Working-class youth are the future, not Gen Z!

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In the second half of 2025, several countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, racked by intense and widespread poverty, were rocked by popular uprisings. These began in Indonesia in August, followed by Nepal and the Philippines in September. They then spread to Peru and several African countries (Togo, Morocco, Madagascar and Tanzania) and broke out in just a few months. Anger was fuelled by corruption, injustice, inequality and lack of transparency in countries heavily affected by the crisis of global capitalism.

The mainstream media exploited these movements, claiming that young people, Generation Z, were going to change the world. But should the world welcome these popular uprisings, and will they help to put an end to barbarism?

Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world and suffers from high inflation, chronic underemployment and low levels of investment. Its economy is kept afloat mainly by money transfers from hundreds of thousands of young people working abroad in appalling conditions. In Indonesia, the economy is also under severe strain, and there are signs that the country is approaching a debt crisis, with high unemployment, massive lay-offs in the industrial sector, and households hit by a crisis linked to the sky-high cost of living. These countries all suffer from underemployment, considerable income inequality, absolute poverty and recurring food crises.

The population of all these countries is very young. Often, young people under the age of 30 represent 50%, and sometimes even 60%, of the population. And the unemployment rate among this generation is very high. For example, in Indonesia, it exceeds 15%; in Nepal, it is well over 20%; in Peru, it is around 30%; and in Morocco, it is even approaching 40%! The outlook is extremely bleak for a large part of the youth in these countries. This is one reason for their involvement en mass in these forms of protest.

Added to this is endemic corruption, which infuriates the wider population. According to “Transparency International's 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index”, all the countries affected by these movements, which mobilise mainly young people, are among the most corrupt: Morocco and Indonesia rank 99th, Nepal 107th, the Philippines 114th, Togo 124th, Peru 127th and Madagascar 140th out of 180 countries. During the protests, the persistent corruption of the ruling clique is always one of the central issues.

Corruption, the spark that ignited the ‘Gen Z’ revolts

In Indonesia, the large popular demonstrations on 25th August were triggered by the announcement of a 50 million rupees per month housing allowance of for members of parliament. This came at the time of mass lay-offs (of more than 80,000 workers), a more than 100% increase in property tax and major budget cuts in education, public works and health. In response to these protests, the Trade Union Coalition (KSPI) decided to call for a general strike on 28 August, making economic demands strongly marked by nationalism and totally awash with democratic mystifications, such as an end to offshoring, an end to lay-offs, an increase in the minimum wage and a review of the anti-corruption laws. However, on 29 August, with the death of a delivery driver who was hit by a police car, the situation worsened and it sparked riots in 30 provinces across the country for a whole week, with dozens of public and private buildings set on fire and more than 2,000 people arrested.

In Nepal, the immediate trigger for the popular protests was the government's ban on 26 social media platforms on 4 September. This blockage was seen as an attempt by the government to cover up its corruption. The banners and placards brandished at the rallies denounced the culture of nepotism, corruption and impunity. For a generation facing unemployment, inflation and disillusionment with traditional parties, these practices epitomise ‘a failing system’. When riot police used live ammunition on 8/9 September, killing more than 70 protesters and injuring more than 2,000 others, the protests escalated. In response, young people unleashed blind and vengeful violence: looting, attacking and chasing politicians, and setting fire to the headquarters of the Congress Party and the Parliament.

In Morocco, the deaths of eight women, who were victims of negligent health care in public hospitals in the town of the Prime Minister, led to a series of protests against widespread corruption among the ‘elites’ and nepotism among politicians. The gap between the lack of prospects for young people, massive unemployment, and the state's costly investments in stadiums for the African Cup of Nations and the 2030 World Cup was a driving force behind the anger, which was fiercely repressed by the authorities, resulting in three deaths, hundreds of injuries and thousands of arrests.

Popular revolts are a dead end

While indignation and the desire to fight are legitimate, the protesters are directing their anger against the mismanagement of the state or the corruption of this or that politician or bourgeois faction, which is only targeting the symptoms of the putrefaction of the entire capitalist system. It is the capitalist economy, now undergoing an unprecedented crisis, that is the cause of the suffering and misery in these countries, a crisis that is sacrificing ever larger sections of the world's population, starting with those in the most fragile countries, in an attempt to prolong its rule. It's the historic crisis of capitalism that lies behind the total lack of prospects for the mass of the population, and especially for young people, who are facing chronic unemployment.

