As an exposure of the barbaric, cruel and murderous ways of our beloved bourgeoisie  - how would we manage without them? - and a laying out of the noble efforts of some of the most badly treated, savagely exploited and repressed workers on the planet, in the Bangladeshi rag-trade, mostly women and children,  this article wins the Gold Medal.  Read it and weep!  But read it and cheer too!  If workers imprisoned at this level of impoverishment and  slave labour conditions, locked in their disgusting cheaply built factories, liable to collapse at any time, with water turned off by the bosses as punishment for daring to complain about  working conditions, if these workers can find the energy for revolt, then there is hope for us all.  You might say, given their conditions who wouldn't revolt!  But it takes courage and vitality to revolt, as well as some modicum of self-organization, not so easy to find if you're truly at the bottom of the bourgeois shit heap. And these workers are. 

Quote:

 Experience of Bangladesh shows that physical absence of unions is not enough. Important thing is the ability of the working class to consciously reject the unions. Even more important is its ability to develop its own self-organization. Development at this levelIortsntly how do we begin?  pmbeen very rudimentary, if at all. Although this movement would not have developed if workers have not stood up to the repressive forces, in the absence of self-organization the revolt sometime took the character of rioting. While some of the weaknesses are expression of the lack of experience of the working class in Bangladesh, they also point toward the need for appropriating all the experience of the workers’ movement world wide.

The authors make a good point about not trusting in the Unions whether they're present or not, and in the need to consciously reject them in favour of SELF-ORGANIZATION.  Without self-organization this revolt tended to turn into mere rioting. Without self-organization revolts and protests around the world tend to fall into line behind bourgeois type demands for better democratic procedures, or, as happens so often with youth protestation, into looting and violent expressions of frustration and anger.  But what exactly is this SELF-ORGANIZATION  which alone points the way forward for proletarian struggle?   If you had been present at these protests in Bangladesh what would you have advised the workers to do?  "Look," you say, "we've got to get ourselves organized, or we're dead meat."   So what do we do next? Draw up a list of  demands?  Elect delegates to take our demands to the bosses?  Send pickets out to neighboring factories asking for solidarity?  Have a discussion about how sticking together makes us strong and that with determination we can get somewhere? But where exactly? Have another discussion about what  "we've got to get ourselves organized" actually means, and why it's  essential? 

It isn't difficult to talk about and even demand self-organization for workers. But what does it mean and, more importantly how do we start to do it?