Gen Z Protests: It Is not the “Youth” That Will Overthrow Capitalism, But the Proletariat United Behind Its Class Party

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It Is not the “Youth” That Will Overthrow Capitalism, But the Proletariat United Behind Its Class Party

Since the fall of 2025, the media cliché of a “Gen Z revolution” has been gaining ground, fueled by multiple uprisings from Nepal to Morocco, Madagascar to Indonesia, Peru to Kenya, shaking the rotten pillars of “peripheral” bourgeois societies, which are relatively young in their historical trajectory and whose means of democratic control are therefore far from matching the mystifying power of their elders. This has reached the point where in Nepal and Madagascar, as in Bangladesh in the summer of 2024, these revolts have succeeded in overthrowing the governments in power – not without the support of the army, which remains the real master of the game.

The proliferation of revolts and the radical nature of the means of action, with frequent insurrectionary struggles against the police and the burning of buildings symbolizing the hated power, have led certain so-called far-left groups (1), never the last when it comes to bourgeois opportunism, to claim that these revolts are the latest incarnation of the world socialist revolution. Even if they claim to welcome it, they are in fact doing everything possible to multiply the obstacles on the long road that will enable the proletariat, guided by its class party, to resume its historic struggle, the culmination of which is the violent conquest of political power and the destruction, through despotic measures, of the bourgeois state and society. As illusory as the prospects for immediate victory of these revolt movements may be, which at best can only lead to a change of leadership, their "virality “—to use a term popular among digital ”specialists" —and the ease with which the means of action, slogans, and symbols circulate around the globe, they require Marxists not to be indifferent to them but to scrutinize them with the weapon of criticism.

SRI LANKA, BANGLADESH, INDONESIA, NEPAL, PERU, MOROCCO, MADAGASCAR: AN OVERVIEW OF “YOUTH REVOLTS”

According to the newspaper Le Monde, the sequence known as the “Gen Z revolts” began in 2022 before intensifying significantly in the fall of 2025 (2). Their first victory was achieved in Sri Lanka where, faced with economic mismanagement and corruption by the Rajapaksa government, economic crisis and inflation, daily power cuts and shortages of essential goods, tens of thousands of protesters, after several months of demonstrations, managed to force President Rajapaksa into exile, having first stormed the presidential palace. These interclassist protests, with a strong youth presence, whose demands were initially general and related to living and working conditions but eventually focused on democratic slogans, initiated a classic pattern that would henceforth be replicated almost identically in many countries.

Thus, in the summer of 2024 in Bangladesh, tens of thousands of students launched a series of mass protests following Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's decision to increase quotas in the civil service for members of families who participated in the struggle for independence led by the Awami League (3), religious or ethnic minorities, under-represented districts, and disabled groups. This measure is denounced by students as an illustration of the nepotism and corruption that characterizes Bangladeshi power; it is all the more controversial because it constitutes an obstacle to access to the civil service, the only professional outlet available to these middle-class students, as in many poor countries where states traditionally have great difficulty providing young graduates with jobs that match their qualifications. As in Sri Lanka, the protests turned into riots, forcing the army to intervene to prevent an escalation of disorder and anarchy, the traditional fear of any bourgeois regime whose stability relies more on the stick of repression than on the carrot of democracy. The military then unscrupulously sacrificed Prime Minister Hasina, the embodiment of the political class despised by young people, and brought the icon of the international petty bourgeoisie, economist and former Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, out of retirement, thus satisfying the protesters.

Since the end of summer 2025, this trend has accelerated worldwide. In Indonesia, increases in property and real estate taxes, combined with higher housing subsidies for members of parliament, sparked a series of protests that drew up to 100,000 demonstrators. The violent crackdown on the protests, which claimed the lives of a dozen people, including a motorcycle taxi driver, radicalized the movement to the point that several MPs' homes and a regional parliament were set on fire, forcing the government to abandon the tax increases.

A few weeks later, Nepal faced a similar movement following the “communist” government's decision to ban social media, while the Nepalese proletariat includes nearly 2 million immigrants (out of a population of 30 million), thus cutting off relations between breadwinners and their relatives who remained in the country. As in previous cases, the intensification of repression contributed to a hardening of the protests, which turned into riots that went as far as setting fire to the seat of Parliament. Once again, it was the army that took the lead, staging a change of government and entrusting executive power to a former chief justice of the Supreme Court, Sushila Karki.

