All around the world, the number of protests led by young people is rising.From Sri Lanka to Peru, from Nepal to Madagascar, from Bangladesh to Morocco…
In all of them, a significant portion of those filling the streets are young.
The imperialist media monopolies, however, are eager to gather this entire phenomenon under one single headline:
“GEN Z PROTESTS”.
This conceptual framework imposed by imperialism has influenced not only petty-bourgeois intellectual circles but also many organizations and parties that claim to be leftist or socialist.
Yet this rushed categorization is both superficial and ideological.
Because interpreting historical and social movements — or developments unfolding in different regions and countries of the world — through similar age groups, colors, beliefs, genders, geographies… obscures the class-based causes that produce them.
Thus, conceptualizations that ignore the reality of classes become part of imperialism’s ideological offensive.
Wherever we look in the world, the fundamental contradiction remains the same:
The antagonism between oppressors and the oppressed — between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
THE IDEOLOGICAL FUNCTION OF “GENERATION THEORIES”: IMPERIALISM’S SMOKE SCREEN
The discourse of generations — especially since the 1990s — has been marketed as a form of social analysis produced in imperialist centers:
- The Silent Generation
- Baby Boomers
- X, Y, Z, Alpha… the list never ends.
Though this schematic classification may seem innocent at first glance, it is in fact a discourse that individualizes crises produced by capitalism and pulls social struggle away from its class axis.
Its core function is this:
- It renders class contradictions invisible.
- It reduces social contradictions to biological age.
- It neutralizes capitalism’s crises using “innocent” notions like “youth character,” “digital culture,” “adaptation to technology”.
- It reduces unemployment, poverty, and precarity to a “youth adaptation problem.”
- It conceals the destruction imperialism creates across the world.
- It softens youth anger, encouraging disorganization and individualism.
Therefore, the most repeated lie today is:
“THE WORLD HAS CHANGED. THERE ARE NO BORDERS ANYMORE, NO CLASSES. NOW GENERATIONS WAGE THE STRUGGLE.”
No.
The world has changed and continues to change, but classes remain in place. Capitalist exploitation, poverty, and inequality are sharper than ever. Under these conditions, the discourse of generations has no real validity; If it has any function at all, it is ideological manipulation — a smoke bomb constantly dropped on the peoples of the world to cloud their consciousness.
THE HIDDEN FACE OF WORLDWIDE PROTESTS: CLASS ANGER
Looking at protests across different continents in the past two years, youth leadership is evident.
But this commonality is not enough to equate the nature of these events.
The reasons that led the people of Sri Lanka to storm the presidential palace and the reasons that led protesters in Nepal to burn parliament buildings are similar only in one domain: class contradictions, not generational categories. Because the forces driving young people into the streets in all these countries are the same:
- Economic collapse
- Poverty
- Precarity
- Corruption
- A sense of hopelessness among workers
- The destruction created by deepened neocolonialism
- The limitless hostility of collaborationist regimes toward the people
Therefore, these movements are not, as claimed, a “Gen Z awakening,” but new forms of class struggle on a global scale.
What pushes young people into the streets is not their belonging to “Gen Z”, but the common poverty and exploitation produced by capitalism.
Thus, the prominence of youth gains meaning only when we understand them not as a “sociological category”, but as the most dynamic segment of the oppressed class that bears capitalism’s heaviest burdens.
NOT GENERATIONS, BUT CLASSES
Every historical youth movement that led social transformation emerged not as a “generation”, but as part of a particular political organization.
It was so in 1968; in 1978; even in the 1990s and the 2020s (in Turkey – editor’s note)
Today, by invoking “Gen Z,” this historical continuity is being deliberately severed.
Making politics through “generations” means reducing social movements and class struggles to biological age, gender, or identity, and thereby ignoring class contradictions.
It detaches the youth movement from its class context and depoliticizes it.
Yet the truth is this: History is not the history of generations, but of class struggle.
Wherever it occurs in the world, the youth who take the lead in the streets are the voice of the collective anger of the oppressed.
