The Moral Economy: Theorizing the CJP

Why do people protest? What prompts people to take to the streets? Why do we see a global epidemic of distrust of authority? What hope does protesting provide to people with no access to healthcare, sanitation, food, education or jobs? At what point does protest lead to massive movements that completely change the geography of the politics of the land?

If you are curious about the rising dissent across India, specifically with the Cockroach Janta Party ( CJP) movement, please read on.

A plausible explanation comes from an understanding of theories such as Moral Economy, Connective Action and Anomie. Let's begin by looking into the definitions of these theories before trying to connect the dots.

An anomie is a social condition marked by a breakdown or loss of social norms, values, and moral guidance. The word comes from a Greek term meaning "lawlessness". It leaves people feeling lost, disconnected, or without a clear purpose.

Connective action is a form of political engagement where people organize and share ideas through digital media and social networks. Instead of relying on traditional groups or strong leaders, individuals join in by sharing personal stories and custom messages online.

A moral economy refers to the shared norms through which people judge whether economic practices, especially those governing necessities, are fair and legitimate.

Now are these concepts relevant to the recent protests across not only South Asia but the world? To answer this question, we must travel back in time to England in the 1700s.

1700s England saw several Food riots from 1740, 1756–57, 1766, 1795–96, and 1800–01. Notably amongst them were the 1740 riots that were to block the merchants from exporting food; riots caused due to the 1756 - 57 food shortages, which resulted in coordinated attacks on grain dealers and hoarders; 1766 riots which resulted in enforcing fair prices on local markets; 1795 price-setting riots with a peak in 1801.

So what was going on in the 1700s that resulted in these riots. A hot dry summer in 1794, an exceptionally cold winter in 1795, followed by spring flooding resulted in poor wheat harvests. At the same time, Britain was also at war with France, which disrupted their trade. Alongside, enclosures were on the rise involving privatization of the lands, the very lands that were used as pastures for grazing animals and collecting firewood. To top it off, poor relief that was locally administered, was uneven, and politically contested; in 1795 some parishes adopted wage-subsidy practices later known as Speenhamland.

Having painted the background, imagine if you found out that some middlemen were buying grain off the farmers before it reached the market, selling it at a higher price to make a profit. The cost of living was going up and your wages did not keep up with the rise. What would you do? Would you riot? Well, the working class, including laborers, artisans, and many women responsible for household provisioning, participated in food protests.

But that wasn't the only reason. The other reason why they rioted was because of the bread mix.

The bakers would often provide a bread mix consisting of lesser wheat than the barley, oats or rye additives. You see white bread was a staple for the peasants. Millers and bakers would routinely provide adulterated flour to stretch their supplies and maximize profits. Sometimes this resulted in the Brown Bread Mix. In fact during the 1795 famine year, the British government tried to ban pure white flour to protect their reserves, forcing the public to eat "Standard Wheaten Bread", a dark, gritty, lower-quality loaf mixed with coarse bran, barley, or rye.

In other cases, a poisonous white bread mix was created to artificially whiten and bulk up the bread by adding in alum, chalk and ground bones. Even rumors of a potential adulteration were met with public violence, which prompted the Parliament to pass the Making of Bread Act of 1757. Other accounts on why people rioted included stones being found in the bread and even uncooked, soggy dough on the inside. The people leading the riots were mostly working class women, which further puzzled the theorists.

The Revolt of the Housewives [1795]

In examining these riots, the English Historian, E.P Thompson attempts to retheorize on why people protest and riot. He coined the Moral Economy.

Upon analyzing the Revolt of the Housewives and the transition into Capitalism, Thompson concluded that the Moral Economy was structured around Customary Rights, the norms, values and beliefs that legitimate economic decisions and actions. He focused on one of the demands of the protestors and that is of "just prices" by stating that economic actions are not based on self-interests but deeply held social values and expectations. He argues that the legitimacy of these economic practices that include just prices, humane working conditions, access to resources, were judged on whether or not they adhere to community norms and ethical standards, and not by efficacy or profitability standards.

Protest and resistance arise when there is a perceived violation of these moral and ethical standards set by the community. These protests become sites to reflect on this collective sense of injustice, demanding moral rectification. Violating these customary rights were seen as moral transgressions justifying collective action, protest and resistance.

In other words, protests weren't only a response to economic hardships and hunger, but driven by moral outrage against perceived injustices.

Does the crowd matter? Moral economy of the 19th century

Karl Polanyi's book, "The Great Transformation" explores the transition from pre-Capitalist (pre-Market) to Capitalist Economic Systems (Market). Its here where he argues that economic activities in pre-Market societies were embedded in social, cultural and political relations. Here, production and consumption was intertwined with broader social obligations, religious beliefs, community norms, custom and tradition. In these societies, reciprocity and redistribution predominated which helped maintain social cohesion, ensuring the needs of the community was met.

