This article was originally published in the World Socialist Web Site on 13 November 2025.
German Interior Minister Boris Pistorius (second left) and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier view recruits taking part in the ceremonial pledge, as a central event to mark the 70th anniversary of the Bundeswehr (German army) in front of the Federal Chancellery in Berlin, Germany on Wednesday, November 12, 2025. [AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi]
The solemn oath-taking ceremony in front of the Reichstag (parliament) and the speeches by Defence Minister Boris Pistorius and Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (both Social Democrats, SPD) on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) recalled the darkest days of German militarism. They underscored the disastrous traditions and war aims to which German imperialism is once again returning.
Significantly, on the very same day, the governing parties agreed on a new military service law providing for the compulsory registration of all young men—aimed at drafting the necessary cannon fodder for new imperialist wars.
Eighty years after the downfall of the Third Reich and the greatest crimes in human history, the military once again dominates the German capital. In a martial display—shielded from the public—280 recruits marched between the Reichstag and the Chancellery and were solemnly sworn in. The spectacle was shown live on state broadcaster ZDF and celebrated in the news programmes, with the obvious goal of spreading the poison of militarism throughout the population. Public oath-taking ceremonies like this have their origins in Prussian militarism, which were expanded under the Kaiser’s Empire and then elevated to a quasi-religious cult under the Nazis.
In their ceremonial addresses, Pistorius and Steinmeier sought to obscure the historical roots of the Bundeswehr. “From the shadows of our history has emerged an army, a special army that is fundamentally different from all its predecessors,” claimed Pistorius, describing the force as “firmly anchored in democracy, committed to law and freedom.”
This portrayal is as false today as it was at the Bundeswehr’s official founding on November 12, 1955—only 10 years after the capitulation of Hitler’s Army, the Wehrmacht, the greatest killing machine in history. Tellingly, at that time the army was still called the “new Wehrmacht.” It was not until 1956 that it was officially renamed the Bundeswehr—and the name reflected its purpose. Of the 44 generals and admirals appointed by 1957, all came from Hitler’s Wehrmacht, most from the General Staff of the Army. By 1959, of 14,900 career officers, 12,360 were from the Wehrmacht and 300 even from the SS leadership corps.
Military historian Wolfram Wette wrote in 2011 that this personal continuity had “heavily burdened the internal life of the army” and that “for a long time there existed not an unbroken, but nevertheless dominant tendency to orient itself toward the traditions before 1945.”
This development intensified after German reunification 35 years ago. As early as 1991, a general declared: “Everything must be oriented toward the Bundeswehr’s warfighting capability.” What followed were worldwide military interventions—in Kosovo, Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa—which, in alliance with the leading NATO powers, reduced entire regions to rubble.
Today, the orientation to the traditions of the Wehrmacht is no longer a “tendency” but official policy. German imperialism is systematically preparing for a major war against Russia and has launched the largest rearmament programme since Hitler. Pistorius made the direction unmistakably clear during the anniversary ceremony: Germany must now “act decisively and without hesitation,” radically expanding “finances, equipment, and infrastructure” and aligning the Bundeswehr with “national and alliance defence”—a euphemism for the creation of an army for total war.
At the Bundeswehr Conference a week earlier, Chancellor Friedrich Merz (Christian Democrat, CDU), Pistorius and General Inspector Carsten Breuer, the most senior military brass, left no doubt about their megalomaniacal plans, which workers and youth will be made to pay for—with their social and democratic rights, and ultimately with their lives.
Merz once again demanded that the Bundeswehr become “the strongest conventional army in the European Union, as befits a country of our size and responsibility.” Breuer spelled out the dimensions this would entail: “460,000 soldiers—that is the framework we ultimately have to reach.” This would not only make Germany’s army the largest in Europe but would openly break the Two Plus Four Treaty, in which Germany pledged to limit its military to a maximum of 340,000 soldiers and to renounce nuclear weapons—something now openly questioned in government and media circles.
Breuer made unmistakably clear where this path leads: toward war, destruction and death. It is about soldiers “fighting at the front line. That’s what it’s about. It’s about the sharp end.” At the end of his war speech, he declared: “For a Bundeswehr that fights successfully … for Fight Tonight, for 2029 and 2039, for a combat-ready Bundeswehr.”
The new/old bogeyman is Russia—the same power against which the German military waged two world wars in the 20th century. Under the Nazis, it carried out a barbaric war of annihilation that killed at least 27 million Soviet citizens and culminated in the Holocaust. It is the declared aim of Breuer and the government to once again be ready by 2029 to wage war against this strategically central, resource-rich nuclear power.
Pistorius reaffirmed plans to raise the defence budget to “around €153 billion by 2029.” Added to this are hundreds of billions in war-ready infrastructure from the €1 trillion in war credits already approved. “Infrastructure is essential for our defence capability,” emphasised the defence minister, calling for “reinforced transport routes,” “efficient depots, barracks, training grounds and logistical hubs.”
The central task is the deployment of NATO and Bundeswehr troops to the eastern flank. Pistorius proudly announced the permanent stationing of Panzer Brigade 45 in Lithuania: “The message must be: Germany leads the way—as a pace-setter among European nations.” For the 5,000 soldiers stationed there, he said, “we need modern equipment and capabilities in all dimensions—not for storage, but for our men and women on the ground.”
This has nothing to do with “freedom” or “democracy” but with the old imperialist great-power interests: German dominance over Europe and the violent enforcement of its economic and geopolitical goals in Eastern Europe and against Russia. The reactionary Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was deliberately provoked by the leading NATO powers to push through an agenda of total militarisation and war preparation.
Pistorius stated openly that militarisation must encompass society as a whole: “We wanted and still want to make the Bundeswehr more visible throughout the country.” For the 70th anniversary, he said, this visibility was being brought “back to the capital as an expression and recognition of 70 years of readiness, performance, and loyalty.”
That German militarism can once again raise its head so aggressively is due to the fact that all the establishment parties support the war course. Alongside the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), whose militarist agenda the government is in practice implementing, the Greens and the Left Party have also demonstratively backed the Bundeswehr.
Left Party spokesperson Ulrich Thoden thanked the troops for their contribution to the “stability and defence of democracy.” Green Party politician Sara Nanni enthused about a new “warmth” between the army and the population and wished the troops “courageous politicians who want to hear plain speaking—who stand by the troops and this country.” The Left Party and the Greens had already joined the governing parties, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, in approving the war credits in both chambers of parliament.
The only party that opposes German militarism and the pro-war policy, and which gives expression to the widespread opposition among workers and youth, is the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP). It advances the only realistic perspective to prevent a third world war: the building of an independent socialist movement of the international working class, which will overthrow the capitalist profit system—the root of war and fascism.
Class Foundations—The Objective Crisis and the Betrayal of fake Leaderships
By Sanjaya Jayasekera.
We publish here Part 2 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.
The social crisis driving these predominantly youth-led uprisings is rooted in objective contradictions of global capitalism that no regime change can resolve.
