Richard Seymour | London School of Economics

Richard Seymour

London School of Economics, Sociology, Graduate Student

London School of Economics, Sociology, Graduate Student |

Writer and sort-of-academic. I am researching a PhD at the London School of Economics. I write a weekly column for the Guardian, and have written for the London Review of Books, In These Times, Al Jazeera, ABC Australia and dozens of other publications. I am a corresponding editor at Historical Materialism. I have written several books, including The Liberal Defence of Murder (Verso, 2008), Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens (Verso, 2013) and most recently Against Austerity (Pluto Press, 2014). I have contributed chapters to numerous books.
Supervisors: Chetan Bhatt and Paul Gilroy

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Books

Humphrys E, Rundle G and Tietze T (Eds) - On Utoya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism and Europe

by Richard Seymour, Elizabeth Humphrys, and Tad Tietze

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Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda, Robbie Shilliam, eds, Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line

This chapter examines the extent to which anticommunism can be understood as a form of racial pr... more This chapter examines the extent to which anticommunism can be understood as a form of racial practice, involved in helping to organise global racial orders as part of hegemonic strategies on the part of states, above all the United States. In particular, it looks at how the United States assumed dominance in the world system in a way that both conserved existing colonial systems and sought to eventually displace them, and the role that Cold War anticommunism played in rendering intelligible the gap between the rhetorical commitment of liberal internationalism to national self-determination and the practical strategic commitments of the US government. Just as the ‘war on terror’ provided an adaptible master discourse through which the US could organise a global offensive, while its allies and dependents implemented ‘war on terror’ strategies in their own domestic disputes, so the anticommunism of the Cold War helped legitimise US imperialism, cement its alliances with colonial and white-supremacist allies, and enable them to contain radical challenges. Using Gramsci’s notion of hegemony in combination with Trotsky’s conception of ‘uneven and combined development’, it suggests that in two distinct phases of global expansion the US ruling class deployed anticommunism as part of a hegemonic counter-offensive against challenges to ‘white-world supremacy’, both in its own Deep South and overseas.

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Against Austerity

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Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens

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On Utoya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror and Racism in Europe

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American Insurgents

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Christopher Hitchens and His Critics

Here's the publishers' blurb: Christopher Hitchens--political journalist, cultural critic, publ... more Here's the publishers' blurb: Christopher Hitchens--political journalist, cultural critic, public intellectual and self-described contrarian--is one of the most controversial and prolific writers of his generation. His most recent book,God Is Not Great, was on theNew York Timesbestseller list in 2007 for months. Like his hero, George Orwell, Hitchens is a tireless opponent of all forms of cruelty, ideological dogma, religious superstition and intellectual obfuscation. Once a socialist, he now refers to himself as an unaffiliated radical. As a thinker, Hitchens is perhaps best viewed as post-ideological, in that his intellectual sources and solidarities are strikingly various (he is an admirer of both Leon Trotsky and Kingsley Amis) and cannot be located easily at any one point on the ideological spectrum. Since leaving Britain for the United States in 1981, Hitchens's thinking has moved in what some see as contradictory directions, but he remains an unapologetic and passionate defender of the Enlightenment values of secularism, democracy, free expression, and scientific inquiry.The global turmoil of the recent past has provoked intense dispute and division among intellectuals, academics, and other commentators. Hitchens's writing during this time, particularly after 9/11, is an essential reference point for understanding the genesis and meaning of that turmoil--and the challenges that accompany it. This volume brings together Hitchens's most incisive reflections on the war on terror, the war in Iraq, and the state of the contemporary Left. It also includes a selection of critical commentaries on his work from his former leftist comrades, a set of exchanges between Hitchens and various left-leaning interlocutors (such as Studs Terkel, Norman Finkelstein, and Michael Kazin), and an introductory essay by the editors on the nature and significance of Hitchens's contribution to the world of ideas and public debate. In response, Hitchens provides an original afterword, written for this collection.Whatever readers might think about Hitchens, he remains an intellectual force to be reckoned with. And there is no better place to encounter his current thinking than in this provocative volume.

