15 results in The Politics of Common Sense
Frontmatter
- Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad
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- The Politics of Common Sense
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6 - The Subordinate Classes: Beyond Common Sense?
- Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad
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- The Politics of Common Sense
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- 30 October 2017, pp 132-160
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Summary
I have attempted in this book to demonstrate how the radical political imaginary that thrived in Pakistan through the late 1970s has been virtually banished from the popular consciousness – the ‘common sense’ of the lower orders of society has shifted away from transformative and towards more accommodative political strategies. This shift has been coeval with dramatic social and economic changes associated largely with the spread of capital and urbanization, and despite the increasingly fragmented practices of state functionaries. All told the twin realities of exclusion and exploitation for the subordinate classes at large, inclusive women, oppressed nations and religious minorities are as pronounced as ever.
As discussed in the introduction, a substantial body of scholarship dealing with different aspects of subordinate class culture, consciousness and politics has been generated over the past few decades. Over time the focus of scholarly efforts to understand subalternity have moved away from the question of whether and to what extent the working class – or any other class – acts as a class-for-itself to much more localized interrogations of events and daily practices.
[Scholars have] shifted the attention of historians away from i ntellectual history to ethnography. Now ethnographic studies are no longer c oncerned with uncovering the implicit conceptual structures that supposedly underlie the practical activities of people who do not produce large bodies of texts of their own, but rather seek to understand embodied practices as activities that people carry out for their own sake.
In this book I have taken what might be considered a somewhat ‘traditionalist’ look at class, even while I have tried to understand the complex micro-foundations of the prevailing structure of power in Pakistan. One of my primary arguments is that even propertied classes in Pakistan tend to map their fundamental interests in terms of access to state power and resources which may not correspond to the understanding of class interests in a traditional materialist schema.
The subordinate classes too have become enmeshed in a system that privileges the building and maintenance of patronage networks often linked to state functionaries. However, the politics of common sense cannot be considered a simple continuity of historical modes of political engagement in the wider social formation that persisted through the British period, and into the post-colonial epoch.
1 - Introduction
- Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad
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Summary
Introduction
There is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded: homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens. Each man carries on some form of intellectual activity, that is, he is a philosopher, an artist, a man of taste, he participates in a particular conception of the world, has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it, that is, to bring into being new modes of thought.
Antonio Gramsci (1971: 9)Pakistan is one of the most written about, yet least understood countries in the world. It is often reduced to a series of categories that obfuscate more than they illuminate. Both in journalistic and scholarly accounts, the imperative of comprehending complex political, economic and cultural dynamics is thwarted by the predominance of monolithic narrative tropes such as ‘Islamic’ and ‘terrorism’.
The events of 9/11 and subsequent developments explain much of the security-oriented literature that has proliferated in recent years. This recent trend aside, most scholarly works on Pakistan's state and society have never strayed very far from descriptive macro-level accounts which detail, in chronological fashion, the continuities and changes associated with different political regimes.
These mainstream accounts are premised, overtly or otherwise, on static readings of state and society; the former often depicted as an island of modernity struggling to impose itself on a society whose cultural moorings are incompatible with the imperatives of socio-economic change and progressive politics.
In fact, the relationship between state and society is far more complex than most academic treatments of Pakistan have generally acknowledged. Only by constructing a thoroughly historicized narrative in which the interplay between myriad economic, political and cultural moments is clearly enunciated can one make sense of the contemporary social order in Pakistan.
In contravention to both ‘security studies’ and mainstream political histories, a grounded brand of scholarship has emerged in recent years featuring both substantial empirical insights about state and society and novel theoretical approaches. This book is a modest attempt to add to this growing archive. In it, I chart how a particular conception of navigating the everyday – what I call the politics of common sense – has become hegemonic across the length and breadth of Pakistan's society over the past three decades.