Social Crises
Youth unemployment has reached catastrophic levels: 67 percent in Kenya, 20 percent in Nepal, with similar or worse figures across the former colonial world. In Bangladesh, even university graduates faced a quota system designed to limit access to the few available government positions, which was proposed to privilege Awami League political patronage networks. This educated but jobless generation confronts a future of permanent precarity, unable to secure even the modest middle-class existence their degrees once promised. Reportedly, by end of the 2022 fiscal year, more than 1,700 young Nepalis left the country daily to seek work in the Middle East or Southeast Asia, with peak periods seeing over 2,300 daily departures. Between 2008–09 and 2021–22, a total of 10,666 Nepali migrant workers died in foreign labour destinations, according to the Nepal Labour Migration Report 2022.1
Thousands of protesters gather at the EDSA People Power Monument to rally against government corruption, in suburban Mandaluyong, east of Manila, Sunday Sept. 21, 2025. [AP Photo/Basilio Sepe]
The cost-of-living crisis has made basic survival a daily struggle for hundreds of millions. Food, fuel, and medicine prices have exploded, driven by supply chain disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic warfare accompanying the US-NATO proxy war in Ukraine, and the austerity policies dictated by international finance capital. In Sri Lanka, families waited in kilometer-long queues for rice and cooking gas. In the Philippines, catastrophic flooding—itself a product of climate change and the profit-mad real estate speculation that has created sprawling shantytowns without infrastructure—killed scores in 2025, one of the deadliest typhoon seasons on record. The flooding, and the human misery that it causes, are fundamentally the fault of capitalism, not corruption, which is undoubtedly widespread in the ruling circles. Corruption is the product of the nexus between big business, government and the state apparatus, the components of capitalism.
Behind these catastrophic conditions for the masses stands an obscene concentration of wealth at the opposite pole of society. While hundreds of millions confront destitution, billionaire wealth surged by $2 trillion in 2024 alone—equivalent to $5.7 billion per day—growing at triple the rate of 2023. The combined wealth of the world’s billionaires reached $15 trillion, with four new billionaires “minted” every week. In the United States, the ten richest individuals saw their wealth increase six-fold since March 2020, with Elon Musk’s fortune exploding from $33 billion to $469 billion—a fourteen-fold increase that recently culminated in a $1 trillion pay package placing his compensation at $50 million per hour, or three million times the starting wage at a Tesla factory2. This accumulation is inextricably bound to the systematic plundering of the low-and middle-income countries. Most damning is the systematic transfer of value from the poorest countries—the centre of Gen-Z protests—to the super-rich of the major imperialist countries: the financial system extracted $30 million per hour in 2023 from these countries to the richest 1 per cent of the imperialist centers3. Global public debt reached $102 trillion in 2024, with low-income countries—predominantly in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean—paying out a record $921 billion in interest to banks, hedge funds and asset managers, a net outflow that exceeded new income by $25 billion4. Some 3.4 billion people live in countries that spend more on interest payments to financial parasites than on health and education combined, with 61 countries devoting at least 10 percent of government revenues to servicing debt. The mechanisms of extraction have shifted: private creditors—BlackRock managing $10 trillion, Vanguard $8 trillion, State Street $4 trillion—now hold 61 percent of the external debt of low- and middle-income countries, extracting 39 percent of all external debt payments between 2020-2025, while borrowing costs for poor countries remain two to four times higher than for the United States.5
As David North observed as early as in 19926, “Not even at the height of its glory did the British Empire possess even a fraction of the power over its colonial subjects that the modern institutions of world imperialism such as the World Bank, the IMF, GATT and the EC routinely exercise over the supposedly independent states of Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.”7 Meanwhile, according to World Bank data, the number of people living in poverty—approximately 3.5 billion—has barely changed since 1990, and at current growth rates with persistent inequality, ending poverty will take over a century8. This vast polarization is not the result of “policy choices” that could be reversed within capitalism, as liberal reformists claim, but expresses the fundamental law of capitalist accumulation that Marx identified 150 years ago: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.9” The Gen-Z uprisings erupt from this irreconcilable contradiction between socialized production and private appropriation—a contradiction that can be resolved only through the expropriation of the financial oligarchy and the reorganization of economic life under workers’ control.
Trapped in debt burden
As stated, behind the immediate social crises stands the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the primary instrument through which imperialism (domination of finance capital) enforces debt peonage on former colonies. The IMF’s structural adjustment programs, supported by the World Bank, demand the same savage prescriptions everywhere: tax increases on workers and the poor, slashed spending on education and healthcare, privatization of public assets, deregulation to benefit foreign corporations, and currency devaluations that enrich finance capital while impoverishing the masses. When Kenya’s Finance Bill 2024 proposed new levies and taxes, when Sri Lanka’s government defaulted on foreign debt, when Bangladesh’s government cut subsidies—these were not isolated national decisions but directives from Wall Street and the IMF.
The debt crisis afflicting countries where Gen-Z protest movements sprouted reveals the IMF’s hand in systematic extraction of wealth from the former colonial world. Sri Lanka stands at the precipice with a government debt-to-GDP ratio of 96.1 percent in 2024, which is projected to be at 102 percent by the end of 202510, following its 2022 default and subsequent IMF-mandated restructuring that reduced living standards catastrophically, under both presidents, Wickremasinghe and Dissanayake. Kenya’s public debt burden reached 67.8 percent of GDP ($91.3 billion) by June 202511, substantially exceeding the IMF’s average 50 percent threshold for developing countries12, with debt service consuming 67.1 percent of revenues as of May 202413—a staggering burden that directly precipitated the Finance Bill 2024 protests. Bangladesh’s relatively lower government debt ratio of 31.6-32.2 percent of GDP (2023-2024)14 masks the structural adjustment pressures that drove the 2024 uprising, while Nepal’s debt stood at 47.87 percent of GDP in 202415, with projections showing continued increases driven by infrastructure spending and limited revenue mobilization.
The Philippines exemplifies how debt peonage operates even in so-called “emerging economies,” with government debt reaching 60.7 percent of nominal GDP in December 202416, and interest payments rising to 6 percent of GDP in the first Quarter of 202517. Peru maintains a lower debt ratio of 32.7-32.8 percent of GDP as of 202418, yet faces IMF pressure for fiscal consolidation despite economic contraction. Madagascar’s debt burden is estimated to be 51.27 percent of GDP in 2025 and projected to be at 54.64 percent by 2028, with nearly 70 percent of public debt being external and held by official creditors19. Morocco’s debt declined from a pandemic peak 71.5 percent to 67.7-70 percent of GDP in 202420 through aggressive fiscal consolidation that has squeezed living standards.
The African nations of Tanzania, Cameroon, and Nigeria show debt ratios of 41.8 percent, 39.6 percent, and 41.3 percent of GDP respectively in 202421. These figures obscure the reality that Africa’s median public debt stands at 65 percent of GDP, with 25 African countries carrying excess debt or facing high risk of debt distress, and over 60 countries spending more than 10% of government revenue on interest payments alone22. More critically, the composition of African debt has shifted dramatically, with commercial debt now accounting for 43 percent of total debt, up from 20 percent in 2000, meaning debt service costs have exploded even as headline ratios appear manageable23. This debt architecture—whether the crushing burdens in Sri Lanka and Kenya or the “moderate” levels in Sub-Saharan Africa—serves a single function: the subordination of national economies to imperialism’s financial diktat, enforced through IMF structural adjustment programs that demand austerity, privatization, and the destruction of social programs while debt service claims an ever-larger share of government revenues.
