Emergency Statement by the Editorial Board of theSocialist.lk and the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA) Â
President Donald Trump speaks with reporters in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, Monday, April 6, 2026, in Washington. [AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein]
Today, 7 April 2026, US President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social: âA whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I donât want that to happen, but it probably will.â
This is not political bluster. This is the public declaration of genocidal intent by the head of state of the most heavily armed military power in history â a power that possesses thousands of nuclear weapons and has already been bombing Iran for forty days.
As the World Socialist Web Site stated today in its emergency perspective: âEvery word Trump said implicates the government of the United States in a crime of Hitlerian proportions. He says openly what the Nazi leaders discussed behind closed doors.â Trump has already threatened to destroy every power plant, every bridge, every desalination facility â the entire infrastructure of civilised life for 93 million people. He has declared this will be accomplished âover a period of four hours.â He was asked by a reporter whether this constitutes war crimes. His answer: âNo, not at all.â
Iran is the heir to one of the oldest and most profound civilisations in human history. Thousands of its civilians â including 168 children killed in a US missile strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girlsâ school on the first day of the war â have already been slaughtered. Hospitals, universities, residential districts and schools have been systematically bombed. The logic of escalation, as the WSWS has warned, is inexorable: from intensified bombing to ground invasion, to the occupation of Iranian cities, and ultimately â in the face of mounting US casualties and military failure â to the resort to nuclear weapons.
This is not a hypothetical. This is the trajectory of a war that has been underway for forty days, escalating each week, with no serious force within the capitalist political system placing any brake upon it.
The Democratic Party of the United States â which funded the war with its own vote for the $839 billion defence budget â now calls Trump a âmadmanâ and âunhinged.â But not a single Democrat has proposed concrete action to halt the war. They are complicit. They are terrified that any genuine mass mobilisation against the war would not stop at the war â it would raise the entire question of the distribution of wealth, the power of the financial oligarchy, and the social order both parties exist to defend.
The parliaments of Europe, the governments of Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom â all are implicated. Australia has secretly deployed SAS commandos, Wedgetail battle-management aircraft and its Pine Gap intelligence station to the war. Britain hosts the Hormuz summit. Germany rearming. The United Nations Security Council paralysed. International law demolished.
The capitalist state system has proved, beyond any doubt, that it cannot stop this war. Only the international working class can.
theSocialist.lk and the Socialist Lead of Sri Lank and South Asia (SLLA) aligned with the International Committee of the Fourth International, calls on workers, youth and all those in opposition to this criminal war:
Strike: Workers in the United States, Britain, Australia, Germany and across the world must take immediate industrial action â in ports, airports, logistics hubs, defence manufacturing plants and transport networks â to deny the war machine the means to function. The AFL-CIO, the UAW, the TUC and every major trade union federation has maintained criminal silence. Workers must act through their rank-and-file committees, independently of the bureaucracy, to halt the flow of arms, fuel and supplies to this war.
Occupy: Workers and youth must occupy workplaces, campuses and public spaces â not to petition governments that have proven themselves servants of the war, but to assert the independent political power of the working class. The eight million who marched on 28 March in the United States alone must be transformed from a protest movement into an organised political force with a program, a strategy and a leadership.
Organise internationally: The war on Iran is not a national question. It is a world question. Workers in Sri Lanka, workers in South Korea, workers in Japan â whose governments are cutting separate deals with Iran to secure oil supplies even as the bombs fall â must join this struggle. The IRGCâs warning that it will âdeprive the US and its allies of the regionâs oil and gas for yearsâ is a measure of how close the world stands to an economic and military catastrophe of civilisational proportions. The only answer is international working-class solidarity, organised through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
Trumpâs threat today must be understood for what it is: a declaration of war not merely against Iran, but against all the accumulated gains of human civilisation â against international law, against the prohibition on targeting civilian infrastructure, against the most fundamental norms of humanity that were codified after the horrors of World War II and the Nazi Holocaust. As David North stated at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice: this war meets every legal and political criterion established at the Nuremberg Trials for a âcrime against peaceâ â the supreme international crime.
If today, 7 April 2026, becomes the date on which Iranian civilisation is destroyed, it will also be the date that the capitalist world order signs its own death warrant in the eyes of humanity. It must instead become the date on which the international working class rises to say: Not in our name. Not with our labour. Not with our silence.
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) sections of the ICFI are organising this resistance. We call on all workers, youth and socialist-minded people in Sri Lanka, South Asia and internationally to join them.
Demand the immediate, unconditional cessation of the US-Israeli war on Iran.
Demand the withdrawal of all imperialist forces from the Middle East.
Build rank-and-file committees. Strike. Organise. Fight for socialism.
Solidarity With the people of Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Cuba â International Working Class Unity!
Hands Off Iran â Stop Imperialist War!
No More Genocide â Stop Trumpâs War Machine!
Workersâ Power Against War and Austerity!
Ports Closed to War â Workers Unite!
Not One Penny for War â Fund Hospitals, Schools, Jobs!
Imperialist and Zionist Troops Out from the Middle East!
Stop the War Criminals â Nuremberg for Imperialist Aggression!
[20] World Socialist Web Site, âPodemos enters Spanish government: (8 January 2020) âOn Tuesday, the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez officially formed a coalition government with the pseudo-left Podemos party, the Spanish ally of Greeceâs pro-austerity Syriza (âCoalition of the Radical Leftâ).â <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/01/08/pode-j08.html>
This article was originally published on the World Socialist Web Site on 24 March 2024.
As the US war on Iran nears the completion of its first month and deepens by the day, its effects on the global economy are intensifying.
In the recent period central banks and governments have sought to overcome major economic storms by throwing money at the problems, amounting to trillions of dollars. This has led to an unprecedented growth of debt while at the same time lifting the wealth of the financial oligarchs to unprecedented heights.
But in the growing crisis set off by the war, that âsolutionâ is not possible. As is being increasingly pointed out, central banks may be able to print money, but they cannot print molecules. Printing money will not miraculously end the lack of oil.
The rapidly worsening situation was underscored yesterday by the director of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, in remarks to a conference in Canberra, Australia.
He said the impact of the crisis was worse than the combined effects of two oil shocks of the 1970sâthat which flowed from the quadrupling of prices in 1973â74 and the turbulence which followed the Iranian revolution in 1979. Even if military action halted immediately, the market would not recover quickly, he said.
That assessment has also been made by energy analysts at Goldman Sachs who have significantly increased their forecasts of higher prices, warning they could even reach the record set in 2008 of $147 per barrel.
The shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz has also sent the price of liquified natural gas (LNG) soaring as supplies are increasingly constricted.
The Financial Times (FT) reported at the weekend that countries around the world are âfacing a cliff edgeâ as the flow of LNG from the regions comes to an end when a âhandful of tankers from the region reach their destinations.â
After that there will be nothing from the Gulf state of Qatar, the supplier of a fifth of the worldâs LNG, which stopped exports shortly after the war began.
Countries throughout the Asian region are the most heavily impacted so far because of their reliance on oil and LNG which comes through the Strait. Only one LNG cargo ship from the Gulf is still expected to arrive in Asia.
