Down with Sheikh Hasina’s reactionary blood-stained regime!
For a fundamentally new liberating society through a real revolution!
By supporters of the New Communism in Bangladesh
July 29, 2024
Permalink: https://revcom.us/en/down-sheikh-hasinas-reactionary-blood-stained-regime
Editors’ note: We received this statement put out by supporters of the new communism in Bangladesh. At this time, there is massive struggle going on in Bangladesh, and we provide some background summary on that here. It is very positive when people bring the new communism into a situation like this, and we look forward to hearing more from these comrades.
The bravery of the people today has shaken the heart of the ruling group. The people have started an inspiring struggle that needs to be carried forward.
The Chhatra League (BCL) [the student wing of the reactionary Awami League government] and the police have attacked and killed more than two hundred people and injured and arrested hundreds more in the just uprising of students opposing the regime’s quota system. Since then, the people’s resistance against the police and the BCL has been growing constantly. The movement has now entered a new phase. Although initially limited to university students, it has now transformed into a people’s movement from the entire country, and the character of the movement has changed and has now become mainly a people’s struggle against state oppression. The slogan calling for the downfall of the dictator Sheikh Hasina has been raised. People are taking to the streets to demand an end to sixteen long years of reactionary and illegitimate rule. At present, opposition to the killings by the armed forces of repression and calling for the fall of Sheikh Hasina has emerged as the main aspect of this movement.
The government has deployed the State’s armed forces, including the RAB and BGB alongside the police, to suppress the movement. The capital city Dhaka’s roads are occupied by armored cars and its skies by police helicopters. People’s skulls are blown away by snipers. The government has shut down internet access throughout the country to sever communications among the protesters, and the Army has imposed a curfew on the entire country. Meanwhile, the Hasina government, seeing the danger of losing power, has also offered to sit for dialogue. The people have rejected this maneuver with disgust, and if the movement’s leadership agrees to dialogue and cracks the movement’s unity, those opportunistic treacherous leaders will face the utmost wrath of the agitators.
No spontaneous movement can continue in a straight line forever
Even so, despite the people’s immense sacrifices, no spontaneous movement can continue in a straight line forever. A real victory for the movement requires specific goals and paths, and for this it is necessary to fully understand the cause of the problem and to be able to think structurally of a new kind of state. Only a revolutionary party armed with a coherent revolutionary theory can make this possible. Any spontaneous movement is bound to fail at some point if such a revolutionary force cannot unite with the movement and move it towards revolution. In that case, the people’s massive participation, their strong efforts and self-sacrifice, will become a powerful force hitting the ruling class’s power.
If this movement is gradually intensified and expanded and properly carried forward, it will contribute immensely to the accumulation of energy necessary for the revolution and for sowing the seeds of revolutionary thought. We need to understand that people are not able to automatically understand the reality that they are facing. This is because in an oppressive system there is a division between manual labor and mental labor. As a result, the oppressed masses do not have the opportunity to join in intellectual activities. Moreover, the ruling class continuously imposes its ideology on the people through its control of the mass media and the means of producing popular consent and brainwashing the people. As a result, in order to harness the people’s potential for revolution, there must be struggle with their spontaneous consciousness to transform it into revolutionary thought.
We need a complete revolution!
Because we need a complete revolution! Exploitation, oppression and inequality cannot be eliminated without ousting the existing oppressive state machinery, the ruling classes and their imperialist henchmen through the force of arms. If the economic, political and social relations of exploitation and oppression are not eradicated from society’s depths, society will return to its previous state. The task of a full-fledged revolution is not only to transform the hostile relations of the masses with the minority ruling class, but also to resolve the conflicts within the masses: the contradictions between mental labor and manual labor, between men and women, between village and city, etc., all must be transformed in such a way as to eradicate exploitation and the seeds of exploitation and oppression. This radical change requires a political strategy, programme and organization based on a scientific method and approach.
We are living under a global political-economic system called capitalism-imperialism. The real source and cause of the terrible suffering, humiliation and pain of the whole world and the people of Bangladesh lies in this system. It is the workings of this system that triggered the war in Ukraine, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. Israel backed by US and Western imperialism is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Fascism is on the rise in the United States and Europe. Unbridled plunder and repression are common features of imperialist global domination. Rabid nationalist, warmongering patriarchal fascists like Trump in the US or Le Pen in France are threatening to intensify this oppression and plunder.
Bangladesh in imperialism’s oppressive division of the world
Two types of countries exist in this world system—the handful of imperialist countries on the one hand and the countries and nations oppressed by imperialism on the other. Bangladesh is a country under the domination of the capitalist-imperialist world system, and this is the main factor shaping the current social reality in Bangladesh. The top representatives in the Awami League government have stripped away all the rights of the people, mainly to protect the interests of the imperialists and the crony ruling class intertwined with imperialism. They brutally suppress opposition in the name of the spirit of the country’s war of independence in 1971 and claim sole ownership of the war’s legacy, but their Awamiization of history hides the war’s true history. The Bangladeshi people sacrificed themselves for equality, social justice and human dignity, but reaped discrimination instead of equality, injustice instead of social justice, and contempt and disdain instead of human dignity.