Class Composition
The class composition of the Gen-Z movements reveals both their revolutionary potential and the mechanism of their betrayal. University students and unemployed youth provide the initial spark and often the most militant contingent. Their energy, courage, and willingness to confront state violence are undeniable. In Bangladesh, students faced down military units, confronting ruthless government attacks that killed close to a thousand and five hundred protesters; in Kenya, youth stormed parliament; in Nepal, protesters set government buildings ablaze. Yet this student vanguard, drawn predominantly from middle-class backgrounds, cannot provide independent political leadership for the fundamental transformation of society.
The decisive social force is the working class, whose participation in these movements demonstrates its latent power. In Sri Lanka, two one-day general strikes showed worker solidarity with the protesting youth, for whose defence the workers rushed to the main protest site in Colombo when they were attacked by government sponsored thugs on May 9, 2022. In Kenya, following the initial Gen-Z protests, wave after wave of strikes erupted: teachers, civil servants, healthcare workers, airport staff, university lecturers—all protesting low wages, precarious conditions, and privatization. Bangladesh’s garment workers, who produce billions of dollars in exports under brutal exploitation, participated in the protests even as their trade unions worked to demobilize them.
Union Treachery
Yet the working class was systematically prevented from transforming these uprisings into a conscious revolutionary movement for socialism. The critical mechanism of this betrayal was the role of trade union bureaucracies and pseudo-left organizations that function as police forces for the bourgeois order within the workers’ movement.
In Kenya, the trade union federations—the Central Organization of Trade Unions (COTU), the Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT), and the Kenya Union of Post-Primary Education Teachers (KUPPET)—all worked to isolate and defeat strikes that followed the Gen-Z uprising.24 When teachers launched strikes demanding salary increases and opposing austerity, KNUT and KUPPET leaders negotiated sellout agreements with the Ruto government, accepting minimal wage increases while abandoning demands around privatization and working conditions. These same union bureaucrats had maintained their positions through the entire period of IMF-dictated austerity, revealing that their function is not to represent workers but to police their struggles within limits acceptable to capital.
In Sri Lanka, the trade unions played an even more directly counterrevolutionary role. During the 2022 uprising demanding Rajapaksa’s resignation, they called two limited one-day general strikes on April 28 and May 6, a response to mass protests and to contain worker discontent over the labor bureaucracy. But having allowed millions of workers to demonstrate their strength, the union leaders worked frantically to prevent this power from being consolidated into an independent political challenge to capitalism. They refused to call further strikes, opposed the formation of action committees independent of union control, and channeled the movement toward demands for an “interim government” promoted by the bourgeois parliamentary opposition—the Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB) and Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), and supported by FSP, that would stabilize bourgeois rule. When health workers launched militant strikes,25 the unions worked with the government to suppress them.
In Bangladesh, where garment workers constitute a massive proletarian force producing billions in exports, the trade union federations collaborated26 directly in suppressing worker mobilizations. Even as tens of thousands of garment workers joined the protests against the Hasina government, their unions worked to prevent factory occupations, general strikes, or any independent working-class political intervention. After Hasina’s fall, when garment workers demanded wage increases and better conditions, the unions collaborated with the military-backed Yunus regime to enforce “order” in the factories.27
This pattern reflects the class nature of the trade union bureaucracy. These officials enjoy salaries, privileges, and positions far above those of rank-and-file workers.28 They are integrated into the capitalist state apparatus through labor ministries, tripartite commissions (union-company-government), and corporatist structures.29 Their material interests lie not with the working class they nominally represent30 but with preserving the system that grants them their privileged position.31 The WSWS analysis is definitive: “On these economic and political foundations—financial investments and direct subsidies from the capitalist state—rests a very privileged petty-bourgeois layer which constitutes the bureaucracy of the official unions. The invocation of definitions such as ‘workers organization’ in relation to this corrupt apparatus only serves to conceal its real social character and the deep-going class antagonisms between it and the working class.”32
The Reactionary Left
Alongside the union bureaucracy operates a network of reactionary left organizations whose function is to provide political cover for this betrayal. These groups—Stalinist, Maoist, various ex-Trotskyist renegades and the pseudo-left tendencies33—present themselves as radical alternatives while systematically blocking the emergence of genuine revolutionary working-class leadership.
In Kenya, the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) and the Communist Party Marxist-Kenya (CPM-K) played critical roles in containing the radicalized Gen-Z uprising.34 The RSL, while using revolutionary rhetoric, promoted the very “leaderless”, “no banners”, “no politics” character of the movement that only prevented working-class independent political intervention. Giving left cover to political confusion that benefited the bourgeoisie, Ezra Otieno, a leader of the RSL, said “…this is a good tactic not to have leaders emerging for now, because the government is actively looking for leaders. […] As the RSL, we go there with a purpose, because we must be in solidarity with the masses—we fully agree with what they say. So we go to the streets, we try to organise our people. When joining in, we do not carry banners as people just go without anything, to move around.”35
CPM-K Politburo [Photo: @CommunistsKe]
The CPM-K’s core political orientation centers on defending Kenya’s 2010 Constitution—a document its predecessor, the CPK, helped to draft—while promoting the reformist illusion that implementing its supposedly “progressive articles” will somehow ‘inevitably’ lead to socialism.36 This constitution was drafted by the ruling class with extensive funding from Britain and the United States precisely to stabilize capitalist rule after the 2007 post-election violence. By channeling mass anger into defense of this bourgeois legal framework, the CPM-K ensures that the struggle remains confined within capitalism.
In the Philippines, the pattern of fake-left betrayal reaches its most explicit and politically instructive form. The Stalinist umbrella organization BAYAN (est. in 1985) and the pseudo-left Akbayan party (Citizens’ Action Party) , which emerged out of a merger of a section of the Stalinist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and various Social Democratic organizations in the 1990s37—though historically rivals representing different trajectories of petty-bourgeois politics38—are “coming into ever closer alignment with each other out of their shared orientation to sections of the Philippine bourgeoisie hostile to China”39. When 100,000 people rallied in Manila on September 21, 2025—the 53rd anniversary of Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s declaration of martial law—these two organizations led separate anti-corruption demonstrations that were, as the WSWS noted, “markedly middle-class” in their political character. However, significantly, the masses who thronged the streets were “not drawn to the protests by an orientation to a particular faction of the bourgeoisie”. In contrast, both BAYAN and Akbayan collaborated openly with bourgeois parties, both worked systematically to prevent the emergence of an independent working-class movement, and both channeled mass anger into the dead-end of bourgeois factional warfare between the Marcos and Duterte camps. The ultimate orientation of these demonstrations, “despite some anti-Marcos slogans and banners” was “towards an alliance against the forces of Duterte,” “which seeks to moderate Philippine ties to the United States in order to secure greater economic investment from China”.
