A New Theoretical Understanding of State and Politics of Postcolonial Pakistan

1.4.1 ‘Liberal' Understanding of Law and State

in Postcolonial Pakistan

The liberal approach to the state in Pakistan holds that political governance moves between dictatorship and democracy, and that the judiciary decides which it is to be.

This is true at a descriptive level that all the military regimes in Pakistan (Ayub Khan, 1958-1968; Ziaul-Haq, 1977-1988; Pervez Musharraf, 1999-2009) came to power through bloodless coups, suggesting that there was widespread agreement among power holders that the prior political democratic regimes were not func­tioning properly. The military regimes also maintained the continuity of the con­stitution through a malleable judiciary, which gave their rule constitutional approval.

In order to consolidate themselves as being elected and design their version of governance, the three military heads took a particular path to constitutional engi­neering. They invented and reinvented local governance to create a new electoral college so as to create a new party in order to bargain with the existing feudal and business elite. This way, the dictator could be elected as a president, and later the assembly could approve the constitutional arrangements for the designed gover­nance mechanism. During such transitions, an intimidated civil bureaucracy had to control the masses.

All the quasi-democratic regimes^[81] led by mass parties, on the other hand, have attempted to loosen the grip of the executive/president over the governance struc­ture. The base of these parties has been the rural elite, the majority of whom have been recruited through political defection (horse-trading, buying and/or terrifying the opposition and rewarding the new ruling party Members of National Assembly). They readjust the judiciary to implement certain legal and constitutional arrange­ments, which usually ends in confrontation with the judiciary.^[82] They also use the judiciary to focus on the opposition’s corruption and to bring attention away from their own corruption cases. The regimes try to control the civil and military bureaucracy and to appoint their own ‘sincere’ Chief of Army Staff. Every time they attempt this, however, the assembly is dissolved and cannot complete its tenure. The judiciary has always been there to put its stamp on this dissolution of assembly as ‘constitutional deviation’.

According to analysis in this book, this much-touted dichotomy of dictatorship versus democracy removes class and class relations from an understanding of the political dynamics of the state and, as a result, the law. The dichotomy emphasizes that the state is completely autonomous from society and social relations.

In order to understand the totality of Pakistan’s politics and how this structures the law, there is a need to go beyond this liberal approach.

1.4.2 From a ‘Legal State' to a ‘Class State'

Instead of reducing Pakistan’s political development as a deviation from an ideal type of democracy (due to military) and a legal state, this book will argue Pakistani state as a class state. That is, how metropolitan bourgeoisie as a hegemonic class, under the leadership of U.S. imperialism, used military and civil bureaucracy as its seat of power to secure a complex hegemony for the inclusion of the reigning classes (feudal and capitalist elite) and the exclusion of the dominated classes. For this analysis, social formations including political and cultural are the actual sites of the reproduction as well as its existence. This means that these sites are the sites of class struggle and hence the history of political struggles can elaborate the theory of a postcolonial state.^[83] This understanding suggests a simple formula that the state formation which came into being, should be linked to the class formation. Borrowing from Poulantzas, state formation as a class formation, would permit an assessment whereby class is dominant in state formation. Below is the step-by-step elaboration of this understanding.

1.4.3 Postcolonial Pakistani State: Factual or Theoretical

Departure?

The Pakistani state has not developed through the European path of state forma­tion^[84] and requires theorization that can account for its particular characteristics.