Their actions are not a “age-group phenomenon,” but spontaneous class reactions—often unorganized—that express the search for justice of the oppressed and working people.
“GEN Z” LITERATURE: LIBERAL FAIRY TALES THAT HIDE EXPLOITATION
“Young people are new, creative, free, digital…”
Such phrases sound pleasant, but they hide another truth:
Capitalism offers no right to live for the youth.
Today, millions of young people around the world face obstacles in accessing education, work, and housing; they are crushed under debt and suffocated by hopelessness.
Their anger cannot be explained by “generation theories.” Its source is not individual — it is class-based.
Thus, reducing the issue to “Gen Z” means separating young people from social struggle and keeping them within the limits of the system.
The developments in Turkey after March 19 show exactly this dynamic. But to classify youth in Turkey as an “apolitical Gen Z” means denying both the class struggle and the historical legacy of youth resistance.
In Anatolia, youth has never acted merely as an “age group”; it has always appeared on the stage of history as part of an organized political structure.
The most concrete example of this is DEV-GENÇ.
DEV-GENÇ: A YOUTH MOVEMENT THAT BROKE GENERATION THEORIES AND INSCRIBED ITSELF INTO HISTORY
DEV-GENÇ (Revolutionary Youth), beginning in 1969, played a decisive role in the politicization of youth.
Though some who fled struggle try to squeeze it into the label of the “’68 generation,” DEV-GENÇ was never just an age cohort.
It was a class stance, an organized uprising, a political consciousness.
Because DEV-GENÇ embodied:
- A perspective on academic and democratic struggle
- The demand for science and education for the people
- A firm anti-imperialist position
- Deep connections with all sectors of the people and a unified youth struggle
- Committees to fight fascist attacks
- The spread of Mahir Çayan’s theoretical and political line among youth
- From the 1970s to today: actions, occupations, boycotts, demonstrations, and militant resistance
- Resistance against the March 12 and September 12 coups, and against the imperialist “change your ideas or die” assaults of the 2000s
Despite waves of destruction and elimination, it kept Marxism-Leninism as its compass and preserved organizational continuity.
This is the proof.
Because DEV-GENÇ is not a generation — It is a revolutionary tradition of struggle.
This is why, even today, when people speak of a “youth movement” in Turkey, the first political force that comes to mind is DEV-GENÇ, and why others attempt to imitate it.
Some denialist, opportunist, and reformist groups try to draw legitimacy by borrowing its name, attempting to exist by clinging to the values created by DEV-GENÇ.
The liquidationist remnants of “Devrimci Yol” (DY) are again at the forefront of this.
But DEV-GENÇ is not an abstract brand; it is a revolutionary organizational tradition built through sacrifice—through blood and life itself.
No “Gen Z creative activism” can replace this truth.
This is why the notion of “generations” is an artificial, fashionable concept.
Classes, on the other hand, are the engine of history.
What Will Change the World Is Not:
- Social media trends,
- Age brackets,
- Or so-called generational “traits,”
But the organized struggle of the oppressed.
Youth is the most dynamic, most courageous, and most creative force of this struggle. But youth does not appear on the stage of history as a “generation”, only as a revolutionary component of class struggle.
Therefore: There are no “generations”; there are classes. Not generation politics, but class struggle prevails.
And the liberation of youth lies in the organized struggle of DEV-GENÇ.
Not ’68, not ’78, not “Z” — it is DEV-GENÇ that can organize the power of youth.
Conclusion
It is not generations but class struggle — and the organized power of youth, DEV-GENÇ — that will change the world.
The fact that young people are taking to the streets across the world today is not the fulfillment of generational predictions, but the natural result of capitalism’s furious exploitation that leaves youth breathless.
To confine youth into generational categories is to hide this reality.
The world will not be changed by Gen Z traits, “creativity,” “digital competence,” or “new-generation activism”, but by the organized revolutionary struggle of the oppressed.
And the name of this struggle in Turkey was clear yesterday and is clear today:
DEV-GENÇ!
There are no “generations,” only classes.
Not “the youth,” but DEV-GENÇ.
Revolution is not the work of generations but o organized peoples.
