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Azizul Rasel (Â鶹´«Ã½ÍøÕ¾)

"State, Class, and Ethnicity: Class Alliance and Class Fracture among the working classes of East Pakistan."

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The newly established postcolonial state played a key role in shaping the composition and dynamics of East Pakistan’s industrial labor force. From the 1950s onward, the industrial working class in East Pakistan became mainly Muslim, and the state labor policy played a key role in shaping this. Yet, this class was far from homogeneous; the working class was fragmented across linguistic and ethnic lines, primarily between Bengali- and Urdu-speaking Muslims. This essay investigates the complex mosaic of East Pakistan’s working class and the roles of ethnicity and the state in class alliances and class fractures within it. I argue that the state sought to fragment working-class solidarity in order to restrict the possibilities of industrial action and collective bargaining. State policies often resulted in tensions between Bengali and non-Bengali workers. Ethnic differences also disrupted the solidarity of the industrial working class, as Bengali workers found that the state was discriminating against them. The emerging middle-class political activists and nationalist labor leaders often fostered this sense of deprivation. While I stress the workers’ agency, I contend that the subaltern historian’s proposition that the subaltern domain is always autonomous, as against what I argue, invoking Rajnarayan Chandravarkar’s works, that neighborhood and meeting places, such as shops and bazars, played an essential role in the making of workers’ consciousness and their actions. I also question Dipesh Chakrabarty’s argument that workers born in a pre-bourgeois condition, such as the Calcutta Jute Mill workers, grow up and uphold a culture which was essentially pre-bourgeois and ‘pre-bourgeois relationship’, and this condition baffled them in forming and acting as a class. I argue that this worker's inability to form solidarity and act as a class was not solely responsible for the ‘pre-bourgeois’ condition. I argue, drawing on the work of Louis Althusser and Michael Foucault, that the state, through both its repressive and ideological apparatuses, played a crucial role in fragmenting workers’ solidarity. In the case of East Pakistan, I argue that ethnic and linguistic differences, and, most importantly, state apparatuses, played a crucial role in fragmenting workers’ solidarity and preventing them from emerging as a class.

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