Aasim Sajjad Akhtar takes on a number of challenging academic tasks in his new volume that examines state, capital, hegemony and resistance in Pakistan in the 21^st century. At one level, the book attempts to fill a gap in structural social scientific analysis of the effects in the Global South of the global economic and political crisis underway since the financial crash of 2007-08. Unlike the many scholarly attempts to understand the political fallout of the crisis and the rise of authoritarian ideologies in Europe and North America, the distinct social-structural roots and ramifications of the crisis in the postcolonial regions of Asia and Africa have been substantially under-examined. Akhtar aims to correct this oversight and tries to examine both what the global crisis looks like from the vantage point of the Global South and what that reveals about the operations of neoliberal hegemony at large.

Concurrently, the book is also an attempt to make sense of the material and ideological configuration of power in Pakistan in the 21^st century, picking up where Akhtar left off in his previous work on Pakistan’s political economy, The Politics of Common Sense (Akhtar, 2017). In that volume, Akhtar expanded on Hamza Alavi’s thesis on the ‘Overdeveloped State’ (1972) from a Gramscian lens to build an insightful theoretical framework for how the Zia dictatorship hegemonised a ruling class project in Pakistan built around a politics of patronage. The new volume provides a historicised account of the evolution of this dispensation of power in the era of neoliberal transformation – beginning, in Pakistan’s case, with the beginnings of the Musharraf dictatorship at the turn of the century – and calls attention to new trends in state and capitalist accumulation, evolving hegemonic narratives and their contestation in digital spaces.

Akhtar’s volume is also an elaboration of a key concept running through the text that he deems ontologically central to the prevailing hegemonic order – ‘middle class aspiration’ (5). Drawing on the work of Gramsci (1971) and Fanon (1965) on hegemony and political subjectivity, Akhtar places the aspirational middle-class subject, understood as an ideological category rather than a social faction, as being integral to the hegemonic ideal of the current era – fusing a desire for commodity consumption, upward mobility and elevated social status with a fear of the proverbial ethnic, racial, religious or gendered ‘other’.

Near the end, the book transforms into a prescriptive text, in that it attempts to identify grounded alternative political imaginaries to neoliberalism, militarism and imperialism in Pakistan and the postcolonial world, ones that understand and respond to the new contradictions and crises neoliberal capitalism has engendered and to give birth to a new universalist political subjectivity. Here, Akhtar both draws on his years of experience as an organiser with progressive people’s movements in the country and excavates the past for inspiration to identify the basis for an emancipatory politics for the present.

In terms of structure, the book itself is divided into four main chapters – The Integral State, Fear and Desire, The Digital Lifeworld and The Classless subject – sandwiched between an introduction and epilogue that theoretically and politically contextualise the analysis.

In the first chapter, Akhtar uses the Gramscian notion of the ‘Integral State’ to outline the contemporary structures of power that condition the political in Pakistan in the 21^st century. He describes how a militarised state apparatus colludes with domestic and foreign capital to put in place regimes of accumulation, dispossession and patronage, involving an array of intermediaries, including ‘mafioso-like’ (35) elements in land development, construction, manufacturing, transport, mining and other sectors that rely on and extend rents to the military establishment and civilian bureaucracy. Akhtar sees these patronage networks as both successful at incorporating various classes and intermediaries in global and local circuits of capital, as well as inherently violent and expropriative in a way that produces inherent volatility.

Drawing from research and engagement with grassroots activists across the country, Akhtar identifies various cases of ‘uneven development geographies’ (49) produced by this structure of power. He describes the operations of a ‘land broker state’ that facilitates capital to acquire land, minerals, agriculture and other resources, often forcibly dispossessing local communities in the process. He outlines how opaque land development processes displace the poor from Bahria Town Karachi to DHA Lahore, developments fueled by an insatiable aspirational desire for gated housing. He also examines the role of Chinese capital under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) across multiple geographies, including securitisation and the displacement (and subsequent resistance) of fishing communities in Gwadar, and the despoiling of natural eco-systems due to coal extraction under the Thar Coal initiative in Sindh and mineral mining in Gilgit Baltistan. The non-democratic and violent manner in which these forms of ‘development’ have been implemented is for Akhtar not an aberration but a central feature of the accumulation regime.

