Statement by David North, national chairperson of the Socialist Equality Party (US), opposing the war and calling for an immediate end to the illegal attack on Iran. pic.twitter.com/IeFnx4Vfju
We publish here Part 3 of a series examining the global wave of Gen Z protests, the deepening crisis of revolutionary leadership, and the necessity of fighting for the program of socialist internationalism on the basis of Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution.Part 1 was published on November 6, 2025 here. Part 2 was published on November 14, 2025 here.
The Lineage of Gen-Z Revolts: Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and the Yellow Vests — Politics, Tactics, Programme and the Lessons for the Working Class
The Arab Spring — Historical Precursor and Political Object Lesson
The Arab Spring of 2010–2011 in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) constitutes the decisive historical precursor to the successive waves of extra-parliamentary revolt examined here and its political lessons penetrate the entire subsequent history. It was not a single homogeneous movement but a global eruption of mass social unrest driven by the structural crisis of world capitalism—rising inequality, mass unemployment, and collapsing living standards—whose politics were shaped by the collision of profoundly antagonistic class forces: a radicalising working class and poor, large layers of youth and petty-bourgeois activists, sections of the middle class seeking political space and a greater share of the spoils, and competing fractions of the national ruling classes including military cliques and Islamist parties. What began as mass popular uprisings against dictatorial regimes rapidly became a battlefield where different class forces and bourgeois factions contended to shape outcomes in their own interests.
Demonstrators celebrate in Cairo’s Tahrir Square after the announcement of President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation
In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and the military-backed Tamarod campaign each sought to channel mass anger into their respective bourgeois projects rather than into an independent working-class overthrow of the capitalist state. As the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) analysis of the Egyptian experience established, the so-called liberal and pseudo-left organisations played a decisive counterrevolutionary role, with Tamarod leaders standing at the side of coup commander General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as he announced the military takeover—an outcome those organisations had materially prepared.[1] The political demands advanced spontaneously in the streets—bread, jobs, dignity, an end to corruption, democratic rights—expressed
genuine and profound social need, but social and democratic demands do not automatically constitute a socialist programme. Where organised revolutionary working-class leadership was absent, liberal, Islamist, and petty-bourgeois currents filled the vacuum, offering alternative programmes that in every instance preserved capitalist property relations and imperialist domination.
A central feature of the Arab Spring was its spontaneity: sudden mass mobilisations, general strikes, and occupations that burst through the limits of existing organisations and terrified ruling classes globally. This spontaneity was simultaneously a strength—demonstrating the capacity of the masses to act independently and with enormous force—and a structural limitation that proved fatal to the revolutionary potential of the uprisings. Without a revolutionary working-class party and without organs of working-class power—factory committees, rank-and-file unions, neighbourhood councils—spontaneous movements remain vulnerable to appropriation by better-organised bourgeois factions or to demobilisation through absorption, exhaustion and repression. As Nick Beams argued in his contemporaneous analysis of the Egyptian upheaval in February 2011, the army and bourgeois forces were able to reassert control precisely where the working class lacked a political and organisational leadership capable of transforming mass revolutionary energy into state power.[2] Egypt possessed, in the strike waves that brought down Mubarak, the objective social power to make a socialist revolution; what it lacked was the subjective instrument—the revolutionary party anchored in the masses and fighting for the perspective of international socialism—without which that power could not be directed to its necessary conclusion. The result, confirmed by a decade of subsequent experience, was a military dictatorship under el-Sisi more brutal than the one the revolution had overthrown.
The Arab Spring exerted a direct ideological and tactical influence on Occupy Wall Street (2011), while simultaneously exposing the political pitfalls that Occupy would reproduce in the specific conditions of the imperialist center. The vivid demonstration that mass occupations of public space and horizontal assemblies could galvanise broad popular sympathy gave Occupy its tactical model and its initial political confidence. But the Arab Spring also disclosed, for those with eyes to see, the precise vulnerability that “leaderless” spontaneous movements carry within themselves: without a socialist programme and independent working-class organisation, mass insurgency is systematically channelled back into bourgeois institutions or reformist dead-ends.
The WSWS identified this danger at the outset of Occupy’s emergence, documenting the efforts of ex-left figures and Democratic Party operatives to absorb the movement into the 2012 Obama electoral campaign—precisely the mechanism of bourgeois reabsorption that had disfigured the Arab Spring’s political outcomes in country after country.[3] The strategic question the Arab Spring posed, and which Occupy failed to resolve, was the same question that confronts the Gen-Z movements from 2022: whether mass protests aim at symbolic disruption and awareness-raising within the framework of bourgeois politics, or whether they are directed toward building independent working-class organisation—general strikes, rank-and-file committees, industrial coordination—capable of fighting the economic power of capital and posing the question of state power. From a revolutionary internationalist standpoint, only transforming spontaneous mass energy into a socialist political programme and durable proletarian (industrial) organisation—linking democratic struggles to the working class’s capacity to seize power—can convert the recurring insurgency of the oppressed into a force capable of overthrowing capitalist rule.