This is because the Awami League acted according to its class interests and overall world view. It was during that period that the CENTO and SEATO agreements were signed in the interests of imperialism. Far from liberating Bangladesh from imperialist subjugation, the exploitation of the people by the imperialists and their local Bangladeshi brokers intensified, as the people were trapped in the most hellish cheap-labour sweatshops in the world. Global corporate behemoths are amassing immense wealth by grinding millions of Bangladeshis on the wheels of their human profit-making machinery. Imperialist parasitism locks millions of people around the world in their factories, to be burned alive as slave laborers (as in the Rana Plaza collapse or the Tazreen Garments fire that killed thousands of workers) or thrown onto the dump as surplus if their labour cannot be profitably exploited.
After the reactionary state of Pakistan was born in 1947 on the basis of reactionary communal politics, the Awami League leadership seeking to share power with the Mutsuddi ruling group of Pakistan on the basis of Bengali nationalist politics in 1971 grabbed state power in Bangladesh with the backing of expansionist India and the Soviet social-imperialism. Naturally, due to its class interests, the Awami League maintained the continuity of imperialist exploitation and plunder in the country, without any revolutionary transformation of the colonial state structure inherited from Pakistan, and in some cases it intensified this. The Awami League and subsequent ruling parties successively maintained economic dependence by adopting various plans in the interest of imperialism and with the advice of its representative World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), etc. The formal freedom that came under the leadership of the Awami League betrayed the aspirations of millions and is no real freedom.
From Bangladesh’s birth in the world imperialist system to today, the divisions between the country’s classes has profoundly intensified. Within the confines of the imperialist-capitalist system, it is not possible to eliminate inequality among the people while keeping the basic relations and dynamics intact. Apart from differences in economic and social status, ethnic, gender, religious and caste differences also prevail. The racial oppression of tribal peoples is one of the fault lines of this society. It is impossible for the existing structure to eliminate the ethnic oppression of the indigenous people. Since the Awami League revolt gaining independence from Pakistan was based on Bengali nationalism, the ruling class has continued to persecute the tribal people to keep everyone united on the basis of Bengali nationalist ideology. Far from the right of ethnic self-determination, efforts to Bengalize other ethnicities are ongoing, as is the oppression of the tribal peoples. The army is permanently deployed in the Chittagong Hills and continuously carries out disappearances, murders, torture, abductions, rapes, looting and evictions. Any form of resistance by the tribal people is brutally suppressed. The indigenous peoples can be freed only by burying this system.
There is no way other than to demolish this discriminatory-oppressive system to achieve the liberation of the exploited, oppressed billions of working people at the bottom of society whose daily life is a constant horror and whom this state constantly tyrannizes, exploits, tortures and oppresses. There is also the stratified middle class people, who are more privileged than the proletariat and who suffer this system’s oppression comparatively less. But if they cross the boundaries set by the bourgeois ruling class, they too are persecuted. Because this middle class is also subordinate to the ruling bourgeoisie, and their lives are dictated by them. Due to the dynamic nature of the current capitalist-imperialist world system, the relatively better life prospects of this middle class are also shrinking.
Unemployment, hunger, poverty, inequality, injustice, tyranny are integral parts of this capitalist-imperialist world system. The dependence of the country’s economy on imperialism and the inability of the ruling class to ensure jobs for the masses of people linked with the failure to develop independent industries is also part of the background to the ongoing protest movement. In the third world countries like Bangladesh, the severity of these problems is several times higher than in the imperialist countries, as imperialism incorporates whole societies into its world-economic circuits for free exploitation.
As a result, the traditional values of the society and the traditional family structure have been greatly degraded, and at the same time, the system’s dynamics have driven huge numbers of women here and around the world into the global labour force. But this change in the position of women in the family and society has given rise to a vengeful patriarchal reaction and the rise of misogynistic religious fundamentalist forces. These religious fundamentalists do not consider women as complete human beings. They seek to reinforce the existing social chains by using the mental chains of religious belief to violently subjugate women.
This same system is constantly driving the Earth’s environment and biodiversity towards disaster. Every year Bangladesh is inundated by floods and cyclones that portend massive damage. According to the United Nations, the number of climate refugees in Bangladesh will reach 30 million by 2050. It is not possible to solve the climate problem by keeping this system intact.
The ruling class of this country will always enforce violence, torture or dictatorial rule to continue imperialist exploitation – it has no other way to defend itself except police brutality, suppression of freedom of speech, black laws etc., and depriving the people of all kinds of democratic rights. This will not change under the BNP, Jamaat-e-Islami or any other reactionary party. The BNP-Jamaat or other petit-bourgeois political forces seek to capitalize on the people’s anger against violations of democracy and human rights and use the people’s just movement with false promises of restoring democracy—and so seek to come to power with the help of imperialism. It is as clear as day that BNP-Jamaat is just like the Awami League—paw-licking dogs of imperialism. The BNP-Jamaat and various petit-bourgeois political parties instead of Awami League seek power as servants of imperialism, specifically US imperialism, to keep the people bound into this same system.
Imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism—we need another way!
The Islamic fundamentalist forces oppose this crony ruling class by portraying it as a representative and propagator of the looting, corruption and degenerate culture of Western imperialism. But these forces are by no means anti-imperialist, rather they want a share of power in this world system without severing ties with imperialism. They seek to impose with a vengeance traditional relationships, customs, ideologies and values rooted in the past, which take extreme forms of exploitation and oppression, especially the medieval barbarism these Islamic fundamentalists impose on women. Forty-five years of theocratic rule in Iran and the subsequent rise to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan have shown that wherever religious fundamentalism is in power, patriarchal-hegemonic radical misogyny reigns. Bob Avakian, the theoretical architect of the New Communism, explains scientifically that:
What we see in contention here with Jihad on the one hand and McWorld/ McCrusade on the other hand, are historically outmoded strata among colonized and oppressed humanity up against historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system. These two reactionary poles reinforce each other, even while opposing each other. If you side with either of these ‘outmodeds’, you end up strengthening both.
While this is a very important formulation and is crucial to understanding much of the dynamics driving things in the world in this period, at the same time we do have to be clear about which of these ‘historically outmodeds’ has done the greater damage and poses the greater threat to humanity: It is the ‘historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system,’ and in particular the U.S. imperialists. [from Bringing Forward Another Way]
So the people have to be free from these two outmoded forces. Because one pole would enslave women and the people as a whole, throwing them into medieval darkness, while the other would enslave the people who parading “democracy” as “freedom” and capitalist-imperialist exploitation as “progress”. The people cannot move towards liberation without the establishment of a completely new state power that relies on the millions of oppressed people led by revolutionary forces aimed at breaking with the imperialist world system and ousting the domestic agent ruling classes to emancipate humanity.
Those who truly want to fight for the emancipation of humanity must aim to revolutionize society through the destruction of this state apparatus and ensure a whole new level of freedom for the people through the establishment of a radically new state. Freedom that unites people and gives them the power to uproot centuries of division and inequality that have kept them destitute and ignorant of their own power to liberate themselves. For this revolutionary change, we need to be united on correct political and ideological line and on the basis of an overall strategic understanding.
Get with revolution and the New Communism!
Today, nothing but the New Communism can bring before the people a scientific understanding of existing reality. Those who truly want to understand “what is the problem and what is the solution” will not be able to point people in the right direction without this. Because the New Communism is a new theoretical framework based on the summation of the experience of previous socialist societies and communist movements and the interpretation and analysis of the reality of the present world, learning from all the various areas of human activity. It is mainly a continuation of the previous communist movement but ruptures with secondary but important errors.
As a result, only on the basis of the theoretical framework of the New Communism is it possible to build a revolutionary movement, seize state power, and build socialism with the goal of communism. The New Communism materially represents the beginning of an entirely new chapter in the historical development of communist theory and practice. If the New Communism is widely known in this country and the whole world and if it can spread more widely and take root, its revolutionary power can transform the whole world. It is the theoretical framework of the next phase of the communist revolution, and is the most powerful weapon for the correct understanding of reality and its revolutionary transformation. It is the duty of revolutionary activists to clearly present this fact before the people: that without a real revolution on the basis of the New Communism, it is not possible to reform the existing system in any way to benefit the people. As Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party in the US, the theoretical architect of the New Communism, has said, “We need a revolution. Anything else, in the final analysis, is bullshit.” And: “…we have two choices: either, live with all this—and condemn future generations to the same, or worse, if they have a future at all—or, make revolution!”
We invite you to join the discussions, debates, campaigns on the New Communism, you who are really thinking about the future of the world. Those who think that this capitalist-imperialist system treats most people as animals. Whose eyes tear up at the death of millions of children due to malnutrition. Those who know that this system’s claim of “justice and liberation for all” is a lie. Who are bursting with anger at the waste of the vitality of billions of young people. Those who cherish aspirations for a society freed of exploitation, oppression, hunger, poverty, war, and the destruction of nature, and whose hearts want to fight for a world of equality—a world for which one can literally give their life.
From THE NEW COMMUNISM: The science, the strategy, the leadership for an actual revolution, and a radically new society on the road to real emancipation, by Bob Avakian:
There is an urgent need for this new synthesis [of communism] to be taken up, broadly, in this society and in the world as a whole: everywhere people are questioning why things are the way they are, and whether a different world is possible; everywhere people are talking about “revolution” but have no real understanding of what revolution means, no scientific approach to analyzing and dealing with what they are up against and what needs to be done; everywhere people are rising up in rebellion but are hemmed in, let down and left to the mercy of murderous oppressors, or misled onto paths which only reinforce, often with barbaric brutality, the enslaving chains of tradition; everywhere people need a way out of their desperate conditions, but do not see the source of their suffering and the path forward out of the darkness.