Akbayan partylist nominees—front from left: Dadah Kiram Ismula, Attorney Chel Diokno and House Representative Percival “Perci” Cendaña. Image from akbayan.org.ph
The treacherous role of BAYAN and Akbayan must be understood not as an aberration but as the logical outcome of their fundamental political orientation toward class collaboration. BAYAN, being one of Maoist CPP’s front organizations,40 has for decades promoted the “two-stage theory” that subordinates the working class to a supposed “progressive national bourgeoisie” in a prolonged “national democratic” struggle that perpetually postpones socialist revolution.41 Akbayan, which bills itself as a “social democratic” alternative, has fully integrated into bourgeois parliamentary politics, holding seats in Congress and supporting imperialist-aligned bourgeois politicians. Its nationalist, opportunist and class collaborationist politics are the continuation of the Stalinist politics of the CPP.42 Once again, these forces unite in a shared function: blocking the independent political mobilization of the Philippine working class and subordinating it to bourgeois factions aligned with Washington’s strategic objectives in the Indo-Pacific. Their increasing alignment reflects not personal reconciliation but the inexorable logic of their petty-bourgeois politics in the epoch of imperialist war. As the Philippines is positioned on the “frontlines of Washington’s preparations for war with China,” both BAYAN and Akbayan have effectively become instruments for integrating mass opposition into imperialism’s war agenda, despite whatever anti-imperialist rhetoric they may occasionally deploy for tactical purposes.43
Anti-Corruption Campaign
The anti-corruption framework promoted by both BAYAN and Akbayan party represents a contemporary disguise for the class-collaborationist politics that Stalinism has peddled globally for a century. Where Stalin’s “two-stage theory” openly called for a “bloc of four classes” including the “progressive national bourgeoisie,”44 today’s pseudo-left calls for unity of “the people” against “corrupt elites”, as part of “completing democratic tasks”. Both formulations divide the bourgeoisie into progressive and reactionary camps, subordinate the working class to a bourgeois faction, and systematically block the fight for socialist revolution. WSWS explained, “The banner of an anti-corruption campaign is a political dead-end. It is politically amorphous and can serve as an umbrella for bringing together a wide range of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties and organisations, including those of the far-right.”45 In the Philippines, this takes the concrete form of supporting bourgeois investigations into the Duterte camp while aligning with the Marcos government’s integration into US military structures. The strategic function becomes clear: ruling-class factions weaponize corruption charges against each other—Marcos launching investigations to preempt Duterte attacks, Duterte forces using the Senate to expose Marcos allies—while BAYAN and Akbayan provide a pseudo-radical veneer to what is fundamentally a reshuffling of positions within the capitalist ruling elite. The working class, which faces catastrophic unemployment, climate disasters, falling wages, and the prospect of being used as cannon fodder in a US war against China, is thereby prevented from organizing independently and advancing its own class interests.
This analysis of the Philippines protests applies universally. Indeed, in Sri Lanka, it was on the basis of an anti-corruption platform that the JVP/NPP exploited the overwhelming public hostility to all the traditional capitalist parties to come to power and implement the IMF’s austerity program. Nepal’s military-installed technocratic government justified itself through promises to combat corruption. Bangladesh’s banker Yunus positioned himself as above the corrupt political establishment.
But corruption is not an aberration from the system but an inherent feature of the property relations of monopoly capitalism. Private ownership of the means of production creates the material conditions for officials to enrich themselves. The bourgeois state exists precisely to defend the interests of the capitalist class, making “clean capitalism”, advocated by IMF, a contradiction in terms. As with all other democratic tasks, the protection of public assets against official corruption rests on the working class as part of its revolutionary act of expropriating the financial aristocracy, capitalist oligarchy and the abolition of the state itself.
Regime change serves imperialism
The wave of Gen-Z protests succeeded in a couple of countries effecting regime changes, replacing one set of representatives of the bourgeoisie in power with another. The mass uprisings, born from genuine rage at intolerable conditions, are channeled through anti-corruption frameworks into support for “clean” administrators who implement the same or worse policies. Bangladesh’s Yunus, with his Western connections, promises “robust economic reforms.” Kenya’s Ruto-Odinga coalition continues austerity while designating the country a US “major non-NATO ally.”
Wickremesinghe in Sri Lanka used police-state repression to enforce IMF demands, while, his successor, president Dissanayaka’s government is employing the whole state machinery, the parliament, media and usual rhetoric of deception, and its trade union bureaucracy to contain and suppress class struggles against its continued implementation of the IMF dictates to the letter. Nepal’s technocrats position themselves above politics while preserving capitalist property relations.
The working class and rural masses bear the full weight of this betrayal by the pseudo-left and trade union bureaucracies. New regimes perpetuate austerity programs and serve imperialist interests under fresh political banners—“progressive” coalitions, “anti-corruption” governments, or military-backed technocrats—while preserving capitalist property relations intact. Workers who risked their lives confronting state violence now face renewed demands for “belt-tightening” and “fiscal discipline” to achieve “economic stability”—the identical rhetoric that drove them into the streets. The revolutionary energy that toppled governments dissipates into exhaustion and demoralization as the pseudo-left channels mass anger back into support for one capitalist faction against another. This political disorientation creates fertile conditions for right-wing and fascistic forces to exploit mass disillusionment. Demagogues channel legitimate rage of the working class and sections of the oppressed middle-class toward scapegoats—immigrants, ethnic minorities, “corrupt politicians”, “corrupt public officers” and “drug menace” or the underworld—while leaving capitalist exploitation and imperialist domination untouched. Parliament and elections function as the critical mechanisms through which the bourgeoisie reconsolidates its rule, channeling mass opposition into safe constitutional frameworks that subordinate the working class to bourgeois factional warfare.
The historical experiences of Italy (1920-22), Germany (1933), and France (1936-39) demonstrate with tragic clarity how betrayed revolutionary movements can be transformed into their opposite. In each case, the political betrayals of Social Democracy and Stalinism—the refusal to fight for workers’ power, the subordination of the working class to the “democratic” bourgeoisie through Popular Fronts, the suppression of independent working-class political organization—paralyzed and demoralized the masses, clearing the path for fascism’s brutal consolidation. As Trotsky emphasized in analyzing these catastrophes, “Fascism is a particular governmental system based on the uprooting of all elements of proletarian democracy within bourgeois society,” made possible only by the prior betrayal of revolutionary leadership.46 The same dialectic operates in contemporary Gen-Z uprisings: pseudo-left organizations systematically prevent independent working-class mobilization under socialist leadership, creating the conditions for bourgeois reaction to reassert itself through both parliamentary mechanisms and, where necessary, authoritarian consolidation.
These outcomes constitute a stark warning: regime change within the framework of capitalism represents a strategic dead-end for the working class. The fundamental lesson of the Gen-Z uprisings is neither that mass movements can overthrow governments—they demonstrably can—nor that overthrowing governments without overthrowing the capitalist system produces only a reshuffling of personnel within the same exploitative structure: but that the lack of independent revolutionary workers’ leadership that can rally the youth, the poor and oppressed middle class around a socialist internationalist program leads the mass struggles to deadly betrayals. The task confronting workers and youth is not to stop their struggle at the doors of parliament or the presidential palace, but to carry it forward to the expropriation of the capitalist class and the establishment of workers’ power. Only the conquest of political power by the working class, organizing the rural masses and the oppressed middle class under its leadership, can overcome the dead-ends that preserve the very system responsible for exploitation, mass unemployment, climate catastrophe, and imperialist war.
WSWS, “A fresh lesson: The end of the Detroit newspaper strike and the crisis of the labor movement”: “The bureaucracy itself is a privileged, upper-middle class social layer. Because it is tied to the capitalist system, it seeks to conceal from the working class the real nature of this system and the position of workers within it.” https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2001/01/iwb-j04.html ↩︎
“Gen Z” Madagascar supporters wave the skull and crossbones flag during a gathering at May 13 Square in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025. [AP Photo/Brian Inganga]
Protesters scatter as Kenya police spray water cannon at them during a protest over proposed tax hikes in a finance bill in downtown Nairobi, Kenya, June. 25, 2024. [AP Photo/Brian Inganga]
We publish here Part 1 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.