For example, there is no separation of state and civil society in postcolonial Pakistan. Separation of the state and civil society is the theoretical basis of the liberal understanding of western capitalist state and society. The concept of civil society, borrowed from Hegel and eighteenth century political theory, connects ‘concrete man’ for world needs into a national political unity through universal suffrage. The ‘equality’ and ‘liberty’ of individual citizens is in their relation to the abstract laws form a ‘legal state’ separated from civil society or above the citizens. The problem with this preposition, even in western capitalist society, let alone postcolonial one, is that it prevents us from understanding the relation of the state to the class struggle. Similarly, individuals are told so equal that it is not possible to constitute social classes from this. In this way, state comes at the origin of the economic individual agents and one cannot start from classes to understand the state.^[87] The separation of state and civil society based on Hegel stayed in Marx but later he evolved the concept of a ‘class state’, with ‘objective structures’ giving birth to a ‘specifically political’ concept of the state. Consequently, Marx and Gramsci conceived of politics as a practice of power.^[88] When I say that in post­colonial Pakistan, there is no separation of state and civil society, this means it is not a state above classes or outside classes (relative autonomous only).

Similarly, in postcolonial Pakistan, there is no separation of political from the economic. In western capitalist society, the state is assumed to be above the eco­nomic interests of all the classes and individuals, and protects the property and ensures contract enforcement. There is an assumed consensus in regards to the economic base or infrastructure, or the organizing principles of the society. The state’s involvement in the economy is assumed to be on behalf of all classes. So there is complete separation of political from the economic.

My take on the issue is that there is no actual separation of the political from the economic in postcolonial societies. In postcolonial Pakistan, the presence of an industrialist class, along with capitalist agriculture, under the hegemony of the metropolitan bourgeoisie was crucial for determining political development and not the civil and bureaucracy only. Of course, this represents the contradictory unity of the dominant classes but the state and its legal arrangements for these classes. This is true from structural adjustment policies (SAP) and privatization under neolib­eralism. Based on this, one can define the functionalist aspects of the postcolonial state.

Based on the above discussion, few very basic factual and theoretical departures from the prevalent liberal and Marxist liberal understanding about postcolonial Pakistan are very clear. First, in postcolonial Pakistan, the state is not relative autonomous only above classes as is in western liberal understanding. Nor the postcolonial state is relative autonomous in Alavian’s understanding that the mil­itary is running the affaires of the country.^[91] In Alavi’s formation, postcolonial state of Pakistan has relative autonomy with respect to three contending fundamental classes (the indigenous bourgeoisie, the metropolitan bourgeoisie and the landed class). Since no class can dominate in the formation mentioned above, this gives relative autonomy to the military-bureaucratic structure that Alavi conceptualized as an ‘overdeveloped state’. This is clearly another form of liberal aclass autonomous state with bad rationality as opposed to ‘good’ rationality of western Weberian state. In my theoretical understanding, the state of postcolonial Pakistan has instrumental and functional aspects also along with its relative autonomy. The natures of all the three above aspects vary and the change depends upon the changing nature of class formations due to class struggle. What is the nature of class formation in Pakistan?

1.4.4 Hegemonic Class?: Redefining the Place of Centre­Periphery Relations in State Formation

Alavi argues that there is a ‘plurality of fundamental classes’ in postcolonial societies like Pakistan, namely the indigenous bourgeoisie, the metropolitan bourgeoisie and the landed class. There is accordingly no one ‘ruling class’. This is in contrast to the fundamental classes in the West, namely the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, where the bourgeoisie rules.^[92] In Alavi’s class formation about Pakistan, the working, or dominated, class is missing. Furthermore, the metropolitan bour­geoisie is mentioned in the bloc of the dominant classes, but is not explained in the ‘overdeveloped’ state formation. That is, how does it affect democracy and dictatorship?

