JULY 2024 A revolution that never was

by Raihan Rahman

AS BANGLADESH approaches a full year since the July Uprising, we find ourselves in a state of something like a Gramscian interregnum. Italian Marxist revolutionary Antonio Gramsci notes that periods of political instability sometimes appear in history when the old order seems to die out but the new one struggles to take shape. What marks this interregnum is the appearance of monsters or a great variety of morbid symptoms. After one year of the July Uprising, we happen to be surrounded and saturated by monsters and morbid symptoms.

The uprising of July 2024, which ousted dictator Sheikh Hasina and the fascist Awami League regime, is often dubbed a revolution, mostly by the student leaders who coordinated the mass movement. It even got some poetic sobriquets like the ‘Monsoon Revolution.’ Fast-forwarding one year from the initial success of the uprising, can we consider the July uprising a revolution? 

To find the answer to this question and grasp the quagmire we are in, I find it relevant to go back to a passage Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write in Empire: ‘As Spinoza says, if we simply cut the tyrannical head off the social body, we will be left with the deformed corpse of society. What we need is to create a new social body, which is a project that goes well beyond refusal. Our lines of flight, our exodus must be constituent and create a real alternative. Beyond the simple refusal, or as part of that refusal, we need also to construct a new mode of life and above all a new community.’

A revolution is exactly that: constructing a new social body, fostering a new mode of life, and building a new community. It involves creating an alternative. A new way of becoming and being economically, politically, socially, culturally, and even environmentally. Revolution is a process of world-making, a journey toward a new ontology. 

July was never a revolution. No matter how emphatically the so-called ‘stakeholders’ of the uprising claim it to be. It did not begin as one. And it failed to become one. There is hardly any possibility on the near or distant horizon of it going in that direction. But there were revolutionary possibilities in the people’s uprising. There were copious utopian moments amid rampant carnage that made us dream of a new beginning. Our solidarity, courage, defiance, and sacrifices seemed to usher in a new mode of life. However, that optimism did not last once the immediate victory was achieved. 

No uprising or revolution can be entirely successful or entirely unsuccessful. The success of the July Uprising was in expelling the fascist Awami League government, the government that destroyed every democratic institution and culture in its long 16-year regime and inflicted unspeakable violence and brutality to suppress any democratic dissent. But once the uprising succeeded in cutting the tyrannical head off, it seems to have lost its way.

The revolutionary possibilities of July died on the very eve of its victory, when the revolutionary multitude turned into a regressive mob on the very day the tyrant was driven out. Violence can be necessary and even revolutionary only when you fight against the oppressor to resist injustice. Once you appear the victor and then commit violence, you take up the role of the oppressor and become the perpetrator of injustice. The chaos that ensued following the fall of the fascists until the interim government was sworn in, and the violence that marked the early days of victory, effectively neutralised the movement’s radical potential. The rest has been the continuation of a journey that lost its way right after stepping onto the road. 

Agreed, revolution is never just an event. Thinking with French philosopher Alain Badiou, it is an event indeed in the sense that it is a radical rupture in the order of things or existing reality. But again, a revolution is also a project, a process. A process of transforming the order of things, changing the very structure of society, and taking it in a progressive direction. A process of restructuring the structures that condition our lives and oppress us; a process of building them anew. 

A revolution, even though it signifies a ruptural singularity, has to play out in the longue durée to become a revolution. A rupture only breaks, doesn’t build. It ends in refusal. But revolution, as a world-making process, does not end there. It continues with the construction of a new social body. Of course, building takes time. In that sense, thinking along the arc of longue durée, it may seem too early to cry a verdict that July failed to be a revolution. But the symptoms and manifestations out there — the morbid and monstrous — corroborate the apprehension. 

Over the past year, little reform has been accomplished, let alone any revolutionary change in the system. The old institutions and the vestiges of fascist political culture are still dominant. The rhetoric of vengeance shadows commitment to justice. Little progress is visible in the trial of individuals responsible for the mass murder and violence of July. However, the politics of tagging are in full force to vilify those who are critical of the post-July failures. 

The government has failed to maintain law and order. In that rubble, unruly forces have grown and unleashed different modalities of oppression. The religious extremists are establishing their reign of ideological intolerance. Moral policing has taken a violent shape against those who do not fit into the narrow boxes defined by them. A constant violence of erasure is being inflicted — erasure of dissent and alternative lifestyles that do not conform to the values and standards set by religious extremists. The streets have become sites of a Hobbesian state of nature. The mob has become a synonym for terror. 

What is more concerning is a surge in misogyny. Regrettably, Bangladesh has always been a deeply patriarchal society where many layers of oppression against women are historically practiced and culturally normalised. But what we see now is a rampant carnival of misogyny where women are openly being harassed on the streets and online, physically abused in public places, and verbally abused even in the rallies of major religious organisations. What is even sadder is the deafening silence of the post-uprising political power on misogyny and the broader woman question. Other marginalised groups who were already living a precarious existence because of their different sexual orientations and gender identities are feeling even more unsafe.

The post-July political scene has effectively become a macho club with systemic marginalisation of any identity that is not heteronormative male. Also, in the rat race of claiming the stake of the movement, the real stakeholders — the peasants and the working-class people — got gradually marginalised that they hardly feature in the nouveau political power’s agenda. Can it in any way be called a revolution if the peasants and working class experience no transformation or find no promise of change in their everyday lives?

None of these crises are new and did not spring out of nowhere in the post-July landscape. What we are experiencing is the exacerbation and aggravation of the crises that have existed for a long time. Karl Marx quips in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte to refer to how the nightmare of history haunts us: ‘The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living’. We are also bearing the cumulative impacts of the past, the accumulated failures of post-independence Bangladesh. The power that has run the country for the last fifty-four years, the lumpen political establishment and the military-bureaucratic complex, only worked toward the demolition of democratic practices and institutions, facilitated a crony-klepto capitalist system, and kept the colonial legacy of the legal and judicial system alive. The rights of the people have been violated to enable a system that works for the interests of a handful. Bangladesh entered into the post-July terrain carrying the legacy of that past and failed to shake it off.

The mass uprising of July was a rejection of all the rubbish that had happened before and kept on oppressing people. They went on the street, defying the threats of death for a change. If not a revolutionary change, then at least some reforms. Now, all the buzz we hear about reform concerns mostly how the power will be divided and shared among the political parties. Not how people will be liberated from old shackles of oppression, or how their quality of life will be improved. 

So, has the July Uprising been merely a movement of regime change? It seems so. The fascist ruler and the ruling party were driven out, but not the fascist tendencies. They live in the mob, in the oppressive practices of the extremists, and in the politics of ‘tagging’ and making people vulnerable who do not comply with the ideologies and practices of the ‘stakeholders’ of the movement. July appears as a revolution only to the beneficiaries of the uprising, who used it as a ladder to climb up the power structure. For most, it feels like a familiar tale of history repeating itself — where the masses find themselves betrayed with no real possibility of any structural change. 

 Raihan Rahman is a writer and PhD researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.