Thailand has to import 90 percent of its crude, half of which comes via the Strait. Some 30 percent of its LNG comes from the Middle East.
The situation in Pakistan is even more severe. Some 99 percent of its LNG imports came from Qatar last year. It has not received any supplies since the third day of the war.
India, which at present is considered the worldâs fastest growing major economy and the worldâs fifth largest after Japan, is also being hit on both the supply and financial fronts. Half of its energy imports come from the Gulf states. There are already widespread shortages of gas used for cooking.
The Gulf region is not only the countryâs largest trading partner. Indiaâs international financial position is being impacted because of remittances sent home by workers amounting to more than $50 billion a year.
According to Priyanka Kishore of the research consultancy Asia Decoded, whose remarks were cited in the FT, the Indian currency, the rupee, âis among the most exposed EM [emerging market] currencies to the Iran war.â
âAlso at risk is the sizable flow of remittances from the Middle East, which plays an important role in containing the current account deficit in the face of a widening trade gap.â
From the beginning of the war, the Indian central bank has been using its foreign exchange reserves to try to prevent a fall in the value of the rupee which has dropped against the US dollar and has been hitting record lows. The fear is that a collapse in the currencyâs value will push up interest rates and hit the financial system.
In the words of analysts at one Mumbai-based financial services firm, an extended war will likely âtrigger stress across all financial markets in India.â Before the war the governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Sanjay Malhotra, described the Indian economy as being in a âsweet spot,â with strong growth and low inflation. It now threatened to rapidly turn sour.
The war is not only causing disruption to oil and gas supplies, but a range of other commodities is also being hit. These include the supply of urea, a source of nitrogen-based fertilisers vital for agriculture around the world and sulphur also vital for the production of fertilisers.
There have been warnings that if the disruption caused by the war continues the situation will be much worse than 2022 in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Helium, a by-product of natural gas processing, for which Qatar provides around a third of the global supply, is also being impacted. It is a vital raw material in the production of computer chips.
In a comment this week FT columnist Tej Parikh pointed to the potential effect of the war on the artificial intelligence (AI) boom which for the past three years âhas propped up global trade and investment and pushed stock markets from the US to Asia to record highs.â
âInvestors have committed trillions of dollars to the technology, one of the most power-hungry inventions ever, on the assumption of ample energy supplies and a slick chip production line that can cross more than 70 borders before reaching the final consumer. But the Iran war is exposing the fragilities in the AI supply chain.â
Both South Korea and Taiwan, which are centres of global chip production, rely heavily on oil to supply energy, most of which comes through the Strait of Hormuz.
Parikh laid out a scenario in which apart from the effect of higher petrol and diesel prices, which are already raising all transport costs, the continuation of the war had the potential to hit the AI boom and set off financial turbulence in the US.
âIf the conflict lingers,â he wrote, âchip prices will steepen as manufacturers ration and compete for tighter supplies. Eventually, production would seize up. In the US, elevated energy costs would make present and future data centres less viable. High tech valuations will unwind, and debt borrowed against AI assets would be at risk.â
No one can predict the exact course of economic and financial events arising from the war and its continuation but after more than three weeks the direction is clear.
As the well-known economic and financial analyst Mohamed El-Erian noted in an X post: âConsensus is shifting, and rightly so. This third week of the war has fuelled a shift from a short-term energy disruption to long-term structural damage. With that, the broader falloutâĻ poses an increasing threat to global economic wellbeing and financial stability.â
Signs of the latter are emerging most sharply in the UK where there was what has been described as a âroutâ in the market for 10-year governments, or gilts as they are known, has developed over the past several days.
The yield or interest rate on the 10-year gilt rose yesterday by 0.11 percentage pointsâa significant move where ânormalâ movements are fraction of thatâto 5.1 percent, the highest level since 2008. One of the main reasons for the rise is that the previous expectation the Bank of England would cut interest rates has been shattered and replaced by the belief that, with inflation on the rise, the central bank will lift them, possibly four times this year.
This shift has the potential for significant financial turbulence as investors and speculators who have made massive bets, with large amounts of borrowed money, are caught out and are forced to exit their positions by selling financial assets.
We publish here Part 4 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 Trotskyâs Theory of Permanent Revolution.Part 1 was published on November 6, 2025 here. Part 2 was published on November 14, 2025 here. Part 3 was published on February 27, 2026 here.
The Lineage of Gen-Z Revolts: Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and the Yellow Vests â Politics, Tactics, Programme and the Lessons for the Working Class (continued)
Tactics: Direct Action, Digital Organization, and the Irreplaceable Role of Revolutionary Leadership
The three waves exhibit a progression in tactical forms that reflects the changing technological environment of mass struggle without altering its fundamental political requirements.
Occupy pioneered the sustained occupation of public space as a form of political presence, consciously modeling itself on the imagery of Tahrir Square. The âpeopleâs microphone,â horizontal decision-making, and assembly democracy expressed a genuine aspiration to overcome the alienation of bourgeois representative politics. But symbolic occupation could not threaten capitalist production or state power. It could only be tolerated until inconvenient, at which point it was cleared by coordinated federal instruction.
The Yellow Vests developed a more economically disruptive tactical repertoire: the blockade of circulation nodes, the weekly cadence of national mobilizations, the combination of symbolic and material disruption. Franceâs tradition of militant industrial action created realâif unrealizedâpossibilities for converting street protest into generalized strike action. The tactical innovation was real; the political ceiling remained identical. Without independent rank-and-file workplace and neighbourhood committees capable of coordinating strikes across sectors and regions, the disruptive energy could not be converted into sustained, organized industrial action that would have posed a genuine challenge to state power. Such committees, independent of the union bureaucracy, are the organizational precondition for elevating local struggles into a revolutionary movement.[17]
The Gen-Z movements added the rapid mobilizing capacity of social media platforms, enabling the coordination of mass actions across vast geographic areas at speeds that made traditional institutional responses appear slow-footed. This digital dimension introduced new capacities and new vulnerabilities. The same platforms that enabled rapid mobilization also enabled state surveillance, intelligence infiltration, and the algorithmic manipulation of political content. More fundamentally, the substitution of social media coordination for political organizationâviral hashtags for programmatic clarity, trending topics for theoretical developmentâproduced movements whose apparent technological strength masked a structural weakness: the inability to translate street power into sustained industrial action through which the working class exercises its decisive social leverage.
The âleaderlessâ framework promoted by theorists like Zeynep Tufekci and Paolo Gerbaudo performs an ideological function related to the reactionary theory of Chantal Mouffeâs left populism. By celebrating the organizational forms of networked protestâhorizontal assemblies, social media coordination, the absence of formal leadershipâthese theorists elevate into a political virtue what is objectively a political deficit. Leninâs analysis in What Is to Be Done? (1902) retains its full force against the spontaneism celebrated by theorists of âleaderlessâ movements: spontaneous working-class anger, however militant, does not generate socialist consciousness; it is the raw material that revolutionary political leadership must organize and direct.[18] The âleaderlessâ ideology does not liberate movements from leadership; it conceals the leadership that actually operatesâwhether of NGO-funded coordinators, pseudo-left academics channeling energy into reformist avenues, or the bourgeois politicians who ultimately harvest the political fruit of mass insurgency.