In the second chapter, titled ‘Fear and Desire’, Akhtar illustrates how the hegemonic apparatus in Pakistan generates consent for the power structure, underlining the centrality of aspirational middle-class subjectivity in this process. A dialectic of development and terrorism undergirds the politics of fear and desire, creating a binary for the upwardly mobile middle-class subject between the allure of participation in the neoliberal development model and the ever-present destabilising threat of the ethnic, religious, rural or working class ‘other’.

Akhtar describes how the politics of fear, a holdover from the colonial era, was reinforced during the War on Terror as the support of the urban public was mobilised for military operations in the Baloch and Pashtun peripheries, alongside increased use of anti-terrorism laws, profiling and surveillance. These instruments became a means both to engage in material dispossession (as in the case of the mass eviction of the Pashtun-majority I-11 katchi abadi in Islamabad in 2015) as well as to quash dissent. On the flip side, the expansion of a digitalised ‘gig economy’ offering ‘flexibility’ and ‘easy money’ (83) through applications like Careem created a mirage of quick upward mobility for young people in desperate need of employment while often propping up precarious livelihoods with diminishing returns and inhumane working conditions.

Akhtar also discusses here the case of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) led by now-former Prime Minister Imran Khan, which he sees as a political vehicle for the ‘youthful, middle-class subject’ disillusioned with traditional political parties. Akhtar contends that PTI was – with the help of digital and electronic media –able to channel disaffection with the traditional political elite and their patronage logic through a fresh iteration of the age-old politics of anti-corruption, while reflecting the aspirations of the new middle class formed in the consumer-driven growth of the Musharraf dictatorship. In effect, however, Akhtar argues, the party’s reliance on traditional dominant classes and the security establishment, and their attendant patronage networks to secure political power helped consolidate the same militarised, financialised and capitalist order that regimes in the past had kept in place.

Akhtar strikes a relatively pessimistic tone on the emancipatory potential of digital technology in his chapter on ‘The Digital Lifeworld’, emphasising the centrality of the new technology in the universalisation of hegemonic middle-class aspiration. While he acknowledges how the emergence of innumerable ‘digital publics’ (93) has provided opportunities for agency for millions of young people, he also warns of what sociologist William Davies has called the ‘politics of recognition in the age of social media’ (Davies 2021), whereby the business model of platform capitalism produces ‘economies of reputation’ (95) where competition, outrage and ‘revenge politics’ (96) rather than cooperation are the default modus operandi. Akhtar notes with concern the role of digital media in fueling new Far-Right religio-political movements, engendering an individualised consumerist subjectivity among young people, and the reconstitution of existing class, gender and nationalist hierarchies in the digital world.

Despite identifying these pitfalls of the digital space, Akhtar documents the rise of two social movements of recent years that benefited greatly from digital technology – the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM) and the feminist ‘Aurat March’ – terming them as ‘embryonic popular hegemonies’ (123) that have come to constitute challenges to the hegemonic order in different and interconnected ways. Akhtar suggests that the digital space is set to experience a prolonged ‘war of position’ (36) with surveillance, commodification and reaction on the one hand and articulation of universalist political ideas and practices on the other. The discussion on the pitfalls and promises of the digital space is among the most important sections of the book and brings into consideration unexplored aspects of digital technology’s impact on political subjectivity in Pakistan.

In his final chapter, Akhtar adopts a more normative tone in an attempt to outline a theory of emancipatory politics that displaces hegemonic middle-class aspiration with a new ‘universal subject of emancipation’ (117), termed the ‘classless subject’ (108). This subject would embody a new ‘imaginary of development’ that combines the imperatives of recognition with those of redistribution, that would seek to meet the material needs of all while refuting capital’s logic of ‘dispossession, brutalisation and despoiling of nature’ (113). Akhtar lays out a brief sketch of this imaginary, drawing inspiration from the revolutionary internationalism of the anti-colonial past, while considering contradictions of class, nation, gender and ecology that determine the present moment and incorporating the emerging ‘embryonic’ counter-hegemonic movements. After laying out the salient issues that must be foregrounded in this imaginary, Akhtar stresses the need for a return to internationalism, of an avoidance of the rhetoric of hate and an engagement with the question of religious faith in a way that challenges regressive ideas and practices while ‘recognising the religious affinities of large segments of society’ (130).

