A Nation of Shopkeepers
Class, as Dan Evans says, ‘is very complex’, and A Nation of Shopkeepers begins by noting the confusion encircling the 2017 and 2019 general elections over the ‘traditional Labour heartlands’. A symbol for the ‘left behind’ working class who voted for Brexit, this was in reality a much broader social constituency. 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. Evans’s focus, though, is on the left’s failure to grapple with Britain’s reconfigured class composition post-deindustrialisation, describing the left’s understanding of class since the 1980s as one step forward, two steps back.
A popular left response to the effects of economic changes is simply to say that the working class has now just changed form: it is no longer white men working down the mines or in the steelworks, but increasingly women and people of colour working in call centres, as cleaners, care workers and so on, clustered in the areas where industrial and manual work was once dominant. The awareness of the changing face and form of the working class has been one of the strongest elements of the left’s return to class. (p. 137)
The left has not dealt with the new reality which makes nonsense of the optimistic discourse of the 99% vs. the 1%. And if we are all working class, Evans points out, ‘there is no need to work to build class alliances.’ Moving on from the inadequate binary of workers and bosses, he turns to the Greco-French Marxist sociologist Nicos Poulantzas’s analysis of class fractions. Rather than a dual society of haves and have-nots, Evans argues that Britain has a class structure of rough thirds: a diminished but still numerically formidable working class, with a majority living in relative poverty or straddling that line; the ruling capitalist and professional-managerial elite; and squeezed between them, the ‘bloated’ petty bourgeoisie. The latter – that politically volatile ‘kingmaker class’ that played a central role in the democratic revolutions of the nineteenth century, and the mass fascist movements of the twentieth – he argues is now split into two components. A traditional fraction comprising shopkeepers and self-employed tradespeople, plus ‘management consultants, tutors, childminders, freelancers, graphic designers, hairdressers, [and] personal trainers’, has been joined by what Poulantzas controversially designated a ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ of public sector employees and supervisors. Today, claims Evans, this new petty bourgeoisie includes the legions of downwardly mobile graduates stuck in the service economy or lower-tier white-collar jobs. Evans’ schema is both too neat and impressionistic, but it captures the essence of the post-Blairite reality. ‘The only way [for the left] to win’, he argues, ‘is by building class alliances between the petty bourgeoisie and the working class’. (p. 274) The limitations of the political conclusions he draws from this soon make themselves clear.
The book does, however, raise some uncomfortable questions for the left. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’, it emphasises that class boundaries are lived through shared mentalities and values. The old working-class habitus with its strong associational cultures of industrial labour has been hollowed out. Now, Evans suggests, the working class is culturally subordinate to the anti-collectivist traditional petty bourgeoisie, with whom they share more political affinity than the university-educated ‘progressive left’ who inherit the cultural mores of the managerial and professional classes. It is the so-called new petty bourgeoisie – including declassed students and graduates – who have ‘adopted the accoutrements and iconography’ of socialism and proletarian collectivism. (p. 141) And as Evans argues, downward social mobility does not make someone organically part of the working class. He dubs the idea of a generational divide pitting selfish boomers against a young precariat a new ‘socialism of fools’. (p. 229) The educated lower-middle classes typically retain their aspirational and status-driven mores, while their economic grievance is often delayed home ownership with longer life spans forestalling inheritance. The sense of reneged or overdue entitlements often encourages a turn to the left, but a gulf in mentalities and material privileges separates them from the working class-proper – a theme echoed in D. Hunter’s Tracksuits, Traumas and Class Traitors. To correct the new middle class bias of the left, says Evans, what is needed is an anti-establishment appeal to working-class and ‘old’ petty-bourgeois communities, whose hostility to ‘globalisation and big capital’ reflect material interests that are not reducible to being ‘innately reactionary or racist’. (p. 289)
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.’ (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. This discourse ran in a ‘pathological cycle’: at first mockery in the form of projected class snobbery, then the reaction that such condescension is anti-working class, and finally the response that ridicule is actually okay because Deano is a privileged member of the propertied class. Both sides had a point, but it highlighted the collective left’s unease about class and a wider cultural rift in British society. This is a divide, Evans stresses, ‘that many on the right see (and weaponize)’.
This latter point speaks to my observations of the challenges facing the left in the West Midlands specifically, where a recent far-right protest in Cannock targeting the government’s housing of asylum seekers in a local hotel gained national media attention which focused on a photo of a middle-aged Union Jack-wearing man holding a sign saying ‘Gary Liniker [sic] You Shithouse’. 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. The fascist group Patriotic Alternative framed the protest in terms of the grievances of a native working class singularly left behind – a well-rehearsed narrative gifted to the far-right by Tory populists and Labour centrists like Margaret Hodge. The pro-refugee counterdemo was faced with a larger crowd spewing anti-immigrant and anti-left venom: ‘the sound people make when they fear the wages of whiteness will not be paid’, in the words of a renegade socialist commentator.
That the anti-fascist camp, largely composed of trade union activists and student leftists, had mostly ‘parachuted in’ from Birmingham city or further afield was obvious to onlookers. The fascists, of course, were themselves outside agitators: Patriotic Alternative, incorporated as a private company, is a British fascist organisation with typically petty bourgeois neo-Nazi leaders like Mark Collett, former chair of Young BNP who is a graphic designer with a business economics degree, and vlogger Laura Tyrie, a former army cadet and politics graduate. Tangentially, their class backgrounds and education reveal the limits of Evans’ culturally determined boundary between the ‘new’ and ‘old’ petty bourgeoisies. 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. For Evans, this weakness maps onto a geographic divide that was exemplified by Brexit.
