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GLOBAL LEFT MIDWEEK — OCTOBER 8, 2025  
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October 8, 2025
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_ Internationalism on the rise _

October 6, 2025. Credit, Jist

 

* Gaza and the Revival of Internationalism
* Mass Defiance of Israel’s Seizure of Sumud Flotilla
* Anti-Corruption Upsurge Still Spreading
* Communal Care in Oaxaca
* _Die Linke_ Faces Bitter Realities
* Think Pieces on Multipolarity
* Europe Unrest
* Women in El Salvador Take On Bukele
* UK Greens: We’re the Left Party Prepared to Lead
* Cambodian and Thai Activists Demand Border Peace

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GAZA AND THE REVIVAL OF INTERNATIONALISM
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_Soumya Sahin_ / Alternative Viewpoint

Internationalism is not an abstraction but a practice rooted in
solidarity. Against the all-encompassing darkness of uniformity, they
keep alive the essential link that joins Bhagat Singh and Ho Chi Minh,
Kolkata and Gaza, miners’ strikes and freedom
flotillas. Internationalism, far from being a nostalgic slogan,
emerges again as the only realistic politics in a world organised
around capital and coercion.

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MASS DEFIANCE OF ISRAEL’S SEIZURE OF SUMUD FLOTILLA
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Associated Press (New York)

Supporters of the Global Sumud Flotilla took to the streets in major
cities — including Rome, Istanbul, Athens, Amsterdam, Barcelona,
Ankara, Sophia, Rabat, Milan, and Buenos Aires — following news
that Israeli forces had intercepted an international
flotilla carrying activists seeking to break Israel’s blockade of
the Palestinian territory.

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Anti-Corruption UPSURGE STILL SPREADING

 • DON’T CALL IT A GEN Z REBELLION   _Will Shoki_ / Africa is
a Country (New York, via email)

Across continents, a familiar figure has returned to the streets. In
Nepal [[link removed]], young
protesters brought down the government after years of corruption and
stagnation. In Morocco, the leaderless collective “Gen Z 212”
filled city squares with chants against state extravagance and
everyday neglect. In Madagascar, students and unemployed workers
facing water shortages and rolling blackouts forced the president to
dissolve his cabinet. The world’s media quickly offered a tidy
headline: Gen Z is rising.

Yet this description, repeated from CNN
[[link removed]] to _The
New York Times
[[link removed]],_ is
both true and profoundly misleading. It is true that the protesters
are young, and that digital tools—Discord servers, TikTok feeds, and
Telegram channels—have accelerated their coordination. But to call
these revolts “Gen Z protests” is to confuse the medium for the
message. It transforms a structural crisis into a generational
mood, reducing politics to demography.
[[link removed]] What
disappears from view is the deeper reality: that these uprisings
express the re-emergence of a global political subject long at the
margins—youth as the conscience of a world system in decay.

This year’s uprisings belong to the same historical arc traced in
our recent special issue, _Revolution Deferred.
[[link removed]]_ That
issue mapped a decade and a half of protest—from the Arab Spring to
#FeesMustFall—when mass mobilizations erupted across the world but
rarely transformed the structures they confronted. Those movements
revealed the limits of neoliberal democracy but were ultimately
contained by it. The deferred revolution was not extinguished; it was
dispersed. The events of 2025 suggest that the energy of that cycle is
returning, shaped by harsher economic conditions and stripped of
earlier illusions about reform. If the 2010s were a decade of revolt
without revolution—of uprisings that exposed the system’s failures
without transcending them—then today’s unrest is a politics of
necessity: not yet revolutionary, but born of the realization that
mere survival now demands confrontation with the system itself.

The recurrence of youth revolt is not mysterious. Under capitalism,
youth are always the first to experience the contradictions of
accumulation. They inherit the costs of crises they did not cause,
entering adulthood in economies that no longer need their labor and
political systems that no longer solicit their consent. In Morocco,
more than one-third of those under 24 are unemployed, even as the
state builds stadiums for the 2030 World Cup. In Nepal,
[[link removed]] whole
generations have been exported as migrant labor, sustaining a
remittance economy that allows domestic elites to postpone any
structural transformation. Across much of the Global South, a
permanent surplus of the young has become a fixed feature of economic
life—a demographic majority condemned to social redundancy.

