The Struggle for Hegemony in Pakistan

Aasim Sajjad Akhtar

Description

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.

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

Sujets

• Political Advocacy
• Political Process
• Political Ideologies
• Political Science
• Modern
• HISTORY
• Pakistán
• 21st century
• Sociology
• Modern history
• Political economy
• Media studies
• Activism
• Asian
• World
• Pakistan
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Media

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780745346687
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

The Struggle for Hegemony in Pakistan
A major analysis of our world s political crisis and a brilliant critique of the ideology of middle-class aspiration.
-Professor Joel Wainwright, Ohio State University
Shows how an aspirational idea of the middle class reinforces the subordination of dispossessed labour, ethnic minorities in peripheral territories, terrorists and deviant dissenters. This wide-ranging book is sure to stimulate critical scholarship and organic intellectual activism both inside and outside South Asia.
-Barbara Harriss-White, Emeritus Professor and Fellow,
Wolfson College, University of Oxford
Akhtar powerfully channels the spirit of Gramsci and Fanon to critique neoliberal hegemony in Pakistan - and to diagnose the next great battlefield for the Afro-Asian Left: the values, aspirations, and solidarities of the digitised youth across core and periphery.
-Majed Akhter, Senior Lecturer, Department of Geography,
King s College London
Drawing with insight on Gramsci, and located in the Global South, this accomplished book is an important contribution to the search for progressive, anti-colonial, and humanist revolutionary politics in Pakistan and beyond.
-Professor John Chalcraft, London School of Economics and Political Science
What is the political in Pakistan, and how does this help update our theories on democratic backsliding and contemporary authoritarianism? Why do we want to think of the middle class at the centre of it all again? Read this book to find out.
-Shandana Mohmand, Research Fellow, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex
The Struggle for Hegemony in Pakistan
Fear, Desire and Revolutionary Horizons
Aasim Sajjad Akhtar
First published 2022 by Pluto Press
New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright Aasim Sajjad Akhtar 2022
Extracts published from:
Aasim Sajjad Akhtar and Ammar Rashid (2021) Dispossession and the militarised developer state: Financialisation and class power on the agrarian-urban frontier of Islamabad, Pakistan . Third World Quarterly 42 (8) pp. 1866-1884 (reproduced by kind permission of Taylor Francis)
Aasim Sajjad Akhtar (2022) The Checkpost State in Pakistan s War of Terror: Centres, Peripheries, and the Politics of the Universal . Antipode (reproduced by kind permission of John Wiley and Sons)
Aasim Sajjad Akhtar (2021) The War of Terror in Praetorian Pakistan: The Emergence and Struggle of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement . Journal of Contemporary Asia 51 (3) pp. 516-529 (reproduced by kind permission of Taylor Francis)
The right of Aasim Sajjad Akhtar to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 4667 0 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4666 3 Paperback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4670 0 PDF
ISBN 978 0 7453 4668 7 EPUB



