The first mistake of vulgar politics is to judge a movement solely by its immediate demands. The second is to confuse its present form with its future potential. Marxism rejects both errors. It understands that social movements are living processes, shaped by contradictions, transformed through struggle, and capable of developing in directions that neither their participants nor their opponents initially anticipated.
The recent movement surrounding India’s National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) provides an important example of this dialectical understanding of politics. Triggered by allegations of examination paper leaks, inflated scores, procedural irregularities, and institutional failures within the National Testing Agency (NTA), the movement rapidly evolved into one of the largest student mobilisations India has witnessed in recent years.
Opposition parties demanded accountability. India’s Supreme Court heard petitions challenging the integrity of the examination process. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) arrested individuals accused of participating in organised paper-leak networks. Investigations extended across Bihar, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, and several other states, exposing corruption far beyond a single examination.
However, for Marxists, the significance of the movement cannot be measured simply by the scandal itself. The real question is what social contradictions the movement expresses.
Millions of Indian students compete every year for a limited number of medical seats. More than two million candidates sat the NEET examination in 2024 alone, making it one of the largest entrance examinations in the world. The pressure surrounding the examination cannot be understood merely as an educational issue. It reflects a broader crisis of Indian neoliberal capitalism.
Over the past three decades, India has expanded access to higher education while simultaneously producing increasingly insecure labour markets. According to the International Labour Organisation’s India Employment Report 2024, educated young people experience significantly higher unemployment than less educated workers. The report notes that nearly two-thirds of unemployed youth possess secondary or higher education, demonstrating a profound mismatch between educational expansion and employment generation.
In other words, education no longer guarantees social mobility. Instead, it has become another arena of ruthless competition.
Medical education illustrates this contradiction particularly clearly. Government medical colleges remain limited in number while private institutions charge fees beyond the reach of most working families. Admission therefore becomes a struggle over scarce opportunities rather than a universal social right.
The corruption surrounding NEET is therefore not an accidental administrative failure, but a symptom of scarcity produced by capitalism itself.
That said, there is no reason to romanticise the movement, as its dominant social composition remains largely middle class. Students, parents, coaching-centre attendees, aspiring professionals and educated urban families constitute its principal social base. Its immediate demands focus upon transparency, fairness, accountability and institutional reform.
Yes, these are democratic demands and not socialist demands, therefore, many activists dismiss the movement as politically limited. This conclusion, however, is profoundly mistaken. Marxism has never argued that revolutionary consciousness emerges fully developed. On the contrary, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky consistently argued that political consciousness develops unevenly through practical struggle.
Workers rarely begin by demanding socialism. Students rarely begin by demanding the abolition of capitalism. Movements begin where people experience oppression most directly. Political development occurs through struggle itself.
History repeatedly demonstrates that reformist movements can develop into revolutionary confrontations. As the Russian Revolution of 1905 began with workers petitioning the Tsar for constitutional reforms, carrying religious icons rather than red flags. Bloody Sunday transformed reformist hopes into revolutionary consciousness.
The February Revolution of 1917 began over bread shortages, inflation and war. Few participants initially demanded workers’ power. Within months, Russia witnessed the October Revolution.
The French events of May 1968 began as university protests against educational restrictions. Within weeks, nearly ten million workers joined the largest general strike in European history, paralysing the French state.
Chile offers another instructive example. Student protests demanding affordable education in 2006 and again in 2011 eventually expanded into a nationwide rejection of neoliberalism. The movement laid much of the political groundwork for the constitutional process initiated after the 2019 uprising.
More recently, Bangladesh’s student movement against the quota system evolved into a broader confrontation with state repression, corruption and authoritarianism. What initially appeared as a narrow policy dispute became a national political crisis because state violence exposed deeper contradictions within society.
None of these movements began with socialist programmes, but their development transformed them. This is precisely how dialectics operates.
Some left organisations continue to reduce Marxism to an obsession with factory workers while ignoring the profound transformation of capitalism itself. India today is not the industrial society imagined by nineteenth-century socialists.
Its economy increasingly depends upon services, education, finance, information technology and precarious labour. Students constitute a transitional social layer entering this changing labour market. Many will become salaried employees, contract workers, healthcare workers, teachers, engineers, delivery workers or unemployed graduates.
Their struggles cannot simply be dismissed as “middle-class politics.” As they occupy a contradictory class position. Precisely because of this contradiction, they become politically volatile.
Chris Harman argued that students often act as detonators rather than substitutes for working-class struggle. They possess greater organisational flexibility, greater access to education and fewer immediate workplace constraints. Their movements frequently expose political crises before organised labour enters the field.
It is obvious that students cannot replace the working class, and as Marx said, only the working class itself can fights for its emancipation. But students can open political space for broader social struggles.
Here lies the decisive political question. Should revolutionaries stand outside the movement criticising its limitations? Or should they enter the movement and struggle to overcome those limitations?
Lenin answered this question more than a century ago. Communists participate in every democratic struggle capable of raising political consciousness. They do not abandon imperfect movements. They work within them while exposing the structural roots of immediate grievances.
The NEET movement therefore demands precisely this intervention. Marxists should support demands for transparent examinations. They should oppose corruption. They should defend democratic rights. But they should simultaneously ask deeper questions.
Why must millions compete for so few university seats? Why has education become increasingly commercialised? Why do private coaching corporations accumulate enormous wealth while ordinary families incur crippling debt? Why does economic growth coexist with educated unemployment? Why has public investment failed to match expanding educational demand? Each question shifts political discussion from administrative reform towards structural critique.
The struggle over examinations cannot remain confined to students alone. Healthcare workers face staff shortages. Teachers confront privatisation. Contract employees experience insecurity. Young graduates encounter unemployment. Families struggle with rising educational costs. These are not isolated problems, as presented by the liberal intelligentsia, but arising from the same political economy.
The responsibility of Marxists is therefore to connect these separate experiences into a unified critique of capitalism. Student unions should build alliances with teachers’ organisations. Medical students should organise alongside public healthcare workers. Campus struggles should connect with labour unions, unemployed youth organisations and democratic movements against authoritarianism. Only through such political expansion can reformist struggles develop into broader class struggles.
Vulgar politics mistakes ideological purity for revolutionary strategy, waiting endlessly for a perfectly proletarian movement that never arrives. Real revolutions do not emerge according to predetermined formulas. They arise through the interaction of multiple social forces under conditions of crisis.
Trotsky understood this clearly when developing the theory of permanent revolution. Democratic struggles, national struggles and economic struggles constantly overlap, creating possibilities for more profound political transformation.
To reject a movement because it begins with reformist demands is not revolutionary. It is politically sterile. The revolutionary question is always how those demands can be connected to broader struggles against exploitation.
The NEET movement will not overthrow Indian capitalism. Nor should anyone imagine that it already possesses revolutionary consciousness. But neither should Marxists dismiss it as merely another middle-class agitation.
As it represents a generation confronting the contradictions of contemporary capitalism of expanding education without expanding opportunity, rising aspirations alongside declining security, and formal meritocracy corrupted by inequality and institutional decay.
Political consciousness is never static. It develops through experience, organisation and struggle. The task of Marxists is not to wait passively until movements become revolutionary. It is to participate actively in the process through which they become so.
History does not reward those who stand on the sidelines explaining why existing struggles are insufficient. It belongs to those who enter them, deepen them, unite them with the wider working masses and transform democratic demands into a challenge to the entire social order. That is not a departure from Marxism. It is Marxism in practice.