IS DEMOCRACY THE END OF HISTORY?

IS DEMOCRACY
THE END OF HISTORY?


Of course not, for I am no democrat and the purpose of this paper is to persuade you not to be one either.

Why Democracy?

Let me begin by listing some standard objections to democratic phenomena. Democratic societies are invariably dominated by entrenched bureaucratic elites. This is the case throughout Europe, in America and in Japan. The institutionalization of the democratic process is virtually synonymous with the process of the bureaucratization of society. Bureaucratized societies are inevitably dominated by an elite which monopolizes all types of power – cultural, economic, political. Elections become merely a means for a circulation of segments within this elite. Is it any wonder that political participation – measured, for example, by election turn out rates – has continued to decline (with rare exceptions) throughout Europe and America for the last fifty years?

The disillusionment with democratic system is fully understandable only if we are prepared to ask some fairly basic questions. The first of these is: why do people in capitalist societies desire the rich life. The second (even more basic) question is: ought we to desire this kind of life? In the rest of this paper I’ll try and answer these questions rather informally.


In answering the first question I’ll describe the capitalist way of life. In answering the second I’ll try to show you why we should revolt against the capitalist way of life and opt for a life of love.

the rest here

Immisering monetary policy

THE State Bank’s annual report 2007 shows that SBP Governor Dr Shamshad Akhtar is following in the foot steps of Dr Ishrat Hussain, who is primarily responsible for the institutionalisation of the market-based monetary policy. The SBP has taken no new policy initiatives and its continued inefficiency is reflected in areas such as mismanaged foreign reserve transactions.

The State Bank’s liquid reserves rose from $10.7 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2006 to $13.3 billion in FY 2007 i.e.by 24.3 per cent. But the gain in foreign exchange transactions dropped from Rs4.37 billion in FY 2006 to Rs1.95 billion in FY 2007, a massive fall of over 42 per cent.

On an asset portfolio of $13.3 billion, the SBP earned about $32 million, a pathetic rate of return of 2.4 per cent, surely one of the lowest in the world. India’s comparative rate of return for FY 2007 is almost double of this figure and China’s even higher.

sourceDr Ishrat Hussain had made a net loss of over Rs30 billion on foreign exchange transaction during his tenure as the governor of State Bank (1999-2005). Why does Shamshad Akhtar fail to realise that keeping the bulk of our foreign reserves in dollars, the world’s weakest and rapidly weakening hard currency, is not prudent? Why have gains from placements fallen by almost 30 per cent and open market transactions during FY 2007 yielded a net loss of Rs7.6 billion? Does America continue to influence our reserve management policy?

The increase in the SBP’s income during FY 2007 is entirely due to its relentless jacking up of interest rates. It is not due to any improvement in its operational efficiency.

The share of net interest income in non-investment disposal, the SBP’s earnings continue to be a staggering 90 per cent in both FY 2006 and FY 2007. The SBP continues to increase its profit by increasing domestic lending rates and the cost of this increased profitability is borne by the poor. The increased profitability is also due to a reduction in provisioning which fell by 75 per cent in FY 2007. There is no justification for this reduction in the notes attached to its annual accounts.

The SBP’s inefficiency is also evident in the nearly 37 per cent increase in FY 2007 in administrative expenses. Forced retirement benefit payments have continued to spiral since the previous governor’s days. In FY 2007, they rose by a massive 69 per cent and accounted for almost 40 per cent of the total administrative expenses.

Salary expenses have gone up by 14 per cent. Depreciation charges have more than doubled despite substantial asset disposal and this is not explained. Forced ‘(voluntary)’ retirements have increased from 73 in FY 2006 to 88 in FY 2007. Almost all senior executives have been “voluntarily” retired and the vacancies filled by specialists on contracts.

The operational inefficiency is more tragically reflected in the SBP’s incompetent management of monetary system. As an institution committed to neo-liberal monetarist doctrines, the SBP should have only one policy objective - price stability. Its foreign neo-liberal mentors have taught the SBP management to believe that if price stability is assured every thing else will follow. The achievements of an ‘optimum’ growth rate and the most equitable distribution of income and wealth follow automatically and unintentionally from the achievements of macroeconomic stabilisation. The SBP’s claims on autonomy are based on the universal applicability of this false doctrine.

But market-based monetary policy has shown to be quite incapable of achieving even price stability alone. In FY 2007 food inflation was significantly higher than in India, China and Iran. The sensitive price index rose by 8.1 and the CPI by seven per cent in FY 2007. Food inflation increased from 7.9 per cent in FY 2006 to 10.3 per cent in FY 2007. The common man will, of course, never believe in these figures. The commodity composition of the CPI, the SPI and the WPI are woefully unrepresentative of the common man’s consumption pattern.

