The following article is based on a talk given by Workers' Fight at the beginning of November 2025.

The recent "GenZ" uprisings we have seen in the poor countries, a few of which we will talk about today, are challenges to class rule over the population, even if they are not challenging this rule consciously. They are a symptom of the inability of the capitalist system in its near-terminal state to even offer the basic necessities of life in these countries. And we must insist on this point. If there is a migrant crisis today and there certainly is, it is a symptom of system failure. And it can not be "solved" except by eradication of this system and its replacement by a centralised international socialist economy. In other words, we all need to be fighting the class war...

    So that said, let us look first, at the background to the conflict in Sudan, because there too, a corrupt and brutal leader was forcibly removed from power. This challenge happened somewhat earlier than elsewhere. But the same pattern was followed, with a huge mass protest movement in this case, beginning in December 2018, and calling for the end of the corrupt and oppressive 30-year dictatorship of President Omar Bashir - who had come to power through a military coup in 1989. The attempt by a civilian movement to replace him was however hijacked by the army in April 2019.

    We are now witnessing the consequences of this military coup - a catastrophic civil war between rival generals which has so far killed 160,000 people, fuelled by Gulf states directly and the imperialists indirectly. And for the second time in as many years, there is mass killing and starvation in Darfur.

    The recent protests in other countries may not end this way. But we see that the challenge made by so-called "GenZ" - has not been against the capitalist system itself, but a fight to change the government. And in almost every case, just as happened in Sudan, it is the military which has intervened to play the decisive role.

    We should not be surprised. Even in the not-so-poor countries like Turkiye - one essential element necessary to guarantee social stability has always been the presence of a permanently mobilised army - maybe hidden in the wings, but always at the ready. How else could the domestic capitalist classes in these countries exploit with impunity the huge mass of poor and very poor, who make up their populations?

    So in August 2024, we saw how the military played a decisive role in the GenZ mobilisation in Bangladesh. The corrupt regime of Sheikh Hasina who had ruled the country for 20 years in total, was overthrown by a mass movement led by students, whose main grievance was that they had no prospect of a job. At the last moment, the generals decided to switch sides and join the youth - undoubtedly they were directed to do so by a panicking business community who saw the movement growing despite the harsh repression - 1,400 mainly students had been killed already. Moreover, now the working class was joining in, including militant textile workers. So something had to be done. Hasina quickly fled to India. The military leaders appointed an interim civilian "chief advisor" - Nobel peace prize laureate Mohammad Yunus, also coopting one of the student leaders. But the army remains ready to intervene if and when needed in order to maintain the status quo.

    In Morocco, this September, another uprising: the youth over there called their movement GenZ 212 - which is the country's dialling code! They mobilised thousands via Discord, right across the country, to protest against the poor state of public services and the fact that the government was spending its money on sports stadiums. Riot police and soldiers were sent in, arresting thousands, charging 2,480 of the protesters with various offences including armed rebellion - and 1,473 youth remain in custody awaiting trial. This is not yet over...

    Then in Nepal the same month, GenZ demonstrations escalated to the point where public buildings were burnt down and mayhem reigned for weeks. Some of the protesters armed themselves. The military could not control the situation and in the end was forced to negotiate with the groups of insurrectionists. The Prime minister resigned and an interim government was agreed upon. But 72 people had been killed, including 19 students and a 12 year old child.

    The underlying problems were exactly the same as everywhere else - autocratic and corrupt government, and rising poverty. But in this case the demonstrations were sparked after the regime closed down 26 social media platforms including X, You Tube, Reddit, Facebook, Signal, and Snapchat - for failing to pay a new digital tax it had imposed. However, everyone knew it was also because of the constant denunciation on social media of the government's nepotism and corruption.

    Nepal is a country where over a third of GDP comes from money sent home from Nepalese workers abroad. Youth unemployment is 20% and many youth work in so-called "online spaces", meaning that they were also directly threatened by the ban on social media. Once the prime minister was gone, the protestors held online discussions on Discord to select an interim leader, voting for 73-year old Sushila Karki, a former judge who has a record of political activism and who spent time in jail for participating in the movement which brought down the Nepalese Monarchy in 1990. A revolution of sorts, yes, but it's not system change!

    Then there was the GenZ protest in Madagascar in September/October, over unemployment, corruption and power cuts - and again mobilised through Discord and similar social media. In fact they managed to topple the regime of President Andry Rajoelina, who fled the country, but in the last days, seeing which way the wind was blowing, the army switched to the protesters' side - and then actually took over power. The youths naively welcomed this, but it has now disarmed them in every sense.

    Another mobilisation of youth this last month has been in Peru - where one prime minister was forced to resign only to be replaced by another who is just as bad, if not worse - and is currently facing a rape charge! Many protesters have been injured in clashes with the police and one was shot dead. These protests continue.

    So to sum up, GenZ has braved bullets, arrest and torture, to topple political leaders. At the critical moment the army has stepped in to restore order and either take over rule itself or ensured that a new civilian ruler is going to restore order... In other words, to guarantee that the exploitation of these dependent poor countries' economies by the dominant rich countries can resume. Because this is the diktat of the imperialist world order.