3 - Accumulation in Practice
- Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad
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- The Politics of Common Sense
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- 30 October 2017, pp 62-93
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Summary
The deepening of capitalism and rise to prominence of the ‘middle’ classes in post-colonial societies over the past few decades has now well and truly become one of the most important thematic concerns of scholars across disciplinary and geographical boundaries. And rightfully so – for too long class analyses of both western and non-western societies have focused on the ‘polar’ classes with all that has come in the ‘middle’ either relegated to the ranks of ‘petty bourgeoisie’ or, in more recent times, banished to the realm of the ‘informal’.
The centrality of the intermediate strata in the Pakistani story of capitalist modernity is, however, still to be adequately understood, both conceptually and in empirical terms. An inordinately large segment of the intelligentsia as well as arm-chair critics continue to depict Pakistani society as predominantly ‘feudal’, thereby understating the extent of urbanization and the substantial political and economic clout of non-agricultural commercial classes.
In many ways, the lack of attention paid to the intermediate strata in particular, and changes in the class structure at large, can be explained by the continuing reliance on ‘traditional’ analyses of the state. I have already mentioned the handful of recent studies that have attempted to capture the specificities of statecraft in contemporary Pakistan through novel theoretical lenses. Research work done on the evolving class structure of Pakistan's society lags further behind; recent efforts tend to rely on limited data and dated conceptual tools. The need to engage in more detailed research on actually existing capitalism in Pakistan can be gauged from one of the few insightful studies on the middle class which estimates it to total almost one-third of the country's population of 187 million.
In this chapter, I identify members of this burgeoning class, their sociological backgrounds, and explain their centrality to my narrative about common sense politics. In doing so I engage – although not exhaustively – with the scholarly literature on the intermediate classes, as well as recent theoretical debates on the nature of capitalist modernity in non-western contexts. In the final analysis I demonstrate that the intermediate classes have become the major protagonists of the contemporary political economy of patronage.
New Contenders for Power
In the first two chapters, I highlighted the main features of the refurbished patronage machine that emerged in Pakistan during and after the Zia years.
Preface
- Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad
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- The Politics of Common Sense
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- 30 October 2017, pp ix-xi
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Summary
While the plethora of literature being produced on Pakistan these days might suggest otherwise, writing a book about the country's politics, history and culture is a task fraught with difficulty. Quite aside from the popular stereotypes and misleading scholarship that one feels compelled to debunk, there has been little grounded research on state and society over a period of three decades which renders dated even substantive literature serving as a point of departure. The constant recourse to material produced in a different time and place can impede our understanding of the present as much as it helps to enhance it.
The task becomes even more challenging in an environment often hostile to ‘traditionalist’ conceptual and empirical debates about class, state and the like. Embodying this challenge is the work of Antonio Gramsci. On the one hand, Gramsci's ideas have very much become part of the mainstream (western) academy. On the other hand, this mainstreaming equates to Gramsci being invoked exclusively as a scholar of the discursive realm, separated by academic fashion from the materialist concerns which underlay his own efforts.
This tendency can be explained in part by the changing mores of western societies. As reiterated in this book time and again, Pakistan has also changed dramatically over the past few decades, and efforts to theorize state and society are doomed to futility without recognition of this (ongoing) process of change. The work of note on Pakistan to have emerged in recent times is based on this recognition, as well as the imperative of being critical of Eurocentric conceptual apparatuses. Yet, I sometimes feel that for all the ‘newness’ of such approaches, the proneness to aping trends in the western academy remains intact.
In this book, I have tried to generate insights in the mould of new-age postcolonial scholars that have grown up being suspicious of conceptual approaches associated with their predecessors, whilst insisting that it is still worth thinking about what this earlier generation uncovered. In short, we must not throw the baby out with the bath water. In practice, this means a book that tries to cover a lot of bases in a ‘grand theorizing’ way which is increasingly uncommon.
Acknowledgments
- Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad
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- The Politics of Common Sense
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- 30 October 2017, pp xii-xiv
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7 - Epilogue: What does a Counter-hegemonic Politics Look Like?
- Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad
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- The Politics of Common Sense
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- 30 October 2017, pp 161-174
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Summary
The narrative presented in this book has featured a dialectic of ‘order’ and ‘change’ that is deeply imbricated in the post-colonial structure of power, as it was during the colonial period. For the most part, the state has upheld the imperative of order even while privileging the logic of capital and the inevitable transformation that a deepening capitalism brings with it. The result has been both substantial continuity in that entrenched classes and institutions have maintained power and privilege, and transformative change as mobility ‘from below’ has allowed newer, nativized segments of society to push their way into an expanded ‘historical bloc’.
This basic dialectic of order and change – and the contradictions to which it invariably gives rise – is not unique to Pakistan's case. In many other postcolonial societies the structure of power is distant and coercive yet permeable and personalized, while the deepening of capital has greatly altered the dynamics of a previously insular political-economic system. Certainly the trajectories of what I have called the politics of common sense must be thoroughly contextualized, yet the conceptual parallels in Pakistan's and other cases are considerable, particularly in the era of ‘globalization’.
In conclusion, I will provide a brief summary of the argument that has been presented in the book, detail developments since the beginning of the millennium, and offer some tentative projections on the prospects of rupture in the structure of power moving forward. In doing so I will once again bring into focus the heuristic method adopted throughout this book; an understanding of contemporary political forms in Pakistan requires explication of a dynamic and expanding structure of power and a recognition of the fact that this structure is, in some measure at least, legitimated from below. As I have argued throughout the preceding chapters, these two levels of analysis should not be considered mutually exclusive; coercion and consent are two sides of the same coin.
When All is Said and Done
Despite the immense changes that have taken place throughout society, particularly from the 1960s onwards, the configuration of power in Pakistan continues to feature the ‘steel frame’ which has survived by propagating the imperative of order.
Glossary
- Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad
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- 30 October 2017, pp 175-178
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4 - The Many Faces of Islam
- Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad
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- The Politics of Common Sense
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Summary
Pakistan is like Israel, an ideological state. Take out Judaism from Israel and it will collapse like a house of cards. Take Islam out of Pakistan and make it a secular state; it would collapse.
Modern nationalism has many variants, but Pakistan is in unique company, being one of only two countries in which religious identity is the basis of membership in the political community. The myth of a monolithic Pakistani nation united by the bonds of Islam was totally exposed by the successful secession of more than half the population of the country in 1971. Yet, instead of acknowledging the glaring holes in the official nation-building project, the state and propertied classes proceeded to reassert Pakistan's ‘Islamic’ essence ever more vigorously.
In no uncertain terms, the instrumentalization of Islam has been a defining feature of Pakistan's political economy, particularly from the time that Zia-ul- Haq came to power. In this chapter, I will detail how religion has shaped the body-politic, and demonstrate that it is constitutive of common sense politics.
Various religio-political forces have come to exercise inf luence in the social and political mainstream and thereby been integrated into the structure of power over time. The religious right played a crucial role in undermining the radical political environment of the 1960s and 1970s, and it was subsequently rewarded by the Zia regime. The right's inf luence has increased in the subsequent period as attendant economic, political and cultural developments have proceeded apace.
Religio-political forces of both the parliamentary and militant variety now espouse a politics of resistance in lieu of the secular-left ideology that was more inf luential through the Bhutto period. This idiom of Islam as the language of the oppressed has been given impetus by the changed global environment since 9/11, and the growing perception that western powers – and client states in Muslim countries – are attacking ‘Islam’ in the name of democracy and human rights.
The claim that it is the fountainhead of popular resistance aside, the religious right's politics has not represented an affront to the everyday patronage regime in Pakistan. The Zia regime's policy of ‘Islamization’ gained at least superficial acceptance ‘from below’ both because of fear of the coercive apparatus of the state and because ‘Islam’ became an avenue for upward mobility in a society ravaged by inequality and injustice.
