By Muhammad Adel Zaky

Media coverage of Nepal's recent protests insists on presenting them as a movement of a disgruntled generation, or as a spontaneous rebellion of a political adolescence seeking its voice. However, this characterization, which appears neutral, is in truth an ideological discourse serving a specific function: to de-socialize the collectively rooted social anger and transform it into a psychological issue. Speaking of a "moody generation" conceals the truth that the entire political system is facing a crisis of legitimacy, and that the very conditions of life have become unsustainable.

This anger was born from the heart of a suffocating economic reality. For two decades, Nepal has lived to the rhythm of neoliberal transformations that have turned it into a fragile service-based economy, reliant on remittances and migrant labor. Millions of young people live without work or with wages insufficient to reproduce the most basic living conditions. In contrast, wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few elites connected to political corruption networks, which have become the real form of power after the collapse of the republican dream that followed the civil war.

The crisis may seem economic today, but at its core, it is a crisis of the very mode of power. The system built after 2006 has failed to transcend the logic of caste and ethnicity, which has reproduced division instead of overcoming it. The performance of parliamentary democracy has turned into a false mask for a system of allegiances, where positions and resources are distributed based on political kinship, not on competence or public interest. With every electoral cycle, the same incapacity is renewed: a state without a project, and corruption without end.

In this context, the current movement cannot be viewed as an isolated rebellion, but rather as an act of collective consciousness against a form of reproducing the power of repression and corruption. When the youth take to the streets, they are not only demanding the fall of a corrupt government, but also the dismantling of the state's repressive relationship with society. They are confronting the structure that has turned the state into an apparatus for distributing spoils, instead of being a tool for organizing social life.

More dangerously, the official and media language has tried to contain this anger by categorizing it. When the revolution is called a "youth movement," it is detached from the history of the popular classes that gave birth to it. And when it is labeled as "political decentralization," its class dimension is overlooked. In this way, language becomes another tool of repression, albeit a soft one: it does not attack the movement, but reinterprets it in a way that makes it acceptable within the existing system.

What is happening can be read as a moment of exposure between the base and superstructure. The neoliberal economy imposed on Nepal under the slogans of development and openness has ultimately produced an unbalanced society, where most of the population has nothing but their labor power to sell, domestically or abroad. As the national economy transformed into a remittance-based economy, the ruling class lost any interest in real production, and political power became merely a broker in distributing rent. When this balance collapses, the contradiction between rentier capital and the productive society appears in its most glaring form: in the street.

What makes this movement exceptional is that it was not initiated by a traditional party or union, but erupted from the very void of organization. This void does not signify an absence of consciousness, but rather the beginning of its formation outside the old institutions of control. The new generations do not start from ready-made ideological categories, but they carry, consciously or not, a radical stance towards the existing social order; their material experience with unemployment, alienation, and meaninglessness is enough to produce this consciousness.

In this sense, Nepal is not experiencing a "youth revolution," but rather a moment of comprehensive class fracture, taking a new form that is both organized and spontaneous. Every slogan raised in the streets today, from "justice" to "dignity," carries a deeper question behind it: For whom is this state run? For which class does this economy work?

What looms on the horizon is not just a protest against corruption, but the beginning of a search for a new social horizon. When contradictions explode in this manner, the possibility of thinking about an alternative becomes more realistic than many assume. For revolutions are not born from faith in ideas, but from the inability of the existing system to reproduce itself. And Nepal today seems a clear model of this: a state eroding from within, and a society discovering, through its own experience, that the future cannot be built on the ruins of the present, but only on transcending it.

Muhammad Adel Zaky is an Egyptian researcher specializing in the history of economic thought. He is the author of Critique of Political Economy, a book that has gone through six editions. His research explores the evolution of economic ideas in relation to social and historical change.