labour force, which is why protests against what is announced in the budget remain limited to issues such as pay increases.

In any case, working-class households that previously survived only on the pay of the male-head who was employed in a factory or government department has itself changed dramatically. The same individual that is formally employed might also run a small shop in the evenings (to which other members of the family also dedicate time) while his wife or daughter earns a wage by working in someone’s home or even in her own home via a subcontractor.

The classical peasant household has undergone a similar transformation. Tenure relations have changed so that long-term links to land — and therefore a propensity to fight for it — have become more short-term and instrumental. Most of the income in the household now comes from a migrant family member who lives in an urban setting (or abroad), whereas non-agricultural sources of income have also become much more significant even in rural areas.

It is thus that the material interests of workers and peasants, in the classical sense, may not be what they were before the era of repetitive budgets and tiring development-speak. This is why we need to think deeply about what the workers of today’s world look like, where they are located, and how best to organise them.

Tailpiece: Protests in the immediate aftermath of the budget indicate how urgent the need to organise variegated segments of the working class is; clerks and teachers agitating for pay raises, and katchi abadi dwellers fighting against eviction, faced police actions as they tried to march towards parliament. But they faced them separately.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, June 6th, 2014