Common Roots: The Crisis of Capitalism and the Crisis of Political Legitimacy
Occupy Wall Street, the Yellow Vest movement (Gilets Jaunes, 2018–2020), and the Gen-Z uprisings constitute three successive and qualitatively escalating waves of mass extra-parliamentary revolt. To treat them as unrelated or merely sequential phenomena is to miss the most important truth they disclose in common: all three are expressions of the same underlying and deepening contradiction of world capitalism—the contradiction between social production organized on an ever more integrated and global scale, and its subordination to private ownership and profit that concentrates wealth in ever fewer hands while condemning the vast majority to insecurity, impoverishment, and precarity.
Each wave erupted from a specific conjuncture of that general crisis. Occupy responded to the 2007–2009 financial crash and the naked reassertion of Wall Street power through the Obama administration’s bank bailout program, which transferred trillions in public funds to the architects of financial ruin while working-class families lost their homes, their jobs, and their savings. The WSWS observed at the time that the Occupy movement expressed “the class struggle reemerging as the basic historical force,” and that it “foreshadows an explosive eruption of class struggle in the United States, the center of world capitalism.”[4]
The Yellow Vests erupted in November 2018 when Emmanuel Macron’s fuel tax—a levy deliberately designed to shift the costs of the energy transition (away from fossil fuels) from corporations onto workers and the provincial poor—rendered unmistakable the class character of the “En Marche” (the centrist, liberal party of Macron) project presented to the electorate as post-ideological (that the era of class politics and ideological conflict was over) technocratic modernization.
The Gen-Z wave erupted when the accumulated wreckage of forty years of neoliberal restructuring, the devastation of COVID-19, the economic warfare of the US-NATO proxy conflict in Ukraine, the IMF’s debt-peonage regime across the backward countries, and the accelerating climate crisis made survival itself a political question for tens of millions of young people across multiple continents simultaneously.
Their common political character follows directly from these shared material roots. All three registered a profound mass rupture with parliamentary politics, with the established parties of both nominal “left” and right perceived as equally complicit in exploitation, and with the trade union bureaucracies and institutional mediators that had long managed and dampened class struggle. The “We are the 99 percent” of Occupy, the Yellow Vests’ visceral contempt for the “Parisian elites” in their media chambers, the Gen-Z movements’ blanket dismissal of all established political formations as corrupt beyond reform—these slogans express not political immaturity but a genuine and deepening crisis of bourgeois political legitimacy that no cosmetic reform or change of government personnel can address.
Politics: Anti-Establishmentism, “No Politics,” and the Populist Trap
Despite their common anti-establishment character, the three waves exhibit significant differences in political composition that must be analyzed with precision rather than collapsed into an undifferentiated “new social movements” category.
Occupy Wall Street: The Middle-Class Rehearsal
Occupy was dominated from its inception by a predominantly middle-class social milieu concentrated in metropolitan centers—New York’s Zuccotti Park, Oakland, Boston, and their counterparts in London and other imperialist cities. The Occupy movement explicitly drew inspiration from the Arab Spring, with organizers from Canadian magazine Adbusters declaring: “Like our brothers and sisters in Egypt, Greece, Spain, and Iceland, we plan to use the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic of mass occupation to restore democracy in America.”[ABC News] The movement’s imagery—the occupation of Zuccotti Park echoing Cairo’s Tahrir Square—and its timing, coming months after the Egyptian Revolution’s triumph, established a direct lineage. As the WSWS observed at the time, “From the revolutionary upheavals in Egypt, to mass demonstrations in Israel and social eruptions in Europe, the class struggle has reemerged as the basic historical force.”[5]
Occupy protests in New York City (Image from wsws.org)
The movement emerged from anarchist organizations, in particular the Adbusters, which explicitly invoked “the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic” as its organizational model while stripping that model of its class content. The “99 percent” slogan, however appealing as an expression of popular anti-oligarchic sentiment, was politically designed to obscure rather than sharpen the fundamental class division between the working class and the affluent upper-middle strata from which Occupy’s leadership was drawn.[6]
The political consequences of this class foundation became visible in the role played by pseudo-left organizations, above all the International Socialist Organization (ISO). Despite its nominally socialist rhetoric, the ISO worked systematically to subordinate
Occupy to the AFL-CIO trade union apparatus and channel its energy toward Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. As the WSWS documented in contemporaneous coverage, the ISO “is attempting to stifle the protest movement by helping to bring it under the control of the AFL-CIO and the rest of the trade union apparatus,” praising corrupt union officials—among them AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and CWA’s Bob Master, both fresh from betraying the Verizon strike—while concealing their role in imposing concessions on workers.[7]
The ISO’s promotion of “no politics” and “no leadership” served to create precisely the political vacuum the Democratic Party rushed to fill. The WSWS warned with prophetic accuracy: “Many of the groups involved in Wall Street demonstrations have echoed the position of the indignados in Spain and Greece that there should be ‘no politics’ and no leadership. The call for ‘no politics’ amounts to a rejection of a principled and coherent political alternative to bourgeois politics and the capitalist two-party system—that is, to socialist politics. It plays directly into the hands of the Democratic Party, which will move to fill the political vacuum.”[8] This is precisely what occurred. The coordinated federal-local police crackdown that destroyed Occupy’s encampments in November 2011—documented by the WSWS as a nationally organized operation involving the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police forces across multiple cities[9]—revealed the ruling class’s settled determination to tolerate no sustained challenge to capitalist order, however embryonic. The ISO’s subsequent dissolution and absorption of its dominant faction into the Democratic Socialists of America merely formalized the political trajectory it had pursued within Occupy from the outset.