To treat this as a generational drama—Gen Z against their
elders—is to depoliticize it. The category “Gen Z” belongs to
the marketing lexicon of late capitalism, not to the vocabulary of
historical change. It suggests that what unites these young people is
culture or attitude rather than material circumstance. But their
shared predicament is not psychological. It is structural. The same
debt-driven economies, privatized social services, and externally
imposed austerity programs that defined the neoliberal era have now
reached their political limit. The young stand at the frontier of this
exhaustion, where every promise of development has collapsed into
permanent precarity.

The form of protest has changed, but its logic has not. In Morocco,
the Discord channel “Gen Z 212” grew to more than 130,000 members
in a few days—a digital infrastructure filling the void once
occupied by political parties and unions. In Madagascar, the online
network “Gen Z Mada” coordinated with trade unions to call
nationwide strikes. In Nepal, the movement that began against a
social-media ban evolved into a mass rejection of the entire
post-Maoist order, discredited by decades of liberalization and elite
rotation. These are not just digital rebellions. They are class
recompositions conducted through digital means, experiments in
organization within the ruins of traditional vehicles of mass
politics.

It’s worth noting that many of these movements consciously adopt the
very label that the media uses to trivialize them. “Gen Z 212” in
Morocco, “Gen Z Mada” in Madagascar, and “Gen Z Nepal” have
embraced the tag not out of identification with a global marketing
category, but as a way of naming their generational commonality within
crisis. It functions as a tactical shorthand—an ironic self-branding
in the language of the world that excludes them (one that coexists
with a cottage industry of journalism and cultural analysis that
treats “Gen Z” like a zoo exhibit, forever speculating on the
species’ strange habits—its “dead-eyed stare,” its aversion to
work, its fear of nightclubs—while often overlooking the social
order that produces these conditions).

The ideological content of these movements is still forming. Many
articulate their anger in moral terms—corruption, dignity, betrayal.
But beneath that vocabulary lies a structural awareness: that national
elites act as mediators for a global system that has ceased to
deliver. As one protester in Nairobi said during Kenya’s own
uprisings last year, “We are ruled from the banks, not from
Parliament.” From Antananarivo to Kathmandu, the accusation is the
same. The state has been sold off; the future is foreclosed.

This consciousness is not yet a program, but it is more radical than
it appears. It represents a re-emergence of world-systemic awareness
from below—the sense that the injustices of daily life are linked to
the architecture of global capitalism itself. In earlier moments of
mass protest, the demand was inclusion: to be represented, recognized,
and developed. The demand that animates today’s uprisings is more
elemental: to survive a system that has exhausted the conditions of
sustaining bare life. That is also why Palestine has become such a
powerful moral and political touchstone. The ongoing genocide in Gaza,
and the courage of those who continue to defy it—from student
encampments to the Global Sumud Flotilla—have clarified for a
generation that empire is not an abstraction (Several activists from
the flotilla remain in Israeli custody under reported inhumane
conditions, including AIAC contributor and South African writer
Zukiswa Wanner, detained alongside hundreds of others who allege
beatings, deprivation, and forced confinement.)_ _It is the
organizing logic of the system they confront. What binds the protests
in Nairobi
[[link removed]],
Kathmandu, Lima [[link removed]], or
Casablanca to those demanding a free Palestine is a shared refusal of
a world ordered through dispossession and hierarchy.

The trajectory of twenty-two-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg
captures this dynamic perfectly. Once the darling of liberal
environmentalism—welcomed at Davos, embraced by Obama, and feted as
proof that “Gen Z cared”—she was celebrated because her critique
appeared moral rather than systemic. But the moment she connected
climate justice to anti-imperialism, stood with Palestinians, and
named Israel’s apartheid and ongoing war on Gaza as genocide, the
invitations vanished (and Thunberg has not only focused on Palestine
and climate justice, but has been consistent on a range of issues,
including on Ukraine, Armenia, and Western Sahara). Western
politicians who once applauded her suddenly discovered their limits of
tolerance. What changed was not her age but her politics. The
establishment can stomach youthful dissent only when it flatters its
self-image; it recoils the instant that dissent names its foundations.

