The way forward

Express Tribune

15-02-2025

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Every politician in Pakistan wants to be referred to as a socialist regardless of what he or she understands about socialism as a concept. The problem with politics in Pakistan is that it is discussing personalities more than society. Ours is the age of acceleration, living in which the most important commodity is the value of time and what we must do with it. Politicians that waste time by not visiting and revisiting order must know that disorder will eventually visit them. Today, three big ideas dominate global politics - peace is the preferred form of interaction between states; democracy is the preferred form of political system to organise political life; and, free markets are the vehicles of growth and development.
All politicians need to be socialists not only in theory but in practice to realise the magnificence of these ideas and the capacities of these ideas to create domestic, regional and global homogeneity. Why almost all our politicians want to pretend to act as socialists is because deep down inside their conscience they are reminded of their social responsibilities. These responsibilities are not met by living and serving only the world of capitalism but the world of democracy in which they live and through which they are supposed to serve the needs of the people. The negative consequences of capitalism - such as unequal opportunities, unequal growth, income inequalities and periods of economic slowdown - have adverse social consequences. In the US alone, one per cent of elite holds as much wealth as the combined middle class of that entire country. I have no data to represent the wealth distribution between the elite and the middle class of our country, but my wild guess is that it is quite similar to what we have in the US, if not worse. So, this forces me to ask: can democracy and socialism in countries like Pakistan ever reconcile?
To answer this question, I take the lead from history and would like to present four ideas that if realised and worked upon can create meaningful difference in how socialism can be understood and democracy can be used as the essential platform to unleash its benefits.
The first is about human freedom in how it can be utilised to shape knowledge as well as all the activities that we surround ourselves with. The ability to reason and resist natural desires is a concept driven from Kant's critical philosophy of idealism. Reasonable societies don't block information; they rather create opportunities to access information from all possible means. Information should not be denied or blocked as it helps us to create our realities. Anything is information that we use to discover truth, and a truthful society is based on access to all platforms of information.
The second idea is related to Hegel, the most influential figure of German idealism. Rationalism in Hegel's era was considered as a great threat to societal reforms. His teachings stood out as great contribution to the battle of ideas to formulate either the Christian state or the rational state. Hegel was a great friend of the Greek religion, because the Greeks had no religion at all. Greek religion was the religion of intellect, beauty, art, freedom and humanity. Greek religion was actually the religion of humanity. Hegel addressed the ideas of freedom, state and society and propagated the formulation of a rational state. He was more a pioneer of socialist thought than a socialist himself. Since Hegel propagated man as a creature of needs, he insisted that the goal of socialism was not the achievement of equality but advent of harmony. The society that he imagined was to be built on egalitarianism, association and cooperation rather than egoism, unfair competition and availability of unequal opportunities.
The third idea is related to the American declaration of Independence, arguably the most beautifully written document of English text which mentions 'pursuit of happiness' as a societal goal. In 1884, almost hundred years after this declaration, Karl Marx started a journal titled 'The Alliance of Those Who Think and Those Who Suffer'. Marx considered man as a natural being whose actions were motivated by the pursuit of happiness and avoidance of pain. The concept was simple - improve the societal environment with better education with the goal of transforming the human nature. Our societal behaviour is in a state of mess and the more we delay our emphasis on introducing quality education the bigger this mess will become.
The fourth idea is about how in this age of acceleration, more and more of our political questions are turning into social questions. The old Poland, old Germany, old England and old France were all lost in the political revolutions of the past. Even the old world was lost after the great industrial revolution but countries like Pakistan are still finding it difficult to let go - of the idea of dominating and controlling society and free will of the people to be able to express themselves. That's a very old school of thought. The best form of the state is a state that is reached after it allows the societal contradictions to become an open struggle. That is the only way that societal contradictions are resolved. The state has no business to support one form of the contradiction and not another. In this age of information, to consider that communal, group or state objectives cannot be maximised unless coercion forces them to do so is a ridiculous idea.
State coercion is colonialism's modern dress; and whatever political, economic, intellectual, social and physical control this coercion exercises is a short-term answer to very deep-rooted and contradictory societal problems. It is for me to say this but it is for those who are keeping the leading roles in our politics to decide how they can rectify their positions. History is not only about the past but also about the change. How come the world changed and transformed almost over a hundred years ago by virtue of learning from the ideas of some of the great scholars and thinkers, but we are still stuck in the medieval world that offers no incentives for change? That is a question that I will leave for the readers to think about.