To bring to light the presence of metropolitan bourgeoisie and the exclusion of the dominated classes in state formations (in so-called democracy versus dictator­ship debates) are the most crucial points of my understanding. As far as the working class is concerned, it always deserves a footnote in liberal analyses. The U.S. “role is considered in liberal analyses regarding inter-elite struggles” literature of Pakistan but is very superficially theorized. The neglect of imperialist design is a phenomenon of the 1990’s under rising ‘institutionalist’ analyses linked with the decline of the Left. Till the 1980s, this ‘neutral’ imperialist presence was not neutral. It was argued, “Pakistan hardly enjoys any degree of freedom in its external relations”.^[93] Now Pakistan’s political elite is fully convinced that the road to Islamabad lies through Washington,^[94] and its liberal elements argue that the U.S. should intervene for democracy in Pakistan. Responding to why the U.S. has supported every authoritarian regime in Pakistan, Siddiqa thought that the U.S. support of dictatorships is just an excuse that dictatorial regimes used. She wants U.S. support for internal movements of democracy to reduce the role of military just like U.S. did in Latin America.^[95] Siddiqa is an example of a more contemporary theorist who has lost the old plotline, that imperial interests work within and through the Pakistani state, and that they have always done this through the military.

In my understanding, the lack of liberal democracy in postcolonial Pakistan can only be explained due to the presence of metropolitan bourgeoisie in the state formation as a relational condensate during cold war as well as post-cold war period in Pakistan. In contrast, in India’s case, the presence of a strong bourgeoisie vis-a-vis the relatively lesser presence of a metropolitan bourgeoisie (along with other social relations and class struggle) explains the ‘level’ and ‘nature’ of liberal democracy. In other words, the weakness of the bourgeoisie vis-a-vis a strong state is not the key to explain a dictatorial state formation, as is Liberals and Alavi’s position. Rather, weakness of the political elite vis-a-vis the metropolitan bour­geoisie in class formation is a reason for the lack of democracy. This presence is not institutional but structural. It is important to remove ‘neutral’ (with respect to imperialist design) explanations of judicial, legal and constitutional issues as part of political development.

How is imperialism, particularly U.S. imperialism, in the state and society of postcolonial Pakistan? Imperialism under the leadership of the U.S. is not only connected in the circulation of capital sphere but in the production sphere in the form of aid under modernization to the dictates of IFIs under SAP to current ‘good governance’.^[96] Foreign investment is not only present dominantly but imperialist countries quotas, licenses and statuses determine the direction and the nature of development of the production sphere. In this mode of production, feudal (currently agricultural capital) exist with the capitalist development with increasing informal economy. The point I want to make is that direct sort of imperialist presence in Pakistan as a front line state compromised with the pre-capitalist formations or local capitalist formations and produced uneven development within the domain of capitalist development. This uneven development is the relative unevenness of the different instances, that is, legal more developed than the political and political more developed than the economic, etc.

A continuous reproduction of the above system is assured in the political, cul­tural and the ideological instances, all connected for a complex hegemony (political instant). But the complexity of this hegemony is the irresolvable contradictions of the structure and not the problems of its own only. Below are some more details of the nature of this complex hegemony in postcolonial Pakistan.

1.4.5 Myth of Miserable Politicians vis-a-vis Military:

Nature of Hegemony

Liberal theses are generally of the opinion that politicians are not allowed to rule by a strong military and civil bureaucracy. As opposed to this, one can see that landed and capitalist elite in Pakistan succeeded in protecting their interests throughout the history after independence in Pakistan, and acted as the reigning class under the hegemony of metropolitan capital. To acquire that hegemony, the U.S. imperialism used military and civil bureaucracy as its seat of power and consequent removal and restoration of democratic regimes.

It is commonly argued that the state (military-civil bureaucratic structure) has never focused on protecting the economic interests of the landed class. Rather, the state’s policies have an urban bias.^[97] Land reforms and labour policies went against this class’s interests. Alavi has shown that the landed elite opposed land reforms and agriculture tax but could not change the long-term bias against agriculture.^[98] Indeed, many studies have shown that there had been no necessary connection between holding or controlling land and having an effect on power in social for­mation.^[99] Land control is not the guarantee of prominence in government decision-making.^[100] Ayesha Jalal found that the interests of the landed class as well as the state can be the same but not necessarily all the time, calling the convergence a ‘politics of compromise’.^[101] Aasim S. Akhtar concludes that the landed elite have become less committed to the autonomy and corporate interests of their class. According to this position, both the major propertied classes are fragmented and are guided by a cynical logic of gaining access to the state to distribute (or access) patronage and both are incapable of following the specific class interests of the party leadership.^[102] All of the above shows one side, that is, the relative weakness of the landed elite as a coherent class to assert itself against the state while bal­ancing the interests of other contending classes.

