Thinking Out Loud About Marxism in Pakistan

The posts whose titles start with ’Thinking Out Loud About…’ are more unstructured than my usual posts. Just so you know.

I’m disappointed that the artists, intellectuals, film-makers, writers and poets of Pakistan are so inclined toward socialism and Marxism. There is nothing inherently Leftist about art, making the marriage between these two cultural elements in the context of Pakistan a contingent, historical event with the appearance of naturalness.

Why are Marxism and socialism so popular there? A socialist economy is not necessary to art or intellectual effervescence. Here is my attempt to explain this strange marriage:

1. The left in Pakistan thinks capitalism is another word for poverty, and since there is poverty in Pakistan, Pakistan must be a capitalist society; and since poverty is bad, capitalism must be bad too. They see the poverty around them and think, rather illogically: oh look what capitalism has done! Look at how capitalism put tuberculosis in that woman’s lungs! We must abolish capitalism to end poverty. There are two important rebuttals to this argument:

a) Pakistan is not a capitalist society from anywhere, from any possible angle. It has not even begun the journey toward capitalism. It is a feudal, militaristic society with a low level of industrialization. The necessary conditions for capitalism are the protection of property and the person, and the ability to enforce contractual obligations. Pakistan has neither, as every Pakistani knows. Nobody’s private property is really safe in Pakistan, and neither is their person. The mobility of capital is greatly limited by the high rates of violence and lack of cultural respect for property, and without the movement of goods you can’t have commerce. According to The Economist – as well the experiences of everybody who’s lived in Pakistan – Pakistan scores very low on ease of enforceability of contracts, the third lowest in the world in fact. My own family has been cheated out of investment. But who cares about private property and contracts, anyway? They’re so bourgeois, I’m sure.

b) Poverty is a negative, i.e. the absence of wealth. A negative does not have a cause (nor can it be a cause, which should be noted by those who say ‘lack of education is the cause of X problem in Pakistan’), only a positive does. It is wealth that has a cause, not poverty. Poverty is the default state: everyone is poor unless their poverty is alleviated in some way. Thus, to say that the mere removal of things will lead to the revealing of wealth that never existed to begin with is patently absurd.

2. The left thinks capitalism is another word for the United States of America. The U.S. happens to be a capitalist society, and one of the lesser functioning ones, but it is not equivalent to capitalism. This is true regardless of whatever wars the U.S. might engage in, whatever proxies it might set up, and whatever its policy on Israel might be. Capitalism is merely an economic system, and not equivalent to any individual country that has that system. A capitalist society is usually also a state with its own national interest, and influenced by other contingencies, ideologies and interests. Every action that such a state engages in is not necessarily the logical outcome of capitalism itself.

3. The Left in Pakistan thinks socialism/Marxism is another word for human rights. They lump socialism in with feminism, using a clever rhetorical device to create the impression that you have to be socialist to care about other people. In fact, you don’t. You could be centrist, or you could simply base your judgments on basic moral principles (on Christian ethics, for example).

4. The Left in Pakistan does not have an established philosophical tradition of liberalism. We do not have an equivalent of John Locke, who emphasizes the importance of private property as an extension of the person. This might be part of the general problem of the lack of proper moral philosophizing, the role of moral philosophy having been dangerously usurped by religion.

I do not see capitalism as the ideal system, contrary to the impression this post might be giving off. Nevertheless, systems in which there is no private property, no or little possibility of commerce, and a high level of statism have been shown to be much worse than capitalism can ever hope to be.

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