Inflation impacts negatively on lower income groups. The SPI figures show that the inflation rate experienced by the lowest income-group in FY 2007 is significantly higher than that experienced by its highest income-group which in the SBP’s table is shown to earn only Rs12,000 and the top 0.1 per cent of the population -- generals, senior level bureaucrats, corporate CEO, etc.-- have incomes averaging Rs1 million per month. To them inflation is of no concern at all. That is why the SBP continues to set such modest inflationary targets.

But even these modest targets are not being achieved. The SBP target for inflation in FY 2007 was six per cent but it estimates inflation in FY 2007 at 7.8 per cent, virtually unchanged from the FY 2006 level. The SBP’s target M2 growth rate for FY 2007 was 13.5 per cent, but M2 is expected to have grown by at least 20 per cent during FY 2007.

Moreover, the discrepancy between the M2 targets and M2 actually realised growth rate have been increasing. In FY 2006 for, example, the M2 grew by 15.1 per cent whereas the SBP’s M2 growth target had been 12.9 per cent. This increased discrepancy between targeted and actual monetary asset growth rates shows that the adoption of a market-based monetary policy stance is slowly but surely weakening the control of SBP over the national monetary system.

As the monetary management system is market-based, it is the private sector players, especially the foreign banks, who determine the volume and composition of money supply. The central bank becomes subservient to the universal international money market. This is happening in Pakistan.

The SBP’s ineffectiveness to ensure price stability is not limited to food inflation. The core inflation has been rising, especially during the last months of FY 2007. Moreover, the increased international vulnerability of the SBP is shown by the fact that the Net Foreign Asset’s (NFA’s) actual contribution to M2 growth during FY 2007 was as high as eight per cent as against an SBP targeted rate of only about two per cent. The NFA grew by Rs274.6 billion during FY 2007.

This clearly shows the inability of the SBP to control the foreign component of total money supply. Econometrics research has conclusively shown that it is movement in the NFA and not the SBP policy initiatives which determine M2. The SBP is a passive respondent to the autonomous NFA changes. Like most other central banks operating market-based monetary policy, the SBP has lost the ability to control money supply growth and interest rates.

Interestingly, neither government’s nor private sector’s borrowings were a major cause of the substantial excess of the M2 growth over the FY 2007 credit plan target. This excess was entirely due to the NFA growth which the SBP cannot control as long as it adheres to the market-based monetary policy. The government borrowing fell short of FY 2007 credit plan target by 29 per cent. The FY 2007 credit plan had expected private sector credit growth to Rs390 billion. It was only Rs365 billion during FY 2007.

The rate of NFA growth, especially the SBP-cum-NFA, was a major cause of inflationary pressure for it stimulated reserve money growth. The SBP could not resist its own building up of the NFA as the principal cause of this was accelerated disbursement by US agencies to provide logistic support to American subsidised military operations in Waziristan and also the very expensive floatation of the GDRs.

Movements in the NFA were a major cause of the increase in interest rates as the SBP admits “International interest rates now have great influence on domestic interest rates”. The sad fact is that as long as Pakistan adheres to market-based monetary policy the SBP will not be autonomous. It will remain subservient to international markets.

There is evidence to show that increase in interest rates has effectively restrained the growth of fixed investment particularly in the textile sector. The negative impact of jacked up interest rates on credit growth is evident from the fact that the credit to GDP ratio has fallen in FY 2007 and the value of this ratio is now lower for Pakistan than for India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka or any other major South East Asian economy.

The aggregate bank spread remained well over seven per cent, the highest by far in South Asia during FY 2007. The advances to deposit ratio fell from about 78 per cent in FY 2006 to about 72 per cent in FY 2007. That neither Pakistanis nor foreigners have been convinced that financial vulnerability has been reduced as indicated by the fact that despite significant increase in the NFA to M2 ratio in FY 2007, the foreign currency deposit to M2 ratio has continued to fall.

The SBP remains committed to a tight monetary policy as indicated by the recent rise in the discount rate. This hurts the poor as the SBP’s own research has shown that increase in policy rates passes through much more rapidly to the weighted average loan rate (WALR) than it does to the weighted averaged deposit rate (WADR) and therefore raises bank spread. The impact of SBP money market operations during both the first and recent half of FY 2007 has been to reduce liquidity and jack up the WALR structure. This has also been the impact of heightened liquidity requirements.

