COCKROACH JANTA PARTY

## Or, The Revolution Will Be Monetised, Retweeted, and Subsequently Forgotten

### A Situationist Exposé in Several Acts of Unnecessary Political Theatre

*Clout Economics — clouteconomics.org*

*Featuring Guy Debord, Karl Marx, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, René Girard, and one cockroach who has apparently mistaken survival for a political programme.*

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### ACT I. ENTER THE COCKROACH. EXIT THE POLITICAL SUBJECT.

Ladies, gentlemen, comrades, enemies, anonymous accounts with suspiciously high engagement rates: welcome to the Cockroach Janta Party, where the revolution is crawling, the establishment is seething, and everybody is having an absolutely wonderful time being against something.

The cockroach is a magnificent political signifier. It evokes infestation, endurance, disgust, the collapse of bourgeois fantasies of hygiene, and the embarrassing fact that extermination campaigns do not always work as advertised.

The *janta*, meanwhile, is that most promiscuously invoked entity in Indian political life: the People. Everyone claims to represent them. Nobody can agree on who they are. They are simultaneously sovereign, betrayed, manipulated, awakened, asleep, and apparently available for immediate deployment in any argument that requires a little democratic legitimacy.

Put them together and you get a rather delicious contradiction: a party of vermin claiming the name of the sovereign people.

One can almost hear the campaign slogan: **THE PEOPLE HAVE RISEN. UNFORTUNATELY, SO HAVE THE COCKROACHES.**

But let us not mistake an excellent joke for an adequate theory of politics.

The Cockroach Janta Party presents us with a problem more interesting than whether it is funny, offensive, radical, or aesthetically successful. Its real problem is whether its opposition to the existing order can avoid becoming another product of that order.

This is not a question of sincerity. Sincerity is a notoriously unreliable political instrument. Plenty of people sincerely believe in their own importance; the internet is practically a monument to the proposition.

The question is structural.

What happens when revolt becomes a recognisable style? When contempt becomes a brand? When the rejection of political respectability produces a new form of cultural distinction? When the subject who claims to despise the attention economy becomes dependent on its capacity to circulate their contempt?

In short: what happens when the cockroach discovers personal branding?

We must begin with Guy Debord, who understood that the spectacle was not simply a matter of too many images and insufficiently educated viewers. In *The Society of the Spectacle* (1967), Debord describes a social order in which relations between people are mediated by representations, and in which the products of collective activity confront their producers as an apparently independent power.

The spectacle does not merely show us a world. It organises our relationship to that world.

And here, dear reader, the cockroach begins to look suspiciously familiar.

The Party wants to expose the spectacle. But exposure is itself a spectacular event. Its irreverence becomes recognisable; its recognisability generates attention; its attention produces the possibility of influence. The critique acquires a public identity, and that identity becomes an asset.

The cockroach has entered the commodity circuit.

It is no longer simply surviving the exterminator. It is negotiating a licensing agreement with the exterminator's marketing department.

### ACT II. KARL MARX WOULD LIKE A WORD WITH THE SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER

Let us introduce the first major embarrassment.

Marx's account of commodity fetishism describes a world in which social relations between people assume the appearance of relations between things. The products of human activity acquire an apparently autonomous value, obscuring the social relations that produced them.

Under the contemporary attention economy, this inversion acquires a particularly comic form.

The opinion appears to possess value because it circulates. The joke appears important because it generates engagement. The political subject appears consequential because the numbers have gone up.

We are invited to confuse circulation with significance, visibility with power, and the ability to command an audience with the capacity to transform the conditions of collective life.

The Party's contempt is therefore vulnerable to a very specific commodity fetish.

Its oppositional content may be genuinely critical. Its social form, however, may reproduce the competition it claims to oppose.

Consider the possibilities.

A conventional political actor accumulates authority by projecting competence, seriousness, institutional legitimacy, and proximity to power.

The anti-establishment shitposter accumulates authority by projecting irreverence, contempt, immunity to embarrassment, and proximity to the absurd.