Programme: The Reformist Horizon and its Necessary Transcendence
All three movements articulated genuine and legitimate grievances with concrete âprogrammaticâ demands. Yet all three remained, in the absence of revolutionary leadership, within a reformist political horizon that left the fundamental questionâwho controls the means of production, and in whose interests?âsystematically unaddressed.
Occupyâs demands centered on redistribution, corporate accountability, and the reduction of economic inequality. The Yellow Vests called for lower fuel taxes, higher minimum wages, the restoration of public services, and various forms of direct democracy. The Gen-Z movements demanded the withdrawal of specific IMF-dictated tax measures, the end of corruption, and the removal of individual heads of state. All these demands expressed authentic material needs. None of them, in the absence of a program for working-class political power, pointed beyond the framework of bourgeois rule.
Left-populist tendencies within each movementâdrawing on the theoretical framework elaborated by Mouffe in For a Left Populism (Verso, 2018) and given organizational expression by Podemos in Spain and France Insoumiseâframed these demands as a struggle of âthe peopleâ against âthe oligarchy,â a formulation deliberately designed to incorporate sections of the bourgeoisie into a cross-class âprogressiveâ bloc while excluding the perspective of working-class political independence and socialist expropriation.
The WSWS analyzed the bankruptcy of this framework through its comprehensive coverage of the Syriza and Podemos experiences. Syrizaâs capitulation to the EU-IMF troika (EC, ECB, IMF) within months of its January 2015 election victory[19] and Podemosâs entry into coalition government with the PSOE to implement the austerity it had promised to oppose[20] are not exceptions to the left-populist rule but its most perfect expressions. History has delivered its verdict: ten years after Syrizaâs 2015 betrayal, Greece remains mired in poverty with intensified exploitation; four years after Podemos entered government, the far-right Vox party emerged as a major force in Spanish politics. The pseudo-leftâs claim that workers must âgo through the experienceâ of these parties before advancing to socialism has been exposed as a murderous lie whose consequences have been catastrophic for the working class.[21]
The genuinely revolutionary programme is the programme of permanent revolutionâthe only programme that corresponds to the objective interests of the working class in the epoch of imperialism. No democratic task, no elementary improvement in the material conditions of the working class, can be secured on a lasting basis without the conquest of state power by the working class, the expropriation of the capitalist class, and the extension of socialist revolution beyond national borders. The partial demands of Occupy, the Yellow Vests, and the Gen-Z movements can serve as transitional demandsâpoints of departure for mass mobilizationâonly if they are embedded in a programmatic framework that identifies capitalism as the enemy and poses the question of workersâ power at the center, as elaborated in the ICFIâs foundational programme documents.[22]
Differences that register: Social Composition, Geography, and Revolutionary Intensity
Having established the essential political homology of the three wavesâtheir common ideological limitations and programmatic deficitsâit is necessary to register the differences that carry strategic implications.
Social composition: Occupy was dominated overwhelmingly by urban, often-educated layers of the precarious middle class concentrated in metropolitan centers. It reflected genuine mass discontent but was organized and led largely by socially privileged layers within the broad â99%. The slogan of â99 percentâ elided the divisions within that 99 percent between the working class and the upper-middle strata whose class interests diverge sharply from those of workers. The Yellow Vests drew a geographically and socially broader baseâprovincial workers, commuters, pensioners, small proprietorsâreaching deeper into the actual working class outside metropolitan milieux. The Gen-Z movements combined student and youth vanguards with genuine proletarian participation on a scale neither Occupy nor the Yellow Vests achieved: Sri Lankaâs general strikes, Kenyaâs successive wave strikes, and Bangladeshâs garment-worker participation despite union-bureaucratic demobilization expressed authentic working-class militancy of a qualitatively higher order.
Geography and the neocolonial dimension: Occupy and the Yellow Vests occurred in imperialist countriesâthe United States and France respectivelyâwhere the immediate political demands did not include the overthrow of IMF debt peonage or liberation from neocolonial exploitation. The Gen-Z movements occurred overwhelmingly in former colonial and semi-colonial countries where this dimension is central: the IMF stands immediately behind the specific tax measures and austerity programs that triggered mass protests, and the question of imperialist domination is inseparable from the question of domestic capitalist exploitation. This adds to the Gen-Z movements a dimension that links national democratic grievances directly to the international socialist revolution, confirming Trotskyâs Theory of Permanent Revolution in its twenty-first-century application.
Revolutionary intensity: Occupy was suppressed while still in embryonic form, never forcing a regime change or a serious rupture in state power. The Yellow Vests subjected the French ruling class to sustained pressure but did not threaten the fundamental stability of its political institutions. The Gen-Z movements, by contrast, drove heads of state from office, forced the collapse of governments, and in Sri Lanka generated a general strike drive that showed the potential to shake the entire structure of bourgeois rule. This heightened revolutionary intensity makes the absence of Trotskyist leadership all the more catastrophic in its consequences. The gulf between the objective revolutionary situation and the subjective capacity of the working class to take powerâwhat the ICFI has consistently identified as the crisis of revolutionary leadershipâis expressed with particular acuity in the Gen-Z experience.
The Pseudo-Left: An International Political Current, Not a Collection of Local Accidents
Any serious analysis of the three waves must confront the role of pseudo-left organizations not as a collection of locally specific political traps but as the expression of a coherent international political current whose functionâwhatever the subjective intentions of its participantsâis the containment of working-class revolutionary energy within limits acceptable to capitalism.
The ISO in the United States, the various Pabloite networks that promoted Syriza and Podemos across Europe, Kenyaâs Revolutionary Socialist League, the Stalinist Communist Party Marxist-Kenya, BAYAN and Akbayan in the Philippines, Sri Lankaâs Frontline Socialist Partyâthese organizations share a common political method regardless of their specific national contexts. The theoretical genealogy is explicit: Chantal Mouffe directly advised both Podemos and MÊlenchonâs France Insoumise; her partner Ernesto Laclauâs post-Marxist elaboration of âhegemonyâ theory has influenced pseudo-left groups across three continents; the International Socialist Tendency provided intellectual legitimation for Syrizaâs trajectory while blocking Marxist criticism of its capitulation.
As the WSWS warned in its analysis of pseudo-left containment strategies, these tendencies serve as a âreservoir for capitalist ideology within the âleft,ââ defending trade-union bureaucracy and social-democratic compromises rather than a revolutionary program.[15] Their middle-class composition, their material dependence on foundations and nonprofits, their rejection of working-class revolutionary politics, and their promotion of spontaneity and âleaderlessnessâ all serve the single function of blocking the emergence of authentic socialist leadership. Workers and youth who participate in mass movements must understand this pattern not as a series of coincidences but as the expression of a determinate class interest.
