the terms that prevailed in other parts of the social sciences where the military
and bureaucracy were seen as modernizing élites and where it was not found
surprising or even disturbing that they enjoyed the most power. They repre-
sented the skills and values that developing countries required if they were to
move down the path to modernity. Some of the functionalists had written about
the modernizing role of this part of the state apparatus. F. W. Riggs, a leading
American political scientist, had also pointed to the colonial inheritance of a
powerful bureaucracy, more powerful than other political institutions
bequeathed at independence (Riggs, 1963). There are parallels between func-
tionalism and Marxism in some of their references to the power of the bureau-
cracy after independence and to the colonial legacy. For both schools of
thought colonialism meant the overdevelopment of the bureaucracy relative to
other political institutions.
The relationship between class and state in post-colonial society gave the
staterelative autonomyfrom class control. Relative autonomy refers to the
controversy within Marxism about whether the state can free itself from
class control in order to manage and control class conflict. It is a difficult
concept to use without ambiguity (Moore, 1980; Wood, 1980). Alavi argued
that the state in Pakistan in the 1950s was not merely a set of institutions
controlled by a dominant class. Its autonomy was not complete because it
was not totally neutral or independent of all class forces. The state was nei-
ther autonomous in the pluralist sense, nor was it the prisoner of a single
dominant class. To support the idea of the state as relativelyautonomous
there has to be an accompanying analysis of class.
The specific circumstances of the propertied classes in Pakistan meant
that three could be identified: a national bourgeoisie whose interests centred
on the ownership and control of industrial capital; an indigenous landed
class dominant in the agricultural sector and consisting of a relatively
small number of wealthy and powerful rural families owning large tracts of
cultivatable land; and a ‘metropolitan bourgeoisie’. While the significance
of a national bourgeoisie can be readily appreciated because they are
actively present in the economy and polity, the metropolitan bourgeoisie is
much less visible or tangible. The interests of these three propertied classes
were found to be competing but not contradictory. This is why instead of a
more orthodox Marxist analysis which would interpret the state as directed
by a single class, Alavi chose a formulation which reflected the more
complex pattern of propertied classes found in Pakistan at that time. This
involved in particular a significant presence of external capital whose
base was outside Pakistan in one of the great metropolitan centres of the
world economy.
114 Understanding Third World Politics