GenZ212: Moroccan youth rise up and open a new chapter in the class struggle!

“Only the fresh enthusiasm and aggressive spirit of the youth can guarantee the preliminary successes in the struggle” – Trotsky, The Transitional Programme

On Saturday 27 September, as if out of nowhere, groups of young people took to the streets in many major Moroccan cities, including Casablanca, Rabat, Marrakech, Tangier, Fes, Meknes, El Jadida, and Tetouan. They came out in response to a call broadcast on social media by young people who named themselves the GenZ212 movement.

What rapid and unexpected developments! What an era we are living in! Did anyone anticipate that this youth movement would emerge? Well, yes – we, the Marxists, the revolutionary communists, had expected it! We wrote in our recent perspectives document, The world turned upside down – a system in crisis:

“There is an accumulation of combustible material around the world. The crisis of the capitalist system in all its manifestations has provoked one revolutionary uprising after another [...] The question that we need to ask ourselves is not whether there will be revolutionary movements in the period opening up in front of us. That is certain. The question is whether these will end up in a victory for the working class?”

Yes, this is the crucial question, which must be asked even in relation to the current movement.

What is GenZ212?

‘Gen Z’ refers to the generation born in the late 1990s and early 2000s, while ‘212’ is Morocco’s international dialing code, indicating that it is a movement of Moroccan youth.

It is a movement of young people who describe themselves as follows:

“We are the youth of Morocco, a new generation. We declare clearly that we do not belong to any political party, union, or organisation. Our movement is independent and peaceful, aiming to express our social and human demands.”

They clarified that their main demands are:

• Free and quality public education that ensures equal opportunities and addresses the problems of overcrowding and school dropouts.
• Decent public healthcare, with proper infrastructure, modern equipment, and sufficient doctors in all regions.
• Fair employment opportunities that allow the youth to build their future with dignity.
• A fight against corruption, cronyism, and nepotism, ensuring transparency and accountability in hiring and public administration.
• Real social justice that supports the poor and marginalised regions.

They emphasised that their actions are “peaceful, based on awareness and discipline, and respectful of the law.” They noted that they had established a “code of conduct for our demonstrations: no violence, no vandalism, no violation of public or private property – only the voice of free youth.”

This movement occurs in the context of protests by working youth in many countries worldwide, such as those witnessed in Nepal, Indonesia, Kenya, Madagascar, France, and others. Young people have expressed their rejection of the tragic conditions they endure due to capitalism, which robs them of their present and future.

The Moroccan GenZ212 movement is part of this global context. It is similar to its counterparts not only in its name and its methods of mobilisation, but also in its demands and the form of the protests.

The similarities with youth movements in other countries are due to the comparable conditions created by global capitalism everywhere. The same causes lead to the same results. 

Yet, it is not mere blind imitation or a fad – it is an expression of a tangible reality experienced by Morocco’s working youth.

It is a purely Moroccan product, emerging from the tragic conditions endured by the working class, especially the youth.

Conditions of the youth

It is no coincidence that the youth’s response to the call that went out has been so widespread, and characterised by such a remarkable level of militancy. The new generation, born during the reign of Mohammed VI that began at the turn of the millenium, have known only crisis, unemployment and poor living conditions throughout their lives.

Official figures indicate that 25.2 percent of Moroccan youth aged 15-24 are not in education, employment, or training. This percentage equals roughly 1.5 million young people. If the age range is extended to include those up to 35 years old, the number rises to 4.3 million marginalised, unemployed youth, deprived of their present and future. What a criminal waste of young potential!

In 2024, the national unemployment rate rose from 13 percent to 13.3 percent. The highest unemployment rates were among youth aged 15-24 at 36.7 percent, and 21 percent among those aged 25-34.

The situation becomes even more catastrophic among graduates, as the High Commission for Planning reported that over 60 percent of educated youth experienced unemployment in 2022.

Thus, these young people have taken to the streets to fight for urgent demands that cannot be postponed: they march for their future, dignity, and right to a decent life. No amount of repression or deception can force them to accept their current situation without resistance.

The necessity of an uprising has deep roots in the tragic conditions of youth, yet it required a reference point and a banner around which to rally. The GenZ212 movement became that banner and point of reference, and we are now witnessing a mass movement of working youth, increasingly winning the sympathy of the working class and other labouring sectors.

