Revolts in Morocco. Popular discontent meets repression from the regime of Mohamed VI

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For several days, thousands of young Moroccans have taken to the streets to protest against the dire economic and social conditions in which the majority of the population lives. They are demanding improvements in healthcare and education, but at the root lies a profound social discontent that has built up over the years and has now exploded, putting young people at the head of a movement that must face both the repression of the Moroccan state and the complicit silence of Western media.

Morocco is characterized by a state ruled with an iron fist, with a bourgeoisie united around the royal family and a central nucleus of the latter—the so-called Majzén—which imposes terror as its only means of government. Domestically, the dominance of this bourgeoisie rests on a military-type regime that guarantees the exploitation of proletarians in both countryside and cities, and the subjugation of vast layers of destitute masses surviving through the exploitation of small agricultural plots, fishing, or the cultivation of marijuana and the processing and smuggling of its derivatives. In addition, this bourgeois class makes huge profits from the systematic plundering of Western Sahara, where it keeps the Sahrawi population in terrible living conditions, constantly persecuted and threatened by the army, which in turn enables the exploitation of the region’s valuable mineral resources.

In terms of foreign policy, since independence in 1956 under Mohamed V, Morocco has been a loyal ally of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, who saw in the conservative and authoritarian regime an effective bulwark against national liberation movements that shook both the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa. This privileged status as ally of the main Euro-American imperialist powers meant for Morocco both a guarantee of internal stability and support for its expansionist project, whose first milestone was the conquest of Western Sahara after Spain’s withdrawal following the “Green March” in 1975. Since then, Morocco has amply repaid the support it received.

First, because it has always acted as a guarantor of peace and stability toward Mauritania and Algeria—countries seen by the former colonial powers as far less stable and thus riskier for imperialist control of the region. Second, and especially in recent years, Morocco has consolidated its role as a buffer state blocking the passage of large migratory flows coming from sub-Saharan Africa toward Europe through Spain. The Moroccan army and gendarmerie have shown their ability to contain thousands upon thousands of migrants within its territory, creating true open-air detention camps, in exchange for financial aid from European Union countries. Unsurprisingly, when these subsidies are interrupted, or when relations with its partners across the Strait of Gibraltar falter, Morocco exerts pressure by allowing hundreds of migrants to cross into Ceuta and Melilla. Morocco is thus a sinister guarantor of imperialist stability in both the Maghreb and Europe, a role reinforced worldwide—for example through its strategic importance in supporting Israel by signing the Abraham Accords, engaging in military cooperation with the Zionist state, and so on.

The current revolts, ongoing for three days, recall those that shook the Rif in 2016 and 2017, when thousands of Riffians, organized by the Hirak Movement, took to the streets demanding economic and social reforms—though those uprisings had a strong ethnic dimension and a more limited geographical scope. Back then, the revolts arose amid the rapid impoverishment of the Rif population, generally engaged in subsistence farming, as one of the consequences of the global capitalist crisis of 2008–2014.

Today’s protests, in contrast, are happening at a time when Mohamed VI’s regime loudly proclaims the country’s growing prosperity, the result of European economic aid and a certain recovery in manufacturing and agricultural processing. The upcoming celebration of the Football World Cup is presented as a showcase for this supposed prosperity—a milestone by which the regime intends to seal its image as a “modern” state integrated among the world’s great powers.

But behind this façade of well-being lies a profound social discontent that has driven thousands of young people to clash with the police demanding change. And this is a discontent with deep roots. As elsewhere, the exit from the capitalist crisis of the last two decades has been achieved through a brutal intensification of proletarian exploitation and heavier pressure on the poorest masses. The “return to normal” in business (normal and inevitable until the next crisis, of course) was obtained by placing the burden of “recovery” chiefly on the shoulders of wage workers, but also small farmers and others, who were devastated by international competition against which they could not fight, leaving them in dramatic circumstances. It is the youth—who rightly see their future as one of suffering and misery, while the country brags about its development—who have lit the fuse of revolt.

This type of uprising reflects the irreparable deterioration of living conditions for most of the population, particularly the proletariat, whose exploitation sustains the entire capitalist economy. It resembles those seen recently in Nepal, Ecuador, and elsewhere. It manifests itself as an indistinct whole that, taken together, demands only democratic reforms, better governance, improved public services, etc.

The Moroccan proletariat does not have a long history as a distinct social class and has only a handful of experiences in struggle against the bourgeoisie and its state. These struggles are undoubtedly commendable but remain few, suffocated by repression and accompanied by the occasional minor concessions that the ruling bourgeoisie grants to some petty-bourgeois strata.

Nevertheless, the course of capitalist development in the Maghreb and the rest of Africa has created an objective factor that can accelerate the definition of the proletarian class terrain in this region: the workers who have emigrated to the metropoles. These proletarians—who share jobs and housing with European workers, who are part of the most impoverished sectors of the Spanish and French proletariat, and who in Europe belong to a working class that unites laborers of many races and origins, forming a powerful potential class force—could act as transmitters of a broader tradition of struggle and organization than what exists in Morocco, and at the same time help show European workers the way to a far more uncompromising struggle than what exists in their countries today.

It is true that this European proletariat has for decades behaved as a relatively docile subordinate to the bourgeoisie, with only small, limited social explosions, but generally submissive to the ruling class’s needs. For many years, forces of political and trade-union opportunism, along with remnants of social safety nets preventing them from falling into absolute misery, have succeeded in tying them to a rigid policy of collaboration with the bourgeoisie. Yet these restraints will slowly wear away. Immigration is a good example: the import of workers from other countries, which the bourgeoisie needs to drive down the living and working conditions of Western workers, objectively undermines the “well-being” that has long served as a social buffer. Just as it is certain that the future of capitalist society will once again be that of proletarian class struggle—since the concessions that the bourgeoisie used for decades to guarantee social peace are being exhausted at breakneck speed—it can also be understood that this class struggle will not only play out in Europe, America, or Asia, but that the immense African proletarian army, today living precariously in those places, will help spread the flame of revolt to the workers of Marrakech, Nador, or Nouakchott.

It would be absurd, un-materialist, and directly fatal to expect the proletariat to abandon these struggles while waiting for a “pure” proletarian struggle, just as it would be absurd to demand that it renounce partial or isolated battles on the grounds that they are useless. In this phase of depression in class struggle, the proletarian revival will inevitably pass through such battles, which do not yet represent a genuine revival of class struggle, to eventually reach independent class struggle. But for today’s struggles to be fruitful, workers must clearly recognize what is happening before their eyes, identify the material interests of the classes in conflict and therefore their own, understand that these struggles are only episodes aimed at effects, not causes, and recognize the very conditions of their emancipation. Only by learning from these struggles will they be able to break the web of class collaboration politics, achieve class independence, unite, and develop all the necessary elements for the battles ahead. They will then cease to be a subordinate class to capital, enter the field of their own political struggle, be followed by other socially marginalized strata, and in the fullest sense become revolutionary.

For us revolutionary communists, working for the revival of class struggle by developing the Marxist work of the party—however limited it may seem today—the task is to prepare the conditions in which such class struggle will reappear. Not as a result of our will, nor as a consequence of praising as “proletarian” or “revolutionary” any convulsion within the bourgeois world, but as the outcome of material facts that push—and will always push—different social classes into a life-and-death war against each other.

The Moroccan workers who fight in the streets today will sooner or later join the great class army of the world proletariat, and they will do so by struggling against every democratic mystification and every residue of cross-class solidarity that today still dominates, dulls, and paralyzes them.

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