Jensine Raihan
Paschim Banga Khet Majoor Samity (PBKMS) (aka Association of West Bengal Agricultural Farm Workers)
West Bengal, India
I don’t think I can properly describe how much the first day of this academic year, the first day of my undergraduate career, felt like the first day of a journey leading me to the doorsteps of Paschim Banga Khet Majoor Samity (PBKMS). I am an undergraduate student studying computer science at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, but more than anything, however, I am interested in organizing the poor and the most oppressed to build power for a fundamentally different society that is centered around human and collective interests.
Since 2013, I have been involved in membership-based social justice organizations in New York City. Primarily, I work with working-class Indo-Caribbean and South Asian immigrants and youth. Upon graduating, I hope to help strategy, envisioning, and organizing efforts that build a potent working-class movement in the United States. Perhaps my education in computer science will support that endeavor. Perhaps it won’t.
How fitting is it that I am attempting to ground myself on my objectives in working with PBKMS as one of the best days of the year, International Worker’s Day, comes to a close? To begin, I think understanding the strategies and organizations of mass-based formations, that organize the poor, and building relationships with those formations is fundamental to movement-building. Movements, particularly those in imperialist countries (like the United States) that have such wide ranging impacts on countries of the global South, need to relate to, work in solidarity with, and support movements globally.
I want to begin understanding the struggles of international revolutionary efforts by working with PBKMS. PBKMS is a union of about 70,000 agricultural workers in West Bengal that organizes its members for decent wages, the right to work, and food. I will support their communications work by conducting training on social media, developing their website, and helping with other related needs.
PBKMS is part of the new trade union movement in India that diverts from traditional union formations, which are affiliated with particular parties. Moreover, the union organizes in a region that has witnessed the longest democratically elected communist government in the world. These different dynamics make the organization interesting because they have not only dealt with a particularly conservative national administration but also experienced hostility from a left local government.
I am curious to understand how the organization deals with with these different dynamics, how they decide which alliances to form, how they organize and conduct political education with their members, and how they build power among their base. Understanding these things would help me gain a better grasp of how Indian leftist organizations deal with challenges and develop strategy to advance the interests of poor people and workers.
I’ll end with that. Inquilaab Zindabad (Long Live Revolution)!