It is worth noting that this emerging mobilisation cannot be separated from the context of increasing protests in Morocco over recent months. In many cities there have been protests against rising prices, and popular marches in villages and rural areas have demanded drinking water, roads, schools, and doctors for their clinics (if they exist at all).

The GenZ212 movement is also connected to the almost weekly marches against normalisation of relations with Israel, and the Moroccan regime’s complicity with the genocidal state, which have evoked the anger of the masses.

Despite the seemingly sudden emergence of this particular movement, it did not appear out of nothing. Youth have previously expressed their anger at their conditions in various ways, most notably through chants sung by ‘Ultras’ every week in sports stadiums, containing bold political slogans against marginalisation and social injustice. Large layers of these young people have also protested in other ways, including the attempts at mass emigration from Morocco in recent years.

Unfolding of events

The first spark for this movement was the Agadir hospital incident, where eight women recently died in the maternity ward due to the devastation of the healthcare sector by decades of austerity, and the systematic destruction of the public sector in favour of private interests.

Youth groups emerged on social media, leading to the formation of the GenZ212 movement to express their anger and their demands. These discussions soon evolved into calls for on-the-ground action in several Moroccan cities.

At the end of August 2025, the first posts appeared on Instagram and TikTok using the hashtags: #GENZ212, #جيل_زد. Short videos criticising the high cost of living and poor healthcare and educational services began to circulate among young people.

During the first week of September 2025, social media pages and groups bearing the slogan ‘GenZ212’ were created, and the first calls for protests were launched.

By mid-September 2025, these young people were circulating online posters promoting Saturday 27 September as the date for demonstrations. This call spread rapidly, particularly among university students and in schools.

Healthcare, education, and the fight against corruption

Since the movement focused especially on demands related to healthcare, education, and administrative and judicial corruption, it is useful to examine the actual state of these sectors.

The health and education sectors in Morocco are a clear demonstration of the crimes of capitalism and its relentless drive to push society toward barbarism.

According to the official Le Maroc en chiffres report by the High Commission for Planning, the number of doctors in Morocco (both public and private sectors) in 2022 was approximately 29,000. This amounts to roughly 7.8 doctors per 10,000 people – a paltry figure in a country as rich as Morocco, with its reserves of phosphates, gold, and cobalt. By comparison, war-torn Libya has 19 doctors per 10,000 people, and Cuba, despite being a poor country without such natural resource wealth and suffering from an imperialist blockade, has 84 doctors per 10,000 people.

Regarding education, in 2022 alone, more than 334,000 students dropped out of primary and secondary schools. Morocco ranked 75th out of 79 countries in the Programme for International Student Assessment for reading and mathematics. Additionally, 30 percent of adults are illiterate.

Corruption is widespread at all levels. According to Transparency International’s 2024 report, Morocco scored 37 out of 100 on the Corruption Perceptions Index, ranking 99th globally out of 180 countries.

The judiciary in all countries serves the bourgeois state, defending the interests of the ruling class. In Morocco, however, it is a gangsterish, corrupt, and degraded apparatus, even by bourgeois standards. 

It is nothing but an extension of the political police apparatus, imprisoning political detainees for long periods on charges that are not only fabricated but also absurd. Examples include the surreal charge against journalist Hamid Mahdaoui of ‘attempting to smuggle a Russian tank’; the fabricated charge against local leaders in the Rif region of conspiring to overthrow the ruling regime; the fabricated rape charges against journalists Omar Radi and Souleiman Raissouni, and so on. 

Thus, the judiciary is completely detested and represents, in the eyes of the public, what the Bastille represented for the people of Paris before the French Revolution.

The state’s response

The state has shown its intense fear in dealing with these mobilisations, evident in the large number of police officers deployed in all major cities, including in city squares that did not witness any demonstrations.

The state has shown its intense fear in dealing with these mobilisations / Image: selh04, Twitter

The repression was harsh, though not reaching the usual level of brutality seen in a police state like Morocco, where an ‘ordinary day’ of repression might involve tear gas, water cannons, running over protesters with police vehicles, and even killings to ‘enforce order’ and ‘protect state prestige’.

