A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petite Bourgeoisie

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This helps to reproduce cultural, social, and ideological positions – such as anti-collectivism, opposition to trade union organising, rugged individualism, promotion-seeking and upward mobility. However, I did observe some shortcomings that limited the usefulness of Evans’s framework: namely, the lack of consideration for the *global* class structure, without which any analysis of class falls short.

A vital part of social mapping is to understand the workplace and its constituent parts, including how all the various roles work together and what their purposes are. We want labour to be a place where we engage in meaningful work that is socially useful and makes us happy, where we have agency and autonomy in how we carry out tasks, where we make decisions collectively about what we do and where it goes. Most questionable of all are the intellectual gymnastics Evans deploys to suggest that gig economy workers, on zero-hours contracts and often receiving below the minimum wage, have a tenuous claim to membership of the working class because they are ‘self-employed’. Far from spurning issues of identity, Sivanandan was a pioneering theorist of the Black political consciousness that emerged in Britain out of the shared experiences of immigrants from the former Empire who, subjected to open workplace segregation and excluded from trade unions, were forced to organise autonomously for their rights and dignity. Significantly, they built alliances with core sections of the industrial working class, as well as ancillary porters and cleaning workers.But de-platforming far-right spokespersons has never been the sole prerogative of student activists – Evans might be interested to know the history of trade union militants enforcing a ‘no-platform’ for reactionaries by, for instance, mobbing them off the streets. p. 284) He illustrates his point with reference to the left Twitter discourse over the Deano internet meme – a satire of relatively successful, new-build owning tradespeople who have no qualms about flaunting their lifestyle. Yet, far from disappearing, structural changes to the global economy under neoliberalism have instead grown the petite-bourgeoisie, and the individualist values associated with it have been popularized by a society which fetishizes "aspiration", home ownership and entrepreneurship.

One class reductionist framework is that in which class is fundamentally determinant at the structural level (meaning that we can identify the objective structural antagonisms at the level of class - the point of production), whilst acknowledging that political interests may not map along class lines.It would however be a mistake to take Evans’ diagnosis of the class composition of the left as given. He redeems himself in the conclusion, having a go at the sections of the liberal left whose identity is protest and those building a nice media career off it, and looks to build a movement led by the working class, well outside the Labour Party and the stagnant bureaucracy of most of the trade unions, dragging the petite-bourgeoisie along with it and away from reaction. The petty bourgeoisie – the insecure class between the working class and the bourgeoisie – is hugely significant within global politics. In this way, top-down nationalisation of industries is not satisfactory, and neither is a retreat to isolated self-employment. The left on the whole missed an opportunity for ‘a genuinely anti-establishment insurgency, pitted both against the EU and the nativist, anti-migrant miseries that the EU and the British Right breed.

Halfway through, an audience member raised their hand and asked the panel to define the ‘working class’. Conclusion: neither nationalisation nor small businesses, but Industrial Unionism and workers control!Contra many of his Eurocommunist disciples, Gramsci’s exhortation for the left to exert moral and intellectual leadership over the popular classes did not entail swallowing whole the reactionary prejudices of either strands of the middling strata – the managerial-paternal, and the anti-collectivist. As usually happens in new fascist groupings, personality and class tensions precipitated a split in the organisation which undermined their local standing, yet during their brief residency in Cannock they clearly enjoyed not-insignificant support – highlighting the painful realities of class dealignment and the left’s disorganisation. Evans thinks of the middle class or the petit bourgeoisie as a “DNA double helix” with two distinct fractions; the Traditional Petit Bourgeoisie and the New Petit Bourgeoisie, which have arisen due to profound changes to the economy over the last fifty years but have not yet been adequately examined by the Left. It helps us understand the ‘intermediary classes’ between proletariat and capitalist, with whom this book is primarily concerned. p. 7) He talks about his own experiences in the tenants’ union ACORN in Splott, a town south of Cardiff where many ex-steelworkers have purchased former council houses.

He gives the example of Guardian investigative journalist Helen Pidd travelling to Leigh, a northern brick in the red wall, to interview a ‘working class’ Tory artisan who owned several pizza restaurants. What a world we could create through seeing the human underneath the voting record and the scars of life in a vastly uncaring system of exploitation.

A society where bottom-up democratic Industrial Unions govern production and distribution could be a way of meeting our basic creative human needs in a way that follows the maxim, from each according to ability to each according to need. However, as is often true with political and sociological topics, some of its analysis didn't work for me and at times it felt a bit repetitive whilst barely covering other things it mentioned.