https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/07/24/nwfj-j24.html
Vijay Prashad is the organizer of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/07/24/the-generation-that-refuses-to-crawl/
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Trump administration witch-hunts People’s Forum and BreakThrough News
The House Ways and Means Committee has issued subpoenas to three non-profit groups with alleged links to the Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL), claiming that the groups received nearly $40 million in funding from multi-millionaire Neville Roy Singham, an American who moved to Shanghai after selling his tech company in 2017.
The compulsory subpoenas were issued July 21 to People’s Forum, based in New York City, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, based in Massachusetts, and BreakThrough News, a media outlet, after all three groups declined to supply documents to the committee voluntarily. The groups were given until August 7 to comply.
According to chair Jason Smith (R-Missouri), the House committee, which has jurisdiction over all tax legislation, is investigating whether existing laws regulating tax-exempt organizations should be tightened. His letters to the three groups declare: “Your responses have failed to include a single responsive document and misrepresented both the scope and purpose of the Committee’s oversight … Accordingly, the Committee is invoking compulsory process to obtain the requested materials.”
The letters cited a Fox News Digital investigation published in March that claimed Singham sent $278 million through a network of non-profits, political groups, and media outlets that “by design, obscure the original source of the contribution.” Both Fox and the House Republicans suggest that it is the Chinese Communist Party that is the actual source of the funds, although Singham clearly has the necessary resources, having sold his Chicago-based software company, ThoughtWorks, for $785 million.
And while Fox is currently leading the media campaign over Singham, its own reports were based heavily on a 2023 investigation by the New York Times, under the provocative headline, “A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul.”
Singham, now 72, was reportedly a member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, a Maoist group active in the 1970s, before becoming a successful tech industry capitalist. In 2017, he married Jodie Evans, a co-founder of the antiwar feminist group Code Pink, and a few months later sold his company to a British private equity firm, and moved across the Pacific to Shanghai, where he is now based.
In addition to his funding of various non-profits, Singham also gave $1.3 million to support Code Pink, as well as millions more to a wide variety of antiwar and other left-wing protest groups. No evidence has been presented to show that any of these contributions were illegal.
According to the Fox News account, “The committee asked for records about foreign-linked funding and projects whose finances the groups managed. It also sought contracts tied to foreign people or organizations, communications with Singham about the groups’ finances or operations, contacts with other foreign interests, foreign donors who gave more than $5,000 and grants sent overseas.”
Attorneys for the three groups cited First Amendment protections for freedom of speech, freedom of association and, in the case of BreakThrough News, freedom of the press, but the House committee’s letter brushed these objections aside, claiming that they were investigating sources of funding, not the political views or activities of the groups being subpoenaed.
This legalistic pretense is a masquerade for anticommunist witch-hunting, as the remarks of Smith to Fox News make clear. “The American people deserve to know whether the CCP has exploited America’s tax-exempt sector to advance its agenda… The Ways and Means Committee is acting on two fronts: exposing the networks that exploit our tax laws and advancing legislation to close those loopholes for good.”
Both Fox News and CBS News (now under the control of right-wing pro-Trump billionaire David Ellison) have reported that a federal grand jury in Manhattan is investigating alleged financial crimes linked to Singham and the organizations he supported. The probe was launched by Jay Clayton, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who has been nominated by Trump to become the permanent Director of National Intelligence, the top-level coordinator of the vast US intelligence apparatus.
According to CBS, “House Ways and Means and other congressional committees allege Singham’s funding of radical activist groups across the globe as well as inside the U.S. bears the classic hallmarks of Beijing’s broader influence campaigns, which weaponize domestic social causes to sow division in American politics.”
This is the classic “big lie” of right-wing witch-hunters: social conflicts in America are caused by “outside agitators,” not by the objective class divisions in a capitalist society in which a handful of billionaires controls the bulk of the wealth and dominates the political system and the corporate media.
This reaches a level of absurdity with claims that the massive “No Kings” protests, in which millions have taken part in some of the largest demonstrations in US history, were actually generated by funds supplied by Singham and George Soros, the Hungarian-American billionaire who has long been the target of right-wing antisemitic conspiracy theories.
The three non-profits subpoenaed by the House committee are only the initial target of the investigation. Fox News, which is spearheading the witch-hunt, has targeted the Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL), claiming that the Maoist organization, a split-off from the Workers World Party, overlaps with the non-profits in terms of leadership and program. Fox also identified the ANSWER group, an anti-war coalition headed by the PSL, as a recipient of funds from Singham.
