Nepal has once again been thrust into turmoil. In September 2025, mass protests driven primarily by young people—the so-called “Gen Z” generation—erupted against corruption, repression, and a political class that has long failed to provide jobs or hope.
The protests, sparked by unpopular government attempts to regulate and tax digital platforms, left dozens dead after brutal repression, and forced the resignation of the sitting government. An interim administration has been installed to manage the situation and guide the country toward elections.
Reformism Leads to Ruin
Karl Marx once observed that the bourgeois state is but “a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” For communists to imagine that they can simply administer this machinery in the people’s interest is a profound illusion. Nepal’s recent experience proves this once again.
The Communist Party of Nepal and its offshoots, after years of revolutionary struggle, turned increasingly toward parliamentary maneuvering and coalition politics. Their record in power was not one of transforming society but of managing capitalism, brokering deals, and distributing offices. This is not communism—it is reformism, and it breeds only disillusionment.
Lenin warned against this trap with characteristic clarity: “To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament—such is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism.” Parties that content themselves with such a role inevitably become indistinguishable from the bourgeoisie they once opposed.
In Nepal, youth unemployment, dependence on remittances, and the absence of radical land or industrial reform steadily eroded faith in the so-called communists. When young people took to the streets in 2025, it was not because they demanded more parliamentary compromises, but because they had lost patience with a corrupt political class presiding over stagnation.
Here lies the first lesson: when communists substitute reformist administration for revolutionary transformation, they betray their mission. They cease to be tribunes of the people and become, in Stalin’s words, “an appendage to the bourgeoisie.” Bureaucratization, corruption, and elite capture follow, severing the party from the masses.
The only antidote is a return to class struggle: to rebuild unions, peasants’ committees, student fronts, and workers’ organizations; to articulate programs that strike at capitalist property, not just bad governance; and to ensure that communists live and struggle among the people, not above them.
Imperialist Machinations Demand Vigilance
If reformism represents one danger, imperialism represents another—equally deadly. The crisis in Nepal immediately drew the attention of outside powers. Both India and China rushed to defend their economic stakes and strategic influence. Western embassies and multilateral lenders, too, seized the opportunity to shape Nepal’s political direction.
Lenin defined imperialism as “the highest stage of capitalism,” marked by the export of capital, monopolies, and the partitioning of the world among great powers. Nepal today is a textbook case: a small country treated as a chessboard for competing empires. Beijing seeks to protect its Belt and Road projects, New Delhi aims to maintain its sphere of influence, while the imperialist West hovers, eager to insert conditionalities and investor protections into any new arrangement.
Adding to these pressures, reactionary and pro-monarchy elements—waiting in the shadows since 2008—stand ready to exploit the instability and push for a restoration of the old order if revolutionary forces fail to lead the people.
For communists, the lesson is clear: never entrust the fate of the working people to one imperialist camp against another. Stalin emphasized that the revolutionary movement must be “independent of the bourgeoisie of all countries.” To lean on one empire for protection against another is merely to exchange one master for another.
This does not mean ignoring the contradictions among imperialist powers. Indeed, communists can tactically exploit such rivalries to carve out space for independent development. But the guiding principle must be proletarian independence: no foreign bases, no debt traps, no surrender of natural resources, no illusions that Beijing or Delhi or Washington can serve as liberators.
What is required is vigilance and mobilization. Every foreign deal must be scrutinized, every imperialist attempt at intervention resisted, and every effort made to build regional solidarity among workers and peasants that transcends national borders. Only then can Nepal secure sovereignty rooted in the power of its own people, not in the patronage of rival imperialisms.
Nepal’s upheaval teaches us that reformism breeds betrayal, and imperialism never sleeps. Together, these dangers form a double noose around the people: one tightening from above, as nominally communist parties degenerate into corrupt managers of capitalism; the other tightening from without, as imperialist powers maneuver to control the country’s fate.
The answer lies where Marx, Lenin, and Stalin always located it: in the independent organization and mobilization of the working class and peasantry, guided by a revolutionary program, hostile to compromise with capital, and vigilant against all imperialisms.
The task is not to better manage the old order but to replace it. The Nepali masses, by their courage in the streets, have already begun to demand it. The duty of communists is to rise to that demand—not with empty slogans, but with a clear program, a disciplined party, and unshakeable fidelity to the cause of revolution.
As Lenin once said: “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” And without revolutionary movement, the people remain chained. Nepal’s tragedy is a warning. Its future can yet be a beacon—if communists learn, and act, on these lessons.
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.