The aesthetics differ. The underlying competitive problem may not.

Both must establish a recognisable identity. Both must maintain an audience. Both must differentiate themselves from competitors. Both may become dependent on the continued production of material through which their identity can be recognised.

One sells respectability.

The other sells the refusal of respectability.

Capitalism, which has never been particularly sentimental about the content of the products it sells, is perfectly capable of accommodating both.

Indeed, the refusal of conventional prestige may be especially profitable as a form of prestige. Nothing distinguishes the initiated quite like the conviction that one is too intelligent to be impressed by what impresses everyone else.

The Party's audience may thus receive a double satisfaction: the pleasure of watching an enemy be humiliated, and the pleasure of discovering that one belongs to the sort of people who understand why the enemy deserves humiliation.

This is a very economical arrangement. One does not even need to leave the sofa to experience political superiority.

The revolution has been reduced to an inexpensive consumer experience.

Marx would presumably ask who owns the means of production. We might supplement the question: who owns the infrastructure of circulation, who converts attention into durable resources, and what remains for the audience once its pleasure has been extracted?

Because the cockroach may be crawling all over the screen while somebody else owns the screen.

### ACT III. DEBORD'S REVENGE: THE SPECTACLE IS NOT IMPRESSED BY YOUR CRITIQUE

Here is the problem with being a Situationist in the age of the algorithm.

The Situationists wanted to disrupt the separation between everyday life and its spectacular representation. Their practices of détournement repurposed existing cultural materials against their original ideological functions. The aim was not merely to produce amusing counter-images, but to interrupt the organisation of experience through which the existing order reproduced itself.

A shitpost can certainly perform a détournement. It can seize the language of power, expose its absurdity, and make the apparently natural appear historically contingent.

But the existence of a détournement does not guarantee the existence of a political rupture.

The platform can distribute the disruption as content. The audience can consume it as an experience of rebellion. The creator can acquire distinction from the performance. And the social relations underlying the spectacle can remain entirely intact.

The Party risks confusing the negation of an image with the negation of the conditions that make the image powerful.

Debord's analysis is particularly unforgiving here because the spectacle is not an external enemy that can be defeated by producing a more truthful representation. It is a social relation, continually reproduced through human activity.

You cannot defeat the spectacle simply by making funnier spectacles.

You cannot abolish alienation by making alienation more entertaining.

You cannot establish political freedom by becoming the most recognisable person in the room who understands that recognisability is a trap.

The spectacle has no principled objection to being criticised. Criticism can generate circulation; circulation can generate value; value can sustain the infrastructure within which the criticism appears.

The system does not need to refute every dissident. Sometimes it is enough to give the dissident an audience, a niche, a distinctive aesthetic, and a regular posting schedule.

The opposition becomes part of the entertainment offering.

The Party may believe it is disrupting the spectacle when it is actually improving the spectacle's product diversity.

Congratulations, comrades. You have successfully differentiated yourselves within the market for dissatisfaction.

There is, of course, a way out of this particular embarrassment. The question is whether the Party's interventions change what audiences can understand and do, rather than simply changing what they can watch.

A critique becomes politically consequential when it helps produce capacities that cannot be reduced to the consumption of the critique itself.

Until then, the revolution remains available in convenient bite-sized portions.

### ACT IV. ADORNO AND THE INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION OF IRREVERENCE

Adorno and Horkheimer's critique of the culture industry offers a further complication.

In *Dialectic of Enlightenment* (1944/1947), they argue that modern cultural production can standardise experience while presenting its products as individualised entertainment. The appearance of difference does not necessarily imply a difference in the underlying organisation of production.

Translated into contemporary internet language: the joke can be different every time while the mechanism remains identical.

One day the establishment is ridiculous. The next day the intellectual is ridiculous. The next day the activist is ridiculous. The next day the person who objected to yesterday's joke is ridiculous.

The targets rotate. The audience's position remains reassuringly stable.

It is always the position of the person who understands.

This is the hidden conservatism of certain forms of irreverence. They attack the content of authority while preserving the audience's attachment to the pleasure of occupying a superior position.

