Our Establishment, Karl Marx, and Winston Churchill

 

Every semester I give a presentation in my university titled “Materialism and our Education”. During the presentation I ask my students if they have heard of Karl Marx and almost always it is less than 5% who answer in affirmative, and out of those only one or two know about his ideas about private property and/or Das Kapital. When I ask them about Winston Churchill almost all of them know about him. At first, I was a bit confused about this bias but my confusion was eliminated when I read the English textbook for 12^th class. That book contains one full chapter on Winston Churchill, in

addition to other famous western figures like Alexander Fleming, Louis Pasteur etc. Now I don’t have anything against teaching our young generation about people like Louis Pasteur who did make significant contribution towards betterment for mankind. The issue is what contribution did Winston Churchill make for the betterment of mankind. He was a just a general manger of a dying superpower ( I am being generous by not highlighting his racist and brutal actions ). What was his intellectual contribution? Nothing, especially if you compare it to Karl Marx. Before I go any further, let me make it clear that I don’t agree with Karl Marx and his theory about private property etc, but he was an intellectual heavy weight, even Allama Iqbal said that he is not a prophet but he has a book. The point to ponder is why the authors of our English textbook gave one full chapter to Churchill but not a paragraph to Karl Marx?

The answer is our establishment/ruling-elite, and by that I don’t mean just the military, even though they are a big part of it. Our ruling elite, like in almost all other countries, consists of top figures of all major sections of our society be it education, defense, media, judicial, commerce even religion. This elite basically works for the global capitalist system. They make sure that the “locals” do not get out of control. So they devise mechanisms tuned for local needs, just like Coca-Cola keeps the basic recipe same but manipulates the level of sugar content according to local tastes. Coming back to the topic of this easy, our ruling-elite does not want our youth to even  know of any other ideology except capitalism, let alone challenge it. Thus, not even a single paragraph about Karl Marx is taught to them but a full chapter on Churchill is drilled into their brains. They want our youth be two things: 1) efficient, low cost workers who produce cheap, useless, environmentally destructive products 2) stupid consumers who buy these products on credit based fiat money.

What is happening in Pakistan, and other parts of the world, is merely a continuation of this global capitalist enterprise. Every day there is some sort of “hearing”  in some court, some sort of protest in this city or that, some religious debate between X and Y, an investigation here and an investigation there etc. The media keeps this circus alive with “breaking news” and “special investigative reports” in addition to their regular feed of lies and deceptions. Yet, nothing happens, because nothing is supposed to happen.