What was so special about
Eqbal Ahmad? Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy explains, followed by
excerpts from Eqbal's essay "From potato sack to
potato mash"
The leadership of his own country never
had much use for Eqbal. During Pakistan's first martial
law government there was a warrant of arrest on him, while
in the second he was put on a death sentence. In the third
military government, that of General Ziaul Haq, he became
a persona non grata. With the passage of years, and his
eventual return to Pakistan, his efforts gradually focused
upon healing the wounds of partition, and diffusing the
poison of intolerance and militarism. He redoubled his
efforts after that fateful day of May 11, 1998, when the
ground trembled uncontrollably at Pokhran and the subcontinent
was to change forever. Exactly one year later on May 11,
1999 Eqbal Ahmad died in an Islamabad hospital. He was
67.
Editorials and newspaper columns published
around the world quickly paid homage to a unique and fearless
thinker. Egypt's Al-Ahram wrote 'Palestine has lost a
friend', while the New York Times, whose Vietnam and Palestine
policies Eqbal had forcefully criticized, admitted that
he 'woke up America's conscience'. The Economist described
him as 'a revolutionary and intellectual who was the Ibn
Khaldun of modem times'.
An apt tribute was that of the secretary-general
of the United Nations, Kofi Annan: Eqbal Ahmad was 'a
shining example of what a true internationalist should
be'. Indeed, here was a man for whom every country was
his own country, the head of an international clan that
had no blood linkages, and which was above the divides
of religion or race. Its many thousand members were spread
across the continents from Vietnam to the West Bank and
Morocco, from India and Pakistan to Europe and North America,
bonded together only by a shared belief in human dignity,
justice, liberty, and all that is rich and precious in
the human experience.
* * * * *
Excerpt from "From potato sack to
potato mash"
Access to the basic necessities of life
in pre-capitalist societies appeared to the people as
being dependent upon natural and social forces which were
impervious to human needs, unyielding to human effort
or reasoning (for example, floods, storms, droughts, pestilence,
raids, invasions and the lord's extortions). Faced with
such persistent and unpredictable dangers, people were
only too aware of the frailty of all things human; thrift,
hard work, and perseverance helped one survive when things
were good, but the threat of calamity hung over all, even
the unsleeping.
These conditions made people cautious;
they created small spaces of security and predictability
around them, strove for concrete and limited goals, and
sought to propitiate the occult forces by means of prayers,
offerings and incantations, beliefs and rituals which
also helped strengthen communal solidarity.
Having experienced power primarily as
a vehicle that caused suffering, peasants distrusted it.
Peasants could be betrayed. 'Once firmly mounted, the
rider begins to spur the horse' runs one proverb. If coopted
into power one was corrupted and betrayed one's community:
'He has just become a Muslim, and already claims descent
from the Prophet.'
Peasants worked with, not against, the
elements, and did not hesitate to bend with the wind that
could not be resisted. Whenever faced with bold and new
schemes, peasants were wary and cautious lest they put
themselves in the position of the proverbial fool who
jumped in the river in order to avoid the rain.
This did not prevent peasants from dreaming
about an ideal world in which justice prevailed. After
all, their lives were marked by a fundamental, systematic
economic injustice; they suffered from the 'permanent
handicap' of having their meager surplus taken from them.
To cite John Berger again: 'For the producer
of food, to have to feed others before one could feed
one's own seemed a total reversal of good order. Such
an injustice, the peasant reasons, cannot always have
existed; so he assumes a just world at the beginning.'
Whence came the drive toward the utopian, millenarian
movement which occasionally but powerfully swept through
peasant societies.
These movements conceived of a transformation
from the real to the desired world by means of a sudden,
thorough and apocalyptic upheaval. They were extravagant
outbreaks of shared dreams, not a consistent, much less
functioning, programme of action. In our time, these millenarian
and primordial uprisings have been the forerunners of
revolutionary movements, thus linking, as Barrington Moore,
Jr suggests, the dualism of the past with the dualism
of the present.
Political power
The ruling minority's elitism and injustices
notwithstanding, precapitalist systems of power enjoyed
a certain legitimacy among their subjects. Legitimacy
is a crucial though badly defined and vastly misused term.
As used here, legitimacy is not merely a matter of beliefs
and sentiments; even less is it a question of popularity
of government. It refers to that crucial and ubiquitous
factor in politics which invests power with authority.
It comes to states and other institutions
of power when their constituents recognize their claim
to authority in some principles or sources beyond their
mastery of the means of coercion, or when citizens actively
or meaningfully participate in the process of government,
i.e., when there is a maximum of self-government.
