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

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Everyone who has an investment in the labour movement or is interested in class in the UK should read this book. It is not a surprise that education is the largest industrial section of the union, encompassing many Higher Education workers and students.

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. Each of these issues is interesting and the left certainly has problems with them, and Evans doesn’t declare himself a Brexiteer or lockdown sceptic - but they shouldn’t be thrown in the conclusion with no elaboration, in which case they come uncomfortably close to dogwhistles.One speaker, true to his Marxist principles, responded: ‘everyone who doesn’t own the means of production. In his chapter on the role of education, Evans lays out the changes to education as a conveyor belt to train the next generation of deskilled service workers. Criticising the new petty bourgeoisie’s preoccupation with US-imported identity politics and cultural snobbery (the book’s garish cover makes a wonderful guilt trap for judgemental hipsters, as I discovered…), Evans insists that embracing structural politics is the only way to unite the fractured petty bourgeoisie – and the working class – behind a progressive vision.

Its attempts at class discourse have been reduced to embarrassing faux-proletarian dress-up, typified by ex-Pontypridd MP (and pharma lobbyist) Owen Smith’s claim to be unfamiliar with the concept of a cappuccino . The growth of this new class is a part of the process of deindustrialisation and the dominance of the services economy.Evans’ superficial account of left-wing attitudes to the referendum is reflective of his wider approach to questions of class and identity. One of Evans’ more useful observations is that increasingly, the left’s activist and electoral base is employed within the state-managerial nexus whose tendencies are technocratic, upwards-looking, and depreciatory of the ‘old’ working class. Halfway through, an audience member raised their hand and asked the panel to define the ‘working class’.

The excision of class and materialism and the relentless focus on individuals, coupled with the shift in the understanding of power, paved the way for the left to be subsumed wholesale not just by identity politics, but by the infantile liberal view of the world in which people are no longer moulded by structural forces beyond their control, but are now essentially innately good or bad, either reactionary or progressive - particularly racist or non-racist”. super insightful on the class structure in the UK today and how it needs to be seen for socialist politics.The subconscious commitment to upward social mobility could be holding many members back from committing themselves to organising in their own workplaces right now. Even if we take the class composition outlined by Evans as given, the causal links between the ideological outlook of mostly powerless individuals and the direction of a highly centralised parliamentary campaign are missing from his analysis. 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. Evans does a terrific job of helping us break out of classic class schemas that are either too abstract to help practical political interventions or have not kept up to date with the evolving and complex developments in the formation of classes in Britain. I'm struggling a bit with how expansive Evans' definition of the petite bourgeoisie is, and as much as I get that the book is *about the petite bourgeoisie*, what with class being relational (As Evans acknowledges), I think it would be nice for there to be more discussion of the working classes and the 'underclass', as so far I have a confused sense of who Evans thinks they are.

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