The Yellow Vests: Broader Social Base, Sharper Edge, Same Political Ceiling
The Yellow Vest movement expressed a sharper social radicalism and a considerably broader working-class social base than Occupy. Its geographical and social centre of gravity lay in provincial France—among commuters, pensioners, small proprietors, precarious workers, and the rural and peri-urban poor hit by transport costs, the decline of local public services, and the accelerating erosion of wages under neoliberal restructuring. This diffuse, provincial social composition—rooted in layers of the working class and lower middle strata most directly exposed to the costs of the “modernization” celebrated by Macron’s metropolitan enthusiasts—gave the Yellow Vests a broader geographic reach and a more direct material confrontation with capitalist rule than Occupy’s metropolitan concentration had permitted.
Its tactics were correspondingly more disruptive. Weekly nationwide actions, roundabout and toll-road blockades, the occupation of commercial arteries, and confrontations with riot police in Paris and provincial cities created real costs for capitalist circulation and subjected the French ruling class to sustained political pressure of a kind Occupy’s symbolic square occupations had not achieved. At certain moments, the Yellow Vest movement intersected with strike waves—teachers, health workers, transport workers—creating the real possibility, if never the organizational reality, of a fusion between mass street protest and organized industrial action.
FILE PHOTO: A view of the Place de la Republique as protesters wearing yellow vests gather during a national day of protest by the “yellow vests” movement in Paris, France, December 8, 2018. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe/File Photo
This possibility was systematically blocked. The French trade union confederations worked methodically to prevent any convergence between the Yellow Vests and the organized labor movement.[10] Left-populist tendencies within and around the movement framed demands in the idiom of “the people versus the elites”—calls for referenda, wealth redistribution, and stronger national welfare provisions—that avoided identifying the systemic enemy: the capitalist class and its state, not merely its more visibly corrupt or arrogant individual representatives.[11] Macron’s government survived. The Yellow Vests dissipated. The underlying social crisis intensified.
The Gen-Z Wave: Global Scale, Revolutionary Intensity, Identical Political Deficit
The Gen-Z uprisings represent a qualitative escalation in both geographic scope and revolutionary intensity. Occurring simultaneously across multiple countries of the former colonial world, they combined militant student and youth vanguards with genuine proletarian intervention through strikes and industrial action. Sri Lanka’s two general strikes of April 28 and May 6, 2022, in which millions participated across ethnic lines, demonstrated the decisive power of the working class when it acts as an independent force.[12] Kenya witnessed successive waves of strikes by teachers, healthcare workers, civil servants, and transport workers erupting in the wake of the initial Gen-Z protests.[13] The scale of political disruption—heads of state driven from office, parliaments stormed, governments collapsed—surpassed anything Occupy or the Yellow Vests had produced.
Nepal Gen-Z protests. Image Courtesy of Kathmandupost.com
Yet the political framework within which these movements operated reproduced in these countries of belated capitalist development the identical dynamics that had contained and betrayed Occupy and the Yellow Vests in the imperialist centers. Kenya’s Revolutionary Socialist League, justifying the absence of leadership on the grounds that “the government is actively looking for leaders,” created a political vacuum filled by Raila Odinga and the trade union bureaucracy.[14] The Communist Party Marxist-Kenya promoted defense of the 2010 Constitution—drafted by the ruling class with British and US funding—thereby channeling mass anger into bourgeois-democratic illusions. BAYAN and Akbayan in the Philippines aligned with bourgeois anti-China factions, subordinating working-class politics to the strategic imperatives of US imperialism’s Indo-Pacific confrontation.[15]
The pseudo-left’s international character was not incidental: these organizations participate in the same international political current—representing affluent middle-class layers whose material interests require the preservation of capitalism while managing working-class discontent—that the ISO embodied in the United States. They celebrate spontaneity to avoid building revolutionary parties. They promote “people power” and “anti-corruption” to obscure class divisions. They align with bourgeois opposition forces presented as “progressive” alternatives. As the WSWS has consistently warned, these tendencies serve objectively as a reservoir for capitalist ideology within the “left.”[16]
[6] The WSWS analysis identified this with precision: “The social and political outlook of those at the core of the protests—including anarchist organizations around the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which initiated the call to occupy Wall Street—was fundamentally hostile to the working class. Contained in the ‘99 percent’ slogan itself was an effort to obscure the deep social divide between the working class and the more privileged sections of the upper-middle class, for which these groups spoke.”