“Gen Z” Madagascar supporters wave the skull and crossbones flag during a gathering at May 13 Square in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025. [AP Photo/Brian Inganga]
From the streets of Dhaka to Nairobi, from Colombo to Kathmandu, from Manila to every corner of the former colonial world—from Morocco to Peru, from Madagascar onward—a wave of youth-led uprisings has shaken the global capitalist order between 2022 and 2025. These movements have captured global attention with their scale, militancy, and apparent spontaneity. In September 2024, in Bangladesh, millions, predominantly angry youth, marched demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina1. In Kenya, the largest and most sustained protest movement since its Independence from colonial Britain took place from June 20242 to last month, where Generation Z (Gen-Z) protesters stormed parliament and brought President William Ruto’s government to the brink of collapse over his proposed austerity law. Sri Lanka’s youth occupation of Galle Face Green in July 2022 forced President Gotabaya Rajapakse to flee the country. Nepal saw its government toppled amid deadly street battles last September. Last month, the Philippines witnessed its largest demonstrations in two decades, while, on October 14, Madagascar President Andry Rajoelina was toppled following a mass popular mobilization and subsequent military intervention. These movements unfolded alongside hundreds of mass demonstrations—mobilizing millions across Europe and around the globe—against Zionist Israel’s genocide in Gaza, against the Trump administration’s preparations for a presidential dictatorship in the United States, and against the growing belligerency of imperialism around the world.
In Bangladesh, the military installed Muhammad Yunus, a banker with close ties to Western imperialism, who immediately announced “robust and far-reaching economic reforms”—a transparent code for savage International Monetary Fund austerity. In Kenya, late opposition leader Raila Odinga, who had postured as champion of the masses, joined hands with Ruto’s government to implement the identical policies the protests opposed, while the country was designated a US “major non-NATO ally”. Sri Lanka’s uprising delivered power to Ranil Wickremesinghe, a pro-IMF stooge who ruthlessly enforced austerity using police-state repression. Nepal’s protests were exploited by the military to install a technocratic interim government headed by former Chief Justice Sushila Karki, sidelining all political parties while maintaining capitalist rule.
For the millions of youth who risked their lives in these struggles, the outcomes represent devastating betrayals. The fundamental questions facing the working class and the oppressed masses remain unresolved: How can youth secure jobs, education, and a decent future? How can democratic rights be defended against increasingly authoritarian regimes? How can the stranglehold of imperialist finance capital be broken? Most urgently, as the United States and NATO prepare for catastrophic wars against Russia and China, how can the working class and youth prevent themselves from becoming cannon fodder in conflicts that serve only the interests of rival capitalist powers?
The answer lies not in the “leaderless”— so, fundamentally pro-imperialist and pro-capitalist— mythology promoted by pseudo-left organizations, nor in the anti-corruption frameworks that channel mass anger into support for one bourgeois faction against another. It requires understanding why these movements, despite their revolutionary potential, have been systematically hijacked by forces defending capitalism. It demands a return to the theoretical foundations established by Leon Trotsky in his Theory of Permanent Revolution and defended by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) against decades of Stalinist, Maoist, and Pabloite revisionism. Above all, it necessitates the independent political mobilization of the working class under revolutionary leadership—the building of sections of the ICFI in every country to wage the struggle for world socialist revolution.
Global Gen-Z uprisings and their betrayed outcomes
The Gen-Z protest movements of 2022-2025 follow a remarkably consistent pattern across continents, revealing not isolated national phenomena but expressions of a single global crisis of capitalism.
Sri Lanka 2022 provided the template. Between April and July, hundreds of thousands took to the streets as skyrocketing prices, fuel shortages, power-cuts, fertilizer cuts and crop destruction, and medicine scarcity made life unbearable. The COVID-19 pandemic and the economic disruption from the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine had devastated global supply chains. Sri Lanka’s foreign reserves collapsed, forcing the government to default on its debt and halt vital imports. Mass protests erupted with demands that President Rajapakse resign—”Gota Go Home”—and that all 225 parliamentarians be removed, in which millions drawn from rural and urban poor participated across ethnic lines (except for the fact that the struggles could not gather support largely from the youth of Jaffna in the North of the country and from the up-country estate workers primarily because they saw no regime change in the South would solve any of their fundamental problems, and not necessarily due to the stronghold of discredited bourgeois Tamil nationalists and the trade union bureaucracy operating within those communities). Trade unions were compelled to call two limited one-day general strikes on April 28 and May 6, demonstrating the immense power of the working class when it intervenes. Rajapakse was forced to flee the country on July 13, 2022.
But the political leadership of the movement remained in the hands of trade union bureaucrats, the pseudo-left Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), youth proxies of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and middle-class groups at Galle Face Green, all of which subordinated the working class to demands for a transitional “interim government” that would preserve capitalist rule. Parliament was thus able to install Wickremesinghe, who imposed the IMF’s austerity program with an iron fist, using draconian legislation including the Essential Public Service Act to suppress worker opposition. The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) warned at the time: “The emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves,” and that “there is no solution to the immense social problems and an end to the suppression of democratic rights within the existing social order.” However, the SEP’s forces remained limited, and it was not yet in a position to provide the mass revolutionary leadership necessary to mobilize a general strike and transform the popular uprising into a struggle for workers’ power. The decades-long betrayals of Stalinism, Maoism and nationalist trade union bureaucracies, and Pabloism within the Fourth International, had systematically undermined working-class consciousness, which in turn pressured the party into alienation, and prevented the emergence of a mass Trotskyist party capable of leading the working class, youth, and oppressed layers of the middle class in a united revolutionary offensive.
Bangladesh 2024 witnessed a similar trajectory compressed into explosive weeks. In July, university students organized under Students Against Discrimination began protesting a regressive job quota system. When Hasina’s government responded with murderous violence—unleashing police, military units, and Awami League thugs who killed scores of students—the protests escalated dramatically. By early August, millions were marching to Dhaka, expressing not merely anger over the quota system but accumulated rage over grinding poverty, massive inequality, and ruthless exploitation in the garment industry that produces billions in exports. The military, unable to contain the uprising, forced Hasina to resign and flee to India on August 5.
The military immediately installed an interim administration headed by Yunus, whose “close connections with US and European imperialist powers” were emphasized even in mainstream coverage. The Bangladesh National Party and Stalinist parties grouped in the Left Democratic Alliance pledged their full support. Throughout this upheaval, the trade unions and pseudo-left forces, including the Workers Party of Bangladesh, worked systematically to prevent the working class from intervening as an independent force with its own program3. The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) correctly analyzed: “Workers and their families joined the student-initiated protests. However, they did so as individuals, not as a class, using strikes and other weapons of class struggle and advancing their own demands.”
Kenya’s Gen-Z insurgency in June-August 2024 represented perhaps the most politically advanced of these movements. Youth unemployment reaching 67 percent, combined with IMF-dictated tax increases in the Finance Bill 2024, ignited mass protests demanding President William Ruto’s resignation. The movement transcended the tribal divisions that the Kenyan ruling class has stoked for decades to weaken the working class4. On “Bloody Tuesday,” June 25, police opened fire on demonstrators, killing dozens as they stormed parliament. Over 60 would die in the uprising, with scores abducted by security forces.
