Representing the Marginalized

 

            In his world-famous critique of ‘Orientalism’ Edward Said declared that the marginalized (colonized) cannot represent himself and must be represented by the Colonizer which is never fair because it is the representation from the point of view of the master, not that of the marginalized. The same was critiqued by Ashcroft in his book ‘Empire Writes Back’, when he said that the marginalized has adopted number of ways and means to use English language to reflect his resistance to the master and to attempt to represent his culture and identity as far as possible. But the same issue was repeated with emphasis by Spivak that a subaltern cannot speak and even if he does, no one listens to him. Although these instances are from the postcolonial literary scene, but the analogy holds good about the sociopolitical situations all around the globe, especially about the democracies in the third world.

 

            Democracy is defined as the government by the people and for the people and is meant to represent the common man with the focus to increase the middle class and reduce the lower and upper class. But in the third world democracies, only the middle class is decreasing, while the upper and lower classes are increasing. The expansion of the lower class means that the people in such democracies are not able exercise their right to develop and progress as they are poorly represented because the representatives elected are mostly from the upper class and so, like the colonial master, they cannot represent their toiling masses in the true sense of the world. So, that is why, government after government comes and goes, election after election takes place but the lot of the people remain the same.

In the poor countries, the Assemblies are full of public representatives who are mainly from the elite class of the country and so all legislation done is the representation of the Elite, not for the proletariat. Consequently, the Proletariat are not represented by the legislature and nor can they represent themselves. In a country like Pakistan, where local democracies are also not functional, the poor and destitute feel even more underrepresented. The same is the case with the social set up where the poor don’t have a voice and so all schemes launched are for the benefit of the upper-class systems. One of the examples is the raise in the salaries of the elite multiple times and the cuts, decrease and taxes added in the income of the poor and the middle class.

This is reflective of the ancient and old kingships and the ruling dynasties where the people were of two types only, i.e. the king and his associates while large number of people on the other hand were simply toiling more than their capacities to generate revenues for the king and his party. The same is the case with the modern day capitalism where the resources are controlled by a few capitalists and the huge number of people have to sell their labor at the lowest possible rates to earn a few pennies and these pennies too they spend to procure his day to day needs and consequently the profit of the capitalist only increases because of the difference in the value of the commodities and the toil of the labor. The extraordinary difference as compared to the purchase value of commodities again stays in the pocket of the elite, as is put forwards by Karl Marx in his critique of the capitalistic system, titled as ‘The Capital’.

This should not have happened in the modern world as here kings have no space to live because people have rights, and they can speak their rights through representatives. But the masses and the poor don’t have their voice and have no way to raise their voice, and even if they try to raise their voice, no one is willing to listen to them. In the absence of their voice being heard, they remain unable to represent themselves and hence no progress takes place, and the existing system keeps on running backwards instead of forwards. So, the need for the hour is that the people must be represented, listened to and allowed to raise their voice because by doing so one can establish an egalitarian state in which all classes are entitled to receive their rights. This has become even more necessary in this age of ours because of the machine technologies like Artificial Intelligence which are already threatening humans to go jobless and so penniless because the rich can make these machines to perform their tasks of earning profits without paying the least amount to any of the workers. The sociopolitical, religious, ethical and cultural dynamics all demand that their must be a well-defined, protected and implemented plan to preserve the rights of the toiling masses which can be secured only if they are effectively and adequately represented