From Bangladesh, a statement from the garment workers’ union (NGWF)
We receive from Bangladesh and gladly publish a recent statement from the National Garment Workers Federation [the date of 24.05 on the header of the sheet is clearly wrong – the text was written on a sheet with an old header], which denounces how in the student and popular protests of recent weeks the police have killed dozens of workers, and sets out the demands of the National Garment Workers Federation against the Provisional Government. Demands that, although mostly referred to the specific category, have the merit of not being simply category-based: release of workers still arrested, conviction of those responsible for the killings, health care for the wounded paid by the state, increase in the minimum wage – conceived as a living or decent wage -, abolition of special laws (brutally anti-worker and pro-capital) in the special economic zones for exports, freedom of organization and strike, equal rights of women workers and women in all areas of working and social life – – we point out that this is one of the very few unions in the world in which a feminist symbol appears in the same flag as the union (advanced Bangladesh, very backward Italy…). The communiqué concludes with an international appeal to send funds to cover the large expenses to be incurred for aid to the families of workers murdered by the police, the treatment of the wounded and the defense of those who are still under arrest.
In fact, as is also clear from this position taken by the NGWF, a great student revolt that started at the beginning of June has gradually been transformed, following the bloody repression of the government of Sheikh Hasina, into a broader popular uprising. The students’ initial demand was, in reality, rather limited: the suppression of the reserved quota for access to public employment in favor of the descendants of the fighters of the “war of independence” against Pakistan (1969-1971), with “merit and knowledge” opposed to the clientelistic use of this reserved quota. No bridge has been built towards the industrial working class, the protagonist of major strikes and revolts in recent years, and there was a certain basic ambiguity regarding the position of the rebels towards the BNP, the rival party of Hasina’s Awami League, certainly no less anti-worker and anti-popular than the ruling party since 2009. But the dynamics of the clash nevertheless involved layers of the proletariat, and forced the student movement itself to pose political and social problems of a general, overall nature. Just as it has provided the right for a union like the NGWF to present its own complaint and its autonomous demands to the new government, presided over by the so-called banker of the poor people – for many, and also for us, leech of the poor – Yunus.
The choice of the part of the student movement headed by Students Against Discrimination to indicate Yunus, considered very close to the notorious Bill & Hillary Clinton gang, and immediately congratulated by the US Secretary of State Blinken (as well as by the Beijing government), indicates at least the confused political state of the student leadership. And it could indicate something even more dangerous for the outcomes of this broad uprising: the trust in a “technical” management of the enormous social and political contradictions of this country subjected to the diktats of the IMF and the predatory interests of the great powers near and far (India, China, the United States and even Great Britain), and of the multiplicity of foreign multinationals (mostly Western, and of course also Italian, starting with the “progressive” Benetton) that suck the blood of millions of young (and not so young) industrial manufacturing workers there, textiles and clothing in the first place.
But we note with interest and attention that a part of the student movement has been dragged into dealing with issues of a more general nature: the defense of Hindu minorities (hit by hundreds of attacks as they are considered accomplices of the Hasina government), price controls in the markets against profiteers (with an “ultimatum” to the Yunus government to take drastic measures against inflation within a week), the restoration of services, and – in some cases – the creation of worker-student committees which, for the first time since the beginning of this revolt, connect these two worlds that have remained in recent months, despite everything, distinct.
The new government immediately presented itself with the sly smile of billionaire Yunus who recommended everyone to repudiate violence and return home, and to work: the government (and its great internal protector: the army) will take care of putting things “back in place”. In what sense: “in place”? In the meantime, the stock market celebrates, the industrialists – trusting the new government – claim to unload the costs of the recent troubles of the economy on the workers by not paying the wages due, the army does not exclude anything (some sectors of the student world, and not only, fear conspiracies).
In short, the risk that this great revolt will be neutralized by a series of internal political and economic maneuvers in Bangladesh and internationally is quite high. However, it is precisely in necessarily complicated and tumultuous class clashes of this kind that the workers’ movement must cut its teeth to make itself totally independent from the multiple bourgeois parties, and become the reference point for that component of the student world that dreams and wants a future of liberation from oppression and exploitation not only for itself, corporately, but for all the exploited and oppressed.
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