Communist Party Marxist Kenya (CPM-K) Secretary General Booker Ngesa Omole in prison [Photo: CPM Marxist (Facebook)]
The Central Committee of the Communist Party Marxist Kenya (CPM-K) has reported that its secretary general, Booker Ngesa Omole, was violently abducted on Monday in Isiolo town by the Kenya Police Service.
In a public statement February 24, the party wrote: “This was not an arrest. This was not lawful detention. This was a kidnapping.” Omole was “beaten severely. Tortured. Brutalised to near death. His tooth was broken. His finger was cut with a pen knife.” They state that after the assault he was “dumped at Mlolongo Police Station,” a facility associated with extrajudicial kidnappings and killings. His phone signal, they report, was traced there.
The party posted a photo of Omole in a Mlolongo Police Station cell February 25, explaining that he is being held unlawfully, “and the police have refused all access to him. No lawyers. No comrades. No family.”
The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) denounces Omole’s abduction and demands that the Kenyan regime release him immediately.
That Omole was singled out by the “broad-based unity” government of President William Ruto—uniting the United Democratic Alliance (UDA) and the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) founded by the late political fixer Raila Odinga—is clear from the repeated and escalating character of the attacks against him and other CPM-K members. A year ago, he was targeted for assassination as part of a broader campaign of intimidation and repression directed at the party’s leadership.
The assassination attempt came days after the attempted abduction of CPM-K National Chairperson Mwaivu Kaluka in Mombasa—Kenya’s second-largest city—along with two other party members, by plain-clothes police officers. While Kaluka was eventually released, the operation came just weeks after a crackdown on the CPM-K following its national congress in November. At that time, Kaluka and former National Chairperson Kinuthia Ndungu—who had been beaten repeatedly and arrested 10 times—were detained at Central Police Station in Nairobi. No reason was given for their arrest.
The repression against the CPM-K is part of the escalating violence of the Ruto regime since he came to power in 2022. In 2023, Ruto’s first year in power, security forces killed at least 31 demonstrators. In June 2024, during the Gen Z protests against Ruto’s International Monetary Fund (IMF) Finance Bill that sought to impose savage tax hikes, police killed more than 60. In 2025, at least 50 were killed in protests and hundreds injured.
The abduction of Omole takes place amid an escalating campaign of repression against opposition figures in the run-up to next year’s elections. Weeks ago, police violently dispersed a rally in Kitengela organised by the former and expelled the general secretary of ODM, Senator Edwin Sifuna, firing tear gas and live rounds at thousands of supporters. One of the victims, 28-year-old Vincent Ayomo, was shot in the eye as he crossed the road from work and another 50 attendees were injured.
This deepening turn to repression unfolds against a backdrop of extreme social inequality and mounting economic hardship. Oxfam reports show that nearly half of Kenya’s population lives in extreme poverty, surviving on meagre daily incomes, even as wealth accumulates at the very top. A minuscule layer of the super-rich has amassed obscene fortunes: the richest 125 individuals now control more wealth than 77 percent of the population—over 42 million people.
Meanwhile, average real wages have fallen by 11 percent since 2020, the cost of food has surged by 50 percent over the same period, and household expenses for transport and energy remain punishingly high. Public services are deteriorating under the impact of IMF-dictated austerity and debt servicing, exposing millions to collapsing health, education and social support systems.
The trade union bureaucracy is backing this assault on the working class and rural masses. Francis Atwoli, Secretary General of the Central Organisation of Trade Unions (COTU), recently declared that workers should “support him [Ruto] and ignore the noise,” hailing him as the only leader capable of transforming Kenya into a “first-world” industrialised economy. “The only person who can take us to that level is none other than William Ruto,” Atwoli insisted, presenting the regime’s pro-capitalist agenda as the path to jobs and development.
Atwoli has openly backed Ruto’s violence on protesters after last year’s July 7, 2025 “Saba Saba” protest massacre, when security forces gunned down scores of protesters nationwide commemorating pro-democracy protests in the 1990s against the Western-backed Daniel Arap Moi regime. Speaking days after the bloodshed, Atwoli instructed young people to “forget about demonstrations, remain home, silent, and promote peace,” warning that protests were “scaring investors away.” He called on the government to take “firm measures to curb the unrest.”
By urging youth to stay off the streets while police deployed live ammunition, mass arrests and abductions, the trade union bureaucracy is providing political cover for state repression. It has made clear that it stands not with workers and youth facing austerity and bullets, but with the capitalist state and its demands for “stability” and investor confidence.
The attacks on the CPM-K, the abductions, arbitrary detentions and cross-border renditions to neighbouring Uganda under brutal dictator Yoweri Museveni, carried out by the Kenyan government, are political preparations for far broader assaults on the democratic rights of the population as a whole. What is being tested against one organisation today will be used tomorrow against striking workers, protesting youth and impoverished communities resisting austerity.
These events lay bare the grave dangers confronting the masses as social tensions intensify and the ruling elite closes ranks in defence of its wealth and power.
