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

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Cannock, an ex-Labour constituency since 2010, is a white enclave town in post-industrial Staffordshire with a higher percentage of ‘lower paid, manual and routine jobs’ than the national average. Well-meaning though the speaker had been, I felt like his simplistic interpretation of class made little sense. The focus of Evans’ scorn is Corbynism, and with it overlapping elements in the Welsh and Scottish indie movements, which he suggests are all inhabited by ‘people whose sense of their own superiority and self-righteousness is far more unacceptable to working-class people than the traditional economic bourgeoisie or even the aristocracy. As the social geographer Alastair Bonnett warns, the danger of a simplistic conflation of localised attachments and nostalgia with political reaction is that ‘[w]ithout an understanding … of the inextricable ties between resistance to uprooting and resistance to capitalism, the radical anti-racist response to such fears is inevitably dismissive.

Relying on a structuralist Marxist framework, leaning heavily on the work of Poulantzas, they propose that neoliberalism has changed the class structure from one that was relatively simple, with a large working class, small middle and small ruling class; to one that is far more complex, with a bloated intermediate class and a more heterogeneous ruling class. For all its limitations, Corbynism represented a seismic shift to the left on both social and economic issues – which is why it was anathema to the entire ruling bloc. Thought this was great until the conclusion, at which point Evans made a few claims that were larger than justified or poorly argued.The North America-based IWW Freelance Journalists Union is a similar project aiming to unite isolated workers, and there are conversations in UK and Ireland to form an organisation by and for freelance artists. The content of that tension - and indeed of the social groups involved - is a subject that constantly rears its head, though is seldom given systematic treatment.

Never has a turn to a new form of syndicalism been more obviously what workers of this country need. The book’s most impassioned passages censure the left for purportedly mimicking the liberal social views espoused by the professional-managerial class (PMC).As always, just don’t consider it in isolation — it must be synthesized with other, more globally minded paradigms. In contrast, the word 'racist' appears 10 times, generally in the context of critiquing the characterisation of certain groups of people (for example Brexit voters) as being racist.