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Dead Cats and Politics

It's the most overused phrase in British politics, and is becoming even more annoying than managerial staples like going forward and the perennially awful across the piece (don't get me started on those who say "piste"). I am talking about dead cats. Not the trail of unfortunates left in the wake of the lately debunked Croydon cat killer, but of the political variety. Apparently originating with right wing dark artist Lynton Crosby, it's a stratagem used to attract the media spotlight away from something politicians would rather not talk about. I.e. Whatever the dinner party is discussing, throw a dead cat on the table and its sudden appearance will dominate the conversation. Crosby might have coined the term, but it's long been a favoured tool of elected officials and spinners.

However, we're now living in the age of peak dead cat. Politics is oversaturated with the remains of the feline deceased. Snided out, as my dad might say. Everywhere on social media you find people pointing at piles of of moggy corpses, slaughtered by the dozen by Boris Johnson. And recent days, if these declarations are to be believed, are a witness to a massacre like no other. The welcome political pain afflicting the Tories as reports of last year's festivities in Downing Street and CCHQ have finally come to light are actually a dead cat designed to distract the media from Priti Patel's Nationality and Borders bill, which was voted on on Wednesday. Apparently, this dead cat has proven so successful it needs a dead cat of its own. And so Johnson reached for Tiddles and the meat cleaver and, hey presto, the rolling out of Covid plan B. It didn't work. So Felix was dispatched to the angels and we got the rumour parliament will go into recess two days early. It's a wonder Carrie Johnson giving birth to her daughter, conveniently six weeks early, hasn't been identified as a terminated tabby too.

Unfortunately, the prevalence of dead cattery underlines the poor understanding of politics we find, even among those who see themselves on the left. Far from politics being events dear boy, events, they are carefully contrived set pieces fashioned by master manipulators behind the scenes. If we are to believe the dominant framing of Johnson, he is simultaneously an incompetent, disastrous oaf and a Blofeldian illuminatus pulling off master strokes on an 11-dimensional chessboard. And this is because a low-level conspiracism - its framing and assumptions - dominate the spontaneous political frames of too many leftists, and not a few liberals too. Politics is an expression of the machinations of elites, and nothing happens by accident. It's a species of naive cynicism, albeit with a superficial veneer of radicalism.

Consider the two main ways of thinking about politics. On the one hand we have Westminster-centrism, which privileges the personal relationships between politicians and sees it as a tussle between disagreeable but well-meaning "tribes". The biography is the education manual of choice, and structural inequalities, institutional power, and social conflict are either entirely erased or acknowledged, distorted to suit self-serving arguments and otherwise treated as if they don't matter. And then on the other is the more political-sociological, the militant political science centring exploitation, class relations, capital accumulation, and circuits of social reproduction. This does not dissolve the personhood of individual politicians, but embeds them in their context and leaves nothing to the silence of bourgeois propriety.

Dead catism as low level conspiracy politics is a move away from the establishment outlook on politics, but mangles the insights of political sociology. The result is a hybrid of the two. It can be a moment, an expression of people in movement. But if it stalls it is not necessarily an advance on the showbiz-for-ugly-people conception of politics. This is because bourgeois politics has to have a certain openness. The personal, decontextualised relationships it privileges have a dynamism. It's the stuff of politics gossip and tittle-tattle. It also has to be open because, no matter how hard Prime Ministers, oligarchs, the police and the press try, class struggle is an inescapable characteristic of capitalist societies. Politics has to be open to a degree because managing the antagonisms underpinning the whole thing demands elements of fluidity.

Conspiratorial politics, however, are fundamentally closed. Nothing can change, nothing will change. It's all rigged. And when an exceptional figure emerges, they're crushed too and we have to wait until another great leader emerges. It's fundamentally disempowering, a paralysing fatalism whose consequences fetishise class rule and class power. An outcome any Tory would be pleased with.

There's no point complaining about what masses of people think, instead it's a challenge. Disseminating the tools for understanding and analysing politics is just as important for the left as building new institutions and winning skirmishes with the boss class. Dead cat discourse is a warning - there's a lot we have to do. But the spontaneous antipathy to establishment politics it expresses, that's also something we can build on.