The other side of the story is of how the landed elite posed a restraint on the autonomy of the state vis-a-vis subordinate classes, particularly by having blunted the efforts of land reforms. Burki suggested the names of prominent landed elites as those who made history, as opposed to the typical ‘who’s who’ of Liaquat Ali Khan, Ayub Khan, Bhutto, Benazir Bhutto, etc.^[103] Rather he gave a list of Khizar Hayat Khan as opposed to Jinnah, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani not Liaqat, Amir Muhamad Khan (Nawab of Kalbagh) not Ayub. He selected them because they were highly effective in impeding change.^[104] Similarly, Naim Ullah highlights how the suppression of a series of reports on land reforms and tenancy rights was in fact a forceful defense of the landed elite against land reforms. Zia declared on 16 Oct 1979 that ‘Inshaallah’ (God willing) there will be no land reforms. In 2003, Prime Minister Jamali announced that there will be no more land reforms as far as our government is concerned.^[105] That is to say, the fundamental interest of the landed elite, their ownership of land, has in fact been protected.

Similarly, we cannot say that state ever went against the capitalist class, except during a short period during Bhutto’s reign. For Ishrat, the market was rigged and distorted for the benefit of the elite, whereas the instruments of the state did not correct these inequalities but benefitted the same small group of people.^[106] Recently, the role of the capitalist class in local politics has been increasing.^[107] The new business class of the 2000s is more closely linked to the popular classes than the business class of the 1960s. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif integrated the busi­ness class with the intermediate classes in Punjab.^[108] Weiss, after studying the steel rolling, pharmaceutical, and sporting goods industries in Punjab found industrialists to be well connected with the local formation and local politics.^[109] Now they fund, back and even participate in political parties.^[110]

Furthermore, the bourgeoisie, through their personal relations with the state personnel, have been directly involved in the formation and implementation of the state policies.^[111] They also affect the legislature in democratic regimes, advising governments sitting on the committees, commissions and regulatory boards. They do not make many decisions, or present or write actual bills for legislative con­sideration, but no policies go against their overall interests within the capitalist system as explained below.

The point I want to make is that the landed elite has largely succeeded in protecting its interests throughout the history after independence in Pakistan, and has acted as the reigning class. Despite lacking coherence in terms of following economic interest, propertied classes have persuaded the state to protect their property and let them increase their property holdings. Every major policy (like the ‘Green Revolution’ of 1960s and privatization of 1990s), though adopted under the pressure of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, has been in favour of the capitalist class as well as the landed class.^[112] Capitalist development, as a part of the liberal project of state building, has always been central for state building in Pakistan. From the available literature, we can only find a positive relation between the three fundamental classes, though at times contradictory: the relation is non-antagonistic, whether under democratic or military-bureaucratic governance. The few episodes of failed and half-hearted land reforms and non-antagonistic ‘governance disputes’ around corruption, democracy and dictatorship have done little, if anything, to affect the material interests of these fundamental classes.