That monetary policy stance is increasing macroeconomics vulnerability is evident in the widening gap between the gross domestic saving and the gross capital formation. The gross domestic saving as a ratio of the GDP fell from 16 per cent in 2000 to 13.7 per cent in 2006 and the investment saving gap as percentage of the GDP rose. In India in 2006 this gap was only one per cent and in Bangladesh 4.3. In China domestic savings exceeded gross capital formation by 2.4 per cent, in Indonesia by 4.6 and in Malaysia by a massive 23.7 per cent. The saving-investment to the GDP gap increased in Pakistan to over eight per cent by FY 2007.

The average weighted lending rate in FY 2007 was 11.55 per cent (up from 10.65 per cent in FY 2006), the average weighted rate of return of savings in FY 2007 was only 2.59 per cent. Savers were thus receiving a massive negative rate of return for their deposits, for inflation was running at eight per cent during that year according to the SBP.

The anti-poor character of the market-based monetary policy becomes more evident when we look at the distribution of bank deposit and bank investment accounts. In 2007, there were a total of about 25 million deposit accounts in the country. About 22 million of these had deposits of less than Rs0.1 million each. The share of this over 80 per cent of deposit holders in total deposits was, however, only about 14 per cent.

As against this, the deposit holders who had more than Rs10 million each in their individual deposit accounts were less than 0.1 per cent of total deposit account holders, but their share of total deposits was as high on 39.6 per cent in FY 2007.

Now let us look at the loan accounts. The total number of loan accounts in FY 2007 was about 5.2 million. Of this number, accounts of those that had borrowed less than Rs0.1 million each was about 66 per cent. But the share of the small borrower in the total amount lent by the bank was only 6.5 per cent.

As against this, large borrowers with investment account limits of Rs10 million and above represented only 0.42 per cent of the total number of investment account holders. But their share in total bank loans in FY 2007 was about 65 per cent. This means that just 22,000 account holders, many of them holding multiple accounts, obtained two thirds of all bank loans in FY 2007. This is ten times more than the share of the small borrowers whose share of total investment accounts was more than ten times higher than that of the large investors.

Moreover, the total deposits of the large account holders in scheduled banks in FY 2007 were about Rs1.3 trillion, whereas the total loan obtained by the large account holders was about Rs1.5 trillion. There was thus a net transfer of about Rs200 billion to these borrowers through the banking system during FY 2007.

As against this, the total deposits of the small deposit holders in scheduled banks in FY 2007 was about Rs560 billion. The amount lent to them by the scheduled banks in FY 2007 was only Rs126 billion. There was thus a net transfer of about Rs334 billion from the small borrowers though the banking system in FY 2007.

The adoption of the market-based monetary policy allows the market (i.e. the banks themselves) to determine interest rates and lending patterns discriminates against the poor.

A bank always uses public (the depositors’) money. The share of equity to total capital employed is necessarily miniscule. In FY 2006, the share of equity and resources was only four per cent of the total liabilities. When a bank is allowed to use public money for maximising its own profits, it necessarily exploits the public.

The adoption of the market-based monetary policy deprives the state of its monetary sovereignty and converts the central bank into a pawn of global finance. The SBP has lost control over movements in the NFA which determines changes in reserve money, level of money supply, cost of credit and the allocation of financial resource.

Empirical research at the CBM, the AERC, PIDE and indeed the State Bank itself has shown that the pre-conditions for the operation of successful monetary policy simply do not exist here. The M1 is an endogenous, not an exogenous variable. Investment demand is not interest elastic nor is the supply of savings.

Changes in broad money are gangrenes caused by nominal GDP and the level of foreign reserves. The relationship between the M1 and the M2 is weak and in any case bi-directional. The market-based monetary policy cannot assure price stability in this situation.

The market-based monetary policy has converted the State Bank into a colonial currency board with declining levels of operational efficiency. It has deprived the government of its monetary sovereignty, and has enabled foreign banks to establish a stranglehold over the national financial system. They have committed injustice against the poor by institutionalising mass financial exploitation.

The Genesis and Telos of the Social Sciences: A Summary

•Social science methodologies are teleological – not value neutral. Their essential purpose is to legitimate and provide the technologies of governance for creating and sustaining capitalist order.

•Social sciences presume the validity of the central proposition of Kantian mechanism and empiricism / utilitarianism.

•Social sciences are committed to a secular conception of being and the world. Man is a (n actual or potential) creator of the world and the purpose of practical reason is to establish man’s mastery over the world.

