Recycling is an over glorified waste-management strategy of upper-middle-class people, displaying the discarded values of overconsumption and merely delaying the environmental crisis. In politics, political recycling is a transient strategy and does not provide permanent solutions to the social, economic, political, and cultural crises facing the world. The governing and opposition parties continue to recycle and to produce and reproduce their ideas, ideologies, policies, processes, leaders, organisational principles, operational structures, and values that are concomitant with the requirements of a political establishment shaped by capitalism. The behaviour of bourgeois political parties (both ruling parties and opposition parties) and their everyday operations follow a path designed by the elite and curated by the powerful. This does not resonate with the lives and lifestyles of the people who elect parties to rule and opposition parties to ensure democratic accountability.
Both ruling and opposition parties talk about democracy, but their policies, programmes, structures, processes, and leadership choices are predetermined beyond the ideological divides in the politics of power. These parties behave in the same way when it comes to exercising power. These practices have found home in so called radical socialist and communist parties. Only a few radical, socialist, communist, left, progressive, and democratic leaders and their organisations behave differently, and their numbers are dwindling in these days when the market and its political agents decide the nature of politics and power.
Political recycling maintains continuity and stability according to the requirements of the capitalist class. Political recycling produces a compliant class of leaders and bureaucrats who uphold the interests of capitalism and produce depoliticised conditions that actively oppose any form of political alternative that protects and promotes the interests of the working masses. Political recycling also prohibits radical political transformation in the name of stability and continues to reproduce class interests at the cost of the people. The nature of the state, government, and governance does not change but reproduces continuity because of political recycling, where the political scene changes, actors change but the stage and director remains the same. Political recycling is not only regressive but also static, and therefore detrimental to the deepening of democracy and citizenship rights.
The culture of political recycling produces conditions in which scripted karaoke democracy shaped by bureaucrats, governs people, produces depoliticised democracy, and creates a political trust deficit in the state and government. Weak political system produced in the processes of political recycling is easier to control, so capitalists promote it. The dominance of bureaucracy in politics produces a political culture in which people’s voices are marginalised to a monolithic tone of governance, and in which the rule of law is used to hide undemocratic practices of governance as merely mechanisms of compliance. Political recycling and karaoke democracy complement each other in continuing policies even when there is an electoral political change. There is little difference between Democrats and Republicans in the USA; the Congress Party and the BJP behave in the same manner and follow similar economic policies; and there is no difference between the Tories, Labour, and various other parties in the UK. Whoever wins elections pursues very similar politics that undermines the people and protects and promotes the capitalist classes. People have little or no choice when it comes to the contemporary culture of political recycling, karaoke democracy, and governance. Stabilisation and continuity in politics are a recipe for authoritarian gerontocracy.
The usual paths of traditional politics and the mainstreaming of political recycling are not working for the people. They only promote the status quo and protect the interests of governing elites by creating conditions of enforced stability with the help of the capitalist state and governments. The hierarchical structures of governance cripple people, control their abilities, and domesticate their potential through authority. Change is branded as instability. It is not change but dominance of status quo breeds instability. Egalitarian democratic values die a natural death in such a system.
Therefore, it is imperative to seek alternatives beyond the duality of the dominant-party systems within market-led capitalist democracy. This cannot be achieved through reforms and minor cosmetic changes within recycled politics. Political recycling does not produce anything new; it only purifies the systems and processes that continue to represent, restore, readjusts and replicate the needs and desires of the capitalist classes. It does not represent the people or their interests, abilities, and aspirations. It requires systemic change and a radical overhaul of all processes and structures of governance to ensure all forms of justice, liberty, and equality—in terms of the availability of and accessibility to goods and services—for working people, so that people can live with dignity without any form of exploitation or inequality. Equality is natural, and inequalities are manufactured by the governing class through the use of power. Therefore, it is time to reclaim absolute equality, justice, and individual freedom through collective and continuous struggles against power in all its forms and in all spheres.