The turn to open repression in Kenya is being emboldened by the example set by would-be dictator Donald Trump in the United States. Thousands of armed ICE agents have been sent into major urban centres, while detention centres have been built across the country, with 66,000 people held in immigration custody—the highest level in US history. These crackdowns have left two American protesters killed.
In France, President Emmanuel Macron and the political establishment have exploited the death of fascist activist Quentin Deranque—following clashes around an event addressed by Rima Hassan of La France Insoumise (France Unbowed)—to whip up a reactionary campaign against the left. Backed by the neo-fascist National Rally (RN) and the Socialist Party, a broad political front is seeking to criminalise opposition and prepare the ground for an authoritarian shift in advance of next year’s presidential elections. As with Charlie Kirk in the US, the death of a fascist is being weaponised to strengthen the repressive powers of the state and legitimise far-right forces.
In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) government is deploying the army into townships under the pretext of restoring order. It follows the mass killings of protesters in Tanzania in the aftermath of last year’s elections, where thousands were reported killed or disappeared amid a brutal post-election crackdown, and the ongoing suppression of opposition forces in Uganda under President Yoweri Museveni.
These developments are expressions of a global crisis of capitalism. From Washington to Paris, Pretoria to Nairobi, ruling elites confront deepening inequality, mass anger and political instability. Their common response is to fortify the police state apparatus, promote far-right forces and normalise violence against social opposition.
Workers and youth must draw the necessary conclusions. The defence of democratic rights cannot be entrusted to the courts, the opposition factions of the bourgeoisie, or the trade union bureaucracy. Mass meetings, demonstrations and workplaces must establish their own defence committees to protect protesters from police violence and state-sanctioned gangs. Those targeted for repression must not be left isolated but defended collectively.
Above all, the working class must build its own independent political movement, rooted in factories, neighbourhoods and schools, and guided by an international socialist perspective. This means breaking from all parties and trade union apparatuses tied to the capitalist ruling class and uniting with workers across Africa and internationally in the struggle against imperialist domination, austerity and state repression. Only through the conscious mobilisation of the working class for socialist transformation can democratic rights be secured and defended.
The ICFI has well-documented and irreconcilable political differences with the CPM-K, which have been clearly presented in the World Socialist Web Site. But it unequivocally opposes this brutal attack on the organization’s general secretary, demands Omole’s immediate release, and calls for an end to all state threats and repressive acts against the CPM-K.
Reposted below is the article of the World Socialist Web Site published on 07 September 2025.
In the wake of a huge police crackdown and thousands of arrests, the protest movement that erupted in Indonesia late last month has largely subsided, but none of the basic issues that fuelled the widespread demonstrations have been resolved.
The immediate trigger for the protests was the decision to pay a huge monthly accommodation allowance of 50 million rupiah ($US3,045) to the 580 parliamentarians of the House of Representatives (DPR)—10 to 20 times the minimum wage paid to millions of workers struggling to survive.
The lavish allowance was emblematic of far deeper concerns and opposition stemming from the immense social gulf between the country’s wealthy few and their political representatives and the vast majority of working people. Moreover, the social crisis facing broad layers of the population, particularly young people, is only worsening as economic growth slows and unemployment rises. The jobless rate for youth has hit 16 percent, forcing many into poorly paid, casual work.
Protesters clash with the police during a protest against lavish allowances given to parliament members, in Jakarta, August 28, 2025. [AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana]
The protests dramatically escalated after the callous killing of a young ride-share motorbike rider Affan Kurniawan on August 28. He was run over by an armoured police vehicle amid a mass mobilisation of police, including the notorious, heavily-armed BRIMOB. In the following days, angry protesters clashed with police, attacked government buildings and stormed the homes of prominent political figures including Finance Minister Sri Mulyani, the architect of the budget cuts that set off protests earlier in the year.
Facing a deepening political crisis, President Prabowo Subianto delayed a planned trip to China. He appeared at a press conference on August 31, flanked by leaders of the main political parties, to appeal for calm, declaring he understood “the genuine aspirations of the public.” At the same time, however, he ordered “the police and military to take the strongest possible action” against purported looting and destruction.
The protests involving thousands were not limited to the capital Jakarta but had spread to major cities throughout the country, including Surabaya, Surakarta, Bandung, Semarang and Yogakarta in Java; Banda Aceh, Padang and Medan in Sumatra; as well as Makassar and Kendari in Sulawesi, Palangka Raya in Kalimantan, and Manokwari in West Papua.
At least 11 people died in the clashes with the police and military, hundreds were injured, and another 20 protesters are missing, according to the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence. More than 3,000 people have been arrested.
Confronting a police crackdown, the protests subsided last week but the anger has not. Smaller protests continued. Last Wednesday, hundreds of women from the Indonesian Women’s Alliance (IWA) marched to the parliament building in Jakarta wielding brooms to “sweep away the dirt of the state, militarism and police repression.”