The Aragalaya in Perspective: Sri Lanka 2022 and the Global Pattern of Gen-Z Revolt
The 2022 Aragalaya â Sri Lankaâs mass uprising of April through July â was not primarily a protest against the Rajapaksa familyâs corruption or mismanagement, though popular anger at the regimeâs criminality was genuine and explosive. It was the expression of the terminal crisis of Sri Lankan capitalism under conditions of global capitalist breakdown. Decades of foreign debt dependency, subordination to the diktats of the International Monetary Fund, and the utter bankruptcy of every bourgeois political formation â the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna, the United National Party, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, and their various parliamentary combinations â had produced a social catastrophe in which fuel, medicine, and basic foodstuffs disappeared from the shelves. The COVID-19 pandemic and the economic disruption unleashed by the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine accelerated the collapse of foreign exchange reserves and forced the government to default on its debt. Between April and July, hundreds of thousands poured into the streets across ethnic lines â a fact of profound political significance in a country whose ruling class has systematically exploited Sinhala and Tamil chauvinism for seven decades as its primary instrument of mass division. Two general strikes, on April 28 and May 6, in which millions participated, demonstrated with unmistakable force the potential power of the working class when it moves as an independent social force. Rajapaksa was driven from office and forced to flee the country on July 13, 2022. At that moment, the labor bureaucracy had already isolated the struggle and the working class was without leadership.
Protesters fill the streets of Colombo ahead of President Gotabaya Rajapaksaâs resignation. (Photo: Sakuna Miyasinadha Gamage |From asiafoundation.org)
The pseudo-left organizations and trade union bureaucracies understood their task with a clarity proportional to the revolutionary danger the uprising posed. Their decisive function was not to advance the movement but to contain it: to ensure that the immense social energy erupting from below was channeled into a political framework that preserved bourgeois rule. The Frontline Socialist Party â Sri Lankaâs principal pseudo-left formation â promoted the demand for an âinterim governmentâ as the movementâs central political objective. This demand, however radical it sounded in the mouths of those advancing it, was not a call for workersâ power but an invitation to a section of the discredited parliamentary establishment to replace another under conditions of mass pressure. The trade union confederations called and controlled the two general strikes â limiting them to single-day actions, carefully isolating them from the movement at Galle Face Green, and at no point advancing demands that could challenge the fundamental capitalist order: repudiation of the IMF debt, nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy under workersâ control, or the formation of independent organs of working-class power. The middle-class protest forces concentrated at Galle Face Green, for their part, reproduced in Sri Lankan conditions the identical âno politics, no leadershipâ framework that characterized Occupy Wall Street and the Yellow Vests â directing mass anger at the persons of the Rajapaksas rather than at the capitalist state and the imperialist domination that had produced the catastrophe. The ICFI warned with precision throughout this period: the emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves, and there is no solution to the immense social problems within the existing social order.
The political consequences of this combined betrayal unfolded with an inexorable logic that ICFI analysis had forewarned and precisely identified. With the working class politically disarmed and demobilized within the âinterim governmentâ framework advanced by the pseudo-left and trade union bureaucracy, parliament was free to act on behalf of the ruling class. Ranil Wickremesinghe â six-time prime minister, organic representative of finance capital and the comprador bourgeoisie, the politician whom not a single constituency had endorsed for presidential office â was installed as president by parliamentary vote on July 20, 2022. His mandate was explicit and has been executed without deviation: enforce the IMFâs austerity program, restore bourgeois order, and suppress working-class resistance. The Essential Public Services Act was wielded against striking workers. IMF conditionalities â privatization, regressive taxation, cuts to public services â were implemented under conditions of systematic repression of labor rights. The attack on the Galle Face encampment, the criminalization of protest, and the systematic persecution of activists who had led the uprising followed in sequence. What the masses had achieved in revolutionary form â the removal of a head of state â was thus converted through the mechanism of pseudo-left betrayal into its precise opposite: the installation of a more disciplined and more ruthless enforcer of the same IMF program the uprising had sought to overthrow. The Aragalaya confirmed the ICFIâs assessment that âthe critical issue is that of political leadership,â and that spontaneity alone â however militant â cannot overcome the organized political capacity of the bourgeoisie and its pseudo-left auxiliaries to contain and divert mass revolutionary energy.
Video shows protesters at Sri Lankaâs Aragalaya mass uprising chanting slogans demanding resignation of president Gotabhaya Rajapaksa in July 2022
The Sri Lankan experience illuminates with particular clarity the global pattern of Gen-Z revolt analyzed throughout this essay, and deserves recognition as the paradigmatic case â the template, as the WSWS established, from which the subsequent uprisings in Bangladesh, Kenya, the Philippines, and elsewhere descended. Every essential element of the global pattern is present in concentrated form: the objective crisis produced by IMF debt peonage and imperialist domination; the explosive intervention of youth and workers across social and ethnic divisions; the decisive role of the two general strikes in revealing the working class as the social force capable of resolving the crisis; the systematic intervention of pseudo-left and trade union bureaucratic forces to channel the movement into a bourgeois-preserving âinterim governmentâ framework; the deliberate suppression of demands that could challenge capitalist property relations; and the installation of a new government whose primary task was to enforce the same IMF program the uprising had repudiated. The âleaderlessâ and âno politicsâ character of the Galle Face movement â celebrated in pseudo-left and liberal commentary as democratic spontaneity â performed in Sri Lanka the identical ideological function that Tufekci, Gerbaudo, and Mouffe perform in academic registers: it severed the connection between the genuine revolutionary impulse of the masses and the programmatic framework â permanent revolution, independent working-class political mobilization, the building of the ICFI â that alone can carry that impulse to its necessary conclusion.
The question posed by the Aragalaya â and posed with equal urgency by every Gen-Z uprising from Nairobi to Dhaka, from Colombo to Manila â is therefore not whether the masses are capable of revolutionary action. The two general strikes of April 28 and May 6, 2022, and the storming of the presidential residence on July 9, provided a definitive answer to that question. The question is whether the working class possesses the political instrument â the revolutionary Marxist party, armed with the Theory of Permanent Revolution, organized as a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, and fighting for the perspective of international socialist revolution â without which the objective revolutionary capacity of the masses is systematically transformed, through the mediation of pseudo-left betrayal, into its opposite: the consolidation of the very capitalist order the masses sought to overthrow.
Lessons and Strategic Conclusions
The comparative analysis of the Occupy Wall Street, the Yellow Vests, and the Gen-Z uprisings in the backward countries yields strategic conclusions of the utmost importance.
Extra-parliamentary revolt is a necessary but radically insufficient condition for social transformation: The ruling class has demonstratedâacross all three wavesâthat it can survive even the most massive and determined popular uprisings, provided the working class lacks the political instruments to translate spontaneous street power into social power.
The construction of independent rank-and-file workplace and neighbourhood committees is the decisive organizational advance: Such committees can coordinate strikes across sectors and regions, connect immediate economic demands to broader political objectives, and create the federated structures through which the working class exercises its decisive social leverage. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees, built by the ICFI, represents the organizational expression of this strategy on an international scale.
