Aj. Dagga Tolar, Movement for a Socialist Alternative (ISA in Nigeria)
(This article was first published on 3 November 2025)
Yet another African country, and another coup. A coup in Madagascar has led to the coming to power of the military, led by Col Michael Randrianirina, following three weeks of protest on the streets by working class youth against the cost of living crisis, made worse by outages of water and electricity supply. This movement, which grew into a call for the impeachment of the President, Andry Rajoelina, is a pointer to the enormous role and power of the working masses, if it is united and acts as a force to take on the ruling elites and the capitalist system.
However, this time around the movement of the street has not posed the question of taking class power directly for itself, on behalf of the working masses. Indeed, its major political demand was the call for the impeachment of Rajoelina, which the military then stepped in with its gun to help accomplish. Immediately, once that was accomplished, they seized power for themselves. According to Col Randrianirina, it was “taking responsibility because the country was on the brink of collapse”.
When in reality the street protest and actions of the working masses was aimed at rescuing the country from the misrule of the ruling elites, it had paid the ultimate price of as many as 22 people shot and killed on the street with another hundred injured by the police, in this country of 30 million people.
While we welcome the end of the Rajoelina regime, Marxists do not have any illusions whatsoever in the new military rulers. The protest had been decisive enough to ground the country to a standstill. Rajoelina had been made barren, and incapable of governing any longer. But this was where it stopped. The movement lacked the consciousness that the organised force of the working masses was the real power and the very wheel that enabled society to function, and that painfully under the economic guidance of capitalism, the wealth and resources of society are appropriated not to meet the needs of the working masses. Instead, they are used to meet the greed for super profits and provide exclusively for a luxurious lifestyle for the tiny numbers of the ruling elites and their cronies, condemning the working masses who toil day and night to a life of excruciating poverty and mass misery.
Why is this so? Why was the mass movement not capable of transmuting and seeing itself as a political force that could end an oppressive regime and assume power for itself as a class distinct and different from the ruling capitalist class? This of course is directly connected to the weakness of the trade union movement, and the refusal of the labour bureaucracy to recognize the historical destiny of the working class to provide the needed revolutionary leadership to all the oppressed strata of the working masses, and a programme for the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with socialism.
The Gen Z revolt
In recent times, similar revolts have taken place in Sri Lanka, Nepal, Morocco, Kenya, Nigeria and elsewhere, with mass protests and uprisings. These movements have been strong enough to oppose the rulers and reject their continued grip of power over society, but still too weak to constitute themselves into a force fighting for working class political power directly.
This is not unconnected to the character of the movements, often branded as “leaderless” and structureless, instead based on fluid and digital organising. The Gen Z revolt continues to be a growing model with a record of successes in organising mass protests but not armed with an understanding of the dynamics of power relations, the stratification of society into classes, the control of the means of production of goods and services, and the control and distribution of the wealth and resources of society.
In Madagascar they chose the name “Gen Z Mada” with a skull and crossbones image from Japanese anime as their symbol and flag, borrowed from the mass protest movement in Indonesia and Philippines. Of course, the use of the digital space is a common feature of movements, with social media tools like Tiktok, Facebook, Instagram used to coordinate protests. At the same time, the street protests have confirmed that no form of cyber protest can ever replace the organised movement and takeover of the streets, and paralysis of the economy, as a means of grounding society to a halt and rendering the control of the ruling class over state and society to a nullity.
What is the class composition of the Gen Z protests? Of course on the street, like all major protests worldwide, they are largely made up of working class youth, as well as a middle class layer, armed with some technical savvy and digital skills, who assume responsibility to drive the protest.
The middle class origin of the movement’s leaders also explains why from the very beginning, it was merely posed as a protest with no other aim than to draw the attention of the state to the issue at hand. The question of politics and power is drawn directly from the street and ultimately injected into the protest movement. The working class and poor masses rightly identify the things that are wrong in society but are not simply organically capable of linking these wrongs with the nature of the capitalist system and the need to organise to replace it. For this, a leadership which is consciously armed with a Marxist understanding must be built within the movement.
These movements also face a conscious attempt, including from the inside, to limit the demands of the protest to not directly pose the question of power but to look to a so-called oppositional wing of the ruling class to step up and take power and, where this is not on offer, for the military to step in and take political power.
So why this fear to pose the question of power when organising a mass movement against mass misery? We have witnessed this repeatedly in movements and protests of youth on the streets, boldly coming out against governments from the early 2000s on nearly all continents from Latin America, to Asia and Africa.
To fully understand this phenomenon, we must return back to the late 1990s in the “advanced” capitalist countries in Europe and North America, and behold the protests against the World Trade Organisation, and other international political and financial institutions like the IMF/World Bank. This included mass protests at G8 summits in Seattle, Paris, Scotland, Genoa etc. These imperialist institutions’ tightening grip on the world economy had seen attacks launched in the form of social cuts and austerity measures, from the mid-1980s in country after country. This was expressed especially powerfully in the neocolonial world, with mass misery growing in wide proportion.
This heralded a mass movement for “reforms” and “social justice” which at its peak, achieved success in halting or forcing the postponement of meetings of these institutions. A global protest movement was born in the cities of western capitals.
Why was the perspective of a socialist alternative the only consistent scientific basis on which capitalism can be confronted and defeated not on offer, at this time when capitalism was being rebranded and made synonymous with globalization? Moreover, the leading role of the working class in changing society was no longer a common feature of discourse, amid the mass state of decay and slowing growth of the world economy and increasing deindustrialization in the imperialist West as well as in Africa.
The answer lies in the fact that this was a new era of capitalist triumphalism, set in motion by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union bringing an end to Stalinism and the bureaucratised regime of planned economies in East Europe and Russia. In this context, the false analysis of the “end of history” and the “death of socialism” proliferated.