    We have to be aware too, that if peace reigns in the rich countries today it is at the expense of the poverty and war in the Middle East and Africa... Indeed, it is because children are mining gold or Coltan in East Kivu with their bare hands - or at best with picks and shovels... processes which could be fully automated, but which would mean smaller profits for Western industry! It is this wealth, appropriated by the richest capitalists in the imperialist countries which trickles down to pacify the European and American working poor... but for how long?

    Anyway, we can say that the days of colonial plunder are by no means relegated to the past - the plunder continues, in fact even increases, under local post-colonial political classes, who take their share, before the wealth makes its way to the capitalists of the former colonial powers - whether British, French, or other. But all of them must stand back from the feast to allow US corporations to eat first!

So what do we make of these GenZ interventions?

Well, the first and most obvious point is that the protesters may have got rid of political leaders, but they have not actually achieved the change they wanted, and moreover, the change they desperately need! The military has been able to dictate the terms, more or less violently, acting on instruction of the capitalist class within the country and outside of it.

    The protesters certainly knew what they did not want. But what would they put in its place? It seems they did not know. And they had no way of preventing the army from side-lining them.

    So they went down the same dead-end road as their predecessors. As the saying goes, "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it". A long time ago already, and in the context of the 1960s and 1970s youth mobilisations, the political poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron famously said: "the revolution will not be televised". Well, the revolution will definitely not take place on Discord or Facebook, either!

    The self-styled GenZ leaders may have put themselves on Instagram or Tik-tok but they did not - and maybe they could not - even show the radicalism of the national liberation movements of old. And yet one would have thought that they actually had an advantage compared to their forefathers and mothers of the mid-20th century, that is, they have access to most of the revolutionary literature of all the previous generations - today it is all out there, on the internet!

    But there was no evidence of their learning from the experience of others... And conspicuous by their absence have been the words "socialism" and "communism". As are the concrete organisational elements which would have been needed in order to implement real change. An organised independent revolutionary party with a programme to implement, for instance. It's also worth pointing out that the one thing those old historical national liberation movements did have in the 1950s and 1960s, were their own armies, from the Mau Mau to the FLN to the Sandinistas - they knew they would have to fight for power and then fight to hold onto it. Also conspicuous by its absence was the most fundamental necessity, the working class - except to some extent in Bangladesh...

    Admittedly, the liberation movements of the last century did not actually liberate the poor of the former colonies, at the end of the day. If they tried the "socialism in one country" policy advocated by the degenerate leadership in Soviet Russia at the time, they could only fail - and they did, many decades ago already. Today, if, exceptionally, president Maduro of Venezuela claims to be a socialist, this can only add to socialism's discredit.

    As for the other word considered "dirty" by the capitalists - that is nationalisation - it is a fact that without state intervention in the economy in the poor countries, these countries would hardly have any economies at all. But nationalisation does not equal socialism. If it did, Churchill, who did not reverse Clement Atlee's nationalisations after WW2, or De Gaulle in France, would both have been ruling "socialist" countries - which is obvious nonsense.

    Nevertheless, we are back to this kind of nonsense yet again but in its obverse form! And the nonsense has even grown wings! So Donald Trump handed Argentina's President Milei a currency swap of $20bn to prop up the debased peso - but only on condition he won the mid-term election... which ensured that he did! Trump spelled it out. He said he wanted none of those "socialists" anywhere near the government - and by this he meant the Peronist opposition which is probably about as socialist as Tony Blair. Anyway chainsaws are the order of the day and not just in Argentina! Nowadays capitalism is in such bad shape that it has to cut up its own state crutch in order to survive!

    Of course, Trump's billions cannot and will not rescue the Argentine economy and neither will the chainsaw. Like all of the dependent economies in the world, by definition, it limps along in a state of permanent crisis only thanks to constant loans - mainly from the World Bank-IMF - which it inevitably defaults on. The rich countries and their finance capital have got the poor counties in a stranglehold - and it's a stranglehold which gets tighter and tighter as capitalism's degeneration accelerates.

    Capitalism is contracting today because it has already over-exploited the world market. New innovations like AI might act as a palliative treatment to slow the terminal illness. But in fact it could even kill the patient. A speculative AI bubble is growing. And when it explodes, this time, Silicon Valley may well explode with it!

    That said, capitalism is not going to go quietly nor disappear down the drain by itself. And there is even talk of another world war. So there isn't any time to waste. As we've always argued, it's the class battles fought in the rich countries - the imperialist heartland - which will settle the fate of capitalism once and for all. If we have only half the courage of the youth who have risked their lives in the past months, we will be able to bring to life the political ideas of Marx and Engels - of Lenin, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg and build the revolutionary organisations which will be capable of seizing power in the name of our class, the working class - and no other: transforming GenZ into Gen "C" - for "C"ommunism!

1 November 2025