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.