Degradation of the citizen, labour and the social contract

Pakistan does not have citizens but residents who reside here by fate. Being a citizen would imply a mutually negotiated relation between the individual and the nation-state. Such a relation, meant to theoretically curtail excesses from both sides, does not exist. The powerless who inhabit this land find themselves voiceless and frustrated. Yet, they remain unable to affect change, finding themselves exceedingly removed from the means to do so. For better or worse, modern nation-states are sustained through contractual commitments between state and citizen but we have never taken such commitments seriously.

Let us not forget that we were once a colony, and still are. We have not been able to burn off the dead wood of colonial-era logics that continue treating citizens as security threats meant to be surveilled and controlled. The state and its organs utilise our fellowmen against us; these fellowmen have been so thoroughly hypnotised by the tight ideological grip of those in power that they cannot recognise friend from foe. This is not an argument decrying the pitfalls of their false consciousness — life is rarely that simple to be categorised through such categories. Yet, we are still ruled through division.

In matters of labour, asymmetric power relations translate to abusive systems. Let us take one example. While the upper classes have garnered enough capital to employ a wide array of support staff to sustain their lifestyles, a certain ethics of labour relations, one grounded in love and charitability, has not emerged. Provincial and regressive attitudes about kinship and patronage result in the degradation of human labour. Such attitudes are most aptly displayed in posh enclaves of our cities, where homeowners employ staff on less than fair wages; benefits do not exist, and holidays are hard to come by. If staff does end up taking leave, their wages are subtracted.

With the onset of winter, many workers do not have adequate heating arrangements as they huddle together in dingy “servant quarters”, a designation of space as reprehensible as the living conditions they generally offer. Some sit outside houses, burning wood or whatever they can manage to stay warm. Many employers cannot care to provide proper meals to their staff — the same meals that may have been cooked by the workers themselves. They are simply treated as less-than.

The truth is that those with means do not want things to change even if they decry the sad state of affairs; it is easier to criticise without giving up privilege. If we were to realise that privilege built on injustice is not mere privilege but an indictment of our moral characters, then we may be able to give way for more equitable forms of social and financial difference to emerge, ones that do not produce a concomitant degradation of man.

Such parochial attitudes have also been suffused with an understanding that treats wealth as divine favour or as fruit of hard work. What is forgotten is that it is exceedingly rare to become affluent without the exploitation of labour. It is not important to ruminate on what we technically mean by exploitation here; it is enough to reiterate that the rules of the game that animate lived experience in our country benefit a certain conjunction of elite interests. Individuals benefiting from this arrangement are spread across institutes and are tightly interconnected in shared networks that seek to protect their class interests.

With a citizenry systematically depoliticised, made to believe in imagined threats through the instrumentalisation of religion or the nation, there is little impediment to the way things are done. Those who find themselves slightly beneath the threshold of the elite spend their life trying to accumulate capital, clawing at the borders of prosperity. Those much more distant from this elusive paradise have greater things to worry about in times made worse by the state’s incompetence in all aspects of governance, the burden of which falls disproportionately on the lower rungs of the class ladder. As far as equating divine favour with wealth is concerned, it is not necessary to invoke this as some harmful Protestant idea that has seeped into our imaginations. It is enough to say that our Prophet (peace be upon him) would not have chosen to be the Prophet of the poor if wealth was any marker of divine grace, and the poor would not have been promised to enter paradise before the rich if wealth was any signifier of God’s favour.

The way we organise our politics is untenable; the internal contradictions are too extensive to be reconciled. The constitution of Pakistan, a force that should have ideally fused disparate interests into a union, remains an ambiguous artefact, unsure of its place, misplaced in its formulation, and scared to assert itself lest it be desecrated by those who claim to protect it. It is neither a comprise pact between various factions nor is it a transcendental entity representing the highest ideals we aim for. It is, unfortunately, simply irrelevant.

While the constitution may have theoretical malnourishments in its make-up, these inadequacies are moot because as it cannot even translate its existing demands into practice. Then, to imagine new beginnings from our existing political vocabulary is itself a crisis of imagination. Principally speaking, the constitution is not merely a legal document enumerating a list of contracts. At its core, it is a philosophical practice, not a legal one. We may not like it, but the world of nation-states is our reality. Then, to be a state that works for its people, the first task is to philosophise justly with righteous strength.

Modernist minded religious critics will criticise the modern state as taking away from God’s sovereignty, of making the state the unjustified sovereign. That may be so, but that comes later. In any case, these critics would do well to pay heed to Carl Schmitt’s reminder that the modern state is more theological than it would seem, that, in its constitution, it is no secular wonderland. Schmitt also makes it clear that the sovereign is one who may enact a state of exception to sidestep any legal norm. By this definition, the regulators of the constitution possess little sovereignty. If one wishes to locate where sovereignty lies, let us find who possesses the power to enact such state of exceptions.

Reconstruction starts from an internal recognition that there are other ways for our futures to unfold. But recognition is not enough, we must create new men and women. The oppressor and the oppressed are both dehumanised; the kind of their dehumanisation is different, but both have been made to forget how much better things could be. The oppressor, in his extraction of unjust labour, forgets his humanity, while the oppressed is left gasping for life trying to meet basic needs with little time or energy left to worry about creative pursuits that define human excellence. In this perverse back and forth dance, the biggest victim is human potentiality. It is easy to not hope in such times because not hoping protects us from the heartache that may inevitably follow. Yet, not hoping also closes us off from what could be, from how much better things could be.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 22^nd, 2022.

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