The audience does not necessarily acquire a more complicated understanding of the object being mocked. It acquires a more confident relationship to its own judgment.

The joke becomes a little machine for manufacturing the sensation of being right.

This is not a trivial achievement. Humour can break through the intimidation of official language, puncture manufactured consensus, and reveal the absurdity of institutions that demand obedience while pretending to embody reason.

But humour can also become a highly efficient method of avoiding the difficult work of explanation.

Why did the institution acquire this power? Which interests does it serve? What historical conditions made its authority possible? What would it take to change those conditions?

The joke offers a tempting alternative: simply show the institution being stupid.

The audience laughs. The institution may even become embarrassed. Everybody goes home feeling that something has happened.

But embarrassment is not redistribution. Ridicule is not institutional transformation. The humiliation of a powerful person does not necessarily diminish the power of the office they occupy.

The Party must therefore confront the possibility that its humour is politically insufficient precisely where it is aesthetically successful.

A brilliant joke can expose a contradiction. It cannot, by brilliance alone, resolve it.

And if the Party becomes too attached to its own comic authority, it may begin to prefer contradictions that can be endlessly mocked over contradictions that could actually be transformed.

After all, a resolved contradiction is terrible content.

### ACT V. LACAN: SOMEBODY PLEASE TELL THE COCKROACH THAT IT IS SPECIAL

We now arrive at the libidinal problem.

Why does the cockroach want clout?

Not money alone. Not popularity alone. Not even power in the conventional sense.

The desire is more peculiar: the desire to be recognised as the sort of subject who sees through the illusions that govern everyone else.

The Party does not simply want an audience. It wants an audience capable of recognising the Party's refusal to be fooled.

This is where Lacan becomes useful.

In *Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis* (1964), Lacan distinguishes the gaze from ordinary vision and situates it within the subject's relation to desire and the Other. The subject cannot fully control the position from which it appears within the field of visibility.

The clout economy offers an apparently ingenious solution to this uncertainty.

Instead of wondering whether one matters, count the views.

Instead of wondering whether one's judgment is recognised, count the likes.

Instead of wondering whether one occupies a consequential position in the social world, count the followers.

The metric appears to settle the question of recognition by converting it into a number.

But the number cannot tell you what the recognition means.

A thousand people may be laughing with you, laughing at you, or simply waiting for the next thing to laugh at. A million views may indicate influence, notoriety, novelty, hostility, or a momentary accident of circulation.

The metric measures a response without resolving the desire that made the response matter.

The subject therefore returns to the metric.

And returns.

And returns.

The cockroach refreshes the page in the hope that the next refresh will finally establish that it has become the sort of cockroach that no longer needs to refresh the page.

This is not sovereignty. It is an extremely elaborate form of dependence.

The Party's irreverence may offer a way to convert humiliation into distinction. To be despised by respectable people becomes proof that one has transcended their standards. To be misunderstood becomes evidence of one's sophistication. To be excluded from conventional prestige becomes an opportunity to cultivate an alternative prestige.

There is something genuinely inventive about this reversal.

There is also something terribly convenient about it.

The subject never has to abandon the competition for recognition. It merely changes the criteria by which it intends to win.

The cockroach does not escape the hierarchy. It wins a prize for being the best cockroach.

And then, naturally, it would like the prize to be photographed.

### ACT VI. FOUCAULT: THE SELF-EMPLOYED REVOLUTIONARY

Michel Foucault's lectures *The Birth of Biopolitics* (1978–1979) analyse neoliberalism as a form of governmental rationality that extends economic calculation into domains of life previously understood through other categories. In his discussion of American neoliberalism, the individual appears as an entrepreneur of themselves, developing and investing in their own human capital.

The contemporary clout subject adds a publicity department to this enterprise.

The self must be developed, differentiated, marketed, maintained, and continually demonstrated to possess value.

Even political refusal becomes an investment.

The subject cultivates a distinctive voice. The voice acquires an audience. The audience generates reputational value. The value opens opportunities. The subject must then maintain the identity that produced those opportunities.