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The Meaning of David Cameron

David Cameron is by his own account a progressive, a meritocrat, someone who cares passionately a... more David Cameron is by his own account a progressive, a meritocrat, someone who cares passionately about the state democracy in Britain. Positioning himself as the legatee of a Disraelian tradition of 'Tory radicalism', he has attacked inequality, and sought to equip the Conservative Party with a distinctively Tory approach to solving the problems of poverty and social distress. Yet his biographies and voting record disclose a Thatcherite, a defender of traditional family values, militant Atlanticism in foreign policy, and a free market economy. The Meaning of David Cameron argues that Cameron's attempt to capture the language of progress and 'fairness' is made possible by the tripartite consensus in favour of neoliberalism. The grammar of progressive Toryism, even as Conservative Party prepared the deepest spending cuts in the public sector since 1945, was only intelligible because of the capitulation of social democracy to the interests of capital, particularly finance capital, even at the ultimate expense of 5 million working class voters. More fundamentally, Cameronism can be understood as a morbid symptom of the erosion and decay of representative democracy. The purpose of gaining the franchise for the working classes was to be able to win reforms that would redistribute political and economic power without having to engage in extra-parliamentry struggle. But the neoliberal state rolls these back and rules out further reforms in favour of working people, such that the parliamentary system is more and more impervious to the needs and interests of the majority of people. Cameronism provides a pseudo-remedy these problems, as a stopgap for the secular decline of the Conservative Party's mass base, but can only be part of prolonging the agony.

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The Liberal Defence of Murder

The contemporary advocates of 'humanitarian intervention' in such diverse circumstances as Iraq a... more The contemporary advocates of 'humanitarian intervention' in such diverse circumstances as Iraq and Yugoslavia draw upon a repertoire of paternalistic arguments for empire that are centuries old. The 'war on terror' in particular witnessed a revival of explicitly imperialist language, alongside more muted support for the projection of force on behalf of oppressed ethnicities and nationalities. Michael Ignatieff decried 'lite' form of imperialism practised by the United States, calling for a much more long-term imperial commitment by the US. Christopher Hitchens urged the US to practise empire in its 'Jeffersonian' variant. Other pro-American intellectuals such as Paul Berman and Bernard-Henri Levy avoided the language of empire, but were very much in favours of its practice on humanitarian and emancipatory grounds. The ugly obverse of this often strident appeal to liberation was the growth of Islamophobic 'civilizational' discourses pitching 'Western civilization' against Islam, the latter constructed in a relentlessly negative, racialising fashion. The Liberal Defence of Murder assesses these arguments in light of a 400 year tradition of liberal imperialism, covering: Locke, Grotius and the origins of liberalism; Enlightenment anti-imperialism and its discontents; Mill and India; the Fabians, Labour and the British Empire; Socialists, communists and the French empire in south-east Asia and north Africa; American liberalism, imperialism and the revolutionary tradition; the 'humanitarian' defenders of the southern slave empire; 20th Century progressivism, race and empire; Cold War liberalism and neoconservatism; humanitarian intervention and Yugoslavia; and the proponents of the 'war on terror'.

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Papers

Margaret Thatcher: An Obituary From Below

Jacobin

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Humphrys E, Rundle G and Tietze T (Eds) - On Utoya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism and Europe

by Richard Seymour, Elizabeth Humphrys, and Tad Tietze

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Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda, Robbie Shilliam, eds, Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line

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Against Austerity

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Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens

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On Utoya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror and Racism in Europe

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American Insurgents

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Christopher Hitchens and His Critics

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The Meaning of David Cameron

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The Liberal Defence of Murder

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Margaret Thatcher: An Obituary From Below

Jacobin

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The Genocidal Imagination of Christopher Hitchens

Monthly Review

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American Insurgents extract

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European Meltdown

Overland

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Theorising Race and Anticommunism in the Cold War

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How the Tories became the dominant party of British capitalism

