The stock market’s response to popular uprisings is usually negative.
In Bangladesh, as an uprising forced Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to flee the country on 5 August 2024, the markets shot up — the bourgeoisie was jubilant that its movement to replace the nominally socialist, rurally-rooted Bangladesh Awami League was successful. There was another starkly contrasting celebration of the same moment: a protestor climbed onto a statue of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman — the Father of the Nation, the tallest leader of their freedom struggle, and Sheikh Hasina’s father — and urinated on its head.
The reservoir of resentment that the Islamist opponents of the Awami League and Sheikh Hasina had kept was finally being opened. This flood was a long time coming; ever since a tribunal appointed by the Awami League-led government gave top Islamist leaders death sentences and life sentences. Political movements are usually the victims of a fallacy: that one has to agitate and mobilise only on one’s own favourite issues instead of working on favourable issues in the present.
Islamists around the world have overcome this political fallacy. They follow Mao Zedong’s advice: true revolutionaries are supposed to be embedded among the people like fish in the water. Quota protests were not the favourite issues of Bangla Islamists. But once the protests had a chance for political hegemony, they found it favourable to be among the people like fish.
Thus, the Bangladesh uprising ought to be understood as a bourgeois upheaval with a structural embedding of Islamism, thanks to the presence of its organised forces at every stage in the movement. That is how radical formations function in societies where they don’t, or can’t, have hegemony.