Racial Nationalism, Subjectivities, and Class
It’s interesting how, in an intellectual journey, one unlearns sometimes to learn anew, and then, at some stage, one relearns what they had unlearned earlier to learn again. Hegel once wrote about this kind of experience of a [sic] man who repeats the prayers he had once memorised as a child, but only with a lifetime of experience. The concept of the nation in Political Science resembles that man’s prayers about whom Hegel wrote. Even class consciousness, at least in our anti-colonial history, assumes imaginations of community/people/nation, i.e., political subjectivities. If class is both subjective and objective, it is the economic content of class that has mainly an objective character. Similarly, I argue that the recent national movements (movements in Kashmir, Pakhtunkhwa, and Balochistan – all mostly employ national idioms) are defying the official Pakistani racial nationalism, albeit in popular forms. The Pashtun national movement, too, teaches us that struggles of war-torn working classes continue around the idiom of ‘nation ’. The Left needs to interrogate why, instead of being sceptical of these movements in the name of the dreaded nationalism.
Let me first explain the history of racist Pakistani nationalism. Like every form of nationalism, it needed to frame the Other(s) in relation to itself outside and inside its territory. This was realised in the known anti-Hindu/India Islamic imaginary since the time of partition, but the Afghan racial construct is rarely taken into account in historiography. The Pakistani state inherited Afghan xenophobia from the British Empire: the outstanding Durand Line issue and the colonial foreign policy about Afghanistan, i.e., Kipling’s Great Game. Later, during and after the Jihad, muhajir and Afghani became swearwords for Afghans almost everywhere in Pakistan. The Khudai Khidmatgars were also seen as Afghan agents by the colonial and postcolonial state. It has a direct connection to the fact that Pashtun politicians, from Fazlur Rehman to Mehmood Khan Achakzai and Manzoor Pashteen, are smeared as ‘Afghanis’ in the media discourses. This history of racism is essential to register in order to overcome it in universalist socialist struggles and alternative national imaginations.
For Pashtuns, any alternative national reconstruction is incomplete without the simultaneous unbuilding of this racial nationalism. Political workers must tread carefully in dealing with this dialectic. Rational abstraction of the former amounts to standing in the camp of the ruling class because it glosses over racial relations. On the other hand, focusing energies primarily on unbuilding racial nationalism through nationalism risks another racial project, and leaves the door closed for reconstruction. Pashtun and other oppressed nations face far harsher conditions than those in central Pakistan. Does that mean we have turned nationalistic, or worse, chauvinistic? Not at all.
Recognising the racism embedded in the Pakistani polity cannot be brushed aside in these terms. The most recent example of this was seen in the current ‘hard-state’s’mass deportation of Afghans, not to mention the everyday oppression in police stations, and stereotyping of working-class Pashtuns as Afghanis or nanbaais in the dominant Pakistani imagination. These recent events are only a link in this long chain of history of racism. One can also note the alienation of Baloch, Kashmiris, and Gilgit-Baltis in the recent waves of oppression against popular movements there. But the history of racism towards Pashtuns is linked to the geography of militarised capitalism in Pakistan: a hungry Punjabi worker selling their flesh for bread is deplorable, but they are still relatively more privileged than a hungry Pashtun worker being exploited while a quadcopter is dropping bombs. A war is a war, no matter how culpable for all this are the Punjabi civilian and militarised bourgeoisie and its subservient bourgeoisie in other nations.
The mechanical Left would hurriedly charge us with heresy here: ‘look, you are dividing workers on a national basis’. But Marxist dialectic, while acknowledging similarities between categories, does not ignore their differences. What moment is this Left waiting for? The struggle towards emancipation demands that we take into account those spatiotemporal differences. The struggles of nations in Pakistan expand the contours of politics and produce a crisis in a theory which ignores particularity. Including these movements as a primary agenda of emancipation makes theory conform to reality, not vice versa.
At the same time, we must also lay bare the mainstream Pashtun nationalist parties. Did they pose any resistance to the deportation of Afghans? Do they even represent the war-affected communities? The Pashtun nationalist parties are closer to the politics of central Pakistan than to representing the politics of the masses in Pashtun lands. For example, PKMAP’s politics can be described as pro Imran, while the ANP leadership supports the current ‘hard state’ and is against Imran Khan. These parties had progressive roots in the past, but do not have a popular following today. They can be safely called the allies of the state. contemporary national movement is led by the PTM, is spontaneous, anti-war, and popular, but not without theoretical weaknesses.
It has sprung up from a geography which has historically been a constituency of armed struggle – first of anti-colonial forces against British colonialism and later of the Taliban and other unpopular militants. It is an altogether new form and represents the rural working-class people who have experienced capitalism as a system with advanced war jets and concrete cantonments. Unlike elite nationalist parties, their struggle against war is, within certain limits, an anti-capitalist national struggle. It has over time taken an ultra nationalist turn, but the unity of spontaneity and conscious leadership itself demands patience, struggle, and solidarity. It is not a question of making a speech only or ‘educating’ the people from the stage.
To conclude, an alternative national imaginary is then tied to the unbuilding of this racial nationalism. Racial oppression of nations challenges the mechanical reduction of politics to the struggle between the proletariat and bourgeoisie. There is no denying the fact that the capital-labour contradiction is the final determining contradiction, but this contradiction is rarely pure in history. We need to reiterate that only a universalist socialist programme can unite the national struggles, but the national contradictions stand in an overdetermining relation to the economic contradiction. Even capitalist exploitation is carried out not despite racial differences but through them.