Even it up

"Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
I first read George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ in translation when in school. It was done with great care and as idiomatically as possible while staying close to the original (which of course I found out later) under the supervision of Jamil Akhtar, and was published by Ferozesons, Lahore, if one can correctly recall. There was a rich tradition of translating quite a bit of international literature into Urdu, mostly through English, at that time. But ‘Animal Farm’ got more attention than usual by some of our literary and avid readers and was translated by three different people.
One reason, of course, was Orwell’s sheer brilliance as a writer but the other was the incisive evaluation he offered on the socialist model of the then Soviet Union and the Soviet-led East bloc. He created one of the most amazing metaphorical stories in modern times. The political dimension of the novel was particularly celebrated by those who wanted to challenge the progressive writers’ movement in India and Pakistan and the local left-wing parties who were struggling for a socialist political and economic order.
Orwell’s novel is not just scathing in his satire and criticism of the Soviet model of socialism, it is also a critique of ‘power’ per se where he questions the ability of human beings as a species, or any species for that matter taken as a metaphor in place of humans, to be naturally fair, honest and just in conduct. In contemporary global politics and economic order, Orwell has proved to be right, in short to medium run at least.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was not just a collapse or disintegration of a country. It marked an end to Soviet Marxism and the model of socialism they practised. The crumbling down of protected East European economies and their replacement with free market economy and the transformation of the Chinese socialist model into state-owned welfare capitalism prove him right.
The recent progressive movements in Latin American countries are more about state control on key resources based on their nationalism in the face of American capital’s hegemony and the regulation of the larger market only to an extent. Better than us though in South Asia but not offering a viable international option to be followed equally by the rich or resource-constrained countries of Africa and Asia.
Let us now move forward from humanity’s first experiments with socialism and see where we stand today in the age of 21st century capitalism and how it benefits humanity. From Karachi and Mumbai to Bucharest and Budapest and from Tokyo and Shanghai to New York and Mexico City, there is a near-consensus among powerful or not-so-powerful decision-makers that free and flourishing market economy, unrestricted movement of capital and largely monopolistic private ownership, and taxed to an extent but unregulated income, make growth take place and make the world rich.
There is a lot of evidence presented to prove the point that we have become wealthier over the past few decades. Even in Asian and African third-world countries, progress is observed in certain quarters. However, in the same novel, Orwell says, “Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer – except, of course, for the pigs and the dogs.” That explains the phenomenal economic growth we have observed in countries that chose to leave socialism and become market economies, and third-world countries where pigs (symbolising the elite) and dogs (symbolising the affluent middleclass) have become richer as the majority languishes in grinding poverty, insecurity and helplessness.
Now listen to the power elites who dominate politics and society anywhere in the world, but more so in our part of the world with their consumption of our resources and unbridled pursuit for profit. See how appropriate the following lines are to explain what is happening to the majority of the people. “Comrades!' he cried. 'You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink the milk and eat those apples.”
In the face of growing wealth on the one hand and sustained poverty on the other, gross injustice and indecent living in which the majority of the world’s population lives, the good side of humanity is also at work. It is indeed a moral argument and for that reason I call it the good side. However, it is also a pragmatic argument for many of us as the economic and social progress humanity has made as a whole is threatened by the fast increasing scourge of inequality in human societies.
Thomas Piketty in his seminal work on capital, income and inequalities, ‘Capital in the Twenty-first Century’, where he analyses American and European capitalism since the eighteenth century, says that inequality is not by accident but a function of capitalism. Therefore, capitalism in its present form and shape can only encourage inhuman and unjust structures and expedite the collapse of human societies. Picketty’s robust intellectual inquiry elucidates a new way of thinking and makes crisp and practicable solutions to our problems. I am yet to finish the book and will, therefore, stop my comments on his work here.
Something significant on the subject of rapidly growing inequality that has come out from development practice is Oxfam’s latest research report, ‘Even It Up – Time to End Extreme Inequality’. The report rightly sees poverty and inequality as two different phenomena but establishes a clear link between the two. For some, it is possible in theory that people do not remain poor but social classes remain extremely unequal.
However, the Oxfam report argues and provides evidence that extreme inequality is the greatest barrier to poverty reduction. Wealth and income distribution and equitable access to resources and opportunities is a precondition to containing abject poverty. It is more than evident that only a small number of economic groups, the elite and the middleclass, benefit from the prevailing system and that is taking us to a crisis of apocalyptic proportions.
Coming to Pakistan, we find no poverty figures available. The last income and expenditure survey was conducted more than ten years ago. We are so blindly following the neo-liberal globally dominant economic paradigm that even measuring poverty and dispossession is not anyone’s concern, leave alone taking systematic measures to tackle the problem. We have a unique situation here. Neither do we have massive growth nor do we have decreasing poverty. We also do not have any current and credible poverty statistics to look at. But grinding poverty and extreme inequality are all around us. The elite and the affluent middleclass are consuming whatever wealth we produce as a nation. They are also consuming whatever the country receives from donor countries and institutions in a subtle but decisive way.
Extreme inequality is a time bomb we are sitting on; one that is ticking at a fast pace. We may not be able to look the other way for too long. What we need is a new egalitarian model based on principles of wealth distribution, plural politics and democratic socialism which also provides space for markets and individual entrepreneurs to function within regulation.
The writer is a poet and author based in Islamabad.
Email: harris.khalique@gmail.com