The PSL is campaigning against AI data center development in many parts of the United States. The witch-hunters are suggesting that this campaign is aimed at setting back US efforts to dominate AI and assisting China in its development of effective competitors in this arena. One right-wing outlet, the Bitcoin Policy Institute, estimated that the PSL had opposed AI data center projects worth a combined total of $23.6 billion.
The Trotskyist movement has long and well-documented political differences with the PSL and the groups targeted by subpoenas. Despite these unbridgeable differences, the WSWS condemns the witch-hunt by the Trump administration against the PSL and other groups associated with it. This is an attack on the democratic rights of the working class as a whole, and would set a precedent to be used against any left-wing, socialist or working-class organization.
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July 24, 2026
The Generation That Refuses to Crawl
Image Source: SALlM BlN YOUSUF – CC BY 4.0
On 20 July, thousands of young people attempted to march from Jantar Mantar to Parliament. They carried placards, shouted slogans, and demanded the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over repeated examination irregularities, paper leaks, cancelled tests, and the government’s refusal to accept responsibility for the devastation inflicted upon students. The Delhi Police answered them with barricades, batons, and tear gas. Some protesters were detained, while others reorganised themselves into smaller groups and continued towards Parliament. The movement had crossed an important threshold: what began as satire on social media had entered the streets as a confrontation with state power.
The protesters call themselves the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). The name arose after a derogatory judicial remark compared activists and unemployed young people to cockroaches and parasites. Rather than retreat before the insult, the young turned it into a badge of collective defiance. If those who rule India see its unemployed youth as cockroaches, then the cockroaches will assemble. The name mocks the Bharatiya Janata Party, but it also captures something of the experience of a generation that has been told repeatedly that it is excessive, ungrateful, unemployable, and somehow personally responsible for the failure of the economic system, which they see as a precarious system that should give them jobs, but which —as the ruthless capitalist system—treats them as disposable.
Since its first major Delhi protest on 6 June, the movement has spread to cities including Pune, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Lucknow, and Nagpur. Its supporters established a camp at Jantar Mantar, where climate activist Sonam Wangchuk undertook a hunger strike in solidarity with their demands before being forcibly removed to the hospital. The immediate questions are serious enough: the integrity of entrance and recruitment examinations, compensation for the families of students who have taken their own lives, the reform of an examination system riddled with corruption, and the resignation of the education minister. Yet behind these demands lies a much larger social crisis, since an examination paper is not simply a sheet covered with questions. For millions of working-class families, it represents years of savings, sacrifice, study, and hope. When that paper is leaked or the examination is cancelled, an entire household’s fragile plan is torn apart.
The media has eagerly described the Cockroach movement as India’s first ‘Gen Z protest’. There is some truth in this description. Its language was born on social media, and it therefore deploys memes, satire, parody, short videos, and self-deprecating humour with great skill. Many of its participants have known no government other than that led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Their political vocabulary has developed under conditions in which television news has largely surrendered to power, dissent has been criminalised, and the internet has become both a mechanism of surveillance and one of the few remaining spaces in which anger can circulate rapidly. But the term ‘Gen Z’ explains far less than it appears to explain. It is a marketing category masquerading as sociology. It groups together the daughter of an agricultural labourer and the son of a billionaire merely because they were born within the same span of years. Generations do not sit for examinations, search for jobs, deliver food, or borrow money for coaching fees, but social classes do. The decisive question is not when these young people were born, but what kind of economic order they have inherited and what place, if any, that order has prepared for them.
The young protesters are not in revolt because they possess shorter attention spans or a special cultural aversion to authority. They are in revolt because capitalism cannot integrate them into dignified economic life. They have been told to study, acquire degrees, learn new skills, remain competitive, and become ‘entrepreneurs.’ Their families have borrowed money, sold land, postponed medical treatment, and reduced household consumption to pay for education and coaching. At the end of this punishing journey, many discover that the promised job does not exist. Others find only temporary contracts, unpaid internships, platform work, or jobs whose wages bear no relation to their qualifications.
