The Meaning of David Cameron [Paperback]

Richard Seymour's The Meaning of David Cameron is a short and pungent apologia for the Marxist categories of class and class war, which declares early on its intention to grate against the sensibilities of readers accustomed to the euphemistic treatment of such topics. The "meaning" of David Cameron, it turns out, is much the same as the "meaning" of any party leader situated within the neo-liberal consensus that unites "left", "right" and "centre" parliamentary persuasions; which is to say that he is a cipher performing an established function within the apparatus of ruling class power.

Cameron's personal "fitness for purpose" as the individual selected to perform this role is at best of secondary interest; Seymour argues persuasively (and contemptuously) that the distinctive "philosophy" he brings with him (Philip Blond's "Red Toryism") is scarcely more than mood-music: Blond's cranky neo-mediaevalism is merely the holy water with which Cameronism consecrates the heart-burnings of the petit bourgeois. In reality, Cameron and Blair are - to borrow a phrase from Badiou's recent The Meaning of Sarkozy - two badgers from the same hill: a pair of trendy vicars, or fashionable proxies for the theocracy of finance capital. Fashions change, but the neo-liberal gospel remains the same.

Seymour's book considers three euphemisms, which label the vertices of Cameron's electoral triangulation. These are "apathy" (a euphemism for popular disempowerment), "meritocracy" (a polite name for the untrammelled reproduction of class privilege) and "progress" (a cuddly version of Thatcher's reactionary radicalism). With respect to the last, Seymour shows that British Conservatism has a long history of ideological capture of the energies and insights of radical dissent, and that the Tories are better understood as a party of reactionary novelty than as defenders of "tradition" in any straightforward sense.

For Thatcher, as later for Sarkozy, "the sixties" named a radical moment which it was imperative to reverse, occult and erase. One wonders what radical energies Cameron's reactionary subjectivity is feeding off: he seems, for the moment, to be a class warrior without a clearly-defined enemy. Popular anger at Tory cuts is likely to provide him with plenty of opposition; but how will that opposition be characterised ideologically? Thatcher's government, bolstered by public choice theory, was able to slander defenders of public services as rent-seeking special interest groups, self-serving enemies of "modernisation". Will the same trick work a second time? It depends, perhaps, on the degree of unity shown by those who protest and resist: if they allow themselves to be picked off, group by group, as "the nurses", "the teachers' unions" and so on, then we may be in for a re-run of the scapegoating politics of the Thatcher years, with the designated "enemy within" changing week by week. A slogan for a new united front: "we are all the enemy within".

No-one familiar with Seymour's blogging at Lenin's Tomb will be surprised by the fluency, cogency and polemical bite of The Meaning of David Cameron. He has become a practised master of this form, and an accomplished phrase-maker, and I look forward to his future publications.

Richard Seymour writes the blog `Lenin's tomb'. In this useful book, he makes a lot of good points. He points out that Blair's evidence-based policy-making turned out to be policy-based evidence-making.

Seymour cites the free market economist Ludwig von Mises, who taught Thatcher's idol Friedrich von Hayek, "It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilisation. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history."

Immigration adds to the supply of workers to keep wages and workers down. Building too few houses drives house prices up. Privatisations put our money into individual accounts managed by the City, while former Labour minister Lord Digby Jones urges the government to `starve the jobless back to work'.

Last year the richest 1,000 Britons got a record 30 per cent more wealth, thanks to the government's pouring £1.2 trillions into the banking system to prop up the euro and stock market and property values. Between June 2009 and April 2010, national income rose by £27 billion, £24 billion of which were profits.

The ruling class rules whatever the voting system, however we vote, whatever we want, whatever they say. Remember Cameron's `cast-iron guarantee' of a referendum on the EU Treaty?

Writing before the attack on Libya, Seymour ends presciently, "What is the meaning of David Cameron? He means war."

Seymour's latest is a nimbly diminutive text next to his previous sturdy, fat tome "The Liberal Defence of Murder" (awful title, lovely book). It works best in two guises.

