Beyond the bubble.

WE live in highly contradictory times. On the one hand, our heavily militarised structure of power appears to be as resilient as ever. The curtailment of press freedoms, the unending saga of enforced disappearances, the incoherence and subservience of parliament vis-a-vis the national security apparatus - all are indicators of the fact that Pakistan's seven-decade tryst with authoritarianism continues.

On the other hand, however, contradictions are intensifying on an almost daily basis. Dissenting voices make themselves heard in myriad ways, speaking truth to power in physical or online spaces, and even from within the structure of power. The Supreme Court judgement announced Wednesday on the Khadim Rizvi-led dharna of late 2017 made clear that at least some functionaries of the state do not agree with the means and methods employed by others in the name of the proverbial 'greater national interest'.

In many ways, the Pakistani story is a microcosm of what is happening around the world. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, establishments and their opinion-making supporters in the media and intelligentsia have become adept at employing politically correct language to cover up their increasingly brazen excesses against the poor and disenfranchised (and the natural environment). Yet at the same time, the silences of the political mainstream are continually exposed, as much by contradictions within the corridors of powers as by the untiring efforts of those organising resistance in all of the forms that it exists.

The problem for progressives, however, is that the horizon of political possibilities remains limited, at least for the time being, to calling out the ever-intensifying crises of the dominant political-economic system. We speak up about state institutions trampling over the rights of (notional) citizens, about rich and powerful interests groups not paying taxes and building economic empires while the poor are squeezed for every little drop, about the depletion of water, forest and other resources and the attendant effects of ecological degradation on ordinary people, and so on.

But this is where the buck stops. The tragedy that has unfolded in Venezuela in recent times confirms that even where progressives take state power, they are undone by a combination of limited vision and deliberate attempts to undermine them (home and abroad). Corbyn, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and others representing the progressive cause globally as much as their...