The political independence of the working class from all bourgeois parties and factions is non-negotiable: This means not only rejection of openly pro-capitalist parties but the political exposure and defeat of pseudo-left organizations that channel mass discontent back into bourgeois management.
Internationalization of the struggle is a strategic necessity, not a supplementary aspiration: The simultaneous eruption of mass revolt across multiple countries in the Gen-Z waveâand the common mechanisms of its betrayal across those countriesâdemonstrates that the crisis is global and the response of the working class must be equally global. Strike actions and defensive measures must be planned to hit the economic and political levers of capitalism simultaneously in multiple countries to break the ability of national ruling classes to isolate rebellions. The construction of genuinely internationalist revolutionary parties, organized as sections of the ICFI, is the precondition for transforming national eruptions into a global challenge to capitalist rule.
The struggle for socialist consciousness in the working class and among revolutionary youth is the precondition for revolutionary success: As Lenin insisted and as a century of revolutionary experience has confirmed, the working class requires not the absence of political leadership but the highest quality of political leadershipâdisciplined revolutionary parties armed with the program of permanent revolution, organized as sections of the world party of socialist revolution. The âleaderlessâ ideology does not liberate movements from leadership; it leaves them at the mercy of forces whose interests are inimical to those of the working class.
The common thread running through Occupy, the Yellow Vests, and the Gen-Z wave is a deepening of objective class discontent and the repeated opening of political spaces that the ruling class cannot close merely by repression or token reform. The critical historical task is to convert this recurring insurgency into organized, conscious socialist struggle under independent working-class leadership. That taskâthe construction of the International Committee of the Fourth International as the world party of socialist revolutionâis the most pressing political obligation of our time.
[20] World Socialist Web Site, âPodemos enters Spanish government: (8 January 2020) âOn Tuesday, the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez officially formed a coalition government with the pseudo-left Podemos party, the Spanish ally of Greeceâs pro-austerity Syriza (âCoalition of the Radical Leftâ).â <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/01/08/pode-j08.html>
People watch from a rooftop as a plume of smoke rises after an US-Israeli strike in Tehran, Iran, Sunday, March 1, 2026. [AP Photo/Vahid Salemi]
1. The joint US-Israeli assault on Iran, which began in the early morning hours of February 28, is a criminal act of war waged in flagrant violation of the United States Constitution and international law. Its opening salvo included the murder of Iranâs head of state, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other senior leaders of the Iranian government. There is not a shred of legal justification for the attack. No authorization has been sought from or granted by the United States Congress, as required by Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. No resolution of the United Nations Security Council sanctioned the use of force. The assault was launched while US and Iranian negotiators were still engaged in talks mediated by Oman, which had concluded just two days earlier in Geneva. The attack on Iran is precisely what was described at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders in 1945â46 as a âcrime against peaceââthe âsupreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.âÂ
2. The war began just two weeks after Secretary of State Marco Rubio used the Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2026 to dress up a program of predation and domination as a civilizational missionâurging Europe to cast off âguilt and shameâ over imperialist atrocities in the colonies and the Holocaust, lamenting the decline of the âgreat Western empires,â i.e., the very colonial order built on plunder, repression and mass killing. The rhetoric of imperial nostalgia has been followed by the real thingâcruise missiles, airstrikes and the bombardment of Iranian citiesâconfirming that the talk of âcivilizationâ is the customary lying preface to barbarism.
3. The bombardment of Iran is a crimeâagainst a people and against civilization. When strikes hit cities like Tehran, Qom and Isfahan, the target is not merely âinfrastructureâ but the accumulated intellectual, cultural and social life of a historic society. The reduction of a nation of 90 million to coordinates and âregime-changeâ slogans is the language of imperialist barbarism. Working people in the United States and internationally must oppose this onslaught, demand an immediate end to the attacks, and reject the normalization of mass killing and cultural annihilation as instruments of policy.
4. It is widely acknowledged, even in the capitalist media, that the United States faced no threat from Iran. In fact, Trump himself, following the Twelve-Day War of June 2025âin which the United States struck three Iranian nuclear facilities with the largest conventional munitions in its arsenalâdeclared that Iranâs nuclear weapons capacity had been âobliterated.â He repeated this claim as recently as his State of the Union address on February 24, 2026. His assertion, four days later, that Iran posed an âimminent threatâ to the United States was directly contradicted by a 2025 assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency, which concluded that Iran was years, if not a decade, from developing intercontinental missile capability. Two intelligence sources told CNN that Trumpâs claim was not backed up by intelligence. Even the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Jim Himes, said after being briefed: âWe have not heard articulated a single good reason for why now is the moment to launch yet another war in the Middle East.â
5. The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) warned repeatedly that such an attack was imminent. On February 19, just nine days before the assault, the ICFI stated: âThe objectives of US imperialismâthe domination of the planetâcannot be achieved peacefully. War against Iran is, for the United States, an essential stage in its preparation for the coming conflict with China.â It continued with a warning of the most far-reaching implications: âWar will not be stopped by appeals to imperialist and bourgeois governments. The international working class confronts a situation comparable to that which existed on the eve of World War II. But the comparison is inadequate, because the consequences of war today would be infinitely more terrible than they were 87 years ago. Humanity faces the imminent danger of a nuclear catastrophe that could result in the destruction of all human life.â
6. Trump is hardly attempting to present a coherent, let alone convincing, explanation for his decision to launch a war. Just four days earlier, he had delivered a State of the Union address, the longest in history, that devoted barely a few sentences to Iran, even though he had by that time signed off on the war. The military buildupâthe largest in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraqâwas well advanced. Israeli and American intelligence agencies had been tracking Khameneiâs movements for months.
7. Trump announced the war not in a nationwide address from the Oval Office, not before the Congress that the Constitution charges with the power to declare war, but in an eight-minute video posted at 2:30 in the morning to his private social media platform, Truth Social, from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. He wore a white baseball cap emblazoned with âUSA.â Trump was not speaking to the American people. He was speaking to his baseâto the fascistic movement that he has cultivated and that constitutes his real political constituency. As the WSWS wrote in a statement on February 28, âNow, Trump, baseball cap on his head, announced his decision in the dead of night, while most Americans were sleeping. He has set the United States and the entire world on a disastrous course.â The statement drew the inescapable historical parallel: âIn the future, historians will compare Trumpâs February 28, 2026 attack on Iran to Hitlerâs September 1, 1939 invasion of Poland. They are crimes of equal magnitude.â
8. The fact that polls confirm overwhelming popular opposition to war has no effect whatsoever on Trumpâs calculations. A University of Maryland poll conducted weeks before the strike found that only 21 percent of Americans favored an attack on Iran, while 49 percent were firmly opposed. A YouGov snap poll taken on the day of the strikes found just 34 percent approvalâthe lowest public backing for a US military campaign in modern history, less than half the support recorded for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found 43 percent disapproval versus only 27 percent approval. Seventy-four percent of respondents in a CBS/YouGov poll said Trump required congressional approval he never sought. The Quinnipiac poll found seven in 10 voters opposed military action against Iran. These figures reveal the depth of the chasm between the American ruling class and the population it oppresses. The war is being waged not in the name of the American people but against their clearly expressed will.