First, it is a good user's guide to the political language used by dismal parliamentarians, fumbling media hacks, predictable pundits, utter bankers and complete think-tankers. In this guise, "The Meaning of David Cameron" takes its subject, a vague corporate personality known as David Cameron, as the starting point for an examination of the founding lexemes of contemporary political discourse.

For instance? Every politician, Cameron in particular, accentuates the progressive these days. Some people might think that the Tories are just re-branding some old reactionary hide when they blather about being progressive, but Seymour argues that the idiom of conservative 'progress' is more than mere subterfuge. It depends on a peculiar idea of progress rooted in the history of conservative thought, from Burke onward, wherein progress is not measured by accumulations of liberty, or approaches toward greater equality, but by accumulations of capital and wealth. It is a conceit that has enjoyed renewed prominence because of the retreat of alternative ideas of progress upheld by social democracy, socialism, and communism. Similarly, the book exposes the dark underside of other seemingly harmless ideas, finding in them concentrations of unacknowledged class power, privilege and undemocratic violence. There are unsatisfactory moments here, but mainly because of what Seymour omits or neglects to flesh out - his dissection of 'meritocracy' would have been better for having included some discussion of what 'merit' is, or can be, and what sort of things a socially just society might reward. This could be asking too much of such a short work, apparently written quickly in the heat of the election race, but there are some questions that are raised by Seymour's book which are not given a full answer.

Second, the book is a summary of how neoliberalism came to dominate politics in Britain today, and how it radically contracted the field of democratic possibility. How did the Labour Party, never the socialist crusade that it was sometimes taken for, become the perverse, deformed monstrosity 'New Labour'? How did the majority of people become so disconnected from electoral politics? How did parliament become so insulated from its electorate that it is simply able to over-ride the unpopularity of most of what legislation passes from it? Here, Seymour is touching on arguments that are likely to be more controversial with certain constituencies in the left, especially given how schismatic it has been in - well, forever. His basic argument is convincing, though again at times only sparingly sketched out. He emphasises that neoliberalism was a class project, and that today's horror is the result of accumulated outcomes of previous class struggles, which fundamentally altered the condition of the working class, the state, capital, and above all the Labour Party. The unapologetic emphasis on class, his insistence on the explanatory power of class struggle which is at the heart of his analysis, is deliberate - the bluntness of his assertions at times seeming deliberately intended to provoke, unsettle and maybe even put off readers who don't usually associate with Marxist riff-raff. And Seymour doesn't evade the fact that neoliberalism has, by financialising the few assets of the majority, as well as the major assets of the few, rendered most people's livelihoods significantly dependent on its success. Meaning that any break with neoliberalism will be a protracted, painful process, resulting from struggle.

Yet, for all that this is laudable, Seymour does not discuss working class resistance, either in the trade union movement or the organised Left, in much detail. It would be interesting to understand at least in outline how much this retarded or shaped the neoliberal settlement, whether certain tactics proved more effective than others, etc. And Seymour could be more specific about how and where this neoliberalism/Thatcherism/financial capitalism, call it what you will, broke down and reconstituted the working class itself, such that today its powers needs to be dramatically reconstructed and rebuilt. Again, this might seem pedantic, but there are points at which the necessary compression of the book's narrative leads to far less detail and specificity than one would like. A few hundred extra words here and there would have covered it.

Still, all my criticisms are immanent, and this is an elegant and incisive book, a vital foundation for understanding Cameronism. Though Seymour was wrong to wager that the Tories would win an outright majority (he also "fancied" Salma Yaqoob's "chances" in Birmingham - d'oh!), the fact is that it makes little difference to his analysis that Clegg and Cable are in coalition with the Tories. After all, Cameron is just "a cipher", "a sort of non-entity" who channels "the prevailing geist" of neoliberal class rule. There is an old saying: "Whoever is in office, the Whigs are in power". Seymour's book could be treated as a lively, topical essay on that theme, and it couldn't be more timely.