The so-called “Cockroach Party” is not a traditional political organisation. It is a satirical protest movement known as the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), or Cockroach People’s Party. It emerged in May 2026 as an ironic, viral response to comments made by then Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, who compared unemployed young people and activists to “cockroaches” and “parasites of society.”
Abhijeet Dipke, a communications strategist and student at Boston University, turned the insult into a meme and a digital platform under the slogan “the voice of the idle and unemployed,” deliberately parodying the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). What began as an effort to exert pressure from outside the party system has grown, according to several analysts, into the greatest youth challenge facing Narendra Modi’s government. The CJP is not an appendage of the opposition. It is an autonomous actor within a digital civil society. Its strength lies precisely in its position outside the system: a satirical party, absent from official registers, in which a growing share of the population sees a better alternative to institutional reality.
What unites the young people in India who call themselves cockroaches with those taking to the streets from the suburbs of Paris to Belgrade is a shared material diagnosis: the exhaustion of the liberal meritocratic bargain that promised social mobility through formal education. The political expression of that discontent, however, is not universal. It is shaped by organisational traditions, historical memories, political opportunity structures and local cultural styles. The CJP illustrates a distinctively Indian variant: satirical, identity-based and deliberately light on ideology. In Europe, the same discontent is more readily expressed through the language of intergenerational inequality, the defence of public services and, in some quarters, criticism of late capitalism or rearmament.
The figures are telling. In India, unemployment among 15- to 29-year-olds stood at around 16.2 percent in June 2026, well above the overall rate. Among young graduates aged 15 to 25, the figure approaches 40 percent. There is a structural mismatch between the rising number of university degrees and the shortage of good-quality formal jobs. Economic growth is not creating enough opportunities for the most highly educated generation in the country’s history. Exam leaks and the buying of exam papers deepen the perception that the meritocratic ladder is either broken or rigged.
In Europe, the picture is different in form but similar in substance. In 2025, 25.5 percent of people aged 15 to 29 in France were at risk of poverty or social exclusion, according to Eurostat. In August 2026, unemployment among people under 25 stood at 20.6 percent, compared with 8.2 percent for the population as a whole. Across the European Union, the corresponding figures were 15.4 percent and 6.1 percent. The most highly educated generation in history studies, remains poor and lives with its parents well into adulthood. The cost of living, deteriorating educational facilities, the housing crisis and perceived corruption overlap to produce a widespread feeling: no one is listening to us.
Ultimately, people mobilise to decide who will bear the burden of adjustment. The most sophisticated and aggressive neoliberal explanation of recent decades has been the theory of “expansionary austerity.” According to this view, the crisis was caused by excessive public spending, and recovery requires the state to step aside, reduce its debt and make room for private initiative. The first claim is demonstrably false. The crisis originated in the private financial sector, in a property bubble. Public spending had nothing to do with it.
Several of the European states hit hardest by the crisis had run budget surpluses in the preceding years. The recessionary consequences of austerity policies became clear immediately. They were nevertheless maintained. From 2008 onwards, the European Central Bank imposed reductions in social spending and freezes on public-sector wages and pensions in an effort to reduce deficits and reassure the markets. In almost every case, the policy proved counterproductive: it deepened the recession, reduced tax revenues and increased the relative burden of debt, later compounded by military spending.
The heart of the conflict is therefore not “young versus old.” It is a crisis of income and wealth distribution. The cost of living, unaffordable housing, stagnant or precarious wages, the degradation of public services and the concentration of assets, especially property, affect poorly paid workers of all ages, impoverished middle-class families, migrants and sections of both the formal and informal working classes. In ageing European societies, pensions have become the largest and most politically protected area of public spending. In France, they account for roughly 14 percent of GDP; in Greece and Italy, the figure exceeds 16 percent. Older voters and the unions that represent them are right to resist cuts. But that resistance does not turn the problem into a natural conflict between age cohorts. It turns the distribution of income into a question of political power.
For decades, meritocracy served as a legitimising narrative for the elites: study hard, work hard and you will improve your relative wages and social position. The data emerging from these protests empirically refute that promise. Young Europeans face precarious employment even when they hold university degrees, housing costs that force them to live with their parents and a labour market in which automation is eroding entry-level jobs. Meritocracy now functions more as an ideology of justification than as a genuine mechanism of mobility. Those who already occupy positions of power can continue to believe in it because it worked for them, or because their networks and cultural capital compensated for the system’s failures. For a growing share of young people, the message is different: we did what we were told, and the promised result never came.