9. The war itself has taken the form of targeted assassinations of political leaders and military commanders, accompanied by massive bombardment that has produced terrible civilian casualties. Within hours of the first strikes, Iranâs Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was confirmed dead, along with the chief of army staff, the defense minister, the head of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, the secretary of the Defense Council and approximately 40 other officials. A girlsâ elementary school was struck in the city of Minab in southern Iran; Iran reported nearly 150 schoolchildren killed. The Iranian Red Crescent reported more than 200 dead in the initial hours alone. The assault has continued, with strikes âin the heart of Tehranâ as the toll mounts. The killing of Khameneiâs daughter, grandchild, daughter-in-law, and son-in-law have been confirmed.
10. In a telephone interview with the New York Times on Sunday, Trump declared that the United States and Israel âintendedâ to continue the war for âfour to five weeks,â making clear that Washington is preparing a sustained bombing campaign aimed at bludgeoning Iran into submission. In the same interview, Trump spoke with chilling indifference about the deaths of US soldiers, stating bluntly, âWe expect casualties,â while adding that Pentagon estimates could be âquite a bit higher.â These remarks amount to an open declaration that the White House is prepared to sacrifice countless livesâabove all, in Iran but also throughout the region and among US troopsâto prosecute a criminal war of conquest.
11. Iranian leaders and military officials were caught by surprise, once again accepting, as they had done before the June 2025 war, American assurances that negotiations were being pursued in good faith. Iranâs foreign minister had left Tehran for Geneva only days before the attack. Iranâs state news agency published a commentary expressing disappointment over the talks but blaming Washington for the impasseâstill, even at that late hour, operating on the assumption that the diplomatic process was real. The pattern is now unmistakable: The United States uses the pretense of diplomacy to lull its adversary into a false sense of security while preparing the killing blow. In June 2025, Israel struck while US-Iran talks were scheduled to resume days later. In February 2026, the assault came two days after the Geneva round ended.
12. The response of the European imperialist powers has been no less contemptible. Though it was the United States and Israel that launched the warâstriking a sovereign nation while negotiations were ongoing, assassinating its head of state, bombing a school full of childrenâthe joint statement issued by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz denounced not the aggressors but the victim. The E3 statement âcondemned Iranian attacks on countries in the region in the strongest termsâ while saying merely that the three governments âdid not participate in these strikes.â Starmer called the Iranian regime âutterly abhorrentâ and demanded that Iran ârefrain from further strikesââas though a nation subjected to a surprise attack that killed its leadership and its schoolchildren has no right to defend itself. By the next day, Starmer had gone further, announcing that British jets were conducting âdefensive operations,â that Britain had already intercepted Iranian strikes, and that he had accepted a US request to use British bases to strike Iranian missile sites. The pretense of non-involvement is being discarded day by day, precisely as it always is. The European powers are being drawn into the vortex of American militarism, just as they were in Iraq, in Libya, and in the proxy war in Ukraine.
13. The United States and Israel have certainly inflicted serious damage. The decapitation of Iranâs political and military leadership is a devastating blow. But history teaches that it is usually a grave mistake to judge the outcome of a war on the basis of the results of its first days or even months. The initial shock and awe of the 2003 Iraq invasion was followed by two decades of insurgency, sectarian civil war, and strategic catastrophe for the United States. The fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021â20 years after the âsuccessfulâ invasion of Afghanistanâstands as a monument to imperial hubris. Iran is a nation of 90 million people with a land mass nearly 74 times that of Israel. Its population has endured eight years of war with Iraq, decades of sanctions and repeated foreign assault. The assumption that the murder of Khamenei will produce the collapse of the state, with a grateful population welcoming regime change imposed by US mass murder, is the same delusion that has attended every American military adventure since Vietnam.
14. The United States has unleashed a war with incalculable economic, social and political consequences. Iranâs retaliatory strikes have already spread across the Persian Gulf, hitting US military bases, civilian airports, and infrastructure in Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan. Missiles have struck Israel, killing civilians in residential areas. The Strait of Hormuzâthrough which approximately 20 percent of the worldâs oil passes dailyâfaces disruption. Oil prices have surged. Global shipping routes are in turmoil. Airlines have canceled flights across the region. The conflict threatens to engulf the entire Middle East in a conflagration whose scale and duration no one can predict. The first American casualties have already been reported.
15. The real reasons for this war lie not in Iranâs nuclear program â for which there is no evidence, acording to the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) that it is anything other than peacefulâbut in the geopolitics of oil, the struggle for control of strategic resources and the deepening crisis of American global hegemony. Iran sits atop the worldâs fourth-largest proven oil reserves and second-largest natural gas reserves. It commands the northern shore of the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most strategically significant chokepoints in the global energy system. The control of these resourcesâand more importantly, the ability to deny rivals access to themâhas been the central preoccupation of American foreign policy in the Middle East for more than seven decades.
16. The drive to subjugate Iran cannot be separated from the broader trajectory of American imperialism. As the WSWS explained even before the attack, the seizure of Venezuelan oil and the assault on Iran are components of the same strategy: The United States is seeking to take hold of the worldâs energy resources in preparation for military confrontation with China, which imports more than 70 percent of its daily oil consumption. Iran accounts for more than 10 percent of Chinese energy imports, and losing access to it would be a major strategic blow to Chinaâs independent industrial base. The war against Iran is, in this sense, a war for global hegemony, directed not only at Tehran but at Beijing, Moscow and the European capitals whose dependence on Middle Eastern energy gives Washington an instrument of coercion. The Trump administration has threatened not only Iran but also its nominal alliesâimposing tariffs on European goods, threatening Greenland, seizing control of Venezuelan oil, and making clear that in the emerging era of great-power competition, the United States intends to use its military supremacy to maintain dominance over every strategically significant region on Earth.
17. The role of the Democratic Party in enabling this war makes it the accomplice of Trump. They have funded every weapon now being deployed against Iran. The $901 billion National Defense Authorization Act passed the House in December with 115 Democrats voting yes. In the Senate, two-thirds of the Democrats voted in favor. In January, 149 House Democrats voted for $839 billion in defense appropriations. In the weeks preceding the attack, as the largest military buildup since the 2003 Iraq invasion was underway, neither House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, nor Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, nor Senator Bernie Sanders, nor Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mounted any serious effort to prevent the war. On the contrary, AOC repeated the administrationâs regime-change talking points at the Munich Security Conference. Democratic Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania explicitly pledged his support for bombing Iran on Newsmax, declaring: âI absolutely was fully supportive and was cheering for that Midnight Hammer.â Democratic Representative Josh Gottheimer issued a bipartisan statement explicitly opposing a resolution that would have prohibited the use of force against Iran without congressional authorization. Democratic Senator Mark Warner declared: âI think itâs appropriate the president has all the options on the table.â
18. The Democrats promote all the vicious anti-Iran propaganda employed by Trump. They echo his characterization of Iran as the ânumber one state sponsor of terror.â They recycle every lying argument for regime changeâfrom the need to ensure that Iran never has a nuclear weapon to the claim that the Islamic Republic is uniquely oppressive (in a region with savage US-backed dictatorships in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf states). The New York Times, speaking for the Democratic Party, was actively involved in legitimizing and preparing public opinion for the attack, publishing detailed outlines of military options, including strikes designed to âcreate the conditions on the groundâ for murdering Khamenei. Now that the war has been launched, the Democratsâ âoppositionâ consists entirely of procedural complaints about the absence of congressional authorizationânot a single word of principled opposition to the war itself. Jeffries himself declared, âIran is a bad actor and must be aggressively confronted.â This is not opposition to war. It is a demand to be included in the decision to wage it.
