The bourgeois has left!

The enemy is not Mexican, Muslim or the fact that you said a naughty word. It is the capitalist mode of production

At some point young people decided that holding on to a vague sort of feminist/socialist position on social media in lieu of having a conscience (or a personality) was a nice strategy to go about living their otherwise bourgeois super-privileged lives. The fact that these progressive ideas are adhered to only loosely in real life becomes abundantly clear when you consider how these ideas always ever remain theoretical (and fragmentary to boot) and never quite enter the world of practical reality. 

A Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) supporter, say what you will, puts his money where his mouth is. Or, if you wish to be shamed by a more progressive example: Manzoor Pashteen’s supporters are equally ready to confront reality head on in order to change it, putting even life on the line to do so.
The bourgeois leftist lobby is extremely vocal online, but it can collectively be described only as noise, at best. They have their moments in the spotlight when even they will take to the streets, but those are singular annual events or follow the wake of a particularly noteworthy tragedy. 

Rape is a daily occurrence in our country. And it is ignored just as readily by a bourgeois feminist as anybody else. The only instance in recent memory when it was taken up as a cause was when somebody from their own social class became a victim during the recent, terrible motorway incident. Upperclass feminists rolled out in droves when they saw one of their own harmed, and that too only when they recognised that now the threat had become immediate. So long as it keeps happening to working class or lower income class women, you won’t hear a peep from our social justice brigade, much less a protest. In any case, the passion, the rage, the revolutionary fervour lasted five days. And then, nothing. Progressively labelled instagram accounts are now selling merchandise though! Place your orders for your very own feminist hoodie!

But when these so-called progressives do show up to decry any awful event, their slogans mean nothing to the masses and ring hollow even among sympathetic ears. And this takes us back to the idea that there’s something inherently flawed with relying on elitist bourgeois women and men (really the white people of Pakistan) for an education in progressive politics. 
They offer you catch phrases, slogans, quotable quotes, shareable cliches, and labels. Labels that you can toss around to categorise and compartmentalise, censor and condemn. Overused words like ‘problematic’, ‘mansplaining’, and phrases like ‘emotional labour’, ‘internalised misogyny’ and the holy grail of pseudo analysis, the singular all consuming signifier: Patriarchy. Anything and everything even slightly disconcerting is, and always must have been, Patriarchy. Anything and everything with the slightest hint at being wholesome and life affirming is attributed to a vague feminine power with associated laudatory phrases. Essentialising women as some sort of fairy godmothers is ahistorical and frankly stupid. 

Why? Because a binary of women versus men is created in pretty much the same way all populist leaders tend to point to a particular group of really very varied individuals who may or may not have anything to do with the problem at hand and scream: enemy! 
For Trump the enemy was the ubiquitous Immigrant. For Modi it was the Muslim. In Pakistan the enemy is the non-Muslim, or even the Muslim when it’s the Shia or the Ahmedi, or the Pashtoon or the Baloch, OK so really everybody. But for the desi feminist, it is this vague, nebulous constant called Men, ignoring completely the undeniable reality that this category is just as meaningless as any other. Or, when they’re trying really hard to seem nuanced: Patriarchy. But in practice it always comes down to the same.
And this is all done to amass a wealth of online followers, retweets, reposts, and thus gain the illusion of being relevant in an increasingly alienating noisy social media oriented lifestyle. In all these cases, the problem can never be solved. Instead, these linguistic categories are used to create the illusion of control and order. You have something vague to go on and on about to psychologically satisfy yourself. It is at best cathartic. Class takes a backseat to gender. And once that happens, then it’s a toss up between gender, orientation, cis-trans and as many categories of Who Wants to be the Biggest Victim.

These phrases and labels such as they are, must have meant something at some point, but are now used exclusively to shut down conversation, to stem debate and to censor those who do not agree with anything and everything you say. 
This can be seen when questions are raised by those who are avowedly sympathetic to the feminist objective. Coming from a man, criticism is to be ignored, primarily because a man does not possess the correct set of genitals and outward appearance to claim experiential knowledge. This line of reasoning has its merits and demerits. But things take on an absurd colour when women who do possess the necessary accoutrement and experience are labelled as suffering from “internalised misogyny” when their critique begins to target feminist discourse, such as it is, online. What a convenient way to shut down opposition and critique. If it harms any cause it harms the progressive and liberal cause. Conservatives never really bought into your nonsense in the first place. They’re immune.
And frankly, there’s very little difference in tendency between what the overuse of these words and phrases achieves and what TLP’s followers wish to achieve every time they use the word Toheen, or Namoos in a phrase meant to disarm and discredit. Just as when the state labels somebody as a foreign agent or a yahoodi sympathiser. 

TLP silences people with the threat of death.  Liberals silence people with the threat of being cancelled online. The severity of the latter compared to the former may seem ridiculous, perhaps no more than say virtual bullying, but seeing as how so much of bourgeois life (from social to academic to business) is spent online, this can have dire consequences. 

Consider the aunty who teaches at an elite Lahori university and will often be the first to tweet when there’s a point to be scored on the socialist-feminist front, but maintains a deathly silence when her parent institution raises its students’ fee by a staggering 40% during Lockdown 1.0 and she continues maintaining her vow of silence when the institution starts firing low income employees during the same period! Her silence is paid for. 

If Pakistan’s leftists are bourgeois to the max, which they undoubtedly are, Lahore has produced some of the worst most hypocritical, and frankly, most liberal of the lot. The way these soundbites and slogans are used to fire the imagination of young people, especially students, only to use their strength of numbers to establish the reputation of the purveyor of these soundbites and slogans as a cult leader is frankly damning evidence that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. 

Not only are you creating a large mass of semi literate cultists, you’re pretty much following the model of the extreme right wing conservative. The only difference is in language and vocabulary. 

Only the most destitute and decadent of minds would try to fix your use of language while the world starves or lies helpless without shelter, unable to breathe air that has achieved a state far beyond all acceptable levels of toxicity. This is another hallmark of the liberalised left: Their focus is on inserting asterisks in the word rape. To achieve what?! To signal how sensitive they are to our feelings. What a way to infantilise everybody who has a functioning brain. Just say the word you mean, you clown! 

The truth is, the enemy is not the Mexican, the Muslim (or the various sects thereof), the enemy is not the fact that you said a naughty word, nor the neighbour across the border. The enemy is the capitalist mode of production. Whether you’re white, brown, black, gay, trans, or frankly a cow in a factory farm, you are all one, united in the fight against Capital. And you have less than seven years left to figure this out or the world will end. 

But, all we have are these self-promoting cult leaders and influencers drowning out reason and debate. What worries me is not that these people are fame-whores. What worries me is that they’re willing to squander a position of influence that could have been better served to move the discussion back to the critique of Capital. 

The liberation of woman is impossible, without the liberation of humankind. It’s not going to happen. The fact that some of the most vile MNC’s on earth project an outwardly feminist, queer, trans friendly face should be sufficient evidence that this is so.