Last Thursday, a student demonstration led by the All-Indonesian Students’ Union (BEM SI) took place outside the parliament, where its central coordinator Muzammil Ihsan read out a list of demands, including the reduction of parliamentary allowances, complete reform of the national police and parliament, the release of all those arrested and the creation of 19 million jobs.
On the same day, members of the Labor Movement with the People (GEBRAK) held a protest in a major road in Jakarta also demanding the complete reform of the police and parliament.
On Thursday evening, a delegation of student leaders was invited to meet ministers at the Presidential Palace but reportedly walked out of the talks after being told they had to consider “the nation’s development” in making any demands.
Last week, a grouping of activist organisations drew up a list of 17 short-term “people’s demands” to be implemented by Prabowo and the government by last Friday along with eight longer-term ones. The deadline, however, passed with few of the demands being met or partially met.
In a bid to quell widespread anger, the parliament did announce the axing of the housing allowance that initially sparked the protests. The announcement was left to the parliamentary speaker Puan Maharani. She is the daughter of former president Megawati Sukarnoputri, chairperson of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P)—the only parliamentary party that is not part of the Prabowo government.
On the same day, Co-ordinating Minister for Economic Affairs Airlangga Hartarto suggested that the government would carry out various stimulus measures to boost jobs and incomes—including wage subsidies for those earning less than 10 million rupiah a month, a program of public works, tax exemptions and steps to prevent mass lay-offs. But under conditions of a slowing economy that will be further hit by Trump’s tariffs, these proposals have the character of empty promises.
No steps have been taken to rein in the police and military. The only action taken against the police has been against low-level officers involved in the widely publicised killing of ride-share worker Affan Kurniawan. The officer in charge of the vehicle that struck Kurniawan has been dishonourably dismissed, and another received a seven-year demotion.
These measures are unlikely to assuage popular anger and resentment. Imran, a food delivery driver, told Al Jazeera that “inequality” was the root cause of the mass protests, “including economic inequality, educational inequality, health inequality and unequal public services.”
Referring to the government and parliament, he said: “They are not concerned about our fate. They should be present to resolve the problems facing the community, not fan the flames. These protests arose from the community’s poor economic conditions.”
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Rahmawati, a housewife, said that public anger had “finally exploded …because we feel like no one cares about us… What we want is for them [politicians] to care about us and our needs. Every year, the price of basic foodstuffs rises and never goes back down again. Groceries are becoming more and more difficult to afford.”
Significantly, the protests in Indonesia reverberated more broadly throughout South East Asia as workers and young people confront very similar economic and social problems, exacerbated by slowing economies. Protests took place last week in support of those in Indonesia, including in Malaysia and Thailand.
Thai students hung a banner on an overpass near Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok declaring “Thailand stands with the people of Indonesia” and called for justice for those protesters killed during police crackdowns.
In Thailand, a social media poster called Yammi shared instructions on how to order meals for Jakarta-based ride-share and food delivery motorbike riders. Revealing sympathy not just with the protesters but the difficult and dangerous conditions facing poorly paid riders, the post went viral in the region and internationally. Donations came in from Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei, as well as Japan, Sweden and the United States.
The protests have provided a glimpse of the explosive social tensions that have built up in Indonesia as well as the broader region and will only intensify amid growing global economic turmoil.
Chemmani Mass Graves on August 01, 2025. Photo courtesy of Kumanan Kana Facebook page.
At the close of the 28th day of the second phase of excavations at the newly uncovered Chemmani–Ariyalai “Siththupaththi” Hindu Cemetery mass grave in Jaffna, 147 skeletons have been exhumed—among them toddlers, children, and babies less than twelve months old. The remains were unearthed in a pit as shallow as two feet, scattered without order—some bodies stacked atop one another, some with bent limbs suggesting they were buried alive. All were stripped of clothing, with clear signs of on-the-spot killings of women alongside their babies, hurried burials, and accompanied by chilling artifacts: a school bag identical to those donated by UNESCO in the 1990s, a baby’s toy and a feeding bottle, small glass bangles, socks, slippers, a suspected machine gun barrel, and fractured skulls. These discoveries, together with already available reports and evidence, leave no doubt that these were not the victims of natural disaster or random violence, but of a systematic, state-organised campaign of mass murder.
The ongoing excavation, conducted under the supervision of Jaffna Magistrate A.A. Anandarajah and led by archaeologist Professor Raj Somadeva, was temporarily halted on August 6 and is scheduled to resume on August 22. On August 3 and 4, this writer visited the site and spoke directly with the Magistrate; J. Thathparan, Executive Director of the Office of Missing Persons (OMP); and Professor Somadeva. All confirmed the significance of the discovery—not only for the scale of barbarism and human tragedy it reveals, but also for the irrefutable evidence it provides of crimes committed against innocent civilians.
From left at the Chemmani grave site, August 3, 2025: Jaffna Magistrate A.A. Anandarajah; J. Thathparan, Executive Director of the Office of Missing Persons (OMP); and the writer. Photo credit Kumanan Kana facebook page.
