“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.” Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

Little could he have guessed that, on occasions, the opposite holds true. The dead generations in their desperation to make a comeback may conjure up the spirits of the living, borrowing from them their names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present itself as a thing of the now.

The recent Gen-Z movement in Nepal, which saw the collapse of the elected government and dissolution of its pratinidi sabha or the House of Representatives, is one such occasion. The old elites of Nepal, the military-bureaucracy complex, hiding under the banner of the youth protest, which wanted an egalitarian, inclusive and corruption-free Nepal, toppled the democratically elected government and replaced it with their own.

The Gen-Z movement of 8 September, 2025 had an innocent start. The anger against the corrupt parliamentary parties and their leaders had been building up for several years. Since the 2006 Revolution, in which the combined power of the Nepal Communist Party (Maoist) and seven political parties toppled the 300-year-old monarchy in Nepal, the new leaders could do little to address the long time demands of Nepali people of livelihood, education, and health. Federalism, secularism and social justice in the new constitution were more whitewash than real because the country’s institutions remained exclusive, unaccommodating to the country’s marginalised poor, including its tribals, Dalits, Muslims and Madheshis.

More so the leaders remained self-indulgent and unheeding to the cry of the people. Every day 1,700 Nepali people, men, women and children, leave the country in search of livelihood in more developed countries, to work in conditions in which their natives cannot be employed. As I have written in my April, 2024 piece, “In the past one and a half decades, according to the data of the Foreign Employment Board, about 12,000 Nepalese who sought foreign employment lost their lives. Currently there are over 3.5 million Nepalese working abroad, which is 14 per cent of the total population of the country.”

Add to this, several developed countries in the last 4-5 years have made their emigration policies stricter, restricting the young people of Nepal and other backward countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America from going abroad for livelihood. Remittance contribution in Nepal’s GDP is around 30 per cent.

Since 2006, there have been 14 prime ministers. In the last four years Nepali people saw KP Oli, Prachanda and Sher Bahadur Deuba taking turns to become prime minister six times, as if playing musical chairs. The changes were so quick, like watching a city go by from a window of a fast train, that their faces merged and it became impossible to tell the difference.

Along with it, Nepal witnessed scams one after another in which big politicians were involved. Rabi Lamichhane, former Home minister, is in jail for a cooperative scandal. Another former Home Minister and Nepali Congress leader Bal Krishna Khand and former Energy Minister Top Bahadur Rayamajhi were arrested in the Bhutanese Refugees Scam. Similarly, a Maoist leader and former Speaker of the House was arrested in a gold smuggling case.

The protest of the 8th September was the result of growing hopelessness of the country’s youth. Even though the protest was led by the young people of Nepal, however, it soon, by the night of 9th September, became clear that the protest had been hijacked by the old elite, the military-bureaucratic complex of Nepal, which had never come to term with the changes brought by the 2006 Revolution, which ushered Nepal into democracy, secularism and social justice, even if they were extremely limited.

Even after the new constitution was promulgated in 2015, this old elite, military and bureaucratic, did everything in its power to weaken its mandate. The Nepal Army refused to abide by the spirit of the constitution that called for the restructuring of it. The Army in Nepal is a state within a state. Since its inception in the 19th century, it has kept its commercial interests intact. Even after the 2006 Revolution, it could keep on extending them. Same was with the other institutions.

Now that the old elite class is back in power by dissolving the parliament and forming a new government of technocrats and bureaucrats, including former chief justice Sushila Karki as prime minister, even though the constitution of Nepal, affirmed by the Supreme Court ruling of 2021, doesn’t have provisions for such acts, it is time to look back and find out why this could happen. Why reactionary forces with an autocratic feudal tendency, could so easily take away the fruits of over 70 years of Nepali people’s struggle, which grew into a powerful revolutionary force in 1996 in the form of the Maoists’ people’s war.

In his The Civil War in France, Marx says, “But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” This, one of the most important lessons in Marxism, was totally neglected by the Maoists when they gave up arms, in a rush to join parliamentary politics. Hungry for power and recognition from imperialism and expansionism, they systematically and very quickly destroyed the gains of the revolutionary war, calling their betrayal as developing and updating the “old” and “outdated” Marxism for the conditions of the 21st century. They allowed their army to be disbanded and their cadres to be demotivated. Few leaders who questioned the trading off socialism and new democracy for bourgeois democracy were humiliated and thrown out. The Maoists' submission had caused great difficulty for the country’s poor peasants, youth, working class and the rest of the marginalised classes and castes. This resulted in their complete disconnect with the masses. It made the old elite’s job easier.

The new government of Sushila Karki has announced that it would hold the elections within six months. Going by the treads in Nepal, it doesn’t look plausible. This is only a measure to buy time before the army-bureaucrat complex consolidated its grip on power. They have already started spying on the youth who had organised the protests. They are now fuelling splits in parliamentary parties. In all likelihood the new government will soon initiate actions against the political leaders accusing them of corruption.

The military takeover in Nepal has, in a way, ended the transition period which had begun in 2006 in favour of the reactionary forces. This has also proved that the so-called old, outdated Marxism is the only true Marxism and those who deviate from it dig their own grave.

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