The result is a particularly cruel paradox: the more successful the refusal becomes, the more expensive it becomes to refuse the demands generated by that success.

The revolutionary must keep revolutionising.

The contrarian must keep contradicting.

The satirist must keep finding things stupid.

The person who has built a public identity around being impossible to impress must remain unimpressed, even when the correct response might be to listen, reconsider, or admit that something is not actually ridiculous.

The brand becomes a disciplinary apparatus.

Nobody has to order the Party to remain irreverent. The audience's expectations, the incentives of circulation, and the fear of losing relevance can do the work.

The subject experiences these pressures as freedom because the constraints appear to arise from its own chosen identity.

What could be more neoliberal than a revolutionary who has become their own unpaid social media manager?

The Party may believe it is refusing institutional discipline. It may instead have internalised a different form of discipline: the obligation to remain continuously interesting.

Its members are no longer merely political subjects. They are the human resources department of their own dissent.

### ACT VII. GIRARD: THE ENEMY IS A TERRIBLE PERSON TO BUILD YOUR ENTIRE IDENTITY AROUND

René Girard's theory of mimetic desire complicates the Party's relationship with its enemies.

Desire is often mediated by others. We learn what is desirable through models whose authority we simultaneously admire and resent. Competition can therefore produce an intimacy between rivals that neither wishes to acknowledge.

The rival becomes indispensable precisely because they must be defeated.

In *Violence and the Sacred* (1972), Girard develops an account of sacrifice and collective violence in which communities can achieve a provisional unity by directing antagonism towards a victim. His later work develops the role of the scapegoat in the production of social cohesion.

The relevance here is not that every political joke constitutes a scapegoating ritual. It is that collective identity can be organised through the shared designation of an enemy.

The Cockroach Janta Party may discover that its members do not need to agree on what they want to build. They need only agree on what deserves to be mocked.

This is a remarkably low-cost form of political unity.

No programme is required. No difficult negotiation over competing interests is necessary. No account of institutional design need be produced. The group can remain coherent through the regular identification of something contemptible.

The enemy supplies the common language.

But such unity has a structural weakness: it is easier to agree on who deserves ridicule than on what should replace the institutions being ridiculed.

The Party may therefore become dependent on the persistence of the very conditions it opposes.

If the enemy disappears, what unites the group?

If the joke stops landing, what remains?

If the object of contempt becomes less ridiculous, does the Party revise its judgment or manufacture a new object capable of sustaining the same emotional economy?

A movement organised around permanent antagonism can become incapable of recognising political success. The continued existence of a problem becomes proof of the movement's continued relevance.

The cockroach needs the infestation.

This is the moment at which the anti-establishment formation begins to resemble the establishment it despises: both require a stable reproduction of the conditions through which their authority becomes intelligible.

The Party must therefore decide whether it wants an enemy to defeat or an enemy to keep.

These are not the same political project.

### ACT VIII. THE CASTE QUESTION, OR WHO GETS TO BE A COCKROACH?

Any theory of clout that treats visibility as a universal resource is already in trouble.

In India, caste and class structure the conditions under which people can appear, speak, offend, fail, recover, and convert attention into durable advantage.

Not everybody can afford to be controversial.

Not everybody can turn public humiliation into publicity.

Not everybody can make a career out of refusing respectability.

For some, irreverence is interpreted as intelligence. For others, the same gesture is interpreted through inherited stereotypes of irrationality, vulgarity, criminality, or social inferiority.

The capacity to violate a convention without being destroyed by the consequences is itself unequally distributed.

This is the point at which the cockroach metaphor becomes politically dangerous.

The language of infestation has a history. It can describe the persistence of a structure that official narratives attempt to eliminate. It can also dehumanise actual populations by depicting them as contaminants to be removed.

The difference depends on what the metaphor is doing.

Is the cockroach an image of survival against an exclusionary order? Or does it become a way of treating particular people as vermin?

A critique of power cannot answer this question by appealing to the good intentions of its author. Political metaphors have histories and effects that exceed intention.