•Social sciences presume the universe to be a self contained self regulating dynamic mechanism the laws of motion of which are to be discovered /determined by self reflection. Knowledge is a product of the self understanding of the self which imposes its order on the world. The self itself cannot be known for it is the condition of knowledge. Reason is a means for practicing the universalisable commands of the (unknowable) self.

•The social sciences are committed to freedom – the unlimited right of the self is to will its ends. Belief in the self legislating self eliminates the need for seeking any moral authority for granting the self this unlimited right.

•The social sciences are an unreserved and total endorsement of the beliefs underlying mechanism and utilitarianism. The social sciences are means for the realization of Enlightenment ends – self fulfillment and progress. There is therefore no room in the social sciences for the recognition of God as sustainer (Rabb) as there is in Newtonian physics.

•The social sciences recognize reason as a slave of the passions. All individual acts and institutions are to be judged on the basis of the felicific calculus. Wealth not virtue is an end in itself. Man is recognized as sovereign in the basic sense that he is the sole legitimate possessor of his body. The social sciences are committed to the elimination not of vice but of poverty and to the promotion of the passion for money making.

•Capitalism is the universalization of this passion – the universalization of avarice and covetousness. The social sciences legitimate and provide technologies of governance for operationalizing the rule of capital in the market and in the state.

social science methodologies and Enlightenment (1)

In the 19th century Mill was to write “over his own body and mind the individual is sovereign” (1960 p. 15). This illustrates the comman commitment of utilitarianism and Kantianism to freedom. Much earlier Bentham and Smith had recognized that freedom was to be sought in wealth not in virtue.

Liberalism and capitalism are committed to the elimination not of vice but of (absolute) poverty and as Smith argues, to the promotion of the “passion for money making”. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments Smith speaks of “self interest” as the legitimate summation of all passion and this as Hirschman has shown is an essential moral argument justifying capitalism (1977).

Capitalism according to Smith emerged as an unintended consequence of the pursuit of self interest of the “great proprietors” and “merchants and artificers” (1981 p.370). Capitalist order is justified according to Smith because it establishes liberal political rule and ensures world wide plentitude .

Smith recognized that sustaining capitalist order requires the existence and reproduction of an individuality focused on the pursuit of (this worldly) self interests and committed to the legitimacy of liberal rights. It is the universalization of this type of individuality which ensures that expansion of the market and dominance of the rule of law (of capital) become inextricably interlinked. The market is both a means and an end of/for the universalization of liberal rights. The market and the liberal state are instruments for the expression of the theoretical sovereignty of the individual and his practical subjection to capital in public life and to the passions in his moral valuation .

The principal function of the social sciences is to justify capitalist order. Explicitly this entails the justification of:

•Capitalist individuality – being dominated by avarice and covetousness and rationality seeking truth through understanding human will and imposing its order on the world.

•Capitalist property – the organization of production and exchange with the objective of continuous expansion of capital in the form of pure quantity and the subjugation of all valuation to the logic of capital accumulation.**

•Rule of law of capital – an order realizing the simultaneous reproduction of theoretically sovereign but practically subjected individuality.

The social sciences also provide a framework for ensuring the practical functionality of capitalism. Capitalist order must produce both abundance and liberties in ever expanding amounts continuously. This requires a continuous readjustment of the market state relationship which the social sciences facilitate. They provide tools for constructing relationships that balance the need for expanded capital accumulation with the need for avoiding marginalization and exclusion from social order of that overwhelming majority of capitalism’s subjects who do not accumulate but are the subjects of capital.

Both the legitimating and the functional role of the social sciences are of fundamental importance for the continuing reproduction of capitalist order. This is so because capitalist order is not natural. Men do not naturally submit to the rule of capital (avarice/covetousness) Men are not naturally self interested and there are no moral / theological grounds available for legitimating self interest as a life governing principle (Bell 1976). Men are not free and do not naturally seek freedom. They have to be forced to be free by capital. Even Hayek can write, “man has not developed in freedom. Freedom was made possible by the disciplines of civilization” (1979 p.163).

The social sciences provide the technologies of governance necessary for the creation and sustenance of capitalist order – an order in which man is subjected to freedom (avarice/covetousness). In the following section we shall seek to describe how three major social sciences – economics and political science – legitimate capitalist order and provide technologies for its governance.

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** Capital may be defined as takkathur which is rendered into English by Maulana Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall as “rivalry in worldly increase”. This definition captures the twin features of capital – covetousness (“rivalry”) and avarice (“worldly increase”). Capital is a vice – the never ending quest for more through continued intensification of rivalries.