Now let me lay down the specific features of hegemony in postcolonial Pakistan. This hegemony is complex and in this hegemony, the U.S. imperialism is the hegemonic class. But in postcolonial countries under neo-colonialism, the imperi­alism cannot rule directly^[113] Nor the hegemonic imperialism can rule through the military directly for a long time. Even during the dictatorial regimes, a quasi-democratic regime had to come very soon. In postcolonial Pakistan, the hegemonic class brought the weak and feeble feudal and the capitalist class under its hegemony. But imperialism did not use the reigning class (legislature) as a seat of power because it was weak vis-a-vis popular challenges unleashed by anti-colonial struggles. To control this, hegemonic imperialism used civil and military bureaucracy as a seat of power. The weakness of this reigning class in the hegemonic bloc vis-a-vis imperialism (to build a counter narrative of hegemony) and vis-a-vis working-class and centrifugal nationalist challenges (bearing a counter narrative of hegemony) is the key to understand the instability, volatility, and slippery nature of political instant in postcolonial Pakistan. Connected to this is the relative effectiveness of the legal (court as the centre of politics for legitimacy) and use of ideological (Islam) instances in the case of postcolonial Pakistan.

Poulantzas insisted on looking into objective coordinates of political domination within this ideological formation. For him, this is particularly useful when we are examining several politically dominant classes or class fractions, of which only one takes the hegemonic role, a situation typified by capitalist Britain.^[114] Fair enough. Based on this, to analyse the particular changing ideological formation of legal and ideological instances of postcolonial Pakistan, we are to first distance ourselves from the dominant liberal dichotomy of secularism versus Islam with its concep­tions the Pakistan’s actual problem after military is Islam and Objectives Resolution.^[115] Related to this is common connection between military and Islam, particularly the ISI, wanting Islam. Theoretically, this means that the state is cre­ating ideology which is dominantly military. This is true at descriptive level but again this is poor theorizing with Islam in its particular form in Pakistan an aclass concept. First of all, the ideology of Pakistan in its particularity is liberal as well as Islamic. Rather than the state giving birth to ideology, Islam should be looked at in the perspective of the Cold War as a defense against communism and its application as a defense against land reforms by Jamaat Ahmedia and then Moudoodi of the Jamaat-e-Islami. Furthermore, this is not something fixed, we should look at the nature of this ideology (Islam as a changing part of it) with changing class for­mation. U.S. as a hegemonic class used Islam for Jihad during cold war and its height was 1980s. So this is not a coincident that this was the height of support for Islam by the postcolonial state. Later, the same state was conducting war against fundamentalist Islam. We are to understand the importance/place of Islam in its materiality. This means knowing which classes are dominant in Pakistan’s state formation.

This book will demonstrate that the Pakistani state has used Islam for its legitimacy (as during the Zia regime) but also resisted it to some extent (as during the Ayub and Musharraf regimes) through state apparatuses but on the demand of the hegemonic class. What common throughout was the deepening influence of international capital, and the growing hegemony of the ruling elite as actual problem and not Islam as the main focus of analysis. Where religion was used by the state formation for legitimizing oligarchic rule, it also came in conflict with the above liberal project of the state.

The use of Islam by the hegemonic class and the feudal class is clear so far. But why the local capitalist class and the merchant class did not resist conservative pre-capitalist modes of production and thinking? Rather, the merchant class was a big supporter of religious parties.^[116] First of all, the very nature of Pakistan’s dependency capital is merchant because of quota- and licenses-based industrial­ization. Metropolitan bourgeoisie and this merchant nature of local industrialist class are not interested in the labour process and organization of capital. This simply means changing the pre-capitalist modes, irrelevant to their agenda and status quo and compromises with conservatives is common. The very merchant nature of capital needs the uninterrupted flow of goods only. Therefore, to co-opt the pre-capitalist modes of production like feudalism and tribalism were not the compulsion of political instance alone but were reflective of the very nature of the mixed mode of production also.

To sum up, overemphasis on Islam is not because of the ‘rationality’ of the state apparatus be it civil bureaucracy or military establishment. State apparatuses do not create ideologies. In my understanding, law and constitution in Pakistan is neither liberal nor Islamic. It should not be analysed as a deviation from one of them. The grafting of Islamic law onto liberal legal institutions, I suggest, was to protect liberal institutions, including legal institutions, against theocracy. The function or purpose or intent or effect of all the regimes was to promote the liberal project, with the help of legal engineering, which in Gramscian terms was a key element of the formation of the historic bloc.