Even the official figures reveal the scale of the problem. The government’s Periodic Labour Force Survey for 2025 placed unemployment among those aged fifteen to twenty-nine at 9.9 per cent, rising to 13.6 per cent among urban youth. It also found that one-quarter of Indians between fifteen and twenty-nine were neither employed nor in education or training. These headline figures obscure extensive underemployment, unpaid family labour, and the desperation that forces people to accept any activity whatsoever as work. Only 23.6 per cent of Indian workers were in regular wage or salaried employment, while 56.2 per cent were classified as self-employed, a category that stretches from prosperous professionals to street vendors and unpaid workers on family farms.
The India Employment Report produced by the Institute for Human Development and the International Labour Organisation provides an even clearer picture. In 2022, unemployment among young graduates stood at 29.1 per cent, nine times the rate among young people who could not read or write. Nearly 82 per cent of the workforce was in the informal sector, while almost 90 per cent was informally employed. Real wages for regular workers had either stagnated or declined, and platform employment had expanded as a digitally supervised extension of informal labour, largely without social security. The report found that the average wait for a first job exceeded one year and that many technically qualified young people were doing work unrelated to their training.
This is the bitter paradox at the heart of the protests. Education has expanded the aspirations and capacities of young Indians, but the economy has not expanded the number of decent jobs available to them. The more they study, the more clearly they see the gap between what society promised and what it can provide. Their degree becomes evidence not of their inadequacy but that of an economic model organised around finance, capital-intensive production, privatisation, and the enrichment of a small corporate elite.
The crisis did not begin with the Modi government, but twelve years of BJP rule have deepened it. Demonetisation and the poorly designed Goods and Services Tax (GST) damaged small businesses, which have historically absorbed large numbers of workers. Public-sector recruitment has been delayed or reduced, vacancies remain unfilled, and secure employment has been replaced by contractual labour. Manufacturing has not grown at the scale necessary to employ the millions entering the labour market each year. Meanwhile, public education has been weakened, and the coaching industry has expanded, turning anxiety into an immensely profitable commodity. The government celebrates GDP growth, highways, digital payments, unicorn companies, and the wealth of Indian billionaires, but none of these statistics answers the question heard in countless homes: where is the job?
Paper leaks must therefore be understood as more than administrative corruption. They are concentrated expressions of a larger class injustice. Millions compete for a small number of positions because secure work has been deliberately made scarce. Each applicant must pay fees, travel long distances, buy study material, and sometimes spend years in coaching centres. When an examination is compromised, the state speaks about technical glitches and investigative committees. For the candidate, however, time itself has been stolen. An upper-age limit approaches; family debt accumulates; another year disappears.
The government would like to isolate the protests as the emotional outburst of an impatient generation. It will alternate between ridicule, repression, promises of consultation, and attempts to divide the movement. The young will be told that they lack experience, that foreign forces are misleading them, or that their protest damages the nation’s image. But there is nothing anti-national about demanding that a country provide its youth with useful work. What damages India is an order in which young people are needed as consumers, data points, delivery workers, and electoral crowds, but not welcomed as workers with rights, citizens with voices, and human beings entitled to a future.
The Cockroach movement’s energy is important, but spontaneity and digital reach alone cannot overcome entrenched power. Its lasting strength will depend upon whether it links examination reform to the struggle for employment, public education, labour rights, and economic redistribution. The students at Jantar Mantar share a future with contractual teachers, scheme workers, delivery riders, factory apprentices, unemployed graduates, and rural labourers. The movement must resist attempts to describe organised politics, trade unions, and established student organisations as relics belonging to another generation. The experience accumulated by the organised working class is not a burden upon youthful revolt; it is one of the resources that can give such revolt endurance and direction.
The name ‘cockroach’ carries an unintended historical truth. Cockroaches survive because they are difficult to eliminate. But the young people in the streets are not asking merely to survive inside the cracks of a decaying system. They want to live, to work, to use what they have learned, and to contribute to society with dignity. Their anger is generational in its appearance but profoundly class-based in its content. The task before the Left is neither to romanticise this anger nor to lecture it from a distance, but to enter into dialogue with it, help it identify the structure behind its suffering, and join its immediate demands to a programme capable of creating millions of secure and socially useful jobs.
The tear gas outside Parliament cannot answer the question posed by the protesters. India’s rulers may push them behind barricades and call them insects, parasites, or troublemakers. But a society that refuses to make room for its young will eventually discover that the young have decided to remake society itself.
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