Nor can the Party simply declare itself anti-establishment and assume that it has escaped the hierarchies through which the establishment distributes legitimacy.

Who is allowed to be disgusting? Who is allowed to be funny? Who gets to convert contempt into cultural capital? Who is expected to absorb contempt as a reminder of their place?

These questions are not distractions from the clout economy. They concern the unequal conditions under which clout becomes available in the first place.

The cockroach is not a universal subject.

Some cockroaches are offered speaking engagements. Others are exterminated.

### ACT IX. THE MOST DANGEROUS POSSIBILITY: THE PARTY IS RIGHT

Let us make the argument more difficult by conceding something important.

The Cockroach Janta Party may correctly identify the absurdity of established political language. It may expose the theatre through which authority manufactures legitimacy. It may puncture the solemnity of institutions that expect deference while concealing their interests.

Its humour may accomplish something that earnest political commentary cannot.

The joke can create a sudden distance between a social arrangement and the appearance of inevitability that sustains it. It can make the familiar look strange. It can reveal that the emperor's authority depends partly on everybody agreeing not to laugh at the costume.

There is real political potential here.

The problem begins when the Party mistakes this potential for an achievement already completed.

To expose a mechanism is not necessarily to interrupt it. To identify an ideology is not necessarily to diminish its power. To humiliate a representative of an institution is not necessarily to transform the institution.

And to make an audience feel intelligent is not necessarily to make it more capable of acting.

The Party must distinguish between the politics of recognition and the politics of organisation.

Recognition asks whether the audience sees the critique.

Organisation asks what the audience can do because of it.

Recognition produces a moment of collective agreement: *Yes, this is ridiculous.*

Organisation confronts the more difficult questions: What interests sustain this arrangement? What resources reproduce it? Which relationships could be changed? What institutions would need to be built? Who must work with whom, despite their differences, to make that change possible?

The first question is excellent content.

The second is where politics begins to become inconvenient.

### ACT X. A BRIEF, UNNECESSARILY CRUEL AUDIT OF THE COCKROACH JANTA PARTY

Let us summarise the indictment.

**First:** the Party risks mistaking visibility for power. Its capacity to attract attention may be mistaken for its capacity to change material conditions.

**Second:** it risks converting contempt into a commodity. Its critique may reproduce the competition for distinction through which the attention economy generates value.

**Third:** it risks confusing aesthetic transgression with political transformation. The violation of respectable conventions may create new possibilities, but it does not automatically alter the relations those conventions sustain.

**Fourth:** it risks becoming dependent on its enemy. A politics organised around permanent ridicule may need the continued reproduction of the object it ridicules.

**Fifth:** it risks making the audience's superiority the principal reward of participation. The audience learns to recognise the ridiculous without necessarily acquiring the capacity to change it.

**Sixth:** it risks individualising structural problems. The incompetent politician, the ridiculous intellectual, the obnoxious influencer and the absurd institution become objects of ridicule, while the arrangements that reproduce their power remain comparatively obscure.

**Seventh:** it risks confusing its own survival with its political success. The continued relevance of the Party may be entirely compatible with the continued reproduction of the conditions it claims to oppose.

This is the devastating possibility: the Party may be most successful precisely when its politics are least consequential.

It may acquire an audience, a reputation, a recognisable aesthetic, and a permanent place in the circulation of political dissatisfaction.

It may become an excellent business model for the expression of opposition.

It may even become indispensable to the people who want to experience themselves as oppositional.

And none of these achievements would establish that it had changed the world.

The cockroach could become famous.

The infestation could continue.

### EPILOGUE: LONG LIVE THE COCKROACH. BUT WHO OWNS THE BUILDING?

The Cockroach Janta Party stands before a choice that cannot be resolved by producing a more sophisticated joke.

It can become a permanent feature of the spectacle: a recognisable brand of irreverence whose audience returns for the pleasure of watching the world be humiliated.

Or it can treat its own circulation as a problem, examine the conditions through which attention becomes power, and develop forms of activity whose significance exceeds their capacity to attract an audience.