Apart from the role of Islam in the lives of Pakistan, why do all the classes in class formation overemphasize Islam as ideology? As is already pointed out, Pakistan’s political instant was highly volatile and unstable and hence the burden of legitimacy heavily fell on legal and ideological instances.

Based on this, to correctly understand the crisis of democracy in Pakistan, a final crucial departure from liberal understanding is needed. That is, rather than looking at the crisis of the state in disequilibrium of the institutional arrangements among state apparatuses (military overstepping legislature), what one needs to analyse is the crisis in the hegemony as changing class formation due to challenges from below.

1.4.6 Crisis of the Hegemony as the Crisis of the State

Common sense understanding of the postcolonial state of Pakistan is that military is doing everything even to the extent of spreading Islamic fundamentalism, etc.^[117] This simply means that the state has its own rationality, though bad in case of postcolonial Pakistan. So, the Pakistani state is a subject. This is a liberal concept except that rationality in case of the Pakistani state is a bad rationality.^[118] It is also extensively argued that the U.S. supported/used the military for its geopolitical ends.^{[119] [120] [121] [122] [123] This means that the postcolonial state of Pakistan is an object. A third problematic and widely accepted so-called Marxist liberal understanding, rejecting instrumental and functionalist aspects of a state, is that the civil and military bureaucracy is relatively autonomous of its own in Pakistan and hence ‘ overdeveloped ’.120}

No doubt, the Pakistan military’s role has increased, over and apart from its constitutional role under Article 245 to defend the country against external aggression and to support the civilian government during disasters. There is plenty of literature available pointing out the manipulative role of the military in political 121 122 123

life, whether in terms of ‘Military Inc.,’ Garrison state, or literature articulating how the military bears a qualitatively greater role than that of a mediator.^[124] Instead of a ‘rational’ state, the concept of a ‘class state’ with ‘ob­jective structure’ can give a ‘specifically political’ concept of state. ‘Political practice’ and ‘objective structures’ give birth to specific forms of state (democracy or dictatorship) through hegemony. Hegemony explains political power of the dominant class with respect to dominated classes through a combination of consent and coercion which the state crystallizes.^[125] This means that not only the dominant, but the dominated classes are also included in the hegemonic project. Connected to this is the dominant class and its fractions which are structured into an ensemble through the mediation of the state. The structure of the ensemble is the state. At the postcolonial level, the ‘specific’ interests of dominant classes are concentrated to form a ‘power bloc’—a contradictory unity of dominant classes, themselves ‘under the dominance’ of the hegemonic class or fractions.^[126] So, particular changes in the state forms of postcolonial Pakistan should be analysed with its specific internal unity and the position of objective system of branches. But each particular changing form of the state should be referred back to important modifications of the relations of production as well as to the important stages of class struggle. I have already explained the hegemonic and the reigning classes in postcolonial Pakistan. Now throughout my dissertation, I will show how the particular state forms while moving from democracy to dictatorship to quasi-democratic and quasi-dictatorial regimes were the changing specific determinations of the dominant classes responding to class struggle. Here the bad rationality or self-interest of the military will not be explaining the nature of postcolonial state of Pakistan as is in abundant liberal literature about Pakistan. Different changing class formations due to class struggle will also explain the changing rationality and the nature and extent of the relative autonomy as well as instrumental and functional aspects of the state. But still the questions about strong military and crisis of the state need answers.

