Press Conference
Venue : Nirmal Sen Milanayatan, Topkhana Road, Segunbagicha
Time : 11 am
Date: 12 December 2018

Eleventh Parliamentary Election: Our Position

The 11^th parliamentary elections in Bangladesh will be held on December 30, 2018. Communist Party of Bangladesh-ML abstains from this election for valid reasons. We feel that there are remote chances of this election being free, fair and impartial; we apprehend that this election will be dominated by violence, intimidation, and money. The Election Commission has practically taken no initiative to recover legal and illegal arms. Moreover, there has been no reform of the tradition of unfair elections, under the party-led government. The current government, too, is organizing this election from a convenient position.

Long before the announcement of election dates, the bourgeois political parties acquired wealth through pillage that they will utilise to buy votes and win elections. The Election Commission is least bothered to recover this looted property. While filing nominations candidates are required to disclose their assets and wealth, only nominally. The nomination fee is fixed high enough to keep at bay from the election process, the ordinary, honest and genuine candidates. On the other hand, the registration process of political parties has been complicated and difficult. The conditions that have been imposed for independent candidates are contrary to democratic practices.

Our clear analysis is that the state is now bourgeois in character. The fundamental basis of this bourgeois state system is a plundering capitalist economy whose main source of accumulation is commercial capital. The political culture of this plundering capitalist economy extends to the working people. Consequently, workers-peasants-toiling masses are victims of extreme exploitation and discrimination. On the other hand, the task of raising political and ideological consciousness in this section is very low. It is the responsibility of the left progressive democratic forces to complete this task.

The other left and progressive political parties have not been able to play an active role in creating consciousness among the workers-peasant-working people, to create its own vote bank.

The CPB-ML analyses that the pillaging economic system that rests on the bourgeois political system throws crumbs at a section of intellectuals, co-opting them in the process. This has been instrumental in creating a society, devoid of principles. These intellectuals, lackeys of capitalism, have a strong disregard for the organic intellectuals, the allies of the toiling masses. This is an arrangement where killings, murders, disappearances, pillage, corruption, bank robbery, insecurity, land grab, deceiving workers, etc. have attained normativity.

Actually, this whole system is a form of capitalism’s uneven development. As a result, a sustainable industrial development remains a far cry. It is a neo-liberal free market economy as per imperialist prescriptions. Therefore, it defends imperialist interests a priori.

There is no reservation provision to ensure the representation of existing small entrepreneurs, middle class, workers and peasants in the parliament. As a result, no election program has been declared to incorporate their interests. However, this is the real producer class whose labour-sweat-blood created the country.

All representatives putting their feet in the parliament will do so to loot people’s wealth using the state, something clear from their past track records. None of them have any commitment towards good governance needed to create an environment for business and prosperity. There is no representative nor anyone to see the interests the middle class, workers and peasants in the parliament. The left and the progressives which had some strength in the past do not enjoy the confidence of the workers-peasants and working people due to their unconditional surrender to this plunder politics. They embraced election in the name of strategy and are busy scrambling for power. As a result, their revolutionary identity has faded away, currently. The duties and responsibilities of establishing the productive class of society in state power through mass movements and mass upsurge remain blurred.

In this situation, CPB-ML believes that sections of the left and progressives who are willing to work in the interests of a workers-peasants-toiling class must be united. It is necessary to build a larger left party (Broader Left Party) which can play a role in consolidating the vote bank of the workers-peasants-working people in the country’s electoral system. This big left party concept is not a coalition or a front. The left must unite in the same party.

CPB-ML calls all left-wing individuals and organizations to form the broader left party. It is possible to form a broader left party only if we agree on the programme to establish a workers-peasants democratic state on the basis of the socialist economic system. This will enable the working class to advance through a socio-political consolidation. This political consolidation will decide the strategies for the struggle against the bourgeoisie. Elections are simply one aspect of the struggle. A counter-hegemony must be built against the bourgeois domination in the social-political-economic-cultural-psychological arena through movements-struggles and other socio-political activities. A bargaining environment must be created between the party and the through this hegemony building. In this process, the party will become the determining force for deciding the political strategy.

Let us, in the coming days, move unitedly towards the democratic state system of workers and peasants through the hegemony of the party on elections and movements and reject this farce in the name of election.

for CPB-ML

Badrul Alam
General Secretary