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Governing the Labor Market: The Impossibility of Corporatist Reforms

Muhammad Zahid Siddique, Javed Akbar Ansari and Qazi Mohammad Salman

The principal propose of labor market regulation is the production and sustenance of capitalist individuality—an individuality committed to the maximization of utility and profit. In the post war era two distinct regulatory regimes have been articulated to achieve this end. During the first phase (roughly 1945 to the early 1980s) ‘corporatism’ was institutionalized with an explicit recognition of labor’s collective rights in the appropriation of capitalist property. Since the early 1980s these regulatory regimes have been dismantled in many countries and capitalist individuation of labor is being promoted through the disempowerment of unions and the development of human resource management systems at the enterprise level. Labor’s collective participation in capitalist state decision making structures has been delegitimized.

This ‘post Fordist’ regulatory regime has been criticized by social democrats as it exacerbates income and power inequalities and alienates the worker from capitalist (civil) society. A partial resurrection of corporatist labor market governance structures is being contemplated in several Latin American countries—Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay etc. Pakistani social democrats will also press a future populist government to modify “post Fordist” labor governance structures (e.g. repeal IRO 2002).
This paper argues that a return to corporatist governance structures is impossible in Pakistan. Sec 1 outlines labor market regulation rationalities presented by three neo classical economists. Section II compares and contrasts Fordist and post Fordist modes of labor market regulation and section III seeks to establish the impossibility of institutionalizing corporatist governance structures in the labor markets of Pakistan.


Read the paper in full (pdf)

A search for an optimum currency area partners for Pakistan

Abstract

This paper empirically examines the existence of a common trend between the exchange
rates of Pakistan and five regional countries Bangladesh, India, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka and the UAE with two of their major trading partners, the United States and Japan as base countries. Results from Johansen co integrating analysis show that the strongest evidence points to the existence of common stochastic trends between the Pakistani rupees on the one hand and the Bangladeshi Taka and the Sri Lankan rupee on the other hand. There is no strong evidence for the existence of such a common stochastic trend between the Pakistani rupee and the currencies of India and the Gulf economies. Optimum Currency Area (OCA) theory seems to justify the formation of a currency union between Pakistan,Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The case of a currency union between Bangladesh and Pakistan is strengthened by a shared political past and a shared history of financial institutional development. The immediate impact of the formation of a currency union on Pakistan’s GDP growth will however be insignificant.

A search for an optimum currency area partners for Pakistan

Freedom’s Purposes

Post-modern liberalism uses freedom to administer subject populations: Freedom is a mode of organizing and regulating Riffat’s conciousness and behaviour.

A free society is a society created by policy. Policy is concerned with implanting in Riffat a calculative rationality. She becomes an “economic women” competitive, profit seeking, hedonist. She learns to want to maximize both pleasure (as a consumer) and efficiency (as a producer/exchanger). She is made free as every social institution the family, the college, the hospital, the mohalla, the mosque, the graveyard becomes a market institution.

The drive for pleasure and efficiency is nurtured by ministers, managers, teachers, television artists, therapists, marriage counselors and siblings. Riffat’s personal
life become an arena for the practice of freedom as a formula of power.

Freedom is a set of norms and principles for organizing Riffat’s experience of her world. It is a technique for exercising power both over others and particularly over her own self.

The supreme purpose of Mrs. Thatcher’s government and its ultimate justification is the universalisation of practices which force Riffat to be free, which mutilate her soul to the extent that she can only know and will her being in terms of a norm of freedom.

This self mutilation leads to an extension of economic rationality the quest for the maximization of pleasure and efficiency to all relational spheres: family, medicine, factory, school. Riffat must choose the maximization of pleasure and efficiency. She must choose an infinite postponement of the realization of pleasure in order to maximize its possibility. She must choose an increase in pure quantity she must operate on herself an economy, which commits herself to this never ending, purposeless, Satanic, quest for freedom.

Riffat is forever in the process of becoming a calculative, choosing, instrumental self concerned with maximizing her pleasure and her efficiency. She is taught to find meaning and fulfilment in this meaningless and frustrating form of existence. This form of existence becomes a norm for evaluating both Riffat’s behaviour and Mrs Thatcher’s political programme.

Riffat is made free, she is not born free. As Hayek says

“Man has not developed in freedom. Freedom is an artifact of civilization. Freedom was made possible by the evolution of the discipline of civilization”.