Protesters scatter as Kenya police spray water cannon at them during a protest over proposed tax hikes in a finance bill in downtown Nairobi, Kenya, June. 25, 2024. [AP Photo/Brian Inganga]
Ruto tactically withdrew the Finance Bill, but this concession only exposed the underlying conspiracy among the ruling class. In August, Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM)—which had postured as opposition—joined Ruto’s government5. The Central Organization of Trade Unions (COTU), led by Francis Atwoli, and influential Christian and Muslim clergy backed this coalition government. Austerity policies continue, the military has been deployed against civilian protesters for the first time in Kenyan history, and the country was designated a US “major non-NATO ally” by the Biden administration, positioning it as a proxy force in Washington’s preparations for war with China.
The subsequent strike wave by teachers, transport workers, healthcare staff, and civil servants demonstrated the potential for working-class power. Yet COTU and the Stalinist Communist Party Marxist-Kenya (CPM-K) worked tirelessly to prevent these strikes from becoming a political challenge to the regime, insisting instead on “no politics” and “leaderless” organization that left the field open for bourgeois forces6.
The uprisings in Nepal (September 2025) and the Philippines (September 2025) confirmed that this pattern extends across Asia. In Nepal, protests triggered by a government ban on 26 social media platforms and fueled by deep resentment over the lavish lifestyles of “nepo kids”—the children of politicians exposed through viral videos—left at least 51 dead. The homes of prominent politicians including former prime ministers were vandalized and set ablaze. Parliament was stormed and burned. Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli was forced to resign, but the outcome was a technocratic interim government headed by Karki, with the military playing a decisive role behind the scenes. As the WSWS reported, Chief of Army Staff Ashok Raj Sigdel “warned that the military would be forced to declare a state of emergency if no political solution would be found,” compelling party leaders to consent to parliament’s dissolution.
The Philippines saw its largest demonstrations in two decades, with 100,000 rallying in Manila on September 21—the 53rd anniversary of Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s declaration of martial law7. The protests were triggered by exposures of massive graft in flood control infrastructure—involving billions stolen through kickbacks to officials and fraudulent contracts. Yet the political character of these protests was “markedly middle-class.” Stalinist organization BAYAN and the pseudo-left Akbayan party led separate rallies, both increasingly aligned with bourgeois factions hostile to China and integrated into Washington’s war preparations. President Marcos Jr. announced his support for the protests “as long as they were peaceful,” attempting to contain any genuine threat to its rule.
Madagascar (October 2025) demonstrated the pattern’s most dramatic expression, with President Andry Rajoelina forcibly removed and exfiltrated by French military aircraft. The uprising erupted in late September when chronic power and water shortages—leaving over 75 percent of the population subsisting on less than €0.80 per day outraged—triggered protests led by the Gen Z Mada formation. When authorities arrested two city politicians who had planned a demonstration on September 25, protests spread rapidly across the island. The regime responded with murderous repression: at least 22 killed, hundreds injured, a dusk-to-dawn curfew imposed, and the appointment of General Zafisambo as Prime Minister on October 6 in a desperate militarization that only deepened the crisis.
On October 14, the CAPSAT military unit—which had itself backed Rajoelina’s rise to power in 2009—toppled him through a coordinated intervention. Colonel Michael Randrianirina announced the dissolution of the Senate and High Constitutional Court while maintaining the National Assembly, providing constitutional veneer to what was fundamentally a coup. Most revealing was French imperialism’s direct role: on October 12, Rajoelina fled aboard a French aircraft in an operation coordinated with Paris and approved by President Emmanuel Macron. The company facilitating his escape, TOA Aviation, was the same that had enabled fugitive automotive boss Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn’s extralegal flight from Japan. Macron emphasized “constitutional order” without condemning repression, exposing France’s concern not for democracy but for protecting strategic interests in Malagasy energy, telecommunications, and rare earth minerals.
The Malagasy Trade Union Solidarity collective, comprising about fifty unions, called a general strike demanding Rajoelina’s resignation and wage increases after a freeze since 2022, while calling on the Church and local elites for “dialogue”. The opposition parties Tiako i Madagasikara (TIM) and Malagasy Miara-Miainga (MMM) positioned themselves as alternatives. This was essentially an opportunistic role, “channeling popular anger into the narrow framework of institutional negotiations while safeguarding the foundations of capitalism.”8 The military intervention aimed to defend bourgeois order and preserve the interests of imperialism and the national bourgeoisie, replicating the pattern observed in Egypt and Tunisia 2011 where “the supposed neutrality or support of the army served to defuse mobilization, restore bourgeois order, and ensure the continuity of the capitalist system under a new facade.”
Across all these movements, certain features recur with striking consistency: economic crisis driven by IMF austerity and capitalist breakdown, and chronic social inequality; massive youth and middle-class participation; violent state repression; the promotion of “leaderless” organization by pseudo-left groups; the systematic blocking of independent working-class political action by trade union bureaucracies and parties based on the petty-bourgeoisie; and outcomes that serve imperialist strategic interests while intensifying the exploitation of the masses.
This webinar was originally published in the World Socialist Web Site on 21 October 2025.
Nazism, big business and the working class: Historical experience and political lessons
On October 16, 2025, the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) hosted a webinar examining the historical relationship between Nazism, big business and the working class—a discussion with urgent contemporary relevance.
The discussion was chaired by David North, chairperson of the International Editorial Board of the WSWS and of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States. He was joined by three distinguished historians: David Abraham, professor emeritus of law at the University of Miami and author of The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis; Jacques Pauwels, Canadian historian and author of Big Business and Hitler; and Mario Kessler, senior fellow at the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, Germany, whose scholarship focuses on the German Communist Party and European labor movements.
The webinar opened with North recounting the vicious academic campaign that destroyed Abraham’s career as a historian in the 1980s. After publishing his Marxist analysis of how conflicts within German capitalism facilitated Hitler’s rise, Abraham faced attacks from conservative historians Gerald Feldman and Henry Ashby Turner, who accused him of fraud. Abraham explained that the attack stemmed from “ideological animus, personal pique, and intellectual know-nothingism.”
In the discussion, Jacques Pauwels attacked the claim that Hitler’s rise was accidental or unconnected to capitalist interests. “Hitler’s so-called capture of power was merely a transfer or surrender of power,” he stated. “Without the financial and other support of industry and finance, in other words, big business, the rest of the German power elite, Hitler could never have risen to supremacy.” Pauwels described fascism as “the stick of capitalism, not to be used at all times, but certainly always ready behind the door.”
Mario Kessler addressed Hitler’s mobilization of the middle classes while preventing their left-wing radicalization toward socialism. He noted that the Nazi Party “never succeeded in making consistent inroads into the working class” and “never achieved an absolute majority of the votes” in any Weimar election. Hitler’s function was to “collect the votes of the unemployed people, the resentment of all who considered themselves losers of what was called the system.” Kessler stressed that “before Hitler and the German fascists could annihilate the Jews, they had to destroy the German and European labor movement.”