These tumultuous earth-shaking events were to have a huge impact on consciousness and led to the emergence of new visionaries defining “new” paths of how to organise “against the system”. A new generation of thinkers and writers unaware or unwilling to acknowledge the foresight of Marxism, as clearly put forward by historic leaders like Leon Trotsky. Indeed, this co-leader with Lenin of the 1917 Russian Revolution, who even paid with his life to defend Marxism by opposing and theoretically explaining the degeneration of the USSR. 50 years ahead of its collapse, in a book titled Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky explained that a Stalinist Bureaucracy taken over power away from the working class and was set on beheading the revolution, driving it to a state of distortion. In response, he correctly identified the need for the bureaucracy to be overthrown, as the only path to preventing the restoration of capitalism.
Far from being the fault of Marxism and its socialist programme, Trotsky points out that the Russian Revolution had suffered from its isolation in backward Russia. After the defeat of attempts to spread the revolution to Europe, this allowed the Stalinist regime to stifle democratic involvement by the working class and the organs of working class democratic control over society, which was the very basis on which the revolution had been accomplished in 1917.
The way forward
To throw the baby out with the bathwater is not the method of Marxism, and cannot in the end lead to any transformation of society to meet the needs of the working masses. Marxism must be restored as the guide and philosophical framework of organizing the working masses against the system, including its understanding of the centrality of the working class in leading protests, directly posing the question of power and bidding to overthrow capitalism.
The trade unions have not helped matters in this regard, with a bureaucratic labour aristocracy that see itself as not the same as the working class, aping and tailing after the ruling class. In the case of Madagascar, the Malagasy trade Union Solidarity joined the movement after about a week of the protests, which had already succeeded in grounding society to a halt, with schools already closed and workers independently providing support and joining the movement on their own. The trade union leaders didn’t seek to play any leadership role or qualitatively come forward to act for the interest of the working class to directly pose the question of power.
But not to despair, the working masses will continue to draw lessons from these repeated movements and struggles against the system. If assisted by organized revolutionary socialists participating side by side with them in struggle, they will draw the conclusion that capitalism is the system that needs to be uprooted.
The military cannot be trusted
A majority of those leading the movement have failed to look to the working class and in so doing hand the initiative back into the ranks of the ruling elites to regain power in the situation. In the neocolonial world, especially with regards to Africa, the top brass of the military hierarchy claims for itself, full of self-entitlement, the task of fulfilling this criteria and assuming power. In many cases, it comes to power with the wide support among the working masses, as the case of Madagascar demonstrates, where the masses are celebrating a victory of ousting a repressive regime.
This is the scenario in Africa, where military rulers have come to power on the promise of curbing Islamic insurgents and laying the basis for society to be transformed. Of course we have witnessed strong anti-French rhetoric and a new leaning toward Putin’s Russia, but basically no fundamental step in taking on capitalism either inside or outside of the Sahel region, with no respite in the war against the insurgents.
No step whatsoever has been taken to develop the democratic involvement of the working masses, or change the class balance of power in society. Power is wielded by a tiny few officers, laying the basis for new plots and coups that will further paralyze state and society. The best that has ever happened in these scenarios is that military rulers announce a transition that hands over power to a new wing of the same ruling ruling elite to continue from where it left off when it was kicked out of power.
Already Col Randrianirina has promised such a transition in the next 18 to 24 months. It follows from the above that Madagascar will not be any different at best from Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea, or Niger. And it will certainly not be the last coup in Africa. Already in its wake there has been a coup scare in Nigeria. The military, with its command structure and colonial origin lacks the means to define and reorganize society in an alternative direction, meeting the needs of the working masses. It lacks all of the democratic credentials to assume power on behalf of the working masses and in so doing can only usurp the leadership role of the working class.
The vacuum will always be filled and military will continue to lay claim to power as long as the working class does not develop the necessary organization and socialist consciousness, boldly coming forward and providing the needed leadership to the whole of the working masses, to take on the ruling class and overthrow capitalism by abolishing the domination of all key sectors of the economy by both foreign and private capital.
The respite of a new face like that of Col Randrianirina in Madagascar, and others that may rise,
will only postpone attacks on living conditions that will return more vicious, as the ruling class tries to manage the crisis, pursuing more income to service debt, and provide super profits for capital while sustaining their luxurious lifestyle at the expense of the wellbeing of the working masses.
The promise from the new military strong man in Madagascar that his coming to power “marks a historic turning-point for our country. With a people in full fervour, driven by the desire for change… we joyfully open a new chapter in the life of our nation” will never be fulfilled.
Capitalism needs wage slave labourers to survive. The fact that only 39% of the population have access to electricity, with less than 12 hours daily supply and that 75% of the population lives below the poverty line is not accidental. The economy is largely based on export and completely dependent on France and Europe, meaning all of the resources needed to develop the means of production and improve the lot of the working masses are frittered away.
The Movement for Socialist Alternative (ISA in Nigeria) calls on the working masses in Madagascar to not think the struggle is over. Not having formed Action Committees to take control of the protests, enliven and enrich the strength of the movement with the direct raw force of the working masses and free itself with all of the bourgeois pretensions and illusions of the middle class layers of the Gen Z Mada movement, has come at a price. The working class must now come forward to draw lessons from the struggle and define the task ahead.
While acknowledging the role played by Gen Z. Mada, the working class must organize independently and institute itself in structures in the factory, schools, and communities to provide the leadership it was unable to offer during the protest and see itself as a revolutionary force. The working class must organize a new independent party and declare its political intention to bid for political power, directly for itself as a class and for the class interests of all the working masses.
