Bhabani Shankar Nayak
WilliamShakespeare’spastoral comedy As You Like It—specifically Jaques’ melancholic monologue in Act II, Scene VII, which con ceptualises the seven stages of human life—defines the realities of world with the following famous lines: “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women are merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts.” Yet this metaphor takes on a literal and deceptive translation in politics, where leaders speak and gesture with spectacular theatricality, delivering moralising speeches on principles designed to capture mass attention and arouse mass emotion.
Their aim is to mobilise people as a collective to achieve certain goals for the greater common good by providing solutions to the issues and challenges people face in their everyday lives. In this process, leaders are expected to hold the people together through coherent missions and visions for meaningful social, political, economic, cultural and revolutionary change. However, once these leaders secure power through the electoral process, they often hide behind the collective to conceal their failures in offering concrete solutions. These leaders, across all walks of life, adhere to a compliance culture of managerialism that is crucial for upholding the interests of capitalism and power—not the interests of people. The collective thus becomes a new hiding ground for failed and deceptive leadership in various spheres of life. This bourgeois culture of performative politics, conducted in the name of collective interests, has now infiltrated progressive politics. Here, leaders and activists alike resort to superficial words and symbolic actions entirely devoid of substance or systematic change, failing to uphold the interests of people as both individuals and members of collectives. Rather than offering platforms for genuine debate, disagreement and consensus, these collectives are used to capture disagreements and manufacture majoritarian agreements. These so-called leaders say something and do something else. In doing so, these deceptive leaders create a hiding ground for directionless, bureaucratic and manipulative leadership that lacks any genuine commitment to collective or individual issues. This dubious performative display relies on virtue signalling without addressing the real needs and desires of people.
Hashtags become more important than human rights. Such a deceptive bourgeois culture has co-opted so-called progressive political parties, organisations, trade union leaders and activists, who publicly promote progressive values while maintaining entirely reactionary practices in their everyday operations—all in the name of a curated collective consensus designed to ensure majority support for a leadership that exercises performance without any substantive material engagement with people’s daily issues. The propaganda of performative politics has transformed people’s democracy into bourgeois practices of majoritarian leadership. This is fundamentally reactionary, undermining both individuals and collectives while upholding the interests of power and privilege within a capitalist system built on inequality, exploitation and discrimination.
Performative politics of deception not only depoliticises the collective struggle for emancipation from capitalism but also dilutes revolution along a revisionist path. It spreads misinformation that manipulates people rather than helping them understand their own material, social, cultural and economic contexts. This performative politics and its deceptive leadership resemble the Shakespearean stage of the soldier in As You Like It, who is “Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation”—all without any substantive politics, principles or ideology for revolutionary social change. People trust these leaders as a collective, but once elected to positions of power, these leaders use people and discard them like toilet paper. Under such deceptive leadership, capitalism and its managerial class consolidate, and society begins to mirror The Tragedy of Macbeth, where Shakespeare depicts the grim picture of life in Act V, Scene V: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.” The deaths and destitution witnessed across the world today—due to capitalism and its imperialist wars and conflicts, perpetuated by these performative political leaders and their managerial class in various fields—create a temporality of human existence that helps capitalism persist by employing strategies of performative politics without performance in real life. The collective becomes a hiding ground where failed leaders evade accountability and outsource their blame to individuals within the collective, dismissing them as mere selfish and brutish actors who failed to play their role in changing society. They claim that the failure of the collective stems from individual self-interest rather than their own incompetence.
As Shakespeare writes in The Merchant of Venice (Act I, Scene I), “I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; a stage where every man must play a part,” emphasising the role of individuals in life. Such Shakespearean logic accidentally aids capitalism and its managerial class, which shapes the performative politics of deceptive leadership, enabling leaders to escape responsibilities and blame individuals—despite all the efforts those individuals make at home, in the workplace and in society—while outsourcing their failures to both the collective and its members. Thus, under the bourgeois culture of capitalism, the collective has become a hiding ground for unaccountable and failed leadership in different spheres of life. The problem lies neither with individuals nor with the collectives they form; rather, it lies with the culture of performative politics, its empty resolutions, and its deceptive, visionless and directionless leadership.
The collective leadership under the Chinese Communist Party and the collective leadership of successful cooperative movements around the world offer hope that individual empowerment is possible within a collective, provided there is ideological commitment to changing society, deepening democracy and protecting individual rights. The successful collective leadership in the history of the present reveals that an alternative is possible and that revolutionary change is achievable—as Shelley’s 1819 political poem, The Masque of Anarchy, reads: “Ye are many — they are few.”
The writer teaches at the London Metropolitan University.
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