When mainstream commentary calls this wave of protests a “Gen Z
rebellion,” what it really means is: don’t take it seriously. The
label domesticates what should be threatening. It turns political
struggle into a lifestyle trend. But if we strip away that veneer,
what comes into focus is a pattern that connects the present to a
longer history of youth revolt under capitalism—from Paris in 1968
to Soweto in 1976 to the #EndSARS and Fallist movements of the last
decade. In each case, the young were not a special interest group but
the social layer through which history announced that an old order had
run its course.

That announcement is being made again. What we are witnessing from
Kathmandu to Casablanca is not simply the impatience of a new
generation, but the resurfacing of a global contradiction that no
government, however repressive, can manage indefinitely. The deferred
revolution has reappeared, stripped of illusions and mediated through
screens, but recognizably the same in essence: an insistent demand for
a world that can sustain life, dignity, and meaning beyond the market,
and for the sake of people, not power or profit.

 • PAKISTAN
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 / NDTV World (New Delhi)

 • ECUADOR [[link removed]] 
 _Gabriela Mena_ / teleSUR (Caracas)

 • MADAGASCAR
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 / France 24 (Paris)

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COMMUNAL CARE IN OAXACA
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_Madeleine Wattenbarger and Axel Hernández_ / Ojalá (Puebla)

The women of the Mazatecas for Freedom collective carried glowing
torches along the seashore as they began their march to the federal
courthouse in Boca del Río, Veracruz. On September 2, they set up a
protest camp in the coastal city to demand an end to the judicial
torture the Mexican state has subjected them to for over a decade.

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_DIE LINKE_ FACES BITTER REALITIES

 • RECOGNIZING ISRAEL’S CULPABILITY
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 _Loren Balhorn_ / Jacobin (Brooklyn)

 • ORGANIZING SOCIAL ANTIFASCISM
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 _Lia Becker_ / Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (Berlin)

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THINK PIECES ON MULTIPOLARITY

 • DEGLOBALIZATION, TOWARDS THE RIGHT OR LEFT?
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 _Walden Bello_ / Foreign Policy in Focus (Washington DC)

 • BEYOND MULTIPOLARITY
[[link removed]]   _Peiman
Salehi_ / Africa is a Country

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EUROPE UNREST

 • GREECE
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 _Helena Smith_ / The Guardian (London)

 • FRANCE
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 _Anaïs Fley_ / Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung

 • CATALONIA
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 _Jordi Oriola Folch_ / The Canary (London) 

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WOMEN IN EL SALVADOR TAKE ON BUKELE
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_Suchit Chávez_ / Truthdig (Santa Monica)

Feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements have become the face of resistance in
El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele — known as the
“millennial president” and an unconditional ally of Donald
Trump — has significantly weakened dissent through increased state
surveillance, the persecution of critical voices and laws that benefit
emerging elites.

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UK GREENS: WE’RE THE LEFT PARTY PREPARED TO LEAD
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_Imran Mulla_ / Middle East Eye (London)

Zack Polanski recently won leadership of the UK’s Green Party, with
over 80 percent of the vote. Twenty thousand new members have joined,
and the party announced on Saturday that the total membership has
surpassed the Lib Dems. Faaiz Hasan, co-election coordinator for the
party: “I think the entire political spectrum has moved to the
right. The threat from the right is so severe that we need
allies.”

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CAMBODIAN AND THAI ACTIVISTS DEMAND BORDER PEACE
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Global Voices (The Hague)

Between July and May 2025, tensions between Thailand and Cambodia over
a border dispute devolved into violence. Amidst the turmoil,
Cambodians and Thais have come together to launch a cross-border
campaign aimed at combating hatred and promoting empathy and lasting
peace.

* Gaza
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* Internationalism
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* Global Sumud Flotilla
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* Palestine solidarity
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* gen z
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* youth revolt
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* Pakistan
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* Ecuador
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* Madagscar
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* Oaxaca
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* Mexico
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* Mazatecas for Freedom
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* Die Linke
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* Israel
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* antifascism
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* multipolarity
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* deglobalization
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* Africa
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* El Salvador
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* Nayib Bukele
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* Women
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* UK
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* Green Party of England and Wales
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* Cambodia
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* Thailand
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* peace movement
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