The uprising paved the way for another bourgeois regime

On 5 August 2024, dozens of students applauded on the roof of the residence of the fugitive Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina. They were celebrating the victory of the struggle that had lasted five weeks, claimed 439 lives and finally toppled the current government. But what kind of ‘victory’ was it really? Was it a victory for the proletariat or the bourgeoisie? The Trotskyist group Revolutionary Communist International (RCI, formerly the International Marxist Tendency) bluntly asserted that a revolution had taken place in Bangladesh and that the demonstrations had reached the point where they could “denounce the sham of bourgeois ‘democracy’, convene a congress of revolutionary committees and seize power in the name of the revolutionary masses [and] that a Soviet Bangladesh would be the order of the day if that were the case”[1].

Bangladesh's economy has been in trouble for several years now. The international economic crisis has had a major impact on the country due to the extreme rise in food and fuel prices. Inflation reached almost 9.86% in early 2024, one of the highest rates in decades. The country is on the brink of a financial crisis due to an alarming level of bank failures in the private sector. Since May 2020, the national currency, the taka, has lost 10% of its value against the US dollar. Public debt has soared from 30% of GDP in 2012 to 40% of GDP in 2022. External debt will exceed one hundred billion dollars by the end of 2023. Unemployment affects nearly 9.5% of the 73 million working population...

A society rotting on its feet
In 2023, Bangladesh was ranked among the ten most corrupt countries in the world. Corruption is pervasive at all levels of Bangladeshi society, and businesses are subject to costly and unnecessary licensing and permit requirements. Irregular payments and bribes are frequently exchanged to obtain favourable court rulings. The Corporate Anti-Corruption Portal ranked the Bangladeshi police among the least reliable in the world. People are threatened and/or arrested by the police for the sole purpose of extortion.

For years, the Awami League, Sheikh Hasina's ‘socialist’ party, in collaboration with the police, has wielded power on the streets through extortion, illegal toll collection, ‘mediation’ for access to services, not to mention intimidation of political opponents and journalists. The gangster-like practices of the Bangladesh Chhatra League (BSL), the student wing of the Awami League, are notorious. Between 2009 and 2018, its members killed 129 people and injured thousands. During this year's protests, they were widely hated for their ruthless behaviour, particularly towards women. For years, they have been able to commit these crimes with impunity, thanks to their close links with the police and the Awami League.

Sheikh Hasina's government, which took office in 2009, quickly turned into an autocratic regime. Over the past decade, it has established its exclusive grip on the country's key institutions, including the bureaucracy, security agencies, electoral authorities and the judiciary. Sheikh Hasina's government has systematically silenced the other bourgeois fractions. Before the 2024 elections, the government arrested more than 8,000 leaders and supporters of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).
But the suppression of the voices of political opposition, the media, trade unions, etc. has made the foundations of the political regime very unstable. The complete stifling of ‘public debate’, even in Parliament, has contributed to the further erosion of the foundations of the political game and ultimately to the total loss of all political control. By 2024, Sheikh Hasina no longer faced a mere loyal opposition. Most sections of the bourgeoisie had become her fiercest enemies, ready to put her in prison for the rest of her life and even to demand her death.

The failure of the fight against unemployment
The demonstrations took place against a backdrop of massive youth unemployment. And the country has no unemployment insurance system, so jobseekers receive no benefits and consequently live in extreme poverty. This context has made the quota system, which reserves 30% of civil service jobs for descendants of the ‘freedom fighters’ of the 1971 war of independence, a source of anger and frustration for all those facing unemployment.

Protests against the quota system are nothing new. But for all these years, the protests have remained confined to the universities, entirely focused on the quota system. The narrowness of the students' demands for a “fair” distribution of new civil service jobs could not provide a basis for extending the movement to the entire working class, including the unemployed who were not in education.

The students ignored the importance of formulating unifying demands in order to extend the struggle to workers facing the same spectre of unemployment. And in 2024, the students‘ demands were no different: instead of trying to extend the struggle to workers, on the basis of workers’ demands, they found themselves once again trapped in violent clashes with the police and political gangs.

Even when staff, lecturers and other workers at 35 universities went on strike on 1 July 2024 against the new universal pension scheme, the students didn't even seek support from the 50,000 university workers on strike. The strike lasted two weeks but, remarkably, was virtually ignored by the students.

A so-called ‘revolution’ for the sole benefit of the bourgeoisie
The students and a section of the population organised a massive demonstration which turned into an uprising that openly challenged the regime. Finally, on 5 August 2024, Sheikh Hasina signed her resignation in the presence of military leaders and handed power over to the army. The change of regime, described as a ‘revolution’, was in reality a behind-the-scenes military coup d'état in which the demonstrators served as civilian back-up and as a mass of manoeuvre.

The leftists quoted above claim that the students were able to “denounce the sham of bourgeois ‘democracy ’”. While the government’s brutal response to the movement showed that an elected democratic government had become an open dictatorship, it replaced it with the barely more subtle dictatorship of another bourgeois faction! And the student organisations are calling for new, more ‘democratic’ bourgeois elections. That's all there is to it!

The question of unemployment has been exploited as a means of settling scores between bourgeois cliques, all the more easily because the demand for ‘equitable’ sharing of jobs in the public service for students alone does not constitute a favourable terrain of struggle for the working class. On the contrary, it's a trap, that of corporatist confinement. The ‘revolutionary masses’ existed only in the imagination of the leftists.

Like the 4.5 million textile workers who went on strike last year, the workers' struggle against the effects of the economic crisis remains the only real prospect. Because the only class capable of giving a political perspective to the struggle against the effects of the capitalist crisis is the working class. But we should be under no illusions: the working class in Bangladesh is too inexperienced to resist, on its own, the traps set for it by the dominant class, with its left-wing parties and its trade unions. It is through the international struggle of the proletariat, particularly in the oldest bastions of the working class in Europe, that the workers in Bangladesh will find the path to an authentic revolutionary struggle.
Dennis, 10 September 2024

 

 

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[1]

What the Bangladeshi Revolution teaches us, marxist.ca