After 13 years of exile the Conservative Party has returned to office, but weaker than ever and d... more After 13 years of exile the Conservative Party has returned to office, but weaker than ever and dependent on a coalition with the Liberals. Amid a global crisis, with a weak incumbent and against a widely disliked government, the Tories only managed to add 3 percentage points to their 2005 share of the vote, bringing them up to 36 percent. This took place amid the ongoing boycott of elections by millions of disappointed Labour voters. As Ed Miliband has acknowledged, most of the five million voters lost by Labour between 1997 and 2010 didn’t switch to other parties, but stayed at home. Still the Tories, under a “modernising” leadership which styled itself as socially liberal and distanced itself from the Thatcherite past, barely exceeded a third of the vote. What explains the Tories’ weakness? Part of the answer, perhaps, is that the Tories “turned nasty” again following the 2008 recession, talking spending cuts and targeting welfare recipients in their election propaganda. But this raises further questions. Why did it take the Tories so long to adapt to the new terrain, adopt a “moderate” leadership and attempt to carve out a conservatism occupying much the same ground as New Labour had staked out since 1994? And why would it squander the fruits of this effort, which had seen the Tories restored to over 40 percent of popular support in polls for the first time since the early 1990s? Why are they determined now, governing with weak legitimacy, to impose widely unpopular policies such as privatisation in healthcare and tuition fee rises, which hurt parts of their electoral base? The answers must be sought in the Tories’ relationship to capitalism, its crisis, and their long-term decline.

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The Sadrist Revolt and the sign of God

Monthly Review

The Sadrist revolt in Iraq was misunderstood in the US and Europe as a fanatical Islamist project... more The Sadrist revolt in Iraq was misunderstood in the US and Europe as a fanatical Islamist project for the conquest of Iraq and its subsumption under an Iranian-style theocracy. In fact, though frequently brutal, it was always pragmatic in its political engagements, its aims more nationalistic than Islamist, and its cadres more suspicious of Iran than the pro-US Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council, with which the Sadrists were in direct conflict. In this article, I explore how some of the myths developed and outline the Sadrists' true role in occupied Iraq.

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The 'war on terror' as political violence

“While it is pardonable for the colonizer to have his little arsenals, the discovery of even a ru... more “While it is pardonable for the colonizer to have his little arsenals, the discovery of even a rusty weapon among the colonized is cause for immediate punishment.” Albert Memmi One of the oddities of the ‘War on Terror’ is that there remains no clear, universally agreed-upon definition of its key referent, terrorism. Notwithstanding such indeterminacy, the term operates doubly in a descriptive and prescriptive capacity. Terrorism both describes a form of (illegitimate) political violence and a primary justification for (legitimate) political violence. In the context of the ‘War on Terror’, connotations of epic and indiscriminate violence accrue to that political violence branded terrorism, while its purported opposite is held to be limited by the humane values of states united in opposition to terrorism. Violence against troops in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, though permissible under international law, is routinely described as terrorism. The violence of the US and its allies is rationalised, while anti-occupation violence is pre-emptively pathologised, its motives ascribed to an anti-modern and illiberal reflux. The caste of Euro-American states permitted the full range of kinetic force, are opposed to a subterranean and disarticulated network of non-state actors with whom there can be no negotiations and whose means of violence are criminalised. This binary stratification of global violence advises against what Robert Vitalis refers to as the “norm against noticing” the impact of race and caste on contemporary international politics. Political violence in the ‘War on Terror’ has been coded in the tropes of (magnanimous, rational, humane) empire versus (illiberal, irrational, suspicious) ‘native fanaticism’. These tropes originate in an era in which white supremacy was the global norm, and their resuscitation reminds us that its effects remain potent.

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Forlorn Hope - Lost Dreams of American Renewal

On the influence of Kriegsideologie on the US Right.

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Thoroughly Modern Tories?: From 'one nation' to the 'big society'

The Tories have a propensity toward explaining their actions in terms of deference toward traditi... more The Tories have a propensity toward explaining their actions in terms of deference toward tradition. From the Tamworth Manifesto onward, every concession that the Tories make to their opponents has been framed as a venerable gesture in the tradition of English conservatism. But there no unbroken lineage that resolves the many turbulent shifts of official Tory doctrine and practise into a solid body of accumulated wisdom. There are constant commitments – but these are not to tradition, and the familiar, as so many Tory apologists vouch. Whether opposing mass democracy or acquiescing to it, whether red-baiting social democrats or mimicking them, whether raising spending or cutting it, the enduring ideological commitment of the Conservative Party is to inequality, hierarchy and domination. Or, to put it in less abstract terms, the capitalist mode of production, the system of Burke’s veneration, the system that made the Tory landowning class rich (for it was still largely an agrarian system when the Conservative Party first emerged in its modern form), and the system whose technological expansion made the Peel family rich, as they were original investors behind the spread of the ‘Spinning Jenny’. In the marxist idiom, the Conservative Party is a bourgeois party, a party that exists to wage political struggles on behalf of the capitalist class into which it is integrated. Adopting this approach gives us a much better chance of understanding today's Tory party and its risky strategy for reviving British capitalism than attempting to situate David Cameron and his supporters in a specific tradition of Toryism, be it 'One Nation' or Thatcherite.

