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Abstract
This paper delineates the problematic of state and civil society set out by Marx and Gramsci in its theoretical-conjunctural validity, as it relates to postcolonial social formations and especially post-1970s Pakistan. The Gramscian concepts of passive revolution, “boundary-traversing” hegemony, and the integral state are elaborated through references to three major theorists of postcolonial societies: Chatterjee, Alavi, and Fanon. The resulting framework is then deployed to understand developments in post-1970s Pakistan as two phases of passive revolution.
Notes
Acknowledgement
Key arguments of this paper were presented as part of my comprehensive examination at the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, May 2016. In addition to the SPE reviewers, I am grateful to Tayyaba Jiwani, Stefan Kipfer, and Anna Zalik for their help and feedback in the preparation of this version.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
About the author
Ayyaz Mallick is a PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He is currently a Visiting Researcher in the Social Development and Policy Program at Habib University, Karachi, Pakistan?
Notes
1 Guha, “On Some Aspects,” 3.
2 For example, see Ahmad, “Fascism and National Culture”; Tugal, “Urban Dynamism of Islamic Hegemony”; Hart, Rethinking the South African Crisis.
3 See, for example, Lieven, Pakistan.
4 Alavi, “State in Post-Colonial Societies.”
5 Zaidi, “Rethinking Pakistan’s Political Economy.”
6 Marx and Engels, “German Ideology.”
7 Marx and Engels, “German Ideology,” 60.
8 Thomas, Gramscian Moment, 186. This, in turn, would point towards potentially more “organic” transitions between civil society and the political state based on democratic control of social life and crucially the means of production and reproduction.
9 In later historical works such as The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx gives practical demonstration of the application and elaboration of his problematic for studying the evolving articulations between the state and civil society in a nonspeculative manner (that is, as grounded in the multiscalar geography of capitalism). In the Grundrisse, Marx also indicates that a volume analyzing the “State as the epitome of bourgeois society” was part of his plans. As we know, this project could not, because of limitations of time and human mortality, come to pass. See Marx, “Grundrisse,” 45.
10 Gramsci, Selections, 160.
11 Thomas, Gramscian Moment, 137.
12 Gramsci, Selections, 182.
13 Thomas, Gramscian Moment, 193.
14 Gramsci, Selections, 263.
15 Thomas, Gramscian Moment, 194.
16 Compare with Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” and Stuart Hall’s critique of Althusser in Hall, “Signification, Representation, Ideology.”
17 The concept of an “articulated historic bloc” has been usefully deployed to conceptualize the differentiated nature of hegemony in a social formation. For example, see Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance,” and Short, “Difference and Inequality.”
18 Gramsci’s supposed positing of an ontological distinction between “Eastern” and “Western” modalities of capitalist transition/modernity is commented upon widely, not least in Perry Anderson’s influential article “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci.” However, as Peter Thomas shows in The Gramscian Moment, such interpretations of hegemony and passive revolution are based on a philologically incorrect reading of the Prison Notebooks.
19 Thomas, “Modernity as ‘Passive Revolution,’” 73.
20 Morton, Unravelling Gramsci, 148.
21 Morton, Unravelling Gramsci, 138. For a recent deployment of passive revolution in combination with “uneven and combined development” for conceptualization of the “international” in processes of state formation, see Hesketh, “Passive Revolution.”
22 Guha, “Some Aspects,” 3.
23 Guha, “Some Aspects,” 4.
24 Modonesi, Constructing the Political Subject, 21.
25 Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought.
26 Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, 50.
27 The term “dominance without hegemony” is of course the title of Ranajit Guha’s highly influential work about colonial rule in British India (see Guha, Dominance without Hegemony). Here, however, I focus on Chatterjee’s mobilization of Gramsci for a few reasons. Firstly, while Guha works with “hegemony” and “domination” as his central concepts when approaching colonial rule in India, it is Chatterjee who (among the Subalternists) accords “passive revolution” a central position as the particular modality of capitalist rule/transition in (post)colonies. Secondly, my approach, which centres passive revolution and the transitions/short-circuits between civil and political society in postcolonial social formations, brings me in close conversation with Chatterjee’s later mobilization of these concepts. As such, while Guha’s Dominance without Hegemony is “perhaps the single most striking work ever inspired by Gramsci” (Anderson, “Heirs of Gramsci,” 86), it is Chatterjee’s innovative, if idiosyncratic, mobilization of Gramscian concepts with regards to the totality of postcolonial social formations that is of greater relevance for the arguments in this paper.
28 The Mandal Commission was formed in India by the post-Emergency Janata Party government in 1979. It recommended increasing quotas in various governmental and educational bodies for historically disadvantaged caste groups (dubbed “Other Backwards Classes,” (OBCs)). The implementation of the Mandal report saw an increased assertion of lower caste politics in various states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Upper- and middle-caste reaction against this subaltern upsurge is considered to have contributed to the rise of Hindutva fundamentalism in India. See, Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution.
29 Chatterjee, “On Civil and Political Society,” 172.
30 Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed, 36.
31 Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed, 24.
32 Goswami, Producing India, 22–23.
33 Hart, “Political Society and its Discontents,” 45.
34 Alavi himself never explicitly employs Gramscian concepts, such as passive revolution and the integral state; however, as we will see in the coming paragraphs, he works within a similar problematic but with key weaknesses.
35 Alavi, “Structure of Peripheral Capitalism,” 181.
36 Alavi, “State and Class,” 298. Of course, Alavi is not the only scholar to point to the persistence of a plurality of dominant classes in peripheral social formations. However, others such as Ranajit Guha and Mahmood Mamdani attribute this more to the specific mode of colonial rule in different contexts than to any economic imperative per se. See Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony and Mamdani, Citizen and Subject.