Freedom is a central element in governance. Freedom is an objective of Mrs Thatcher’s rule as well as an instrument for domination. It is a technology for governance. “The same people who in the nineteenth century celebrated liberty also built the prison.” The significance of liberalism is in its ability to link the acts of governance to the practice of freedom. Liberalization ensures that Riffat “must be willing to do (her) bit in maintaining the systems that define and delimit (her), (s)he must play her part in a game whose intelligibility and limits s(he) takes for granted”. Riffat must freely participate in the mutilation of her own self for her realization of the purpose of Mrs Thatcher’s governance.

Liberalism frees Riffat within the family, community and the market. But to make Riffat free in these spheres Mrs Thatcher has to invent means for shaping and managing Riffat’s conduct and perceptions. Riffat’s “public” evaluations and conduct are evaluated by codes of orderliness, prudence, civility and consequentialism. Her “private” deliberations and behaviour are to be moulded by equipping her with languages and techniques and self understanding and self mastery. To be free Riffat must be taught to accept as natural and rational the pleasure/efficiency maximizing, conduct, characteristic of post enlightenment liberal society. Riffat becomes free when she becomes a normal citizen of a liberal social order. Freedom is nothing else.

The purpose of freedom are multidimensional but single hued. The worker is freed by the universalization of the wage form and of capitalist property.

Individuality is fostered by locking Riffat spatially into a plethora of normative gazes in the school playground, the shopping mall, the discotheque, the hospital ward.

Architecture becomes a technique for regulating Riffat’s liberty. An anxiety over the exterior department of the self imposed on Riffat by surrounding her in a web of visibilities and embarrassments.

The disintegration of the family through the elimination of the mother’s expressive role and forcing her to play an instrumental role is a crucially important move in the construction of post-modern individual.

As the family disintegrates the salience of expert
advice as a shaper of individual consciousness increases. Experts teach Riffat how to conduct her private affairs in ways that are desirable not because they are required by God but because they maximize pleasure and efficiency; they are ways of approaching the liberal truth. Experts responsibilize Riffat both for the care of her body and the mutilation of her soul. They determine how she cares for others and the conduct for her daily routines.

Riffat is taught to be normal. The notion of normality is the lynchpin. The norm is socially worthy, scientifically true and personally desirable. Riffat is made keen to struggle to achieve normalcy. She has to work on herself under the guidance of experts to achieve this cherished good. Riffat must become a normal subject for the exercise of Mrs. Thatcher’s governance. In order to be a free citizen, a free subject of Mrs. Thatcher, Riffat has to accept certain social ways of conducting her existence and thinking about herself as normal. She is irrevocably bound to the experts who define these normal deliberations and life styles and teach her how to live by them. Riffat is to be disciplined essentially by judgment.

Riffat judges herself on the basis of liberally legitimate social norms. Experts judge not just Riffat’s behaviour but also her inner life. She is taught what to feel and how to rationalize her feelings so that her thought is liberally circumscribed an increasing range of things become unthinkable. Liberal education seeks to create new sensibilities in Riffat, develop a new moral perception not just in relation to others but in relation to herself.

Riffat practices upon herself in accordance with the compulsions of freedom and constitutes herself as a free subject of Mrs. Thatcher’s regime. Riffat achieves freedom when she succeeds in fusing her personal desire for the maximization of pleasure and efficiency with all the obligations of free subjectivity of a liberal regime.

Liberalism seeks to link Riffat’s self practices with the practices of the state. This was also the purpose of the institution of social insurance which softened capitalist antagonisms and absorbed the family into the state. Through enmeshing her into a complex web of rights, Riffat is locked into a rights oriented community.

Security is combined with responsibility and both are rationalized by the never ending quest for welfare. Situated in this prison of rights, Riffat is easily taught the liberal civilities which constitute western civilization. Riffat’s privacy is easily invaded and she is easily persuaded to become a bearer of social obligation and to submit to expert guidance for thus alone can she merit and assume her rights.

The post-modern liberals believe that Riffat can abandon the fiction of being grounded in a ‘community’ which is prior to her individuation. The move from Christianity to a welfare ‘community’ was a false move. It created in Riffat a false consciousness which frustrated her development as a calculating competing, acquisitive, entrepreneur. Riffat’s true liberal identity is to be found in the creation and articulation of this entrepreneurship not in a family or a community of which Riffat is a constituent.

Riffat seeks freedom by the practice of the therapies premised on the belief that the truth of the self is lodged within the angst of the self.

But the psychotherapies reveal if they reveal anything at all only a void and an emptiness, for that is the ultimate reality of freedom.