The comparison between the Cockroach Janta Party and the European mobilisations remains productive precisely because it reveals two different political languages for the same diagnosis. In Europe, discontent is more readily articulated in terms of intergenerational inequality and the defence of public services. In India, it takes the form of satirical meritocratic outrage: the demand is that the examination and selection system should once again fulfil its promise of social mobility, without necessarily rejecting the idea of merit at its root. In both cases, the elites underestimate the depth of the phenomenon. They see “youth protests,” when what is taking place is a generation experiencing, in real time, the closure of the routes to advancement it had been promised. Once that experience becomes widespread, it cannot be dispelled by symbolic gestures or promises of future growth.
Two themes stand out. The first is the collapse of neoclassical human-capital theory. As formulated by Gary Becker, it has lost much of its explanatory and normative power. For decades, it helped shift the debate away from the redistribution of income and power and towards “investment in oneself.”
Education was presented as a rational investment made by individuals to increase their future productivity and, consequently, their earnings. The more one invested in years of study and skills, the greater the return was supposed to be. Unemployment or low wages among the highly educated were interpreted as temporary adjustment failures, or as evidence that the investment had been inadequate. In practice, a degree has ceased to be a strong differentiator. At best, it has become a necessary but insufficient condition.
The theory struggles to explain why so much investment produces diminishing or nonexistent returns for large sections of the population. Classic critiques had already pointed out that education often functions more as a signal of discipline, conformity or social origin than as a direct source of productivity. When the labour market becomes divided between stable and precarious jobs, that signal becomes more costly and less effective for those without additional networks.
The theory focuses almost exclusively on supply, on what individuals bring to the market, and fails to explain why, even as aggregate human capital increases, the wages of young and semi-skilled workers stagnate or decline while labour’s share of income grows smaller and capital’s share expands. If you studied and things are not going well, the problem is supposedly yours. This logic turns a problem of distribution and opportunity structures into a matter of personal responsibility. It is precisely what today’s protests reject: the bargain was broken, not the individual.
The second theme refers to “Murders in Paradise,” the title of one of the chapters in the celebrated book Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures (1977), by the American anthropologist Marvin Harris. Drawing on Richard B. Lee’s fieldwork among the San people of the Kalahari, Harris showed that the average adult in that society devoted between twelve and twenty hours a week to obtaining food. The rest of the time was spent on leisure, social life, rest and play. Their diet was nutritionally adequate. By contrast, the Western middle-class worker of the 1960s and 1970s was already working forty-five formal hours a week, in addition to commuting, domestic tasks and the constant pressure of debt and taxes. Harris used this contrast to dismantle the idea that agriculture and later industry had freed us from work. In reality, he argued, they had increased the burden of labour and inequality, even as they raised total production.
Today’s data update that critique in uncomfortable ways. In most OECD countries, the formal working week is around thirty-five to forty hours, but commuting time and unpaid domestic work must be added to that figure. Time-use studies show that the total workload of many working-age adults remains far higher than the fifteen or twenty hours worked by the hunter-gatherer groups studied by Lee.
In Brazil, in this year of our Lord 2026, there is still debate over moving from a six-on, one-off schedule, amounting to forty-eight hours, to a five-on, one-off schedule of forty hours. The problem is not only the number of hours. It is the distribution of time and of the social product. A society that produces unprecedented material wealth continues to impose long working hours, economic insecurity and anxiety on broad sections of the population, while concentrating free time and security among those who already own assets: housing, financial capital and networks.
Harris’s argument remains powerful because it allows us to look at the present without the fog of the myth of progress. If a Kalahari San person in the 1960s could obtain an adequate diet with two or three hours of work a day and spend the rest of the day on social life, what does it say about our societies that millions of educated young people work, or search for work, for many more hours, live with greater housing insecurity and feel that their efforts do not translate into security or time of their own?
The comparison is not nostalgic. It is a critical tool. It shows that rising productivity has not automatically translated into a lighter life for the majority, and that the story that people must study and work harder in order to get ahead now functions, to a considerable extent, as an ideology that conceals a problem of income, time and power distribution. In that sense, Harris speaks directly to the crisis of human-capital theory and to the discontent expressed both by India’s cockroaches and by the young people occupying the streets of Europe.
Recognising the cockroaches is not an act of condescension. It means acknowledging that a significant share of the world’s young people have stopped believing in the story they were offered. They did what they were told. The promised result never came. And when that result fails to materialise on a mass scale and over a sustained period, traditional politics begins to run out of answers.