Akhtar’s book is an important and novel contribution to the political economy of Pakistan and brings forth a range of understudied themes into the discussion. While the socio-economic changes from the period covered in the book have been analysed in different disciplines, they have been far from adequately historicised or theorised. The book goes beyond the surface-level themes surrounding scholarly discussions on Pakistan (like national security, terrorism, and corruption) to delve into the material foundations of Pakistan’s structure of power, the hegemonic ideologies sustaining it and the global currents shaping it. The book supplements and synthesises recent scholarship on Pakistani political economy, including on elite networks (Armytage 2020), passive revolutions (Mallick 2017), infrastructure and state hegemony (Akhter 2015), the new middle class (Maqsood 2017), state building in the peripheries (Ali 2019) and value struggles on agrarian-urban frontiers (Anwar 2018), among others. It also provides important socio-historical context on the emergence of new political formations like the PTI and new social movements like PTM and Aurat March.

In the context of Marxist and postcolonial historiography, Akhtar’s book brings new evidence from Pakistan to bear on the debates surrounding the nature of capitalist accumulation and development in the postcolonial world. He builds on the work of theorists like Kalyan Sanyal (2007), Partha Chatterjee (2008, 2011), Asef Bayat (2013), Lucia Michelutti and Barbara Harris-White (2019), and Dipesh Chakrabarty (2021), while reasserting the need for a focus on class and emphasising the importance of interrogating subjectivity and consciousness in the conversation on economic and political transformation in the Global South. The thrust of his arguments both reflects and urges a shift from the identitarian particularism of the heyday of postcolonial and subaltern studies towards the beginnings of a universalist theory of politics that can create what Chakrabarty refers to as the necessary ‘planetary consciousness’ required to tackle ongoing ecological collapse.

Undertaking such an ambitious theoretical task within a concise volume does of course carry certain risks which impel trade-offs such as accessibility over detail. While discussing new accumulation and dispossession regimes in ‘The Integral State’, though there is mention of ‘mafioso-like’ structures in various economic sectors, there is absent an assessment of the institutional mechanisms, rent-seeking arrangements, formal and informal regulatory capture or roles of political intermediaries that comprise the new accumulation regime. Similarly, while it is mentioned that local patronage networks are integrated into global financial circuits, the nature of those linkages are not fully explored nor the differences between the modus operandi of various kinds of foreign capital in the country (such as the US and Chinese).

Further, while the book explores questions of redistribution and recognition in detail, little attention is devoted to questions of production or productive capacities. The question of whether the preponderance of certain forms of state-patronised capital in Pakistan, such as land development and real estate, has affected productive capacity – central to the country’s economic crises – is not explored. While there is a discussion on the gig economy, the broader growth of the service sector since the Musharraf dictatorship and its relationship with the inequality, unemployment, precarity and indebtedness engendered by neoliberalism is not fully fleshed out.

Such questions become particularly relevant when considering comparative trajectories between other South Asian countries that are mentioned in the book. While similarities in the hegemonic ideas and regimes of dispossession between Pakistan, India and Bangladesh are discussed, the significant and widening developmental differences between these countries across a number of indicators are not. Despite sharing a similar postcolonial legacy, Pakistan’s South Asian neighbors (and certainly other countries further to the East in Asia) have managed to dramatically improve productive capacities (Mian, 2021) as well as state-run social institutions in the same neoliberal period, leading to some undeniable development successes (including higher real wages, literacy, life expectancy and gender equality). To firm up the applicability of the book’s argument about middle-class aspiration under neoliberalism to other similar contexts, there is a need to account for these differences.

The text also does not appear to consider whether the embryonic counter-hegemonies it discusses at length – including those being constructed on the lines of nation and gender – can become implicated in the dominant hegemony of neoliberal aspiration. There is certainly global evidence to suggest this may be the case, including the rise of what has been called ‘Woke Capitalism’ in the West as well as the use of social justice rhetoric to justify foreign intervention by the US military and NATO (Mott, 2022). Pakistan’s own recent history has no shortage of political figures who lay claim to ‘resistance’ along national, gender or class lines before collaborating with state authoritarianism. It may be important for the Left to consider more thoroughly how counter-hegemonies can resist cooptation by state and capital.

Finally, considering recent events in Pakistan and with the benefit of hindsight, it would be interesting to consider how Akhtar understands the events of the past year – particularly the rupture between the military establishment and the PTI – in the context of the hegemonic framework. Does the break between the establishment and the PTI’s social base amount to a fracture in the historical bloc, or simply a rearrangement of power? Does the current political crisis present any opportunities for a reconfiguration of the hegemonic structure? All these questions can and should be the subject of further investigation. For now, Akhtar’s book should serve as essential reading for those seeking to understand how neoliberalism and hegemony functions in 21^st century Pakistan and the Global South.

References:
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