In memory of Abu Sayed and all the nameless people of the July 2024 Revolution

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I. A chronicle of the July Revolution

After Bangladesh, then still East Pakistan, fought independently from its occupying power Pakistan in 1971 and became a sovereign nation, the government under Rahman established a quota system for the civil service sector, which particularly favored veterans who had fought in the Revolutionary War and some minorities. The system remained intact for decades — albeit with fluctuations — and was expanded to include their descendants after the original freedom fighters died slowly. The civil service sector, as here in the West, is, of course, associated with better working conditions and higher positions, so that in effect entire families moved into privileged positions within Bangladeshi society, while the majority of the population was forced into ever more precarious working conditions. Public criticism of the quota system grew and repeatedly led to protests across Bangladesh, but was vehemently continued during the autocratically led and corruption-riddled government periods of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina (1996-2001 & 2009-2024), who belonged to her father's party, the Awami League. After Hasina promised to abolish the quota system under pressure from the protests, it was reinstated in June 2024 by a decision of the Supreme Court.

What happened next is likely to have surprised the whole of Bangladesh and beyond, including everyone involved themselves: Peaceful protests by a group of students in Dhaka against the court decision quickly became a national, student-led insurgency that drove thousands of students onto the streets. Hasina initially reacted to the protests by calling everyone involved as Razakars denounced — a militia that had worked with the Pakistani military at the time of the War of Independence — and thus equated it with traitors to the Bangladeshi liberation struggle. What developed over the course of time can probably be described as ping-pong between, on the one hand, the mobilizations of resistance struggles, ranging from individual existing student groups to broad masses of students, and state-police repression including regime-related student cadre organizations on the other. On July 16, student Abu Sayed, one of the organizers of Students Against Discrimination-Movement, standing on the street with open arms shot dead by police. The outrage over his brutal murder radicalized the uprisings, the crowd of protesters grew into a mature and remarkably well-organized network that was able to resist repression both through police and militia violence as well as closure of dormitories, curfews and the complete shutdown of the Internet, up to Hasina's shoot-on-sight command, which was supposed to lead to several massacres. Hasina, who was no longer able to withstand the pressure of the uprisings supported by public opinion despite brutal attempts at repression, agreed to negotiate. However, the organized crowd, which in the meantime had also joined large sections of the working class, for example from the textile and transport industries, had only one demand at that time, namely Hasina's resignation and a rebuilding of the government. She fought back with further killings until finally, on August 4, over a million people marched to Hasina's residence, but only found an empty house there. A day later, on August 5, Hasina resigned as prime minister after more than 15 years in power from exile in India. The consequences of their leadership in just this one month are disastrous: the death toll is estimated at 1,400 people — many of them massacred beyond recognition so that identification was impossible — the number of injured is over 20,000. Nevertheless, Bangladesh, despite all the losses, is cheering, because the end of the Hasina regime is something that many would no longer have dreamed of in their lifetime.

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II. The The will to power And the revolutionary

The speed and spontaneity of the events, the extent of violence and bloodshed, the dimension of organized revolutionary resistance and its ultimate success are remarkable and require an attempt at explanation. In the hodgepodge of Nietzschean concepts, one immediately notices the The will to power in the eye. Nietzsche, who understood the world neither dialectically nor teleologically, is rather based on material power relations to which “an inner world [must] be attributed.”¹ and which express themselves in everything alive. They are the will for positive, i.e. self-affirming and always complete, complete, power. As such, he does not lack anything, he is self-sufficient, has neither a singular origin nor an appearance on which he would depend. This means that the material forces are realized in their expression and only through this. “This world is the will to power — and nothing else. And you yourself are also this will to power — and nothing else.”²to let Nietzsche speak. But we must not be led in the wrong direction by Nietzsche's jargon; the will to power should not be imagined as a metaphysical totality similar to God, “it is the principle of the synthesis of forces. In this synthesis, which relates to time, the forces go through the same differences; in it, the different is reproduced.”³. We have it with difference to do that gives the quantitative forces their respective qualitative diversity, i.e. the fullness or multiplicity of material reality. It is in the relationships of these forces that the decisive factor for life lies; life emerges from them or, more accurately, they are life itself. Because we must not forget that the will is an inner one, which is the real multiples Reproduces on his own without having to create an artificial, external opposition from which he would have to draw on. It is a creative force in itself, never ceases to produce, to improve, to revolutionize, driven by desire to will.

What happens when this will to power becomes reactionary, total, negative and repressive, subject to standstill instead of becoming eternal, can be clearly seen in the material conditions. Human modernity is characterized by global exploitation patterns that cannot be eradicated even long after the alleged disappearance of European colonialism. Rather, they flow viscously across the globe in the neocolonial hangover, where they find their own sophisticated mechanisms of both material and cultural appropriation and appropriation. The so-called global South became a productive factory, a place of surplus value production through exploitation for the rest of the world and, even more, an outsourced battleground for geopolitical interests. The consequences are being felt by billions of people: environmental disasters, expulsion and dispossession, precarious and life-threatening working and living conditions, starvation, unjustified, sometimes life-long detentions, political repression, torture and wars, including genocides. Where Nietzsche conceptualizes the world as a fundamentally productive, enriching, relatively free and heterogeneous force through the will to power, you see it as tremendous self-destruction up to and including annihilation — you see the one who has turned against himself The will to nothing, who is busy cutting off both legs.

