Asfandyar Shinwari
‘Never has a pretender’, wrote Marx about popularity chasing Napoleon Bonaparte, ‘speculated more stupidly on the stupidity of masses.’ Little did he know that this pretender was not the last, and a separate category of his likes would keep aflame the torch of Bonapartism. Imran Khan, essentially the concentrated image of the PTI, belongs to the same peculiar coterie of ‘superhumans’ who come to the reins of power usually riding on the backs of the middle class. His particularity in the Trumpist era of populism, however, was his close relations with the men in uniform which makes him more of a Bonapartist than an ordinary populist figure.
Trotsky defined Bonapartism as an instrument of ‘order’ facilitated by a bureaucratic military-police alliance that has risen above the interests of struggling classes. The ‘stupidity’, identified by Marx, continues to dominate the political milieu of Pakistan even after the dominant sections of the establishment divorced the PTI, and tortured, incarcerated, and humiliated its members.
At the present conjuncture, the phenomenon of Imran Khan has further disturbed the socio-political equilibrium of Pakistan. With the tables of power turning after the saber abandoned the PTI, all the contradictions have come fiercer to the fore. The PML(N), feigning all anti-establishment formerly, is now pandering to the establishment again; the PTI, except for a few of its members, has now assumed the same role of pretender of being anti-establishment.
The self-styled constitutional, constitutionalist, and moralist judges of the country have betrayed their charters and shallow promises made in the name of democracy and civilian rule. The digital spaces, formerly filled with hymns sung in honour of the military, are now bombarded with tirades against them by the common PTI workers. Geo has become the ARY and the ARY Geo. The bourgeoisie wrongly assumes that the PTI is the main culprit in bringing the country to bankruptcy; the masses mistakenly consider the PTI a force of resistance and redemption.
The erstwhile staunch political defenders of the center are currently playing allies of the periphery; the opportunist peripheral leadership has sided with the forces protecting centralism. In short, what is happening is startling and extremely confusing. But as Marx reminds us in The Eighteenth Brumiere of Louise Bonaparte what seems like clashes between representative individuals and institutions are essentially the expressions of the struggle between different classes.
Already written about it by many analysts, the PTI is a middle-class dream party. This class, not to mention the working class, has been left financially maimed by the recent economic crisis of the country. These professionals, shopkeepers, small traders and peasants, entrepreneurs, state officials, real estate dealers, etc., because of their specific relation to production, bear a tendency to search for a solution to their political problems in the personality of a superhuman who could represent them because active politics has not been their vacation in Pakistan historically.
Although a large section of it has been politicized recenly, they are still short of providing any viable political program and are limited mainly to sloganeering and campaigning in the name of good governance. The working class lent support to the PTI only as a reaction against the existing order. The crux is this: because of the growing accumulation, exploitation, and pelf, the discontent in society has risen to new heights; and, because of the absence of an organic working-class movement and its representative Left due to the discontent has not been channelized into a real political struggle that can guarantee its end. Therefore, it would be right to think that the PTI has been very successful in mobilizing the hate that people of this godforsaken country have for the bourgeois affair of things.
t is the bourgeoisie, and civilian, and landed classes of Pakistan that in alliance with imperialism safeguard the rule of capital in the country. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) reported $17.4 bn granted to these classes in 2019 only, which amounts to roughly 6% of the economy of Pakistan. These classes influence the policies of the government because of their direct representation in parliament, either in the form of bourgeois parties like the PML(N), PML(Q), and PPP or ‘electable’, and also through the postcolonial state structure which bears no qualms about its allegiance to the rich.
The militarized capital also protects its profits in this game of interests, and thus cannot remain an apolitical and a subservient state institution. It is the fear of the bourgeoisie and landed classes that wrongly blames the PTI for bringing the country to the brink of default. The truth is that the bourgeois parties have lost all political credibility and Imran Khan is trying hard to make this class believe that only he is the relevant person to be entrusted with the task of representation of capital.
February 8 was a farcical expression of the class struggle in Pakistan. The people of Pakistan resisted the capitalist establishment. That they thought polling stations are fight arenas, and the PTI is anti-establishment is a different matter.
More importantly, the election was a manifestation of rejection of exploitation, oppression, totalitarianism, and injustice albeit in a very strange and contradictory way. Without obsessing over elections and paying only necessary attention to them in postcolonial Pakistan, political workers know that oppressed classes and nationalities mostly wage battles on the streets and, sometimes, mountains.
But it cannot also be ignored that the election has also set a new convention of defiance that will mark the future of politics in the country in formal politics as well. Now, it is the PTI that has become the biggest and the only relevant symbol of resistance in that sphere of politics however unjustified one may call it. The small parties of the likes of the ANP, not to mention the JI, both almost wiped out now, have received the message of the new game very well. The political situation in Pakistan can best be recapitulated in Gramsci’s words: ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
The writer is PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh, UK.