Above all, legitimacy is assured to the
extent that the political relationships and processes
promoted by the system of power are responsive to the
forces created by the system of production. In order to
be legitimate, power must find an operative ideological
justification in the divine right of kings - the mandate
of heaven, the sanctity of priests, or the superiority
of lords; in constitutions stressing the principle of
democratic consent, or in the dictatorship of the proletariat.
But its functional validity comes from
the concurrence of economic and social forces and needs
with it political institutions and relationships. The
erosion of legitimacy generally marks the increasing shift
of citizens from obeying authority to rebelling against
it.
Its breakdown always heralds the pressure
toward revolution. Unlike rebels - who normally protest
the failures and excesses of existing authority rather
than question its right to exist - revolutionaries challenge
a system's very title to rule. They question the legitimacy
of the entire system and seek new bases of authority in
new values as well as in new political and economic arrangements.
In no small measure the pre-capitalist
systems enjoyed a certain legitimacy because in relation
to what centralism implies today, state power in these
societies was invariably decentralized. Even in such 'centralized'
systems as the Chinese, Mughal, or Ottoman, power was
pluralistically distributed among more or less autonomous
tribal and religious leaders, landed lords, provincial
governors and other state officials.
When excess of discontent led to an outbreak,
the rebels' targets were normally the local authorities.
Central authority was often too remote to be deemed responsible
('If only the king knew!'). The kingship or the caliphate
was invested with enough inscriptive legitimacy for the
office not to come into question (thus the restorationist
thrust).
Repressive state
The centralized, repressive state backed
by a well-organized bureaucracy, a nationally deployed
police force, and a large standing army is a contribution,
by and large of western imperialism. 'Oriental despotism'
arrived in the Third World in the guise of 'westernization,'
a crucial part of the colonial baggage; in the post-colonial
period it prospered and strengthened under the cover of
'modernization'.
Pre-capitalist societies were usually
composed of a multitude of small, cohesive, self-absorbed,
autonomous, often mutually hostile units whose integration
into a larger whole was markedly deficient. This lack
of integration had important consequences: people devoted
the greatest part of their lives to the conduct of local
affairs; groups living outside the village community or
kinship group appeared to them either as irrelevant strangers
to be avoided and ignored, or as potential enemies to
be feared or courted, or as potential victims to be used
and exploited.
Cooperation across the boundaries of clan
and community was a compact of defence entered into only
in times when the survival of all was threatened by an
external enemy or a natural calamity. Being so dispersed
and disconnected, the mass of the people were unorganized
and - given the pre-technological means of communication
and conditions of work - unorganizable on a large scale
or sustained basis. Hence local problems rarely merged
to become society-wide issues.
Karl Marx noted this phenomenon while
discussing the lack of revolutionary potential in the
French peasantry, and concluded that:
Insofar as millions of families live under
economic conditions of existence that separate their mode
of life, their interest and their culture from those of
the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition
to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is
merely a local interconnection among these small-holding
peasants, and the identity of their interest begets no
community, no national bond and no political organization
among them, they do not form a class.
Less than a hundred years later peasants
constituted the backbone of protracted and successful
revolutionary struggles in the Third World. This is because
these non-industrialized countries have undergone, and
are still undergoing, a shift in the fundamental equation
of human condition. This change marks the Third World's
transition from rebellion to revolution.
Revolutionary challenge
In the Third World today, history and
technology have intensified and accentuated the injustices
and tensions which, in pre-capitalist times, produced
peasant rebellions and millenarian movements. The social
and political milieu which had, in the past, circumscribed
discontent within the boundaries of religiosity and rebellion
has been drastically altered by: (1) the forced integration
of Third World economies into the international market
system; (2) the externally determined superimposition
of modern technology upon pre-capitalist social and economic
infrastructures; and (3) the consequent transformation
of land and labour into commodities (in the capitalist,
market sense of the word).
These fundamental, if uneven and exogenous,
changes define the contemporary crisis of the Third World.
Past grievances remain; in fact, they have vastly augmented.
Yet, what underlies the passage from rebellion to revolution
is not so much the augmentation of grievances as the creation
of a political milieu which compels collective action
toward a different, better world.
The basic drive, the inner logic of this
situation is not merely the fulfilment of limited goals,
like raising the per capita income and level of food consumption,
but the transformation of society and, within it, of all
relationships between classes and individuals, between
the elite and the masses, between national minorities
and the dominant majority, between men and women.