From the end of September, Madagascar saw the so-called “Gen Z” take action on socio-economic and political demands: against water and electricity cuts; an end to the deterioration of public services suffering from a lack of investment; an end to corruption and abuse of power; etc. The Rajoelina government's decision, which has become customary, to use force to suppress the movement, at the cost of some 20 deaths and hundreds of injuries, was as ineffective as in previous examples. Although aware of the need to rely on the army, the only force of stability in the country, which explains his choice to appoint a military man, Ruphin Zafisambo, as the new prime minister, Rajoelina was forced to flee, benefiting in these circumstances from the help of French imperialism. He was faced with the decision of part of the army to support the demonstrators and the mutiny of CAPSAT, whose commander, Michaël Randrianirina, proclaimed himself transitional president before being officially invested by the Constitutional Court. Once again, the example of Madagascar shows that the keys to the situation remain in the hands of the army, and therefore of the bourgeois order (4).

These movements are currently continuing in Morocco, where demonstrators, mostly young people and often from the working class, are protesting against disastrous economic and social conditions and facing massive repression from the government and the royal authorities, who are resorting to the arbitrary imprisonment of demonstrators (5). This is also the case in Peru, where young people are mobilizing against endemic corruption among the political class and rising insecurity, particularly in the most working-class neighborhoods of Lima. Taking the lead, the Peruvian bourgeoisie preferred to sacrifice its current puppet by removing the highly unpopular President Dina Boluarte, who was elected on a far-left ticket with former President Pedro Castillo, whom she then betrayed, in order to calm the protesters without having to respond to their main demands.

Based on this brief chronicle, which could also have mentioned similar movements that took place in Kenya in May-June 2024 against the finance bill; in Ecuador in September-October 2025, following the removal of fuel subsidies; and in the Philippines last September against corruption, particularly in relation to flood control projects, it is possible to highlight a number of common characteristics that enable revolutionaries to navigate seemingly diverse and unique situations and thus avoid the pitfall of immediatism that characterizes the “analyses” of the pseudo-far left.

Where the media and bourgeois thinking see indistinct individuals or masses, such as the famous “Gen Z” that refers to people born between 1997 and 2012 who have been familiar with the use of new information and communication technologies since birth, Marxists see social forces with antagonistic interests, which we call classes. “Youth” is not a social class; it is divided by class boundaries in the same way as “adults” are. Admittedly, it differs from the rest of the population in its greater propensity to mobilize and its apparent greater radicalism. This explains why, historically, the youth organizations of socialist or communist parties have often counted among their members particularly advanced elements, such as Karl Liebknecht in Germany, Amadeo Bordiga in Italy, and many of the future leaders of the Third International. This is even more true of students, who are often the first to take up the struggle in times of crisis and instability, to the point of seeing themselves as a true vanguard. This was particularly evident in Leon Trotsky's analysis of the fall of the Spanish monarchy, which was about to give birth to the Second Republic: "When the bourgeoisie consciously and stubbornly refuses to solve the problems arising from the crisis of bourgeois society, and the proletariat is not yet ready to take on this task, it is often the students who take center stage. During the first Russian revolution, we observed this phenomenon many times. It has always been of great significance to us: this revolutionary or semi-revolutionary activity implies that bourgeois society is undergoing a profound crisis. The petty-bourgeois youth, sensing that an explosive force is building up among the masses, seeks in its own way to find a way out of this impasse by advancing the political situation." (6)

The absence of the proletariat as a class, reflected in particular by the absence of its party, thus opens the way for the petty-bourgeois youth to impose its methods of action and, even more so, its demands. In almost all countries facing such demonstrations, all of which belong to the “periphery” of global capitalism, it is mainly young people from the petty bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie who have access to university education; They find themselves confronted with the gap between, on the one hand, their professional aspirations in line with their qualifications and, on the other hand, the limited possibilities of their bourgeois societies to offer them jobs that match these aspirations. As a result, these young people find themselves facing the danger of proletarianization, which they seek to avoid at all costs, hence their insistence on fighting against the nepotism and corruption of the political and economic elites who block the already narrow paths to positions of responsibility in bourgeois society. It is therefore not surprising to see many young people from bourgeois backgrounds emerging as leaders or spokespersons in these struggles. This is particularly noticeable in Madagascar, where the main leaders of the movement all belong to the educated bourgeoisie and even include the son of a minister (!) (7).

These elements, due to their greater knowledge of political mechanisms and their greater willingness to organize and use social networks, logically place themselves at the head of protesters who, for the most part, are marginalized and condemned to precarious jobs and therefore belong to the proletariat. They thus manage to encompass the social and economic demands of the proletarian or impoverished masses in democratic and interclassist demands, with the sole consequence of relegating the original reasons for the anger to the bottom of the list.

In the vast majority of cases, with the exception of Bangladesh and, to a lesser extent, Nepal, these movements are driven by genuine social anger. It is in response to the economic crisis, poor living and working conditions, dilapidated public services, and rising living costs due to anti-social government policies that marginalized young people from the proletariat or proletarianized middle classes take up the struggle. Although the spark is often a particularly controversial decision by the bourgeoisie, these struggles are often only the spontaneous and brutal expression of underlying social discontent, which has grown over the years, and in some cases, decades.