Pauwels demolished the myth that Hitler improved workers’ living conditions, documenting how “the German workers’ real wages fell dramatically under Nazi rule while corporate profits soared.” He revealed that work accidents and illnesses increased from 930,000 cases in 1933 to 2.2 million in 1939, calling Nazi policy “a high profit, low wage kind of policy.” The first concentration camp at Dachau was established not primarily for Jews but because “regular prisons were full of political prisoners, mostly social democrats and communists.”
The discussion then turned to contemporary parallels. North drew explicit connections between Weimar’s collapse and America’s current trajectory under the fascistic Trump administration, noting gold’s rise from $35 per ounce in 1971 to over $4,000 today as an “objective indication of a real crisis of the American economic system.” Abraham described the emerging alliance of “old right-wingers in the fossil fuel industry” with “anarcho-libertarians” from Silicon Valley, noting that Peter Thiel recently gave lectures invoking Carl Schmitt, the Nazi legal theorist, while identifying workers, leftists, minorities, and environmentalists as civilization’s “blockage,” which Abraham described as “a kind of new Judeo-Bolsheviks.”
North posed a critical question: “Do objective conditions create the possibility for a revolutionary orientation? Is fascism inevitable?” He argued that the same contradictions driving reaction also create revolutionary potential, citing how World War I produced both catastrophe and the October Revolution.
Christoph Vandreier, chairman of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei in Germany, addressed the rehabilitation of Hitler and the Nazis within German academia. He described how historian Jörg Baberowski declared in Der Spiegel that “Hitler was not cruel” and “was not a psychopath,” claiming the Holocaust “was not essentially different from shootings during the civil war in Russia.” Vandreier noted that “Baberowski was supported by almost the entire academia in Germany” and that such positions “are part of the mainstream” today, coinciding with Germany’s trillion-euro rearmament program.
The historians agreed that the struggle against historical falsification is inseparable from political struggle. Pauwels emphasized that “history is subversive” and that “the powers that be don’t really want us to know how we got into this trouble.” Abraham noted a modest revival of political economy studies after decades in which “the right captured Washington, the left captured the English department.”
North concluded by emphasizing the persistence of the same fundamental contradictions: “We are not only talking about the past, but we’re really discussing the present. The same issues, the same social forces are present today.” He predicted an “explosive turn by the working class and the most advanced sections of young people and workers toward Marxism, which is the only theoretical framework for which one can understand objective reality and on that basis build a revolutionary movement.”
This article was originally published in the World Socialist Web Site on 16 October 2025.
Few figures have done more to derail and contain the revolutionary strivings of Kenya’s oppressed masses than Raila Odinga. His death on Wednesday ends the long political career of a man who, for more than four decades, served as a central pillar of capitalist rule and imperialist domination in Kenya. Whether as opposition leader, cabinet minister, or prime minister, Odinga played the role of political fixer, channelling mass protests against inequality, corruption, and repression into the dead end of constitutional reform and imperialist-backed “national unity” coalitions.
Born in 1945 in Maseno, western Kenya, Odinga was the son of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Kenya’s first vice president after independence and a co-founder of the Kenya African National Union (KANU) alongside Jomo Kenyatta, the country’s first president. KANU struck a deal with British imperialism and ruled a de facto one-party state for over three decades.
Raila Odinga in 2012 [Photo by CSIS / Flickr / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]
In the early years after political independence, Jaramogi Odinga emerged as the leading figure of KANU’s left wing. Amid mass support for socialism among workers and the rural masses, Odinga sought to secure a base, advancing a programme of state-driven capitalist economic development within the national boundaries imposed by colonialism, the seizure of European settler farms without compensation and the rapid Africanisation of the civil service and public-sector jobs, as he explained in his book Not Yet Uhuru [Not Yet Freedom] (1967). These were measures to be carried out by a capitalist government leveraging close ties with the counterrevolutionary Soviet bureaucracy, not by the working class in alliance with the rural masses.
Kenyatta crushed this opposition, banning Odinga’s attempts to launch a new party, the Kenya People’s Union (KPU), and placing Odinga under house arrest.
In the decades after independence, Kenya’s new elite enriched itself through vast land grabs financed by Western loans, buying up former settler estates at the expense of the rural poor while looting state resources and deepening military and economic ties with British and American imperialism that continue to this day. As with other post-colonial African independence governments, Kenya’s experience exposed the organic incapacity of Africa’s bourgeois nationalists to realise the aspirations of the African masses for freedom from foreign domination, democracy, and social justice.
Raila Odinga’s political ascent was built on his father’s legacy as the nominal left opposition to Kenyatta and his successor Daniel arap Moi. Educated in Stalinist East Germany as a mechanical engineer, he returned to a Kenya that his father had helped build to join the ranks of the new ruling class, expanding the family’s business empire in energy, construction, and media. By the time of his death, his fortune was estimated at between $1.2 and $3.3 billion, placing him among the richest 0.1 percent of Kenyans—an oligarchic layer of roughly 8,300 individuals who, according to Oxfam, own more wealth than the bottom 99.9 percent combined. This obscene inequality epitomises the class gulf between Odinga and the millions he claimed to represent.
Odinga under Moi and Kibaki
Odinga’s political career began in the 1980s after his arrest following the failed 1982 coup attempt against Moi’s regime. He spent nearly eight years in detention, during which he was beaten, denied medical care, and subjected to psychological torture that left him with lasting speech difficulties. Upon his release, he re-emerged in the 1990s as a leading figure in the bourgeois opposition to Moi’s dictatorship, the “Second Liberation” movement. Alongside Kenneth Matiba and Charles Rubia, Odinga campaigned for the restoration of multi-party democracy, channelling growing popular anger against the regime into a struggle for limited constitutional reforms within the framework of capitalism.
Odinga’s role as leader of the opposition was boosted by what passed as the leading underground left-wing opposition to the regime, the Maoist Mwakenya. With its two-stage theory of first reinstalling capitalist democracy, postponing indefinitely the struggle for socialism, it helped funnel opposition into Odinga’s camp. It called for “all progressive democratic and patriotic political organisations, workers trade unions, peasant cooperatives, professional bodies, religious organizations, student societies, the business community, welfare and other nongovernmental interest groups to unite in a single force of action to pressure Moi to resign.” Many of its members, including future Chief Justice Willy Mutunga, became key Odinga allies.
Facing mounting unrest and pressure from Washington, long his backer but now fearful of a genuine popular uprising, Moi was forced to repeal the constitutional ban on opposition parties, paving the way for Kenya’s first multi-party elections in 1992.
By the late 1990s, Odinga had reconciled with the regime and merged his National Development Party (NDP) with Moi’s deeply unpopular KANU after contesting the 1997 elections. He went on to serve as Moi’s Minister of Energy, marking his entry into the state apparatus.
In 2002, as social opposition to Moi intensified, Odinga left Moi’s government and joined a coalition of anti-Moi bourgeois parties led by Mwai Kibaki, Moi’s former minister of finance. With Kibaki ill during the campaign, Odinga effectively led the election effort that ended Moi’s 24-year rule. However, after the victory, Kibaki sidelined him, denying Odinga and his allies the senior positions they had been promised. Given the post of Minister for Roads, Odinga soon fell out with Kibaki, whose government, like Moi’s before it, unleashed brutal police violence—including the extrajudicial killing of an estimated 8,000 mostly young men.