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Better Off Red

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Thoroughly Modern Tories?: From 'one nation' to the 'big society'

...Cameron’s leadership is operating in a situation in which two key difficulties beset the party... more ...Cameron’s leadership is operating in a situation in which two key difficulties beset the party’s ability to act as, as I say, a hegemonic party of capital. First is the secular tendency for its electoral base to decline, which is actually obscured a bit by the declining turnout, which is concentrated mainly among former Labour voters. The actual share of Tories among the total electorate may be closer to a quarter than a third. To overcome this, Cameron has had to triangulate, pacifying the core vote while appearing to offer something to the centre and centre-left. The second problem is the growing gap between the interests of the hard right base, the lower middle class, and those of the capitalist class, particularly the dominant financial fraction. This demands a second triangulation, though where there is a conflict, capital tends to win. If it did not, big business would withdraw its support and its funding. Cameron’s position on Europe – allying with the parties of the far right, while implementing the policy of big business – is typical of this strategy. These two difficulties are combining to produce a long-term crisis for the Tories, notwithstanding their present lead in the polls (which isn’t usually greater than 5%). Thus, the reinvention of the ‘Big Society’ as a mantra for spending cuts, welfare cuts, and faster privatization, is part and parcel of a gamble by the Tory leadership that a repetition and further entrenchment of the Thatcher revolution will revive British capitalism and restore their position in it, as the dominant party of business. It is, as the students have shown, a gamble that has the potential to backfire horribly on them.

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Racism and the recession

A crisis of capitalism is not just a crisis of the economy. It’s a crisis that wracks the whole o... more A crisis of capitalism is not just a crisis of the economy. It’s a crisis that wracks the whole of society – politically, ideologically, and culturally. It is, in that sense, also a crisis of the racial structure whether that expresses itself in planetary migration systems, domestic hierarchies, or imperialism. And globally, since the crisis began with the credit crunch in 2007, we have seen an intensification of racist crackdowns. In the United States, the state of Arizona has passed a new law that makes it a crime for immigrants to be in public without carrying documents, and which allows police to detain anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant whatever the circumstances. This isn’t uncontested, and the immigrant movements are one of the signs of real hope in America. The ‘tea party’ Right is also leading a vicious campaign not just against the so-called ‘ground zero mosque’, but against a wide array of actual mosques or mosque-building projects. In Italy and Hungary, there have been fresh pogroms against Roma gypsies. Across the continent, the far right has made gains – in Holland and Belgium, for example, and recently in Sweden. The era of the ‘war on terror’ has, of course, seen a revival in civilizational discourse that sees Muslims in particular as a barbarian and antipathetic menace, a solvent of ‘Western values’. Thus, in a very obvious way, imperialism has intersected with and amplified already existing domestic racism towards largely South Asian and North African minorities in Western Europe. The global economic crisis is accelerating this, partly by the way in which it intensifies competition between different groups of workers, so that migrant labourers are increasingly seen as a problem rather than a solution, but partly also because of the way in which it adds appeal to the false security offered by integrationist models of nationality and citizenship. With echoes of the 1930s so abundant, this accelerating political polarisation should not surprise us...

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The changing face of racism in Britain

...Historically, the act of oppression that produced the category of race preceded the systematic... more ...Historically, the act of oppression that produced the category of race preceded the systematic pseudo-scientific classification of human variation along racial lines. This was true, according to Theodore Allen, in Ireland under the Protestant Ascendancy, and it was true in colonial America. What happened first was that a group would be singled out on the basis of some characteristic or other, and excluded from the normal citizenship rights enjoyed by the rest of society no matter how poor. Then, that group would be racialised – a process known as ‘race-making’...

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