Furthermore, these simultaneous struggles on a global scale cannot be understood without first placing them in the context of the economic trajectory of contemporary capitalism. To escape the period of crisis that began in 2007-2008 with the Great Recession, all bourgeois states were forced to intensify their attacks on the working class so that increased exploitation could make production profitable again. As we already stated in our text on Morocco, "The “return to normal” in business (normal and inevitable until the next crisis, of course) was obtained by placing the burden of “recovery” chiefly on the shoulders of wage workers, but also small farmers and others, who were devastated by implacable international competition which leaves them in a dramatic situation. " (8) Today, we are once again witnessing the beginnings of a new crisis, one that will be all the more violent because it has been delayed by a series of temporary and ineffective long-term remedies, with new attacks on the global proletariat looming. Young proletarians are therefore faced with a future where the only prospects are anti-worker attacks, climate disasters—particularly violent in a country like Bangladesh, for example (9)—and a Third World War that is becoming more certain every day.

The major problem is that these generous but vague demands can easily, in the absence of class-based organizations, be mixed up with other demands that are explicitly democratic, i.e., bourgeois.

... BUT WHICH ARE DROWNED OUT BY INTERCLASSIST AND BOURGEOIS DEMOCRATIC SLOGANS.

It is therefore unsurprising that demonstrations in all these countries have focused on interclassist slogans calling for an end to corruption, a change of government, or more socially oriented policies to strengthen public services. This predominance of democratic demands can be explained by the combination of two factors that feed off each other: on the one hand, proletarians who, as a result of more than a century of counterrevolution, do not recognize themselves as such and consider themselves “citizens” instead; on the other, the predominant place occupied in these movements by elements from the educated petty bourgeoisie, who act as their spokespersons. Despite all their generous intentions, they inevitably carry with them the prejudices and illusions of their class of origin. Caught between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, they believe themselves to be above the classes. They are therefore convinced that they represent the interests of the entire people against a corrupt oligarchy that must be overthrown, more or less peacefully—the degree of violence is irrelevant here—so that democracy can once again operate freely.

Karl Marx wrote masterful pages on the equally harmful and quixotic role of the petty bourgeoisie in popular movements in his work The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, and even though this text is nearly 175 years old, for us, inveterate dogmatists, it has the same importance as if it had been written today. Thus, criticizing the Montagnards of 1848, those romantic “socialists” who claimed to represent the interests of the entire people and who failed miserably in their struggle against Prince-President Louis Napoleon, Marx writes: "No party exaggerates its means more than the democratic, none deludes itself more light-mindedly over the situation. […] the democrat, because he represents the petty bourgeoisie – that is, a transition class, in which the interests of two classes are simultaneously mutually blunted – imagines himself elevated above class antagonism generally. The democrats concede that a privileged class confronts them, but they, along with all the rest of the nation, form the people. What they represent is the people’s rights; what interests them is the people’s interests. Accordingly, when a struggle is impending they do not need to examine the interests and positions of the different classes. They do not need to weigh their own resources too critically. They have merely to give the signal and the people, with all its inexhaustible resources, will fall upon the oppressors. Now if in the performance their interests prove to be uninteresting and their potency impotence, then either the fault lies with pernicious sophists, who split the indivisible people into different hostile camps, or the army was too brutalized and blinded to comprehend that the pure aims of democracy are the best thing for it, or the whole thing has been wrecked by a detail in its execution, or else an unforeseen accident has this time spoiled the game. In any case, the democrat comes out of the most disgraceful defeat just as immaculate as he was innocent when he went into it, with the newly won conviction that he is bound to win, not that he himself and his party have to give up the old standpoint, but, on the contrary, that conditions have to ripen to suit him.” (10)

The petty bourgeoisie thus appears as an eternal dupe, deceiving itself with its illusions but, even more seriously, dragging the proletariat down with it in its fall. Thus, his demands for good government ultimately depend not on his own strength but on the goodwill of the only actor who holds the key to the situation in these peripheral countries with poorly established foundations: the army.

It is clear that in most countries facing “Gen Z revolts,” it was the intervention of the army that brought the protests to an end. This was the case in Bangladesh and Nepal, where the army, recognizing the weak foundation on which the ruling power was established, took the lead by choosing the composition of the new government itself before officially stepping aside in favor of civilian rule. In reality, behind the facade of a civilian government of technocrats with no real legitimacy, it is the army that wields real power. This dynamic is even more visible in Madagascar, where it was the support of part of the army for the movement and the CAPSAT mutiny that caused Rajoelina's departure and the establishment of a transitional military government.