The distinction is not between humour and seriousness. It is between two ways of organising the relationship between critique and social life.

One makes opposition consumable.

The other attempts to make opposition consequential.

Debord teaches us that the spectacle is a social relation, not merely an image. Marx teaches us to look for the social relations concealed by apparently autonomous forms of value. Adorno warns us that rebellion can be standardised into entertainment. Lacan complicates the fantasy that recognition will deliver sovereignty. Foucault shows how the demands of competition can become the subject's own project. Girard warns us that collective unity can depend on the production of an enemy.

The cockroach must take all of this seriously, which is unfortunate, because taking things seriously is precisely what it has built its brand around refusing to do.

But here is the final joke.

The spectacle does not need the cockroach to love it.

It only needs the cockroach to keep showing up.

It can tolerate mockery. It can accommodate dissent. It can circulate the image of its own absurdity. It can even profit from the spectacle of its critics exposing the spectacle.

What threatens it is not the existence of an oppositional identity, but the development of capacities that reduce dependence on the relations through which that identity acquires value.

So let the cockroach crawl. Let it mock the palace, the parliament, the platform, the pundit and the professor. Let it expose the vanity of power and the vanity of those who claim to stand outside it.

But let it also ask who owns the building, who cleans the building, who is permitted to live in the building, and why the people inside have been made to compete for the privilege of being seen.

Otherwise, the Cockroach Janta Party will have achieved something truly remarkable.

It will have discovered that one can despise the spectacle, understand the spectacle, make jokes about the spectacle, and still spend one's entire political life auditioning for a better role in it.

**The cockroach has survived extermination. It has survived ridicule. It has survived the collapse of bourgeois respectability.**

Can it survive becoming a brand?

Can it survive the loss of its audience?

Can it survive winning?

And if it cannot, what exactly has it been fighting for?

**The final verdict of Clout Economics:**

The Cockroach Janta Party is not revolutionary merely because it crawls where respectable politics refuses to go.

It becomes politically interesting when it makes the architecture of the room visible.

It becomes politically consequential when it helps people change the conditions under which they must live.

And it becomes indistinguishable from the spectacle when it mistakes the applause for the revolution.

*The revolution will not be televised.*

It will, however, have a content strategy, a recognisable visual identity, and an increasingly urgent need to explain why its engagement rate is down.

**Long live the cockroach. Down with the infestation. And for the love of God, let us stop confusing the two.**

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### REFERENCES FOR THE POLITICALLY INCLINED COCKROACH

1. **Karl Marx**, *Capital*, Volume I (1867), especially the discussion of commodity fetishism in Chapter 1. For understanding how relations between people can appear as relations between things.

2. **Guy Debord**, *The Society of the Spectacle* (1967), especially theses 1–34. For the spectacle as a social relation mediated by images, rather than simply a flood of media representations.

3. **Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer**, *Dialectic of Enlightenment* (1944/1947), especially “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” For the standardisation of cultural production and the incorporation of apparent difference into commodity culture.

4. **Michel Foucault**, *The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979*, translated by Graham Burchell (2008). For neoliberalism, human capital, and the individual as entrepreneur of the self.

5. **Jacques Lacan**, *The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI* (1964), translated by Alan Sheridan (1977). For the gaze, desire, and the instability of the subject's relation to visibility.

6. **René Girard**, *Violence and the Sacred* (1972), translated by Patrick Gregory (1977). For sacrifice, collective violence, and the social function of the scapegoat.

7. **Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman**, “A User's Guide to Détournement” (1956). For the repurposing of existing cultural materials as a tactic against dominant meanings.

8. **Pierre Bourdieu**, *Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste* (1979), translated by Richard Nice (1984). For the social distribution of cultural capital and the ways taste establishes distinctions between groups.

These works offer different and sometimes incompatible theories. They should not be treated as a single school of thought. Their value here lies in the tensions between them: commodity and spectacle, discipline and desire, cultural production and political action, collective identification and the production of enemies.