Failure of Institutions in Pakistan?

There is nothing wrong with Pakistan’s socio-cultural institutions; they are working exactly the way they should logically be working, i.e., what they are meant for. The basic fallacy that one tends to fall prey to while making a judgement about the failure of institutions in this country is the idealistic position that institutions somehow evolve and work in a vacuum, being cut off from the rest of the society, particularly from the foundational base on which the whole of the social set-up is structured. No matter how perverse may be the rest of the society, institutions should work for people’s welfare, which I believe is a rather glib, moralistic approach to study an objective situation.

Call me a neo-communist, an apologist for Marxism or whatever, but I think Karl Marx got it exactly right when he wrote in the Preface to Critique of Political Economy that “… In the social production of their life, men enter into definite … relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. ...”

This implies that people don’t just come together and agree to form a social order. Society has a base and is organized in terms of the logical requirements of that base. The base of society is the way people relate to one another in the production and their means of subsistence (or wealth generation), i.e., the productive relations. Social classes are an outcome of aspect of these productive relations. People relate to one another in this class system through their respective position vis-à-vis the ownership of the means production and the wealth generated therefrom. This class system in turn defines the society—the state, its legal system, social institutions and ideological constructs. These elements make up what we call the superstructure of the society. The superstructure reflects, protects, organizes and strengthens the base which defines the productive relations .

Now let’s see how this doctrine of societal evolution and functioning applies to Pakistan in terms of society’s base and the resulting superstructures. Ever since independence as a continuation of the colonial legacy of disinterest in the development of a locally responsible culture and institutions. The productive relations applicable to the people of Pakistan have been based on an ‘unnatural exploitation’ of productive forces as a result of an illegitimate / dishonest relation between the productive process and the people who manage / control it. Illegitimate because factors exogenous to the productive forces and process of the country have acted as the main source of wealth generation. Be it the landowning feudal class or the mercantile/industrial capitalists, they have always relied on these exogenous factors for their material benefit. These factors are:
• Using government’s influence to warp the competition in the entrepreneurial playing field.
• Successive governments’ non-reliance on the local production as the primary source of its revenues and prosperity / welfare of the people. They have been relying overwhelmingly on external sources such as foreign aid, expatriates’ remittances and stipend-like aid packages during the period of Cold War alliance with USA and its allies.
• Artificial inflation of the volume of wealth in the country due to the existence of a parallel Black Economy based on smuggling, corruption, and drug money.

These factors largely sum up the base on which Pakistan’s society and its superstructural institutions have been built. The people whose wealth generation depends on this base cannot afford to have institutions unlike the ones that have been and are operating in this country. The superstructures will only reflect, protect, organize and strengthen the base.

Just as you cannot have oranges growing on apple trees, no matter how many reforms of the superstructures / institutions we may perform, as long as the base of our social order continues to be what it is, institutions will never work for the welfare of the people of this country.