This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
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
Preface and acknowledgements
My motivation for writing this book is straightforward. In my previous book, The Politics of Common Sense (Cambridge, 2018), I deployed a Gramscian framework to elucidate how the pro-imperialist military regime of General Zia ul Haq (1977-1988) designed and executed a ruling-class project hegemonised around a cynical politics of patronage. As was the case with all reactionary regimes around the world at the onset of the neoliberal counterrevolution, the Zia dictatorship sought to suppress the substantial revolutionary currents that had threatened propertied classes and the country s powerful military establishment in the preceding conjuncture.
In more than three decades since General Zia ul Haq s demise, the hegemonic order has been largely insulated from anti-systemic popular class mobilisation. Many students, political companions and academic peers who engaged generously with The Politics of Common Sense have at the same time questioned why I did not attend to the imperative of rehabilitating progressive politics and fomenting an alternative hegemonic conception. Put simply: what is to be done?
Even without any coaxing, I have obsessed about this challenge since at least the coup d etat of October 1999 when General Pervez Musharraf became Pakistan s fourth military dictator. I had returned to the country after completing graduate school a year before the coup and became immediately involved with Pakistan s emaciated left. At 22 years young, I was the exception in the ranks, virtually all other comrades hailing from the generation that had lived through the painful defeat of actually existing socialism.
With neoliberal globalisation at its zenith, the old guard was a source of inspiration simply because it resisted the tidal waves of capitalist triumphalism that engulfed Pakistan (and the world at large). Yet, while myself and a handful of other youngsters wanted to immerse ourselves in organic working people s struggles, whatever their shape and form, older comrades revolutionary imaginaries were often out of sync with our novel organising methods.
Over these past 23 years, I have seen much change in organising circles. Like many on the left in much of the world, we in Pakistan too today take solace in having resuscitated the idea that naming and challenging capitalism and its various affiliated political forms at the global, national and local scales is once again on the agenda.
Our progress is most evident in the fact that a new generation of young people has gravitated towards critical ideas and political action. But in a country that boasts a predominantly young population - approximately 150 million of Pakistan s 230 million people are below the age of 30 - we do not yet constitute a critical mass to penetrate the hegemonic mainstream. Young progressives are certainly on the frontlines of movements of resistance - to imperialist war, state repression, class/caste exploitation, dispossession, patriarchal norms and violence, climate change, privatisation of public services, and so much more - but a theory of revolutionary politics that can appeal to the majority of Pakistan s people in the medium and long run remains conspicuous by its absence. In fact, as I argue in this book, most of Pakistan s young people are imbued with a hegemonic middle-class aspiration.
Put differently, the rebuilding/resuscitating of left discourse/politics has not necessarily translated into a viable imaginary sufficient for a hegemonic political project, a Gramscian national-popular collective will, as it were. It is noteworthy that few amongst today s young progressives identify themselves as revolutionaries in the mould of the past, and they are more likely to be active on Facebook and Twitter than physically seeking out and working with the proverbial worker and peasant. Under the backdrop of what I call an increasingly digitalised lifeworld, the meaning and practice of progressive politics is changing even more rapidly than ever.
As such, this book attempts to achieve two separate but interrelated goals. First, I present an empirical and theoretical sketch of actually existing capitalism in Pakistan. What forms do globalised finance capitalism take in a highly uneven social formation that continues to bear the legacies of colonialism? What is the class/demographic structure of Pakistani society? How is contemporary hegemony (re)produced in both banal and spectacular ways, especially in the age of the mass/digital media? How are patriarchy, ethnic-national oppression, caste and other forms of identity inscribed onto the patronage-based structure of power?
Second, I offer some building blocks for a theory of politics that can lead us, tentatively, in the direction of what Jodi Dean has named the communist horizon . How do we foment a hegemonic alternative to what I call the politics of fear and desire? Can we do so without deeply interrogating objective changes in the field of politics, and particularly to the digitalisation of this field? How can the burgeoning contradictions of contemporary capitalism - including but not limited to imperialist wars, ecological breakdown and the creation of a mass reserve army of labour/surplus populations - become the basis of an emancipatory collective subject rather than a dramatic race to the bottom based on hate of the proverbial other ?
I do not offer answers to all of these questions, only points of departure. In what I understand to be a long(ish) war of position, deeply interrogating the relations of force and attendant problematics of political subjectivity and consciousness that will shape left politics in times to come is, I believe, of primary importance. While I focus on Pakistan, the book offers insights relevant to the postcolonial regions of South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa more generally.
Ultimately, of course, what our future holds will be determined in the course of struggle. My own struggle has gone through many phases since I started out in the late 1990s. Whatever the ebbs and flows, however, the terrain of active politics has thrown up lifelong relationships. In a society as brutalised as Pakistan s, to continue immersing oneself in popular struggles while sustaining one s own humanity is a task unto itself. The task of transforming society, as Gramsci and many more revolutionaries have always reminded u