This fundamental political role of the army distinguishes the peripheral countries from the rich imperialist countries, where the tradition of democratic opium has been built up over several centuries. On the contrary, in peripheral countries, most of which gained formal independence after World War II, it was almost immediately the army that seized power in order to put an end to the fratricidal struggles between bourgeois clans and embody the general interest... bourgeois, needless to say. Only the military had sufficient strength to discipline the various bourgeois factions as well as the petty bourgeois and proletarian masses who, in some cases, had waged an insurrectionary struggle to overthrow colonial rule. In these countries, where democratic traditions are not deeply rooted, where coups d'état and grossly rigged elections are commonplace, delegitimizing the democratic myth, only organized force, i.e., the army, is capable of guaranteeing the country's stability and maintaining bourgeois order. As Ferdinand Lassalle, for once, accurately explained in “What is a Constitution?”: "The army [...] is organized, assembled at all times, perfectly disciplined, and ready to intervene at any moment; on the other hand, the force that lies within the nation, even though it is infinitely greater, is not organized, and the will of the nation, and in particular the degree of resolve that this will has reached, is not always easily discernible by its members; no one knows exactly how many companions they would find. Furthermore, the nation lacks the instruments of organized force, those foundations of a Constitution that we have already mentioned: cannons." (11)

This lesson, crystal clear to a Marxist, can never be understood by a petty bourgeois. This is what condemns him to eternal impotence, and the proletariat with him until it finds the strength to reconnect with its historical trajectory and set itself real goals. Before achieving its emancipation, the proletariat will have to follow a long path to rediscover its traditions, its forms of organization, in short, its internationalist and international class party, which, once reconstituted, will be able to guide it to final victory over the bourgeoisie. The current struggles of the so-called “Gen Z” are expressions of social anger; but they are still miles away from a genuine revolutionary struggle. While they are a symptom of the future resumption of the proletarian class struggle, they could only really contribute to the latter if the proletariat, taking advantage of the weakening of the bourgeois order, found the strength to enter into struggle for its own immediate interests.

This would be an important step towards its class-based reorganization, bringing closer the hour of the true revolution that Bordiga, against the opportunism that saw in the student movement a new revolutionary subject, defined as “plurinational, single-party, and single-class, that is to say, above all, without the worst interclassist rot: that of the so-called student youth” (12).

(1) See, for example, the Revolutionary Communist International (sic), whose British newspaper, The Communist, ran the headline “Join the Gen Z Revolution” on its front page and claimed that “From Bangladesh to Britain, ‘Gen Z’ are turning theirs back on capitalism and embracing revolution (sic) and communism (resic).” https://communist.red/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Digital-The-Communist-Issue-35.pdf ; https://communist.red/generation-revolution-fight-for-your-future-join-the-communists/

(2) « Asia's Gen Z rises up against entrenched political elites », Le Monde, September 29, 2025 : https://www.lemonde.fr/ en/international/ article/ 2025/09/29/ asia-s-gen-z-rises-up-against-entrenched-political-elites_6745909_4.html

(3) The Awami League is the organization that historically led the “struggle” for Bangladesh's independence from Pakistan, which was ruled by the Muslim League. Continuously in power between 2009 and 2024, under the leadership of Sheikh Hasina, daughter of Bangladesh's founder Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the party is notable for its high level of corruption and fierce repression of any dissent.

(4) See our statement “Social Explosion in Madagascar”, dated October 7, 2025.

(5) See our statement “Revolts in Morocco. Popular discontent meets repression from the regime of Mohamed VI”, dated October 2, 2025.

(6) Leon Trotsky, « The tasks of communists in Spain. Letter to Contra la Corriente », May 25, 1930, French version available online on marxists.org : https://www.marxists.org/francais/trotsky/oeuvres/1930/05/300525b.htm. Underlined by us. Our translation.

(7) « A Madagascar, la Gen Z refuse de se voir confisquer sa victoire », Le Monde, October 16, 2025.

(9) In 2022, Bangladesh faced a series of floods that impacted the lives of millions of people, causing dozens of injuries and displacing hundreds of thousands.

(10) Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1851, available online on marxists.org : https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/ works/ 1852/ 18th-brumaire/ch03.htm. Underlined in the original.

(11) Ferdinand Lassalle, What is a Constitution?, 1862, French version available online on marxists.org: https://www.marxists.org/ francais/ general/ lassalle/ constitution.htm. Underlined in the original. Our translation. A former member of the Communist League, Lassalle was a pioneer in organizing the proletariat in Germany in the 1860s, but he also embodied a whole series of deviations against which Marxists had to wage a long and difficult struggle.

(12) Amadeo Bordiga, Letter to Umberto Terracini, March, 4 1969, available online: https://www.quinterna.org /archivio/ carteggi/ 19690304_ bordiga_ a_terracini.htm Our translation.

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