Out of power, Odinga continued as the main opposition figurehead, while making it clear he was virulently opposed to socialism. In his autobiography, The Flame of Freedom (2013), he recounted how, ahead of the 2007 elections:
Because of my father’s and my longstanding support for equitable distribution of national resources, I had often been accused of being left-wing anti-capitalist (the latter a strange misconception about a man who, like his father before him, had long been involved in private enterprise). It was said that, as president, I would reverse some privatisations and make radical changes to the Kenyan stock market. The latter probably also had a connection with the charge I had made that the extensive profits from illegal drug-dealing had been ploughed into the national bourse [stock market]. In mid-October, I visited the Nairobi Stock Exchange to offer assurances of my support for its continued activities.
The “Grand Coalition” with Kibaki and alliance with Kenyatta
The 2007 elections marked the peak of Odinga’s political influence and the most violent crisis of Kenya’s post-independence history. Running as the main opposition candidate against incumbent Kibaki, Odinga appeared poised for victory until widespread electoral fraud secured Kibaki a self-declared win. Odinga called for mass demonstrations, and his supporters, largely drawn from Kenya’s working-class and impoverished layers in the slums and rural areas, poured into the streets.
The regime responded with brutal repression. Ethnic violence, stoked by both ruling factions, engulfed the country, leaving more than 1,300 people dead and over 650,000 displaced. William Ruto, now Kenya’s president but then an ally of Odinga, played a criminal role in fomenting ethnic clashes for which he was later indicted by the International Criminal Court.
Odinga, fearing that the mass opposition might break out of his control and advised by Washington, entered into a US-brokered power-sharing agreement with Kibaki in 2008, becoming prime minister in a “Grand Coalition” government. The imperialist powers hailed the deal as a model of “stability.” It was designed to preserve Kenya’s role as a key regional base for Western military and financial interests.
During his five years as prime minister (2008–2013), Odinga demonstrated his loyalty to imperialism. His government backed US-led military interventions in Somalia under the banner of the “war on terror,” and supported France’s 2011 invasion of Ivory Coast. Domestically, his administration helped push through the 2010 Constitution, drafted under US and British guidance, as a mechanism to contain mass anger and restore confidence in the capitalist order after the post-election bloodshed of 2007.
In 2013, Odinga lost to Uhuru Kenyatta, son of the country’s first president. As disillusionment with the political establishment deepened, Odinga’s role as a “progressive” alternative was shown to be a fraud. When the 2017 elections were again marred by corruption and saw the killing of over 100 protesters, he briefly postured as leading a “people’s resistance movement.” But in early 2018, he abruptly reconciled with Kenyatta in the so-called “Handshake,” presenting the pact as a step toward “national unity.”
By the time of the 2022 election, Odinga had openly transformed into capitalist political fixer par excellence. Backed by Kenyatta, Kenya’s richest man whose family owns a multi-billion-dollar business empire, he faced Ruto, a former ally who exploited popular anger with a populist “bottom-up” campaign and by presenting himself as an outsider—despite being the sitting deputy president. Ruto’s slim victory reflected widespread hostility to Kenya’s political dynasties, including Odinga.
Once elected, Ruto violently turned against the working class, as the economic crisis facing the country deepened, particularly soaring costs of living intensified by the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023, Ruto imposed the first round of an IMF austerity programme, sparking mass protests. Odinga once again sought to channel mass discontent. He called intermittent protests against the austerity-driven Finance Bill 2023, only to suspend them when they began to merge with broader strikes by teachers, doctors, and civil servants. Dozens of his supporters were gunned down.
Odinga and Ruto versus the Kenyan working class and youth
Just when Odinga believed he had successfully contained social unrest, the Gen-Z uprising of mid-2024 erupted against the entire Kenyan political establishment. What began as protests against President Ruto’s IMF-dictated Finance Bill 2024—imposing sweeping taxes on fuel, bread, cooking oil, and digital services—quickly developed into a nationwide rebellion against the whole post-independence capitalist order. Unlike previous mobilisations, this movement arose entirely outside Odinga’s control. On June 25, protesters stormed parliament, and in the brutal crackdown that followed more than 60 people were killed, thousands arrested, and dozens abducted.
While he publicly voiced sympathy for the protests, Odinga was privately negotiating with Ruto on how to defuse them. Soon after, he integrated his Orange Democratic Movement into Ruto’s administration to form the current “broad-based” government, providing a political cover for the regime to push ahead with its IMF austerity agenda and consolidate a police-state dictatorship. Odinga then moved to co-opt self-styled Gen Z “leaders” into the regime’s orbit.
The result was a de facto parliamentary dictatorship, lacking even a nominal opposition. It soon escalated bloody repression. Last July, as hundreds of thousands took to the streets, security forces killed 57 demonstrators and injured more than 600 in one of the worst massacres perpetrated by the Kenyan ruling class in decades.
Nothing could better expose the rottenness of Odinga than his death being used by the current Ruto regime to impose austerity and police-state measures. Barely had the ink dried on Odinga’s death certificate, with the media providing wall-to-wall obituaries hailing his democratic credentials, than Ruto decided to sign into law eight deeply authoritarian and anti-working-class bills.
These include the Privatisation Bill 2025, which allows the government to sell off state-owned enterprises without parliamentary approval; the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes (Amendment) Bill 2024, granting sweeping powers to police and intelligence agencies to monitor, censor, and shut down online platforms; and the National Police Service Commission (Amendment) Bill 2024, further expanding executive control over the security apparatus.
Other laws include the National Land Commission (Amendment) and Land (Amendment) Bills, centralizing decision-making authority in Nairobi, weakening local land protections to allow more land looting by Ruto’s entourage, while the Air Passenger Service Charge (Amendment) and Virtual Asset Service Providers Bill impose new levies.
In one of his final interviews with the Sunday Nation, Odinga drew a parallel between Kenya’s youth revolt and the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, which toppled Hosni Mubarak. He recalled being “the last international leader hosted by Mubarak” before the dictator’s fall, remarking that even regimes that seem strong can collapse within weeks. Odinga’s message was a warning to the ruling elite that uncontained popular uprisings threaten the entire capitalist order.
The real lesson of Egypt, and of Kenya today, is that bourgeois “opposition” figures like Odinga, posing as champions of democracy, play the decisive role in strangling revolutionary movements and paving the way for renewed repression, austerity, and military rule. Odinga died at 80 in a private hospital for the wealthy in Koothattukulam, India, where he had been flown for specialist treatment. Like the rest of Kenya’s ruling elite, he sought medical care abroad while the country’s public health system, ravaged by decades of corruption, privatisation, and IMF-imposed austerity, lies in ruins.
Odinga’s death comes amid a new wave of social upheaval across the world, from Peru, Nepal, and Bangladesh to Madagascar, Morocco, Mozambique, and Angola, driven by soaring prices, mass unemployment, IMF austerity and opposition to war and genocide. These movements express the mounting anger of workers and youth against unbearable social inequality and imperialist oppression.
Victory depends on rejecting the various representatives of a pro-capitalist opposition, which, like Odinga, fear the independent movement of the masses far more than dictatorship. The defence of democratic and social rights poses before Kenyan workers and youth the task of building a revolutionary Marxist party, a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), dedicated to the perspective of Permanent Revolution—the unification of the struggles of workers and the oppressed across Africa and the world for the establishment of a United Socialist States of Africa.