The repression of Saturday and Sunday’s protests was not at that extreme level. This is not because the regime has suddenly become democratic or tolerant of protests, but because it understands that the situation could explode and that the demands of the youth deeply reflect the interests of the working class and the labouring masses. The regime knows that any spark could ignite the accumulated anger. Thus, it attempted to crush the movement at its inception, while avoiding provoking the masses’ anger.

The repression took the form of baton charges to disperse protesters, and the arrest of dozens, most of whom were quickly released without prosecution.

However, this repression did not produce the results the dictatorial regime had hoped for. Instead, it further radicalised the movement and expanded the mood of solidarity, particularly among students. Many student groups issued statements supporting the protesters’ demands and condemning the repression.

In response to the crackdown on Saturday, GenZ212 called – via the Discord platform – for new protests on Sunday 28 September at 4pm in multiple cities including Casablanca, Rabat, Marrakech, Tangier, Fes, Tetouan, Nador, Meknes, Beni Mellal, and Taounate.

A broad layer of the youth responded to this call. Several cities witnessed larger demonstrations, particularly Casablanca and Tangier – the country’s largest working-class cities – where protests continued into late Sunday night. Video footage documented young protesters blocking the highway in Casablanca, a level of militant action never before seen in Morocco, even during the peak of the 20 February Movement more than a decade ago.

The left’s position

Some ‘revolutionaries’ despair at the movement’s ‘reformist’, ‘bread-and-butter’, ‘narrow’ demands. They feel disgust when these young people declare that they are “neither against the monarchy nor against His Majesty King Mohammed VI, may God preserve him,” and that they consider “the royal system to be a guarantee of stability and national unity.” They note that the youth’s demands “are limited to reform within the framework of the Moroccan state and its institutions.”

Here the movement will stumble into a grave problem, because those ‘revolutionaries’ will refuse to issue it a birth certificate: they will refuse to recognise it as one of the ‘genuine popular movements’ as they see it.

That is predictable – these comrades only grant a movement its certificate of authenticity when it emerges from the start with clear slogans, a revolutionary programme, red banners, and – why not! – portraits of Marx and Lenin.

What these ‘revolutionaries’ do not understand is that there has never been a revolution like the one in their imaginations. The Russian Revolution of 1905 was led by a clergyman and began as a peaceful march to the Tsar’s palace to hand him a petition demanding reforms. The February 1917 Revolution erupted after demonstrations by working women demanding bread and peace; even the October Revolution, that brought the working class to power, began with slogans for peace, bread, and land.

Some may also criticise the movement because its youth insist on remaining independent of all parties and unions. But that criticism is certainly wrong. All the official political parties are bankrupt and complicit – they inspire nothing in young people but revulsion.

When the youth declare their disgust with those parties, they are expressing a healthy instinct, that we Marxists understand as a desire for a revolutionary alternative – a bold leadership that genuinely adopts the masses’ demands and is capable and willing to fight.

All the official political parties are bankrupt and complicit – they inspire nothing in young people but revulsion / Image: fair use

When politics becomes synonymous with careerism, opportunism, and submission to the status quo, instead of fighting to change it, disgust with politics becomes a healthy and justified feeling. It becomes a revolutionary stance that we salute, and to those who adopt it, we call for a wholly new form of politics: revolutionary socialist politics. This is the only kind of politics that is capable of offering an alternative to the rot that surrounds us.

Unfortunately, left parties and labour unions are no exception to this rot, because their leaderships are mired in reformist illusions and are afraid of any initiative that might escape their control. As a result, they are effectively party to a de facto ‘peace and truce’ arrangement with the state.

As if to confirm the youth’s rejection of them, leaders of reformist left parties were quick, as soon as the spark of the movement was ignited, to occupy their usual positions and transform into advisers to the police state on how to deal with the movement.

The rank and file of those parties participated in the protests from the first moment, and were themselves subject to repression and arrest. But the leaderships issued statements asking the state to ensure a “healthy political climate that respects freedoms and human rights,” in the words of the Federation of the Democratic Left. Meanwhile the Unified Socialist Party called for “listening to the demands of the Moroccan people and the nation’s youth, fair distribution of wealth, and an end to repressive policies.”

They should be explaining to the youth and to the working class, the impossibility of any freedom or rights under the existing system. Repression is inherent to its nature as a system which defends the interests of the big capitalists and their imperialist masters.