37 Alavi, “State and Class,” 302.
38 Ahmad, “Postcolonial Systems of Power,” 128.
39 Singh, Colonial Hegemony, 48.
40 See, for example, Alavi, “Ethnicity.”
41 In the next section, I explore these silences in Alavi in more detail, by looking at the changing historic bloc in post-1970s Pakistan.
42 Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic, 119.
43 Thomas, “Modernity as ‘Passive Revolution,’” 67.
44 Fanon, The Wretched.
45 Fanon, The Wretched, 117.
46 Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic, 132.
47 Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic, 106, 144.
48 Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic, 130.
49 Bayart, State in Africa, 98.
50 Bayart, State in Africa, 219.
51 Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic, 121.
52 Fanon, The Wretched, 199.
53 Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic, 153.
54 Gramsci, Selections, 418.
55 Fanon, The Wretched, 199.
56 Alavi, “State in Post-Colonial Societies.”
57 Alavi, “Formation,” 18.
58 Compare with Mouffe, “Hegemony and Ideology.”
59 Ali, Communism in Pakistan.
60 For example, almost 1.2 million workdays were lost to industrial disputes and militancy in 1973 alone, compared to just 0.2 million lost workdays just a decade earlier in 1963. See Candland, “Workers’ Organizations in Pakistan.”
61 Shaheed, “Union Leaders.”
62 For instance, in 10 years between 1977 and 1987, more than US$20 billion was remitted through official channels alone. See, Zaidi, Issues, 503.
63 Akhtar, “Overdeveloping State,” 203.
64 Toor, State of Islam.
65 Captured perhaps most poignantly in Mohammed Hanif’s highly acclaimed novel Case of Exploding Mangoes.
66 Government of Pakistan, Economic Survey 2005–6.
67 Kemal and Qasim, “Precise Estimates.”
68 Yusuf, Conflict Dynamics in Karachi, 26.
69 Akhtar, “Overdeveloping State,” 171.
70 Gramsci, Selections, 59.
71 While a direct translation of ihsan in Urdu is “reward” or “doing someone a favour,” in everyday parlance the word means a deep indebtedness to the local intermediary/party worker who had solved a person’s or their group/family’s issues with regards to securing jobs, solving problems with the police etc.
72 Akhtar, “Overdeveloping State,” 203.
73 Toor, State of Islam.
74 Zaman, “Sectarianism in Pakistan.”
75 This led to a totalitarian nationalism based on an “overwhelmingly exclusive polity and symbolic apparatus” and violently exclusivist effects, especially for women and religious minorities. See Bannerji, “Cultural Nationalism,” 103.
76 For example, a former Vice President of Citibank was appointed Finance Minister (and promoted to Prime Minister in 2004) while a World Bank official was appointed Provincial Finance and Planning Minister for Sindh (later made Federal Minister for Privatization and Investment).
77 As several commentators have pointed out, Pakistan has generally not had a major role in the economic calculus of multinational capital, but is of enormous geopolitical significance for imperialism (Ahmad, “Democracy and Dictatorship,” 132). As such, the United States has always maintained much closer and organic linkages to the Pakistani military than the various fractions of the bourgeoisie. Also see Husain, “Pakistan and IMF.”
78 Warraich, “New Direction”; Durr-e-Nayab, “Estimating.”
79 Excellent accounts of the rise of ethnic politics based in the Muhajir (migrants from India during Partition) middle class of Sindh can be found in Verkaaik, Migrants and Militants, and N. Baig, “Mohallah to Mainstream.”
80 Laclau, Politics and Ideology, 172–6.
81 Khan, “West & East.” There is also a pronounced spatial aspect to the protohegemonic project and aspirations of the newly emergent middle class, most visibly expressed through yearnings towards a “world class” city and claims to (an exclusionary) urbanity
82 Gramsci, Selections, 349.
83 AFP, “PTI Second Most Votes.”
84 “Imran Khan modifies his Demand.”
85 Graf, “State in Third World,” 145.
86 Graf, “State in Third World,” 146.
87 Siddiqa, Military, Inc.
88 Having retired at the end of 2016, Gen. Sharif is now leading a Saudi-led, 39-country military coalition (Siddiqui, “Raheel Sharif’s Appointment”). Pakistani generals’ willing and well-paid services to foreign powers are, of course, no new development. See, for example, Mashal, “Pakistani Troops.”
89 Sahill, “Pakistan’s Terrorism Discourse;” Boone, “Islamabad Targets Slums.”
90 A. Ahmad, “India Liberal Democracy;” Palshikar, “India’s Party System.”
91 Gramsci, Selections, 161.
92 Jorgic, “Pakistani Power Firms,” 92–97 and 99–103.
93 Husain, “Hidden Costs.”
94 Guriro, “Pakistan’s Coal Expansion.”
95 Kakar, “CPEC Controversy.”
96 Husain, “CPEC Enclaves.”
97 Rehman, “ASWJ’s Avowal to Mend”; Arfeen, “Mainstreaming Militancy.”
98 “Parliamentary leaders, extension of military courts.”
99 Sayeed. “Missing Activists’ Families.”
100 “No Stone Unturned to Complete CPEC: COAS.”
101 “Pakistan Coercion, Afghan Refugees.”
102 Jalil, “Government Versus NGOs.”
103 Hart, “Relational Comparison Revisited.”
104 Gramsci, Selections, 418.