Jensine Raihan
Paschim Banga Khet Majoor Samity (PBKMS)
West Bengal, India
With more than five years of involvement in social movements and other organizations seeking to change our society, there are certain organizations I am most attracted to. There perhaps is a general acknowledgement of some of the evils that exists in society, but some approach it believing that those evils are a mistake or a failure of our society, while others believe those evils are a characteristic of the kind of society we live in. I fall into the latter and for those of us who do, our task is to completely transform society so it is fundamentally different from the kind of world we live in.
However, if we are really invested in fundamentally transforming society we need to define new organizations that attempt to overcome the oppressive ways in which institutions in our society functions. When we are trying to transform society, we cannot replicate the same undemocratic, individualistic functionalities that define most of the institutions in our world. Instead, we need to seek to build deeply democratic organizations that seeks to build the protagonism–that is, deep involvement in the participation of shaping society, of everyday people. Very few organizations are able to successfully build this kind of process.
I was impressed by how the founding members of Paschim Banga Khet Majoor Samity (PBKMS), Anuradha Talwar and Swapan Ganguly, have attempted to build such an organization. The organization boasts 100,000 members of agricultural workers all over West Bengal and has been working in the state for three decades. The two were moved to build such an organization because none of their social change-driven academic, party, and NGO work were making substantial changes to the conditions of the people. Even though the two had successes in organizational campaigns, they found that the type of the institutions they were working in were inept in actually changing the material conditions of poor people. So, they decided they needed to get involved in a mass organization organizing the most oppressed people in India—rural agricultural workers.
They were able to identify that in order to change the material conditions of regular people, they need to engage masses of people and build a democratic organization politicizing members and making them the center of social transformation. Currently, PBKMS has an elaborate system of membership engagement whose nucleus comes from a local neighborhood and runs committees up to the state level. It is in these committees of members that organizational decision are made.