Popular revolts are by definition heterogeneous and do not have a class character: they mobilise ‘the people’, but the working class is unable to develop its own autonomous struggle because the boundaries between classes are blurred. In fact, these revolts are incapable of developing any perspective other than the illusion of a nation-state abandoning its predictable abuses which means they feed all the democratic illusions in defence of the state that the bourgeoisie uses to distance the proletariat from its revolutionary perspective. They are thus not directed against the bourgeois state, but only against its ‘malign effects’ that are thought to be 'fixable’.

However, when they are reduced to impotence and a lack of perspective, one of the intrinsic characteristics of popular revolts is aimless violence. Since demands cannot be met, immediately and satisfactory, rage begins to take over and the movements quickly degenerate into blind violence, destroying everything in their path. But clashes with the forces of repression, the occupation of government buildings, the hunting down of members of the government, and even the massive participation of workers in these actions do not give these social movements a revolutionary character, not even a potential one, despite the repeated efforts of the capitalist far left to make us believe so.[1]

These popular revolts are regularly exploited and manipulated by bourgeois cliques and used to their advantage. Protests against corruption in the Philippines, against income inequality in Indonesia, or against the ban on social media in Nepal, etc.; all these pretexts provide bourgeois organisations with an excellent smokescreen for settling their rivalries, as was the case during the anti-corruption demonstration on 17 November in Manila, which was largely hijacked by a Christian sect in favour of Duterte's camp.

We see the effects of this impasse in Iran, where the working class, unable to develop its struggle independently, to direct its discontent against exploitation, trapped by illusions about ‘democracy,’ ‘the people,’ “individual rights,” is caught up and massacred in bloody clashes between bourgeois factions, all of which promise a country free of corruption, freer, and more just.

All these protests end either in false victories, when the old bourgeois faction is replaced by a new one, or in outright state repression, or both. And the state's response to these demonstrations is generally brutal: in Nepal, it has left more than 70 dead and hundreds injured; in Indonesia, thousands have been arrested; in Madagascar, 22 have been killed and more than a hundred injured. Popular revolts, reflecting a world without a future and characteristic of the system's phase of decomposition, can only spread the ills of a putrefying capitalism.[2]

We must fight on our class terrain

Popular revolts perpetuate the myth of a fairer and better-managed capitalism and are in no way a springboard for class struggle. They represent a major obstacle and a dangerous trap for the proletariat. For the demands made during these movements “dilute the proletariat within the general population, blurring its awareness of its historical struggle, subjecting it to the logic of capitalist domination and reducing it to political impotence”[3].  The proletariat has everything to lose by allowing itself to be drowned in a wave of popular protests, totally blinded by democratic illusions and the possibility of a ‘clean’ capitalist state.

On the contrary, workers must impose their own slogans, their own demands and organise their own rallies, within the framework of a movement of their own. By fighting on the economic front (wages, ‘reforms’, redundancies, etc.), they are beginning, even without seeing it clearly, to oppose the very structures of capitalist society and wage-exploitation. In the long term, they are creating the conditions for broader reflection and an awareness of the revolutionary perspective.

The proletariat is, in fact, the only force in society capable of offering an alternative to the increasingly unbearable conditions of an obsolete capitalism. But this cannot succeed within the borders of a single country, especially when this proletariat is isolated from the battalions of the proletariat at the heart of capitalism and has little experience of the struggle against bourgeois democracy and the many traps that this class sets for it. Only by developing a common struggle with the working masses of the central countries, who have a long experience of dealing with the democratic mystification, will it be possible to bring about the necessary overthrow of capitalism and the emancipation of humanity.

 

Dennis, January 2026

 

[1] The English section of the Revolutionary Communist International (formerly IMT) gives one of its articles the title: ‘From Italy to Indonesia, from Madagascar to Morocco: a wave of revolution, rebellion and revolt is sweeping the world’.

[2] The International Communist Tendency (ICT) has shown blatant opportunism by publishing a statement on the protests in Nepal (Statement on the Protests in Nepal), signed by the South Asian section of the NWBCW. By supporting the call for Nepal's Generation Z to ‘engage in political and violent struggle,’ it is in fact inciting them to engage in adventurist actions that are tantamount to suicide!

Rubric: 

Popular protests around the world