Chemmani from 1998 to today: Linking State Military to the Graves
One does not have to grope around to relate these mass graves to the Sri Lankan armed forces who occupied Jaffna after 1995. It is an indisputable fact—even acknowledged by ultra-right Sinhala racists—that mass graves exist and massacres were carried out by the state military. Alarmed by the Chemmani exhumations, racist warmonger Udaya Gammanpila, leader of the Pivithuru Hela Urumaya and a former minister, told the media: “The North is war-ravaged, so mass graves will appear anywhere. Digging them up and commenting [on them] is pointless and a waste of money.”
Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) reported in December 1997: “The fate of about 600 people who disappeared from Jaffna Peninsula in recent times is unknown”. The name “Chemmani” entered the world’s attention in July 1998, when Sri Lanka Army Corporal Dewage Somaratna Rajapaksha, convicted for the rape and murder of 18-year-old Tamil schoolgirl Krishanthi Kumaraswamy, told the Colombo High Court: “We didn’t kill anyone. We only buried bodies. We can show you where 300 to 400 bodies have been buried.”
In Jaffna Magistrate Court, just prior to exhumations in June 1999, he said, “I can show you how people were arrested in Ariyalai, tortured and buried…I can show you 10 places in Chemmani where bodies are buried. The other four convicted with me can show another six places.”
Rajapaksha’s testimony exposed a network of clandestine mass graves in the Jaffna area, containing hundreds of civilians who had “disappeared” following the Sri Lankan military’s recapture of the peninsula in 1995. In the late 1990s, limited excavations at Chemmani confirmed the remains of 15 individuals, but political obstruction, witness intimidation, procedural impediments, and the deliberate tampering with evidence ensured that most sites remained untouched for over two decades—like many other mass graves scattered across the country.
The present Ariyalai mass grave—only a short distance from the original Chemmani site—confirms the truth of Rajapaksha’s claims and directly links the Sri Lankan army to these atrocities. Media reports from the period documented hundreds of Tamil civilians vanishing after being stopped at military checkpoints and round-ups. The close proximity of the central army camp at Chemmani at the time, few yards away from the burial site, random placement of the skeletons, absence of clothing, a military item found with the bodies, and evidence of blunt force trauma all fit the established pattern of military abductions, torture, and summary executions.
The fractured skull of a victim found on August 6, 2025 at the Chemmani mass grave. Photo credit: Shabeer Mohamed.
State repression: from the North to the South
The AHRC documented the systematic nature of disappearances, noting in December 1997 that more than 16,700 cases had been verified in the South during the 1988–90 counterinsurgency against the fascist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). Only in isolated instances were prosecutions initiated against the perpetrators, and almost all of these resulted in no convictions. In both the South and the North, the Sri Lankan ruling elite deployed the full apparatus of the state—the military and police, death squads, the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and emergency regulations that served as a legal licence to kill and dispose of bodies with impunity, along with the use of mass graves—to eliminate perceived threats to capitalist rule from the political right and, above all, against the innocent rural poor and the oppressed.
There were, however, differences in the methods of disposal. In the South, tyre pyres—burning corpses in public—were used to terrorise the population and demonstrate the cost of defiance. In the North and East, the army often concealed its crimes, burying the bodies in remote or controlled areas to evade scrutiny while continuing the repression.
These were not “excesses” or “aberrations,” but the outcome of deliberate class policy. The AHRC identified seven patterns behind disappearances, including direct political decisions to eliminate thousands as a precondition for introducing free-market economic policies, and the use of 1965 Indonesian-style mass killings as a model for repression.
Successive governments, shared crimes
The Chemmani mass graves, like nearly two dozen others uncovered around the island, indict not only the military but every government—UNP, SLFP, SLPP, and now NPP/JVP—that has presided over a regime of impunity for state violence.
The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), which today attempts to posture as a “clean” and democratic force, played a key role in the nationalist, chauvinist, and militarist campaigns that legitimised repression in both the North and the South—at least since July 1987, when the reactionary Indo–Sri Lanka Accord was signed. The JVP did so while entering into coalition governments with former presidents Chandrika Kumaratunga and Mahinda Rajapaksa. The JVP’s hands are soaked in the blood of Tamils. Its current silence on Chemmani speaks volumes about its real class allegiance—to the capitalist state and imperialism, which it defends against the working class and the poor.
Militarization, Intimidation, and Suppression
In the South, it was only after 1994—when President Kumaratunga came to power with phony pledges of truth and justice to the families of the disappeared—that limited space was opened for victims of state terror under the UNP government and of JVP fascists to lodge even police complaints. Soon, the military was elevated to the highest esteem by the People’s Alliance (PA) government in resuming the war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The continued militarization and repression in the North did not spare the South, where abductions were commonplace under president Rajapaksa’s reinvigorated war, keeping the working class and all dissenters in a state of terror. All throughout, the JVP waged a sinister chauvinist campaign supporting the war. Today, retired military officers have largely found a safe haven under the JVP/NPP government. These were the conditions that prevented the aggrieved relatives of the disappeared from pursuing judicial processes, while the police and military actively intervened to block prosecutions.