Riffat is taught to shape this emptiness by adopting a style. Her ethics are to be the ethics which celebrate the crafting of a style which displays the liberal truth that she is an infinite possibility a becoming sans being.

In post-modern liberalism the self and not just its labour is commodified. The technologies of mass communication shape the relations between the self and the world. The world is merely a world of commodities exchange values. You can exchange your self identity, assume a myriad of self conceptions (which appear but are not) exactly as you exchange commodities.

Riffat expresses herself not by being a worshipper, a lover, a mother but by consuming a certain set of commodities in a certain style. Her self expression is managed by market researchers, salesmen, designers, advertisers who style commodities on their conception of Riffat’s self the ultimate commodity they buy and sell.

They transfigure not just the commodities Riffat buys but Riffat’s own self by shaping, intensifying, and satisfying her desires they commodity Riffat by shaping her anxiety and frustrations into desires for commodities which promise to but never do quench these frustrations.

The authority of the media man and the advertiser are an element in the constitution, transformation and consolidations of the authority of Mrs. Thatcher.
They establish a “public habitat of images” and intertwining pedagogies for living a pleasurable and civilized life. Neither Riffat nor Mrs. Thatcher can afford to step outside this habitat.

Riffat has the right to oust Mrs. Thatcher if she fails to secure the conditions of pleasurable and civilized existence for Riffat. Mrs. Thatcher can survive only as long as she can secure the conditions which enable Riffat to play the games of civilization and shape a style of life for herself through (apparent) acts of choices in an (illusionary) world of goods.

Extension of this choice is an extension of the market. Riffat chooses her
husband as she chooses her car the concern in both choices is self expressive
not the fulfillment of moral obligations. Thus not only the husband, but the
institution of marriage itself is commodified by Riffat’s choice. Marrying (or
not marrying) is a means for self expression and the achievement of pleasure,
as is having children, participation in philanthropy, worshipping gods. Riffat
is not merely free to choose she is forced to be free, obliged to understand
and live her life as an act of successive choices, each rationalized by the
commitment only to increase the choices available to her.

Riffat is free to choose but her only choice is to increase her range of choice every other choice is irrational, unauthentic, perverse. She must pretend that facticity, death and the unknown do not exist. This never ending pretense constitutes her becoming for the gilded chains of freedom can never be discarded.

Every relationship, every social institution is transformed by post-modern liberalism
into a market institution. The only identity actually available to Riffat, in this
prison of rights and choices, is the identity of the entrepreneur.

Modern psychology, as Riffat knows, is principally concerned with elaborating
techniques by which the practices of every day life can be organized in accordance with the ethic of a self forced to be free, condemned to choose choice alone. These techniques are emotional, interpersonal and organizational. The self is to be taught to fulfill and realize itself in the world of commodities.

Psychology teaches the entrepreneurial self to seek gratification in the world
of commodities in three ways:

It trains the wielders of authority teachers, managers, doctors to form Riffat as an acquisitive, competitive being seeking to relieve her frustration by accumulating commodities.

Secondly through the media it indoctrinates Riffat to evaluate her life and organize it in accordance with the therapies of normality she is taught to work upon herself in a way which deluded herself to seek fulfillment through the maximization of pleasure and efficiency in the world of commodities.

Thirdly the psychotherapies take the place of religion from which liberalism has freed Riffat. The psychotherapies provide ways for self inspection founded on a scientific observation of the self. The psychotherapies also enable Mrs. Thatcher to judge Riffat on the basis of these social - scientific norms. This judgmental process is necessarily democratic for Riffat must participate in it if she is to be forced to be free.

Riffat frees herself by subordinating herself to a psychiatrist who claims knowledge of her reality and seeks to fuse civility with self adjustment. The psychotherapist teaches Riffat how to reach for the inner reality of herself by applying to herself a rational knowledge and a technique for operationalising the ethics of post-modern liberalism. Without acquiring this new ‘knowledge’ and learning these new echniques, Riffat cannot mutilate her soul sufficiently to appear as a normal free and equal citizen of a post-modern democracy.

Freedom is the domination of Riffat. Riffat is dominated by experts of the self, experts of the image, experts of life style and experts of other dimensions of the liberal truth which is a lie. Riffat is free to the extent to which she forced herself to behave in accordance with the rationality of pleasure and efficiency
maximization. Riffat has been freed from Islam and handed over to the expert who subjects her to the disciplines of normal post-modern living. He forces her to be free to craft her personality in accordance with post-modernist norms which insist that the self must seek only the gratification and intensification of desire through accumalation and competition in a world of commodities. By thus grafting her personality Riffat becomes free.