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III. The Bangladeshi will for liberation

For the major powers, Bangladesh plays a central role in the region and Hasina's regime offered strategic advantages. On the one hand, Bangladesh lies between the two competing giants India and China, both of which are fighting for control of South Asian territories, and on the other hand, the USA depends on India as an ally against China. While Hasina toyed with them all, but was supported above all by India and the USA, there is a different tone among the Bangladeshi population, because for the masses, those major states mean forces of imperialism lurking around the corner, which express themselves in conflicts over water resources, anti-Muslim and Bangladeshi violence on the part of India under the right-wing Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the supremacy of multinational, western corporations. It should come as no surprise that such a situation in Bangladesh under Hasina, a prime minister notorious for electoral fraud, corruption and an iron hand against any form of opposition, i.e. oppressed its own population and at the same time sold the country to imperial powers, would lead to ever stronger revolts. Because rebellion against totality lies in the nature of Willens zur Macht, revolutionary is inherent in him. Foucault's reflections in his analysis of the 1979 Iranian Revolution echo this:

Uprisings are part of the story, but in a way they escape it. The movement by which an individual, a group, a minority, or an entire people says: “I no longer obey,” and is willing to risk life in the face of a power considered unfair, seems irreducible. That is because no power is able to make them absolutely impossible.⁴

Time and again, it is clear that where a balance of power is consolidated until no more movable difference seems possible, the will to power erupts like hot lava that melts the petrified soil. Every attempt to make life impossible leads to the emergence of an even more radical counterforce, which is making its way to liberation. This is also the case in Bangladesh. The court decision to continue the quota system may have served as a trigger, as a last push that caused the magma to shoot above the surface. In any case, July 2024 marked the decisive moment in history, which drove the crowds to where the risk of death was preferred over the compulsion of obedience and the fighting spirit of isolated groups spilled over to the masses. Because, as Palestinian writer and resistance fighter Ghassan Kanafani said, “to liberate our country, to have dignity, to have respect, to have our mere human rights; these are things as essential as life itself.”⁵. What provokes the fighting spirit is therefore by no means a simple question of mere survival, but of what gives life value, a desire so essential that it has a universal effect and brings entire populations to a collective will despite, or rather precisely because of, their differences. After all, it is precisely the difference that is worth fighting for in a totalitarian, absolute regime, and so is the revolutionary form of organization “diverse, hesitant, confused and obscure even for itself.”⁶. Bangladesh's political landscape is thwarted by such divergent axes of different religions, ideologies and classes, and accordingly the network of groups and movements was not a unification, but a clash driven by the collectively experienced impossibility of the prevailing conditions.

Gilles Deleuze describes such forms of organization of desire as rhizomes, a decentralized system of roots that grows in all directions, “[can] take on a wide variety of forms, from branching in all directions on the surface to compaction.”⁷, and its power lies in this flexible relationship, which has no central leadership power. It is moved less by a utopian idea of not yet, but rather a spontaneous outbreak of a heterogeneous beacon that resists the intolerable and knows how to adapt to the repressive backlash. At universities, in factories and on the streets of Bangladesh, the desire for a life of dignity and respect sprang up, as is usual for grassroots movements — because a truly liberating revolution can only come from below, where the material, real difference operates. Only a minority can be revolutionary. This does not mean a quantitative outnumber, but the marginal sub-systems, deviations, the diversity and the majority of a ruling regime that is outside of dominant supremacy. Minorizeto take away its supremacy from it and transfer it into the process of becoming, where it itself becomes a sub-system. A revolution is never complete when one majority is replaced by another, but only when the minority has become the inner principle of society. The July uprisings must also be understood in this sense, and it is in this sense that Shadik Kayem, one of the leading students, should say the final word:

We wanted to build a democratic Bangladesh where people could live in freedom and dignity... We developed ideas together and helped each other organize the movement and motivate students. I'm not saying that this or that person is the leader of the movement. I say that all students and masses who have helped and participated in us are the heroes.⁸

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sources

‍ABC's Richard Carleton interviewing Ghassan Kanafani, 16/10/1970. Online: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-19/abc-richard-carleton-interviewing-ghassa/104368218.

Chandan, Khan & Md Shahnawaz: A chronicle of the July Uprising, n.d. Online: https://thegreatwave.thedailystar.net/news/a-chronicle-of-the-july-uprising.

Deleuze, Gilles: Nietzsche and philosophy. Translated by Bernd Schwibs. A series of passages. Munich 1976.

Deleuzees & Felix Guattari: A thousand plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia II. Translated by Gabriele Ricke and Ronald Voullié. Berlin 1992.

Ghamari-Tabrizi, Behrooz: Foucault in Iran. Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment. Muslim International. Minneapolis 2016.

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image sources

Item image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abu_Sayed_holding_flag.png #

Figure 1: https://www.newagebd.net/post/country/242084/yunus-to-visit-abu-sayeeds-family-in-rangpur

Figure 2: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_victory_celebration_of_Bangladeshi_student%27s_one_point_movement.jpg

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footnotes

1: Subsequent fragments 1885 36 [31].

2: Subsequent fragments 1885 38 [12].

3: Deleuze, Nietzsche and philosophy, P. 56.

4: Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran, 70. Freely translated by the author.

5: ABC's Richard Carleton interviewing Ghassan Kanafani. Freely translated by the author.

6: Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran, 61. Freely translated by the author.

7: Deleuze & Guattari, A thousand plateaus, P. 16.

8: Khan Chandan & Md Shahnawaz, A chronicle of the July Uprising.