Saving Maldives from the game called “elections.”
Artwork: Dosain
This will be the last op-ed I write for a formal news outlet in the Maldives.
We need to stop waiting for a new hero to swoop in with a revolutionary group, a set ideology to follow, and answers to all of our societal problems. If we keep waiting for this, we will always be stuck.
There is a difference between the rest of us and the electoralists: they are playing this game to win. Our objective is to end this game forever. We refuse to play. The moment we get our hands on that console, we’re smashing it to pieces.
Leadership figures, parties, organisations, and new manifestos are not the things that create the conditions for revolutionary change, even historically. It’s actually the opposite: it is producing the right material and intellectual conditions that will give birth to the new leaders, organisations, systematic responses, names, and faces of the revolutionary future.
The duty of those who are able, therefore, is to produce those intellectual conditions, particularly political consciousness.
And so, we have abandoned electoral politics under capitalism.
This op-ed is to amplify the voices of the hundreds of such friends and colleagues I know who share these views but do not have the same privileges of time, opportunities, energy, and resources as I do. While the working classes loyal to the establishment parties all have their voices amplified by elite and privileged counterparts in their parties’ leadership and media, the unaffiliated do not have that.
I hope this reflects our shared views for all of us on the anti-electoral side across class lines.
Building political consciousness across class lines
No one needs to convince anyone about the shortcomings of capitalism as an economic system. The material conditions people must live through will convince them. This is the “inevitable” half.
The sudden spike in fuel costs, stores abruptly running out of staples like eggs and onions, electricity costs doubling in a month, inability to access the most basic life-saving medicines, and so on: these are the “inevitable” products of the economic system that will do half of the convincing. It’ll be a gradual, not sudden, build-up of economic conditions. We’re seeing this happen in real time.
The intellectual condition, that is, the political consciousness of the public, is another matter. I don’t mean having read all the right books or theory or following the right political ideals or whatever. I mean the most basic things:
The material economic reality and class relations: i.e., “Who owns what?” “What does ownership mean in each context?” “Who owns the infrastructure of production like land, labour, and capital?” “What exactly is the nature of land, labour, and capital beyond the garbage we’re fed in the IGCSEs?” “Who works, who profits, and what exactly gives things value?” and so on.
Economic contradictions: capitalist economics is driven by conflicting and irreconcilable class interests. Material/historical dialectics is the scientific tool developed over countless years (still relevant today) to dissect this. Not everyone has to by-heart this; there should just be efforts at spreading awareness of its simplest applications. For example: the capitalist class here – that is, the resort elites, the wealthiest of the wealthiest, next to the landlord elites, bureaucrats, bankers, and state entrepreneurs — want to maximise the landmass for capital accumulation from tourism for their own profits. The working class wants landmass for housing, education, basic infrastructure, and so on. Clearly, these two interests cannot coexist together. One must win, and the other must lose.
The function of the state and international forces: neither the government or international states and organisations (like UN, Amnesty, or Transparency) are “neutral referees”. All of them represent various arms of capital and how they move. Observe how various state and non-state institutions are all deployed to serve capital and its accumulation, and how the national and comprador elites of vassal states like ours serve the imperial elites and their multinational forces.
All of these are very basic things.
They’re the “whats” and “hows” of the things that move our economies. It’s not rocket science.
What’s the point of everyone knowing all the political and administrative know-hows of so-called “ފަރުދީ ޒިންމާ” like their voting rights so on, but the most basic material contexts these things exist in are gatekept as “too complicated and irrelevant”?
That also insults the countless working class people who do share this political consciousness and studied these things on their own, many of them doing so far better than I could.
Do their voices and lived realities and suffering as unprivileged working class people in the islands or Malé not count, then, just because they want to choose a different form of political engagement and don’t want to support your parties?
What I’m trying to say in this section, rather than demonising anyone, is that building political consciousness is far more efficient than trying to look for the next new name, face, ideology, group, or party to magically solve all our problems.
