New Book on UK Conservatism

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Out later this month -- The Meaning of David Cameron:

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2010/05/meaning-of-david-cameron.html

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4034/4567377367_74598d3777_o.jpg

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Here's the author's summary of part of this book:


Cameron's Conservatives - not so progressive
by Richard Seymour

David Cameron comes to us with olive branch in hand—yet promises nothing but war.

Like his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy, he is out to impose ruthless austerity measures which amount to an unprecedented attack on the public sector and the welfare state.

This will satisfy the very financial sector which caused the recession and was bailed out with public money.

But like Sarkozy, he has had to build a coalition extending beyond his own party to do so. This comprises not only the Liberal Democrats, but also centre-left intellectuals.

Cameron has relentlessly vaunted his “progressive” credentials—offering a Tory agenda on poverty, inequality and climate change that he claims will outperform New Labour.

Where did Cameron’s “progressive” politics come from? Some highlight the influence of the Catholic intellectual Philip Blond, who advocates “Red Toryism”—a pseudo-medieval ideology embraced by far right sympathisers in the early twentieth century.

There is also the influence of Marvin Olasky, a religious right strategist who advised the Bush team in 2000, and devised the idea of “compassionate conservatism”—that charities and private institutions are better at delivering welfare services than the state.

One can certainly see traces of this in Cameron’s appeal to a “Big Society”.

However, one influence less readily acknowledged is Tony Blair. Blair, and the Third Way intellectuals he surrounded himself with, helped redefine “progress” during the 1990s.

Progress no longer meant a movement toward the eventual abolition of capitalism, rather adapting to the realities of globalisation.

By globalisation, Blair meant the freeing up of financial markets, the deregulation of industry, privatisation, and flexible labour markets.

Intellectuals

Third Way intellectuals claimed this was progressive, as it constantly attacked and undermined tradition. The left, by defending traditions such as the welfare state and trade unionism, were just as conservative as the right.

This ideological twist helped to obscure the fact that what conservatism has sought to conserve has been domination and inequality—class power.

Whether that is best defended by means of an appeal to tradition, or by an appeal to modernity, is entirely dependent on the circumstances in which conservatives operate.

Conservatism has taken the form of neoliberalism, which is aggressively modernist.

The idea that class is outmoded and that Britain will be a thriving meritocracy if people are freed from the constraints of a paternalist state, was central to New Labour’s conception of progress. It is at the heart of Cameron’s outlook.

The taboo on class politics is partially responsible for Cameron becoming leader of the Conservative Party. He is the first truly upper crust leader that the Tories have had since 1965, after 40 years of selecting leaders of

petit-bourgeois origin. When Labour satirised Cameron’s class background, he responded by calling the attacks “petty” and “spiteful”—as if class was just an incidental ethnic trait of no importance, and which it was unfair to mock.

So a Tory party led by millionaires intent on shredding the public sector, offered itself to the electorate as a force of “progress”.

Yet Cameron’s position within his party is tenuous. He has never really won over the Tory right, and his leadership has depended exclusively on his ability to deliver poll leads.

Having failed to win an outright majority, he has turned a loss into a tentative win by forming a coalition with the Lib Dems—themselves currently led by their most right wing, free market faction.

But Cameron has no mandate for the public sector cuts he intends to introduce. No rhetoric about progress will detract from the fact that he is another Tory at war against welfare and public services—and the trade unions that defend them.

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=21271

[Kenco Smooth]

I love his blog but haven't read either of his books. Might pick this up at some point.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Well, his first book was excellent too. Haven't read the second yet (it's only just been published!).

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Here's a review:


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.

http://codepoetics.com/poetix/2010/05/27/the-meaning-of-david-cameron/