I have recently become convinced that the probability of aliens visiting Earth is considerably higher than the probability of capitalism ending. Not because I have suddenly acquired evidence of extraterrestrial life, but because capitalism has survived so many of its own funerals that I have begun to suspect it is immortal. Every few years someone announces the death of capitalism with the solemnity of a priest at a burial. There are papers, graphs, documentaries, essays, and men with impressive beards explaining that this is finally the contradiction that will bring the whole thing down. And then capitalism, apparently offended by the attention, gets up, stretches, acquires another industry and sends us all an invoice.
Perhaps this is because we misunderstand what it means for a system to end. We imagine the end of capitalism as a spectacular historical event: factories shutting down, workers taking the streets, stock exchanges collapsing into the sea, somebody dramatically waving a red flag while history applauds. But power has never been particularly theatrical about its survival. It does not necessarily disappear. It reorganizes itself. It changes vocabulary and uniforms. It changes institutions. It learns new ways of explaining the same old arrangement.
Pakistan is a particularly intimate example of this. We have lived through governments that came and went, constitutions suspended and restored, elections celebrated and questioned, politicians imprisoned and released, institutions strengthened in speeches and weakened in practice. Yet the fundamental question remains stubbornly familiar: who actually possesses the power to decide? The answer is rarely as simple as the name written on the ballot paper. Recent developments have made the concentration of military power increasingly difficult to disguise, even as the civilian architecture of the state continues to exist around it. Pakistan can simultaneously have a parliament, a government, an opposition, elections, courts and a very obvious shadow cast over all of them. It is almost an achievement of political architecture: democracy, but with the load-bearing walls somewhere else.
The faces change; the arrangements survive.
This is where capitalism and political power become rather unpleasantly intimate. Capitalism does not exist somewhere outside politics, as though the market were a neutral weather system that occasionally rains unemployment upon us. Markets are organized through laws, property rights, taxation, debt, institutions, coercion and the political decisions about who gets protected when things collapse. When an ordinary person loses everything, we call it personal failure. When a corporation loses billions, suddenly media is discussing systemic importance.
There is something almost comic about how adaptable power is. We can turn rebellion into merchandise, revolution into aesthetics and political anger into an algorithmically targeted advertisement. You can spend an evening watching a documentary about the exploitation of workers and wake up the next morning being sold a hoodie that says RESIST. The system has become so talented at absorbing its own criticism that perhaps its greatest achievement is making opposition profitable.
And yet I don’t think this means change is impossible.
Systems die slowly, when they become unable to justify themselves. Perhaps the first crack is simply the moment when enough people stop believing that exploitation is inevitable.
And perhaps this is why we keep returning to students.
Resistance does not begin when you are thirty-five and suddenly discover that the world is unjust. It begins much earlier, when you first enter an institution and realize that someone has already decided how much of your life you are allowed to control.
The university is one of the first places where a young person encounters power in an organized form. There are administrators, rules, fees, disciplinary committees, dress codes, attendance policies, hostel regulations, surveillance, arbitrary authority and, sometimes, the wonderfully revealing experience of being told that you are an adult everywhere except where you disagree with someone who has institutional authority over you.
This is precisely why students have historically been considered dangerous.
Students have time, numbers, proximity, anger and, perhaps most importantly, the audacity of people who have not yet been sufficiently socialized into believing that everything is impossible. They are not yet fully incorporated into the labor market, the bureaucracy or the respectable machinery of political life. They have not accumulated enough to be frightened of losing it all. They can still imagine that the world could have been arranged differently.
History has repeatedly demonstrated what happens when that imagination becomes organized.
South Asia being the example in recent times. In Bangladesh in 2024, a student movement that began around government job quotas expanded into a nationwide uprising that ultimately forced Sheikh Hasina from power. In Nepal in 2025, youth led protests over corruption, nepotism and restrictions on social media escalated into a national political crisis and the resignation of Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli. India, too, has continued to see student and youth movements pushing questions of education, examinations, unemployment and institutional accountability into the political center.
None of this means that students possess some magical revolutionary quality. They don’t. Students can be reactionary, conservative, sectarian, elitist and just as capable of reproducing the structures they claim to oppose. But organized students have something that every entrenched political system understands very well, the ability to turn private frustration into collective consciousness.
That is why the history of student politics in Pakistan is so important.
Student unions were not simply rendered irrelevant by the passage of time. Their organized political space was deliberately dismantled. General Zia-ul-Haq banned student unions in 1984, explicitly in a political context where student resistance had already challenged authoritarianism and anti-democratic rule. Subsequent democratic governments did not restore that political space in any meaningful, nationwide way, and later legal and institutional restrictions continued to constrain student political activity.
It is difficult not to notice the political convenience of this.
If you want to weaken a generation before it enters the machinery of the state, the workplace and the economy, one very effective method is to make sure it never learns how to organize while it is young.
Remove the union, remove the assembly. Make political discussion suspicious. Turn collective action into misconduct. Tell students that politics will ruin their careers. Tell them that they are here to study, not to question. And then send them into adulthood with a degree in one hand and political helplessness in the other.
The disappearance of student unions did not mean that student resistance disappeared. It merely became fragmented, informal and considerably more difficult to sustain. Students continued to protest fees, harassment, administrative violence, disappearances, hostel conditions, academic policies, political repression and national crises. The struggle for student political space in Pakistan is therefore not a dead history. It is an unfinished one.
And I think this matters when we talk about revolution. Because I am not saying that revolution is fast.
I am not saying that it will happen because we organize one march, occupy one campus or fill one square.
I do not believe that a revolution will arrive in Pakistan within the next few years even decades. I may not even live long enough to see the society I imagine. There is something intellectually childish about expecting a centuries old structure of class, state power, patriarchy, imperialism and economic exploitation to collapse because we have had two particularly good weeks of protest.
That expectation can be dangerous.
When the revolution does not arrive immediately, people conclude that resistance has failed. When resistance fails once, morale collapses. When morale collapses, people go home. And when everyone goes home, power gets to remain exactly where it was.
Revolution is not a weather event.
It is accumulation.
It is memory.
It is organization.
It is the person who learns how to speak in a meeting today and the person who learns how to organize ten people tomorrow. It is the student union that fights over a hostel policy and, somewhere years later, produces someone who understands collective bargaining. It is the small protest that does not overthrow a government but teaches fifty people that they are not alone. It is the pamphlet, the discussion circle, the strike, the classroom argument, the workers’ committee, the neighborhood meeting, the person who refuses to cross the picket line.
Every movement leaves something behind.
A possibility.
And perhaps this is why power is so frightened of organized students. Not because every student protest is going to overthrow a government, but because organization is a form of political education. Once people discover that their problems are shared, they begin asking who benefits from those problems remaining unsolved. Once they begin asking that question together, the political imagination becomes much harder to contain.
And so we should not expect revolution to come quickly. Rather we should be more interested in whether we are building the conditions in which it could one day become possible.
Organize in the university, the workplace, among tenants, among women, among workers. Organize wherever people are being told that their suffering is private and inevitable.
Hold on to every small thread.
Because perhaps history is not made by one enormous rope suddenly appearing from nowhere. Perhaps it is made by thousands of people refusing to let go of the tiny threads they have managed to find. The revolution may be late. It may be badly organized. It may, like most things in Pakistan, require considerably more patience than anyone would prefer. But that is hardly an argument for going home.