5 - The Nation that Never Became
- Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad
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- The Politics of Common Sense
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Notwithstanding the growing inf luence of Islam in Pakistan's body-politic, ethnicity rather than religion has been the primary marker of identity in large parts of the country both before and after 1947; outside of the dominant province Punjab, the so-called ‘ideology of Pakistan’ has always been seriously contested. Through the course of this book I have attempted to explain how the politics of common sense came to displace more expansive and transformative political idioms from the Zia period onwards. To truly make this hypothesis a viable one in what is a very ethnically divided country, it is necessary to probe the history of ethnic-nationalism and its relationship with the politics of common sense.
Contrary to official myth, the various ethnic-linguistic communities that came to comprise the new Muslim-majority state were not all f lag bearers of the Pakistan movement. Most famously, Pakhtuns in the Peshawar Valley region largely supported the Congress-allied Khudai Khidmatgars. After the creation of the country, Pakhtun nationalism retained its appeal in the Peshawar Valley and other parts of NWFP, as well as what is today northern Balochistan. Ethnic Sindhis had been protesting political and economic marginalization at the hands of migrants and allottees of state land since well before 1947, notwithstanding the passing of a formal resolution in favour of the Pakistan demand by the Sindh provincial assembly in the lead-up to Partition. Balochistan, which was only formally recognized as a province in 1970, also had what at best could be called an ambivalent relationship to the new state. The Khan of the Kalat state, the large princely territory that comprised most of the Baloch people, repeatedly claimed that he was forced to accede to Pakistan at the barrel of a gun.
In the event, the protestations of various ethnic-linguistic communities in west Pakistan were dramatically overshadowed by the conf lict that erupted immediately after the establishment of the state between the Bengali majority based in east Pakistan and the civil and military bureaucracies dominated by Urdu-speakers and Punjabis respectively. Troubles began as early as 1948 following an infamous speech by Muhammad Ali Jinnah to students in Dhaka in which the country's founder insisted that Urdu would be the official language of the new state, even though Bangla was the native tongue of more than half of Pakistan's population.
Dedication
- Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad
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- The Politics of Common Sense
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2 - The Structure of Power ‘From Above’
- Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad
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- The Politics of Common Sense
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- 30 October 2017, pp 31-61
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Summary
Scholarship on the Pakistan state in particular and the structure of power ‘from above’ more generally has historically centred around a handful of themes, including, but not limited to, the dominance of military over civilian apparatuses; an ethnically skewed structure of power; state sovereignty in the face of consistent intervention by foreign powers; and the fortunes of landed and other propertied classes. At various points in the country's history, hypotheses about the very viability and continued existence of the state have also come to the fore.
In this chapter, I develop a historical-sociological sketch of the Pakistan state and the propertied classes, building upon the theoretical foundations laid out in the introductory chapter. My basic argument is that though the structure of power in Pakistan appears to remain centred around the ‘steel frame’ established by the British, substantial changes have taken place over the past few decades that demand fresh interrogation of the institutional dynamics of the state as well as its sociological composition. In similar vein, the mythical ‘feudal’ elite of the British era has been significantly affected by the process of social change, to the point that classical characterizations of Pakistan's political economy are now largely obsolete.
Put simply, the structure of power in Pakistan as it has evolved since the later 1970s is far more complex than most mainstream scholarship suggests. For all the change that has taken place, however, the story that I tell in this chapter is also about continuity. Despite its increasingly fragmentary character, the state remains the repository of power in society, both because state functionaries continue to mediate access to political and economic resources, and due to the (coercive, economic and discursive) control exercised by what is often called the ‘military establishment’. Even the propertied classes, therefore, perceive their interests to be served by proximity – and often deference – to an entrenched state apparatus.
As noted in the introductory chapter, the specific focus of this book is to explicate how Pakistan's patronage-based political order has undergone change, particularly since the late 1970s. It follows that there is a need to think much more deeply about how the structure of power operates ‘from below’ than most academic literature has traditionally done.
Contents
- Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad
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- The Politics of Common Sense
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- 30 October 2017, pp vii-viii
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Index
- Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad
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- 30 October 2017, pp 195-200
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Bibliography
- Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad
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- The Politics of Common Sense
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- 30 October 2017, pp 179-194
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