Based on the above explanation, I am going to present an understanding about the strong military and the crisis of state in postcolonial Pakistan, which is very different than liberal understanding. In most of the abundant liberal literature available on Pakistan, the crisis of democracy is reduced to the crisis of the state, that is, because of the ‘overdeveloped’ military and civil bureaucracy. The political crisis in the state apparatuses sometimes is reflected in the conflict of personalities, as seen with the Chief of Army Staff conflicting with the parliamentary leader, or Chief Justice differing with the elected Prime Minister or the crisis of a wrong decision in a writ petition. These conflicts of personalities must be traced back to political crises and the crisis in the class formation. When political crises led to the problem of state’s own unity, the dominant class (the metropolitan bourgeoisie) created networks to oversee different branches of the state. An example is that of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), which was created to control corruption, and other governance mechanisms initiated by the World Bank. As another example, the U.S. Gulf states brokered an agreement between Musharraf and Benazir and Nawaz. This was the National Reconciliation Ordinance.^[127]

This is very particular to ‘institutionalist-functionalist’ and ‘system’ analyses of bourgeois sociology and political science. Here, the crisis is a dysfunctional moment in an otherwise harmonious functioning of the ‘system’ and will pass after the equilibrium is re-established because the state is assumed to be an integrated pluralist society of ‘powers’ and ‘counter-powers’ resulting in ‘the institutional­ization of social conflicts’. In addition, conflicts are taken to the level of conflicts of ‘ideas’, ‘opinions’, ‘values’ or crisis of ‘legitimation’.^[128] The above illustration shows the dislocation within branches of the state where the compromises of the allied classes are being crystallized, as well as the dislocations in ideological and political forms that are trying to unify allied classes. But where are the origins of this dislocation of state apparatus as crisis? The actual contradictions between dominant and dominated classes in the postcolonial society can be explained when the state is understood as a class formation engaged in politics defined as class struggle. So it is not a crisis of institutions, but rather a structural crisis that has resulted in the crisis of hegemony.^[129] This means there is a challenge posed by class struggle of the dominated classes and within the ‘power bloc’ of dominant.

Based on all of these points of critique, I argue we should depart from liberal’s and liberal Marxists Alavi’s explanation of the state’s actions as being motivated by its self-interest. Oppressive regimes are not only due to the self-interest of dictators. It is necessary to locate class struggle against which repression is unleashed.^[130] Bringing back class struggle simply means to understand the power of the state as a class power. The military in Pakistan and other newly developed countries operated for the benefit of the fundamental classes, particularly metropolitan capital, and against the subordinate classes. This was an institutional arrangement to keep the structure intact. What Liberals and liberal Marxist Alavi tried to debunk was the idea that the working-class struggles in these countries mattered.

Bringing back class struggle of the dominated classes is the main contribution of this book.

1.4.7 Bringing Class Struggle Back in State Formation

Working class does not deserve a footnote in liberal analyses. Even the Marxist liberal Alavi dropped the subordinate and intermediate classes from his analysis as either weak or irrelevant. Alavi found economic competition as the main reason preventing poor peasants from revolt. For Alavi, the helplessness of the poor peasant is not subjective but an objective fixed reality.^[131] The same neglect of class struggle is carried by all liberal writings. Yet in 1968, the working classes did get organized, and did gain victories in Pakistan. The state did not stay impartial. The concessions were greater when the working classes were better organized and lesser when they were disorganized. Poulantzas was clear that the working class has specific ideological elements even without a revolutionary party, which Lenin called a ‘class instinct’, as an autonomous discourse. They behave differently even under bourgeois ideology. He gave an example of the U.S. working class without a revolutionary party. The absence of a politics of resistance in postcolonial societies can be traced to the absence of class struggles that focus on the fundamental structures in order to change those structures. Poulantzas stated that it is class struggle that determines how the apparatuses are modified.^[132] In the complex relation between class struggle and state apparatuses, it is class struggle that has the principal role.^[133] Not taking working class struggle as a constituent element of the state formation left Alavi discussing the state as removed from class relations. I will show how the class struggle (through leftist class politics) and even the class in different class formation, such as the translation of the working-class movement in the ethno-nationalist idiom of the National Awami Party-NAP, has serious conse­quences for class formations and hence state formations in Pakistan.