Across the periphery of the global capitalist system, revolt has become the natural response to immiseration as the global overproduction crisis continues to expand the social and class contradictions to a breaking point.

In Madagascar, the spark came from mass demonstrations beginning on 25 September 2025, where students, transport workers, and public-sector unions poured into the streets after weeks of blackouts, fuel shortages, and food inflation. Police repression left dozens injured and several dead, yet the protests only grew. Strikes spread to the ports and public services, paralyzing the economy and forcing President Andry Rajoelina to dissolve his cabinet on 29 September 2025.

What appeared as a local crisis was in truth the eruption of contradictions long imposed by international finance. Years of IMF-supervised austerity and debt restructuring had gutted state investment, privatized utilities, and tied the nation’s economy to the export of raw materials under foreign ownership. The so-called “reforms” demanded by creditors reduced the Malagasy state to a debt-collection agent, squeezing its workers while mining and agribusiness profits flowed abroad.

In Nepal, the revolt took a different form but shared the same cause. On 4 September 2025 the government banned twenty-six social-media platforms, triggering mass protests from 8-13 September. Students and informal workers’ protests erupted in Kathmandu and across other cities. But beneath the anger over censorship lay a deeper material decay within a nation surviving on remittances (about one-third of GDP) with youth unemployment above 20 percent.

Decades of neoliberal adjustment and foreign loans had ensured Nepal remained dependent on imported goods and external credit. The political parties, whether communist-branded, centrist, or royalist differed only in rhetoric; all served the same capitalist logic dictated by the World Bank and international donors. When students and workers took the streets, they were rejecting not merely a government decree but an entire social order built on dependency and the export of human labour as a commodity.

In September, Indonesia witnessed its largest wave of protests in nearly a decade, as worsening economic conditions and elite excesses ignited nationwide unrest. Years of post-pandemic inflation, currency depreciation, and sluggish wage growth had left millions of workers struggling to afford food, fuel, and housing, while unemployment, especially among youth and informal workers, remained high. Discontent deepened when reports surfaced that members of parliament were receiving monthly housing allowances of roughly 50 million rupiah (about US $3 000), vastly exceeding the national minimum wage. This revelation became the catalyst for mass demonstrations across Jakarta, Surabaya, and other major cities. The protest movement, uniting industrial labourers, teachers, gig-economy drivers, and students, demanded wage increases, an end to outsourcing and precarious contracts, stronger labour protections, tax reform, and the abolition of political privileges for elites.

The government of President Prabowo Subianto, backed by Indonesia’s business conglomerates and foreign investors, responded with tear gas, arrests of over 1 000 people, and temporary internet shutdowns, while promising minor reforms such as suspending lawmakers’ perks. These concessions failed to address the broader class contradiction at the revolt’s core, a society where economic growth has enriched a narrow elite while leaving the working class burdened by inflation, insecurity, and state repression.

In Serbia, revolt was instigated by tragedy. On 2 October 2025, the collapse of a railway-station canopy in Novi Sad killed sixteen workers, a disaster that became the symbol of decades of corruption, crony privatization, and infrastructural decay. The working class, even though still fragmented, suddenly found its voice. Transport workers, educators, and pensioners marched beside students and laid-off factory laborers, denouncing the government of Aleksandar Vučić and the foreign contractors who profit from public neglect. Serbia’s economy, tethered to European capital through low-wage manufacturing and extractive finance, has left millions in precarity while a thin elite grows rich on speculative construction and export subsidies. The state answered this awakening with riot police, media censorship, and accusations of “foreign interference.” Yet the slogans of the movement “Justice for the Dead, Bread for the Living” reveal a class awakening that transcends nationalism.

Meanwhile, in Morocco, the Gen Z 212 movement has erupted as one of the most sustained youth uprisings in North Africa since 2011. Beginning in late September 2025, demonstrations spread from Casablanca to Rabat and Tangier, uniting students, precarious workers, and teachers under the call for karama wa ‘amal, “dignity and work.” The material basis is unmistakable: youth unemployment near 30 percent, soaring prices of food and fuel, and a debt burden consuming over a fifth of state expenditure. The Moroccan monarchy, celebrated by Western creditors for its “stability,” responded with the brutality typical of comprador regimes as hundreds were arrested, student unions dissolved, and online organizers hunted by security forces. The protests have drawn in public-sector unions and sections of the transport workforce, transforming generational frustration into embryonic class solidarity. Here again, the face of rebellion is that of a proletariat excluded from the future, confronting a capitalist order that offers only debt, surveillance, and repression in exchange for obedience.

As of October 2025, the movements in Madagascar, Nepal, Serbia, Indonesia and Morocco remain unresolved. In Madagascar, the transitional government continues to face strikes in the energy, transport, and education sectors, while negotiations with unions have faltered under pressure from foreign creditors. In Nepal, the ruling coalition has fractured, the ban on social media has been repealed, yet security forces still detain student organizers, and the cost of living continues to rise. Serbia remains under emergency decrees, and Morocco’s prisons swell with young dissidents. The bourgeois press proclaims a “return to order,” but beneath the surface, the conditions of revolt persist. Each uprising demonstrates that where capital rules through debt, austerity, and dependency, resistance is not a choice it is an inevitability.

What is now required is the organization of the workers under class unions. The International Communist Party calls for a return to the classical Marxist program that sees beyond the illusions of democracy and nationalism toward the abolition of wage labour itself. The struggles in Madagascar, Nepal, Serbia, Indonesia and Morocco are not isolated storms but manifestations of a single global antagonism, capital versus labour. Only through disciplined international organization, beyond borders and parliaments, can the proletariat transform its revolt into revolution and finally abolish the conditions that make revolt necessary.