Produce the political and intellectual conditions, and when the material conditions inevitably come to pass, the names, faces, ideologies, groups, parties, and even systematic/structural alternatives will all be born from those conditions, not the other way around.
Change
Even in the natural sciences, we learn two types of change: physical and chemical. Physical changes are reversible, indicating changes in states of matter (e.g., from solid to liquid), dissolution and separation of substances, and deformation of large structures (bending, cutting, stretching, et cetera). Chemical changes, on the other hand, occur when bonds are broken or formed within subatomic structures. That is how new substances are formed. Many times, chemical changes are either hard to reverse or irreversible. A good example is the combustion of fuel to form carbon dioxide.
I think these laws can be applied to socio-political and economic change as well.
To simply change the form of our political and economic realities without any substantial changes in the microcosms of our economic relationships with each other; what is produced and why; where political power exists, for whom, and how it is exercised; and other such structural changes — this is not meaningful change. And like I’ve argued before, we haven’t had any meaningful change in almost a century. Nothing’s really changed fundamentally in our class relations or how our resources are organised, they simply evolved into modern-day instruments and technologies.
More importantly, these “changes” are easily reversible and have been reversed. You can see that quite clearly with what’s going on with MDP’s pathetic attempt at a “decentralisation act”. You can see that in the economic conditions the working class people are forced to live in. You can definitely see that in the monarchy-level disparities of wealth between the working class and even just the parliamentarians, awarding themselves with all kinds of massive spoils year after year, administration after administration, let alone the industrial elites.
And even now, all we do is change names, faces, parties, bureaucratic instruments, electoral procedures, legal jargon, rules, regulations, and so on. These things change nothing about the economic roots of our societal decadence.
No matter how “bodu” your “badhalu” is, this is an immutable reality. Eventually, you’re going to have to face it. Why not now?
And sure, these changes look vastly different. Water that forms the ocean and water that forms the clouds are radically different from each other. One travels in the sky and harbours thunder and lightning; the other is home to multiple life forms and is a massive, cohesive body. Yet both of these things are water nevertheless. When the sun heats up the ocean’s surface, water particles evaporate and travel to the sky where they condense into clouds and eventually fall back to the Earth as rain, and so the cycle goes.
We have to break this cycle to transcend this economic system and liberate ourselves from this never-ending game. Collapse of our society founded on capitalism and exploitation might be inevitable, but surviving that collapse with little to no casualties is also possible.
That should be our goal: everyone’s survival, and to see the sun shine on the day after, and to rebuild ourselves from the rubble into a much better society.
If things can get much worse than we can even imagine, if we will “live to see man-made atrocities beyond our comprehension” — and indeed, things may get a lot, lot worse before things get better for us all — then, it is equally possible for things to get much better than we could’ve ever imagined, that we’d live to see miracles and joys and peace beyond our present comprehension.
And therefore, we must ensure that the socio-political and economic changes we strive towards are not merely just substantial and meaningful. We must commit to making sure those changes are not reversed, to eventually reach a horizon where these changes become irreversible one day, where the threat of counter-revolutionaries beyond imperial violence is no longer even plausible.
And to do this, we must first produce the socio-political conditions for such change. That is, we must produce the mass political consciousness requisite for such a change.
And from that, the names, faces, ideologies, systems, groups, parties, or whatever else will be born naturally.
And beyond that lies the shining hopes and dreams of our future.
Let’s end this game and smash the console to pieces.
Mahal Ibrahim Abdulla is a writer, artist, musician, and an interdisciplinary researcher. He is a co-founder of Moosumi. He is an honours graduate in Politics and Social Policy from the University of Leeds. His current research interest is post-growth economics, and is studying physics to progress into a multi-disciplinary post-graduate pathway in his academic career.
All comment pieces are the sole view of the author and do not reflect the editorial policy of the Maldives Independent. If you would like to write an opinion piece, please send proposals to editorial@maldivesindependent.com.
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