19. The assault on Iran is the outcome of a 73-year history of American imperialist aggression against that countryâa history that makes nonsense of the propaganda presenting Iranian resistance as irrational or unprovoked. In 1953, the CIA and British MI6 overthrew Iranâs democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh to secure Western control of Iranian oil; some 300 people were killed in the streets of Tehran. For 26 years the United States sponsored the Shahâs dictatorship, training and equipping the SAVAK secret police in the methods of torture and repression. During the Iran-Iraq War of 1980â88, the US provided intelligence to Saddam Husseinâs regime knowing it would be used to direct chemical weapons strikes against Iranian soldiersâtens of thousands of whom were gassed. In July 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian airliner, killing all 290 passengers and crew, including 66 children; the warshipâs captain was awarded the Legion of Merit. Since 2007, Israel, with American complicity, has assassinated at least seven Iranian nuclear scientists by car bomb, magnetic device and remote-controlled machine gun. The Stuxnet cyberweapon, jointly developed by the US and Israel, destroyed approximately 1,000 centrifuges at the Natanz facility. In January 2020, the US assassinated General Qasem Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport. In June 2025, the US bombed Iranâs nuclear facilities under international safeguards, killing over 1,000 people and specifically targeting nuclear scientists in their homes. And now, in February 2026, it has assassinated the countryâs head of state and dozens of other top officials, as well as bombing an elementary school. To describe Iranian hostility to the United States after all this as irrational is not analysis. It is the self-serving mythology of an imperial power.
20. This is, moreover, a war being waged by a government that is simultaneously at war with the American people. The Trump administration is systematically dismantling democratic rights, purging the civil service, weaponizing federal agencies against political opponents, attacking the judiciary, gutting social programs and concentrating unprecedented power in the executive. It has deployed ICE and CBP agents to terrorize immigrants, murder American citizens, and subject American cities and neighborhoods to police-state methods that violate the Bill of Rights. The same administration that has launched this criminal war against Iran is seeking to impose a dictatorship at home. It governs in the interests of a financial oligarchy whose wealth has reached obscene levels, while the working class confronts falling real wages, a housing crisis, collapsing public services and the erosion of every social gain won over the past century. The war against Iran and the war against the American working class are not separate phenomena. They are two fronts of the same offensive. Militarism abroad has always served as the instrument and companion of social reaction at home.
21. The working classâin the United States, in Iran, in Europe and throughout the worldâmust be mobilized against this criminal war. No section of the capitalist political establishment will stop it. The Democratic Party, as demonstrated above, is not an opposition to imperialism. The trade union bureaucracies, bound hand and foot to the Democratic Party and the capitalist state, will do nothing. The pseudo-left organizations that orbit these institutions serve only to channel opposition back into the framework of capitalist politics.
22. The Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International advance the following program in the fight against the criminal war on Iran:
The immediate and unconditional cessation of all US and Israeli military operations against Iran. Not a single bomb more, not a single drone more. This war must be stopped now, and with it the broader US-Israeli campaign of aggression across the Middle Eastâincluding the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the escalating attacks aimed at subjugating the entire region through terror, blockade and military force.
The withdrawal of all US military forces from the Middle East and the closure of the hundreds of military bases that serve as the infrastructure of imperialist domination. The vast network of American military installations across the Persian Gulfâin Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iraqâexists not to defend the American people but to project the power of American finance capital over the worldâs energy resources.
The disbanding of NATO and the liquidation of the massive military-intelligence apparatus of American imperialism. More than 1 trillion dollars a year is funneled into the Pentagon and the intelligence agenciesâa colossal diversion of social resources into the machinery of death. These resources must be redirected to meet the pressing social needs of the working class: healthcare, education, housing and the rebuilding of crumbling infrastructure.
The repudiation of all forms of sanctions and economic warfare against Iran and every other country. The sanctions regime that has strangled the Iranian economy for decades, restricting access to medicine and essential goods, is a form of collective punishment directed against an entire population. It must be ended immediately.
Full accountability for the architects and perpetrators of this war. The launching of a war of aggression without congressional authorization, in violation of the U.S. Constitution and the U.N. Charter, is a criminal act. Those responsibleâfrom the president to the military and intelligence officials who planned and executed the assassination of a head of state and the bombing of civilian targets, including an elementary schoolâmust be held to account.
The defense and extension of democratic rights. The fight against war cannot be separated from the fight against the fascist transformation of the American state. The same government that bombs Iran without congressional approval is gutting democratic rights at home, attacking the judiciary, weaponizing federal agencies and criminalizing dissent. The working class must defend the right to protest, to organize and to oppose the policies of its government without fear of repression.
23. These demands cannot be achieved through appeals to any section of the political establishment. They require the independent political mobilization of the working class. The International Committee of the Fourth International has established that the building of a genuine anti-war movement must be based on four essential principles:
First, the struggle against war must be based on the working class, the great revolutionary force in society, uniting behind it all progressive elements in the population.
Second, the new anti-war movement must be anti-capitalist and socialist, since there can be no serious struggle against war except in the fight to end the dictatorship of finance capital and the economic system that is the fundamental cause of militarism and war.
Third, the new anti-war movement must be completely and unequivocally independent of, and hostile to, all political parties and organizations of the capitalist class.
Fourth, the new anti-war movement must, above all, be international, mobilizing the vast power of the working class in a unified global struggle against imperialism.
24. American workers have nothing to gain and everything to lose from a war that will cost lives, drain resources, fuel inflation and accelerate the drive toward dictatorship. The fight against war is inseparable from the fight against the capitalist system that produces it. Imperialism is not a policy choice; it is the inevitable product of the contradiction between a globally integrated economy and its division into rival nation-states, each dominated by a ruling class that pursues its interests through the exploitation of the working class at home and the plunder of resources and markets abroad. The struggle to stop this war is the struggle to put an end to the profit system itself and to replace the outmoded division of the world into rival nation-states with a world socialist federation, in which the productive forces of humanity are harnessed for the benefit of all.
25. Call meetings in your factories, workplaces, schools and neighborhoods demanding the immediate end of this war. The world must know that the American people oppose this war and demand that it be ended immediately. Take a stand. Join the Socialist Equality Party in the fight to build a powerful movement against imperialist war.