Nationalist traps and the dead-end of appeals to imperialism
Neither Tamil nationalist organisations operating in the North or Colombo, nor the Tamil diaspora—whose real aim is to secure an elite self-rule in the North and East to safeguard their privileges against the Tamil working class and poor—offer any way forward. Their appeals to the United Nations, Western governments, and international human rights bodies have only been pretexts, largely for US imperialism to exert pressure on Colombo into submission. These are the very same imperialist powers that provided military, intelligence, and diplomatic backing to Colombo during the war.
Similarly, Sinhala nationalism justifies past and present massacres under the cover of “protecting the unitary state” and defending “national security.” Both ethnic nationalisms serve to divide the working class, the only social force capable of ending the cycle of repression and impunity.
Massacres as class war
Like the massacres in the South during 1988–90, those in the North and East during the 1983–2009 anti-Tamil civil war were not simply crimes committed against an ethnic minority, but primarily acts of class war. The victims—whether rural Sinhala youth accused of JVP links, or Tamil villagers suspected of aiding the LTTE—were overwhelmingly drawn from the working class, unemployed youth and oppressed rural poor. Their elimination was intended to crush political opposition and terrorise the masses into accepting the “open economy” policies demanded by the local bourgeoisie and international finance capital.
As the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) has emphatically explained, there has been—and will be—no justice for the victims of the South without justice for the victims of the North, and vice versa. The capitalist state, founded in 1948 on communal division, cannot and will not prosecute itself.
The way forward: a socialist programme for the working class and the Oppressed
The ICFI advances a clear perspective for ending repression and securing genuine justice: the independent political mobilisation of the working class, uniting Sinhala, Tamil, and Muslim workers in the struggle for a Sri Lanka–Eelam United Socialist States, as part of the Union of Socialist Republics of South Asia.
This requires building a revolutionary party grounded in the Trotskyist programme of permanent revolution, fighting to unite the oppressed rural and urban poor, along with unemployed youth, behind the leadership of the working class. The middle class and petty bourgeoisie must break from nationalist illusions and join forces with their true class brothers and sisters, both nationally and internationally.
The truth is that justice will not come from The Hague, Geneva, or Washington, but from the victory of the working class over the capitalist system that breeds war, dictatorship, and mass murder. The graves at Chemmani are not merely relics of past atrocities—they are a warning of what the Sri Lankan state will resort to again if the working class suffers another defeat. This is not a distant possibility but a living reality, demonstrated before our eyes in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians by imperialist-backed Zionist Israel.
By the Executive Committee of the CACPS and the Editorial Board of theSocialist.LK
“The death toll in Gaza is staggering. More than 30,000 Palestinians have reportedly been killed in just 150 days; 5% of the population is dead, injured or missing. It is impossible to adequately describe the suffering in Gaza”
Philippe Lazzarini, Head of UNRWA (Tweet on X on February 5, 2024)
Colombo Action Committee for People’s Struggles (CACPS) and theSocialist.LK yesterday (05) launched a public online Petition titled “Stop Gaza Genocide Now! No to Zionism! No to Imperialism!”. The significance of this political act to mobilize the working class, in Sri Lanka, South Asia and internationally, and all those who want to stop the massacre in Gaza, is expressed by the statement of Lazzarini, quoted above.
The Petition calls upon masses to reject the reactionary appeals to imperialist warmongers to stop the massacre. “Crisis ridden, these powers are planning a war with China, and are waging a war against Russia in Ukraine, as part of a global nuclear war that would entail Iran, the Middle East and the rest of the world. In these imperialist centers too, the war abroad has brought social counter-revolution at home,” Petition states.
Pointing out the necessary relationship between war on the one hand, and debt and austerity on the other, over billions of people around the world, the Petition states, “Manifestation of the hold of imperialism takes different forms: it may be war, it may be debt and austerity. Therefore, there is no fight against debt and austerity without a fight against war, and vice versa.”
It calls upon mass solidarity with the Palestinian people and to fight till their demands are met. These demands are expressed in the slogans the Petition fights for. These include, Stop Gaza Genocide Now! No to imperialist Barbarism! Punish War Criminals!
Refuting the imperialist political trap of the two-state solution, it calls upon to fight for a socialist programme to build a Jew-Arab Unified Socialist State, which would be part of a Federation of Socialist Unified States of the Middle East and the World.
In the backdrop of traditional working class organizations, the trade unions and their pseudo-left bckers, being lined up with imperialism and the capitalist state of austerity and international finance capital, the CACPS and theSocialist.LK call upon working class of Sri Lanka, united with the Israeli and US working people, to “unleash our enourmous power to fight for political power, independent of the State-Company-Trade Union alliance, to call general strikes, to stop war funding and military aid, and stop the Genocide and the world war.”
This Petition was launched as part of the wider campaign by the CACPS and theSocialist.LK against the long oppression of Palestinian people by the imperialist-backed Zionist Israel.
We invite fellow workers and our readers to sign the Petition today, share it widely and fight to stop the Gaza Genocide Now and halt to the impending neuclear war.