They benefit from austerity, the privatisation of education and healthcare, and all the policies implemented by successive governments. The left parties should clarify that the only path to achieving demands for liberation, decent living, quality education, and healthcare, is to overthrow this system and build one that serves the workers and the poor, under their own control.

What next?

So far, the youth have shown all the courage, militancy, and creativity in forms of struggle and political slogans that can be expected. But the question that must now be posed – boldly and consciously – is: what next?

The state apparatus, caught off guard by these mobilisations, will soon regain its balance and adopt the tactics needed to crush the movement through a mixture of repression, containment, and deception. It will use all the experience it has accumulated over the years, and the services of its reformist and liberal slaves who are ready to help steer the movement into ‘safe channels’.

A mass movement cannot remain in a permanent state of boiling without a horizon or an alternative. At a certain point, the movement will inevitably begin to tire and become confused, and the most revolutionary elements will become isolated from the broader masses.

This will make it easier for the regime to single them out and retaliate, in order to make an example of them, as it did with the leaders of the 20 February Movement, the Rif Movement, the 2017-18 protests which began in Jerada – the list goes on.

Regime mouthpieces posing as friends of the movement and the liberals will then rush to praise the movement’s weaknesses – its spontaneity, the lack of a political programme, and the absence of organisation. They will tell anyone who will listen that spontaneity is purity and that organisation is a shackle, and that the movement is best left at this initial stage.

They will praise the movement’s leaders as educated, polite, well-mannered youth, and advise them to avoid working-class neighbourhoods and the youth of poor districts – the ‘bad’, ‘violent’, ‘ignorant’ ones – and to refrain from going to workplaces, since those places ‘are not suitable for them.’

There is nothing more disastrous than such advice – it is the enemy’s counsel to its enemy, and it cannot serve the interests of the movement. They want the movement to remain under control, isolated from its popular base and without any compass, so that it can be easily exhausted and finally crushed.

Then they will drop their smiling masks, reveal their ugly faces, and raise against you the same banner of war they raised against the youth of Jerada, the Rif, and the 20 February activists before them: “Woe to the vanquished!”

To you, struggling youth, we Marxists say: we must do precisely the opposite of what these enemies advise if we want the movement to develop and reach its goals!

Protests and even marches, by themselves, cannot achieve the movement’s demands / Image: fair use

Young fighters, we must pose with boldness and clarity the following question: what should we do now?

You have shown that you are a tremendous force; as soon as you began to awaken, the ruling class and its state trembled. But your strength alone is insufficient for victory.

Protests and even marches, by themselves, cannot achieve the movement’s demands. The working class must enter the arena with general strikes aimed at paralysing the economy and bringing down the government of austerity, exploitation, and repression.

We must appeal to the entire working class and all the exploited layers concerned with these demands, to call them to join the struggle. The movement’s isolation will make it easy for the regime to exhaust, isolate, and crush it.

We must begin organising the movement by creating organisational structures in every neighbourhood, every school, every university, and every workplace, and coordinate them locally and nationally. Structures should be democratically elected by youth, workers, housewives, and all those engaged in the struggle for the movement’s demands, under their control and direction. The absence of organisation will make it easy for the regime to infiltrate, control, and crush the movement in the end.

Fighting youth, you must ask: why are our conditions so bad – is this government alone responsible for our tragedies? Are our conditions not similar to those of the youth in other countries; from Nepal to Kenya, from Madagascar to Brazil, and even in France and Italy? Isn’t that itself evidence that the culprit behind our misery, our bleak future, and our despair, is the capitalist system itself? 

The culprit is precisely the system of private property that subjects us and our parents to exploitation and poverty, destroys our future, pollutes the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the food we eat, all to serve the interests of a tiny handful of capitalists, their political representatives, and their servants in the media and state institutions.

Revolutionary youth: if we do not clearly identify the enemy, our energies will be wasted. If we do not clearly define our goal, we will lose our way. We will not attain our demands under the bourgeois state and the laws it made to protect its profits and perpetuate its rule.

We urge you to rally under the banner of a clear revolutionary socialist alternative – to fight to overthrow the capitalist system and to build a state run by the workers, peasants, and the entire working masses.