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
World Socialist Web Site, âThird National Congress of the SEP (Sri Lanka): Greetings from the French and German sections of the world Trotskyist movementâ (19 June 2022) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/06/20/bnmf-j20.html>
[6] The WSWS analysis identified this with precision: âThe social and political outlook of those at the core of the protestsâincluding anarchist organizations around the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which initiated the call to occupy Wall Streetâwas fundamentally hostile to the working class. Contained in the â99 percentâ 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.â
[9] World Socialist Web Site, âThe shutdown of Occupy Wall Streetâ (17 November 2011) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/11/pers-n17.html> ; see also âMayors conspired to close Occupy Wall Street encampmentsâ (17 November 2011) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/11/occu-n17.html> and âPolice repression escalates against Occupy protestsâ (19 November 2011) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/11/occu-n19.html>
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 Trotskyâs 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 â Politics, Tactics, Programme and the Lessons for the Working Class
The Arab Spring â Historical Precursor and Political Object Lesson
The Arab Spring of 2010â2011 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 capitalismârising inequality, mass unemployment, and collapsing living standardsâwhose 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 takeoverâan outcome those organisations had materially prepared.[1] The political demands advanced spontaneously in the streetsâbread, jobs, dignity, an end to corruption, democratic rightsâexpressed 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 strengthâdemonstrating the capacity of the masses to act independently and with enormous forceâand 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 powerâfactory committees, rank-and-file unions, neighbourhood councilsâspontaneous 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 instrumentâthe revolutionary party anchored in the masses and fighting for the perspective of international socialismâwithout 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 âleaderlessâ 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 Occupyâs emergence, documenting the efforts of ex-left figures and Democratic Party operatives to absorb the movement into the 2012 Obama electoral campaignâprecisely the mechanism of bourgeois reabsorption that had disfigured the Arab Springâs 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 organisationâgeneral strikes, rank-and-file committees, industrial coordinationâcapable 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) organisationâlinking democratic struggles to the working classâs capacity to seize powerâcan 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, 2018â2020), 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 capitalismâthe 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 2007â2009 financial crash and the naked reassertion of Wall Street power through the Obama administrationâs 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 âthe class struggle reemerging as the basic historical force,â and that it âforeshadows an explosive eruption of class struggle in the United States, the center of world capitalism.â[4]
The Yellow Vests erupted in November 2018 when Emmanuel Macronâs fuel taxâa levy deliberately designed to shift the costs of the energy transition (away from fossil fuels) from corporations onto workers and the provincial poorârendered unmistakable the class character of the âEn Marcheâ (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 IMFâs 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 âleftâ 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 âWe are the 99 percentâ of Occupy, the Yellow Vestsâ visceral contempt for the âParisian elitesâ in their media chambers, the Gen-Z movementsâ blanket dismissal of all established political formations as corrupt beyond reformâthese 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, âNo Politics,â 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 ânew social movementsâ category.
Occupy Wall Street: The Middle-Class Rehearsal
Occupy was dominated from its inception by a predominantly middle-class social milieu concentrated in metropolitan centersâNew Yorkâs 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: âLike 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.â[ABC News] The movementâs imageryâthe occupation of Zuccotti Park echoing Cairoâs Tahrir Squareâand its timing, coming months after the Egyptian Revolutionâs triumph, established a direct lineage. As the WSWS observed at the time, âFrom 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.â[5]
Occupy protests in New York City (Image from wsws.org)
The movement emerged from anarchist organizations, in particular the Adbusters, which explicitly invoked âthe revolutionary Arab Spring tacticâ as its organizational model while stripping that model of its class content. The â99 percentâ 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 Occupyâs 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 Obamaâs 2012 re-election campaign. As the WSWS documented in contemporaneous coverage, the ISO âis 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,â praising corrupt union officialsâamong them AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and CWAâs Bob Master, both fresh from betraying the Verizon strikeâwhile concealing their role in imposing concessions on workers.[7]
The ISOâs promotion of âno politicsâ and âno leadershipâ served to create precisely the political vacuum the Democratic Party rushed to fill. The WSWS warned with prophetic accuracy: âMany of the groups involved in Wall Street demonstrations have echoed the position of the indignados in Spain and Greece that there should be âno politicsâ and no leadership. The call for âno politicsâ amounts to a rejection of a principled and coherent political alternative to bourgeois politics and the capitalist two-party systemâthat is, to socialist politics. It plays directly into the hands of the Democratic Party, which will move to fill the political vacuum.â[8] This is precisely what occurred. The coordinated federal-local police crackdown that destroyed Occupyâs encampments in November 2011âdocumented by the WSWS as a nationally organized operation involving the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police forces across multiple cities[9]ârevealed the ruling classâs settled determination to tolerate no sustained challenge to capitalist order, however embryonic. The ISOâs 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 Franceâamong 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 compositionârooted in layers of the working class and lower middle strata most directly exposed to the costs of the âmodernizationâ celebrated by Macronâs metropolitan enthusiastsâgave the Yellow Vests a broader geographic reach and a more direct material confrontation with capitalist rule than Occupyâs 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 Occupyâs symbolic square occupations had not achieved. At certain moments, the Yellow Vest movement intersected with strike wavesâteachers, health workers, transport workersâcreating 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 âthe people versus the elitesââcalls for referenda, wealth redistribution, and stronger national welfare provisionsâthat avoided identifying the systemic enemy: the capitalist class and its state, not merely its more visibly corrupt or arrogant individual representatives.[11] Macronâs 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 Lankaâs 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 disruptionâheads of state driven from office, parliaments stormed, governments collapsedâsurpassed 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. Kenyaâs Revolutionary Socialist League, justifying the absence of leadership on the grounds that âthe government is actively looking for leaders,â created a political vacuum filled by Raila Odinga and the trade union bureaucracy.[14] The Communist Party Marxist-Kenya promoted defense of the 2010 Constitutionâdrafted by the ruling class with British and US fundingâthereby 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 imperialismâs Indo-Pacific confrontation.[15]
The pseudo-leftâs international character was not incidental: these organizations participate in the same international political currentârepresenting affluent middle-class layers whose material interests require the preservation of capitalism while managing working-class discontentâthat the ISO embodied in the United States. They celebrate spontaneity to avoid building revolutionary parties. They promote âpeople powerâ and âanti-corruptionâ to obscure class divisions. They align with bourgeois opposition forces presented as âprogressiveâ alternatives. As the WSWS has consistently warned, these tendencies serve objectively as a reservoir for capitalist ideology within the âleft.â[16]
[6] The WSWS analysis identified this with precision: âThe social and political outlook of those at the core of the protestsâincluding anarchist organizations around the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which initiated the call to occupy Wall Streetâwas fundamentally hostile to the working class. Contained in the â99 percentâ 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.â
[9] World Socialist Web Site, âThe shutdown of Occupy Wall Streetâ (17 November 2011) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/11/pers-n17.html> ; see also âMayors conspired to close Occupy Wall Street encampmentsâ (17 November 2011) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/11/occu-n17.html> and âPolice repression escalates against Occupy protestsâ (19 November 2011) <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/11/occu-n19.html>