Riffat pays a terrible price for this freedom this price is nothing less than her humanity. For to be human is to be bound bound to God, bound to me, bound to her children. The bond which binds her is the bond of love. Seeking
freedom is rejecting love. The autonomous being contracts; she can submit, she can never surrender. To be free is to make self sacrifice, self denial, self annihilation impossible. The quest for self expression makes it impossible to so cleanse the heart that it becomes a mirror in which the glory and majesty and beauty of Allah is reflected.

Yet Allah has said “My earth has not room for Me neither has My heaven; but the heart of My believing slave has room for Me.” Riffat knows though post-modern liberalism may force her to deny any knowledge of this knowledge Riffat knows that “the contentment of hearts lies only in the remembrance of Allah”. Contentment is not to be found in the illusory world of commodities and appearances but in the reality of surrender. Riffat needs not autonomy but its very opposite. She needs the love of Allah. She needs to be my beloved. She needs to love me. She needs to love God.

Riffat needs to reject self interestedness, self deification, for the slave cannot
become the Lord. Her nature demands that she acknowledge her position as a slave of Allah, surrendering willingly all her powers to Him. She must learn to leave the self with the world, the heart with the hereafter, the secret with Allah, and to fill her life with His love. She must learn to be a revolutionary fighter against this world of commodities for it has, in the form of right or reason or welfare or history, sought to take the place of God in Riffat’s life. Thus alone can she attain refuge from the tyranny of the ego, from the worship of the spirit of evil which is freedom.

social science methodologies and Enlightenment

Accepting social science methodologies necessitates accepting Enlightenment presumptions regarding the nature of being and knowledge. Quite explicitly social sciences commit their practitioners to a specific amalgamation of the philosophies of Hume and Kant. For Hume nothing exists but sensations. Reason is a slave of the passions (1951 p. 451) not an autonomous human capability. Reason can therefore provide no proof of natural laws or of causative processes but Hume argues men have a natural propensity to presume the universality of natural laws and in Hume’s view this intuitive belief in natural regularity necessitated a rejection of all religious doctrine.

Hume’s empiricism provides the philosophical underpinnings for the utilitarian approach common to all social sciences – utilitarianism is the translation into social and moral theory of the core of Humean empiricism. Human behaviour – individual and institutionalized – is to be judged not in terms of religious edicts but on the basis of this worldly pleasure maximizing consequences. The application of this felicific calculus to acts, individuals and performance of institutions provided an indispensable basis for the justification of capitalist order. It is also a basis for justifying democracy for all human beings are seen on having the same passions and in the felicific calculus every individual counts as one.

Kant was an avid student of Hume; Kant strongly endorsed the cognitive claims of empiricist based sciences. Kant did not reject the Humean claim that the senses provide no proof of the existence of natural laws or causative processes. Instead Kant presumed that the notion of causality and objectivity are inscribed in the structure of the human mind. Our experience of the external world is shaped / structured by pre-existing mental categories. “The self” says Kant “does not derive its laws from but prescribes them to nature” (1954 p67) for “it possesses an order which is fixed and inalienable in all of us” (p73). Kant agrees with Hume that the world is not “out there” but “in us” Kant’s assertion that “objects must confirm to knowledge” (1966 p75) implies that it is the self which determines the structure of experiences.

The self imposes the one possible set of structures upon the world, which it has discovered by categorizing its sensations to recognize objects and their relations and by developing concepts on the basis of such ‘understanding’. The self is thus the basic source of all experiences and concepts. Kant describes it as “transcendental” in that it is the necessary and universal basis of all experiencing and conceptualizing . The self possesses “a priori knowledge of the concept of an object and the process of causation and reality must conform to those structures of the mind.

Man is autonomous in that he can unaided discover truth. Kant’s emphasis on rights and duties do not – as we have seen – represent a definitive break with empiricism. Rule utilitarianism (following Mill) endorses both individual rights and universalizability. Despite it’s focus on separable phenomena empiricism seeks to investigate what it takes to be an orderly structure of the world. The utilitarian calculus is grounded on a basis – every individual counting as a basis – which Kant justifies in the form of autonomy. Empiricism and Kantian mechanism compliment each other in the Enlightenment project and both seek to defeat a comma enemy, religion. Both Hume and Kant opened the way for the development of the liberal social order in which the rational, pleasure seeking human individual replaced God as the source of creation, knowledge and value.

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