He further points out that in the transition from pre-Market to Market societies, economic activities became dis-embedded from social relations, leading to self-regulated Markets. This dis-embedding of the economy required a reconceptualization of land, money and labor into Fictitious Commodities.

Fictitious commodities are elements, specifically labor, land, and money, that are treated as if they were goods produced for sale on a market, even though they were never actually created for that purpose.

Why They Are "Fictitious"?

• Not Produced for Sale: True commodities are made specifically to be sold. These three exist naturally or socially.

• Social Harm: Treating people, nature, and finance purely as market items leads to crises like poverty, environmental ruin, and economic crashes.

• Need for Control: Societies must use laws and rules to protect these areas from total free-market control.

When Market forces determine the price and the value of these items, by treating them as commodities for sale, a process that Polanyi defines as Commodity Fiction, Liberal Capitalism emerges.

“...To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity, "labor power" cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man's labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity of "man" attached to the tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rovers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed...” [Polanyi, 1944]

While Thompson's theory focusses on cultural and moral foundations of economic actions, Polanyi's theory speaks of how economic systems are dis-embedded in social relations. Since Thompson's analysis is focused on the micro-level his theories are often used to understand economic grievances across the world like the hunger riots of Chile, Egypt's labor protests, survival strategies of Vietnamese peasants, and more.

In authoritarian political economies, education is not simply a route to employment; it is a mechanism through which the state and its allied corporate interests sort people according to their usefulness as labor. Entrance examinations, degrees, recruitment systems, and political compliance determine who may access a secure livelihood and who may be excluded from it. Social protection is therefore not an independent guarantee against market or state power. It is conditional, selective, and often distributed through patronage, loyalty, or productivity. In this sense, labor is not merely treated as a fictitious commodity: human security itself becomes contingent upon an individual’s usefulness to the regime’s political economy. Those unable or unwilling to meet those conditions risk being treated as surplus, disposable, or socially abandoned.

For CJP supporters, unemployment and credential exclusion are not private failures but evidence that the state has made dignity conditional on usefulness. Enter, Necropolitcs.

Necropolitics, a term developed by Achille Mbembe, describes the exercise of sovereign power through the capacity to determine who may live securely and who is exposed to death, injury, abandonment, or conditions of extreme precarity. It names the production of what Mbembe calls “death worlds”: social spaces in which certain populations are reduced to a life that resembles a drawn-out death. In authoritarian political economies, this framework becomes relevant when the state’s distribution of security and protection is made conditional on political obedience, class position, or usefulness as labor.

Necropolitics

Which brings me to the growing dissent among young people against governments across South Asia. Contemporary crises may be experienced by some young people as evidence that established institutions no longer provide credible moral or material guarantees. This resembles a problem of moral regulation. For Émile Durkheim, anomie described a condition of inadequate or disrupted moral regulation amid rapid social and economic change.

While older generations operated under institutional, localized, and often faith-based moralities, many digitally connected young people are experiencing a profound moral re-regulation. Driven by the hyper-exposure of global crises on social media, they are bypassing traditional 'us vs. them' societal boundaries. Rather than falling into a state of normless anomie, they are actively constructing a collective, borderless ethical framework centered on universal human rights and systemic resistance against corporate and political oligarchies.

Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the global village offers an early way of thinking about how media can compress distance and make distant experiences politically immediate. In the CJP movement, however, digital media does more than connect a global audience: it provides the infrastructure through which humiliation is converted into political identity. Connective action does not require participants to begin with a fixed party identity or a formal organization. It works when individuals recognize their own experience in a shareable political frame and circulate that frame through digital networks. The Cockroach Janta Party demonstrates this process. A term of humiliation aimed at unemployed youth was reclaimed as a collective language of dissent. Reels, memes, posts, and testimony allowed people to connect personal experiences of unemployment, examination pressure, exclusion, and political contempt to a common political demand. The movement’s mass scale did not contradict connective action; it emerged through the rapid aggregation of these personalized grievances into a shared political force.

A phone in this situation acts as a newspaper, a TV network, a classroom, an organizing office, a reporter's camera, and as a witness to state violence. While the older generations were introduced to politics through formal institutions such as parties and TV networks, the younger generations have the capacity to enter politics through reels, shorts, lives and tweets. This changes the game from being exposed to carefully scripted information, to live, real-time experiences. This transforms social media platforms into a fluid, self-organizing infrastructure capable of challenging global power centers.

Taken together, moral economy, Polanyi’s account of fictitious commodities, anomie, necropolitics, and connective action do not explain every youth movement in the same way. They do, however, clarify the CJP’s trajectory: material insecurity is interpreted as a violation of moral obligation; usefulness as labor becomes a condition of social survival; institutional authority loses moral credibility; and digital networks transform private humiliation into mass, self-organizing dissent. The CJP is therefore not merely an online trend or a reaction to one insult. It is a political movement through which young people articulate a demand for dignity, security, and democratic accountability.

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