Evans follows other left-wing sociologists in complicating the notion that Brexit was an authentically working-class rebellion. As Jonas Marvin summarised in ‘Brexit From Below: Nation, Race and Class’,
Just as the Remain coalition drew young precarious workers into alignment with those who have benefited from neoliberalism, the Leave alliance included traditional [petty-bourgeois] Tory voters from the shires alongside millions of workers and unemployed from South Wales, parts of the Midlands, and the North, most of whom traditionally vote Labour or don’t vote at all.
The ‘sinister’ instrumentalisation of an implicitly white ‘working-class identity’ by the likes of Blue Labour was, Evans stresses, an act of ‘ventriloquism’ (p. 22) – but the framing of Brexit as an anti-establishment revolt does contain ‘a large grain of truth’. (p. 284) The working class’s alienation from parliamentary politics dovetailed with the anti-bureaucratic impulses of the traditional petty bourgeoisie, whose ire was further provoked by leading Blairites’ call for a second referendum as a supposed ‘People’s Vote’. Corbyn himself was justly critical of the EU’s ‘failed neoliberal policies’, but in the 2019 general election prioritised a sham party unity at the expense of both his own principles and political credibility.
There was a clear geographic dimension to Brexit reflecting the uneven economic fallout of deindustrialisation. The right-wing discourse of ‘metropolitan elites’ – often an antisemitic dog whistle – was effectively deconstructed by Runnymede Trust director Omar Khan, who pointedly asked: ‘Why aren’t the ethnic minority and migrant people who live in tower blocks and experience disproportionate levels of child poverty (rising to 59 per cent for Bangladeshi children) viewed as working class? Why aren’t those living in cities, or who die in preventable fires also “left behind”?’ It is nonetheless the case, as Evans emphasises, that ‘the agglomeration of certain industries and jobs in urban areas – universities, the media and culture industry, the political bureaucracy, the civil service and so on – means that the “progressive classes” … are overwhelmingly clustered in the cities.’ (p. 6)
Evans is concerned by what he and others refer to as nihilistic ‘rainy fascist island’ discourse on the left that has a misanthropic and potentially classist inflection. Such notions can readily merge with middle-class liberalism’s ‘dependency on working-class “backwardness” for its own claim to modern multicultural citizenship’.2 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.’3 Relatedly, a shallow anti-imperialism that views working-class attitudes as wholly predetermined by Britain’s colonial legacy and neo-colonial present can obscure the more complex and diffuse processes underlying racialised nativism and local xenophobia – and, in response, the necessity of a firmly socialist anti-racism.
Nonetheless, Evans has not grasped the complexities of the referendum for the left. Being opposed to Brexit did not, as he seems to suggest, necessarily entail being pro EU. The Brexit campaign was, as Marvin puts it, ‘a carnival of reaction’ that directly precipitated a spike in racist violence and the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox, spurring the radicalisation of the Tory right and in turn galvanising the ‘law and order’ Labour centrists. The inability of the left to take ownership over the campaign against the European Union compared to the situation in the mid-1970s – when even Tony Benn at times veered perilously close to Powellite nativism – was obvious. In recognition of this, a significant minority of the left advanced a critique of Eurocapitalism and Brussels bureaucracy as well as the reactionary Brexit camp. 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.’ Evans’ superficial account of left-wing attitudes to the referendum is reflective of his wider approach to questions of class and identity.
The Misuses of Sivanandan
The book’s most impassioned passages censure the left for purportedly mimicking the liberal social views espoused by the professional-managerial class (PMC). Evans joins wider calls for a ‘return to class’ taking the form of a backlash against identity politics, from the consciously ‘class-reductionist’ Marxism of Adolph Reed Jr. to the red-brown liaisons of Compact Mag. One group of British academics conjure the particularly evocative metaphor of ‘intersectional struggle’ operating as ‘a cross-cut shredder … [which] ripped apart potential class solidarity along cultural fault lines as it simultaneously ripped apart potential cultural affinity along class fault lines’, as Simon Winlow et al. write.4 The problem with such narratives are their ahistorical erasure of the processes by which a radical identity-conscious politics of building solidarity across recognised differences became the victim of ‘elite capture’.
Particularly unhelpful is Evans’ misappropriation of Ambalavaner Sivanandan, the late editor of the Race & Class journal, as some kind of anti-identity authority who straightforwardly opposed ‘sectional “progressive” causes’. (p. 13) Arun Kundnani, a longtime associate of Race & Class, notes a wider trend of casting Sivanandan as taking ‘a trenchant stance on one side of this battle, a definitive denunciation of “identity politics” as a betrayal of Left principles’. 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. It was only from the late 1960s, when wider class militancy challenged a prevailing corporate and political paternalism, that Black radicals were able to form (critical) alliances with trade unionists as well as new left activists. Crucially, for Sivanandan this new convergence was not about ‘subsuming the race struggle to the class struggle’ but rather ‘deepening and broadening class struggle through its black and anti-colonial, anti-imperialist dimension.’ Into the eighties, Sivanandan became concerned by the co-optation of legitimate identity-based claims away from socialist coalitional politics and into individualised and culturalist cul-de-sacs.
In what socialist feminist Nancy Fraser calls a cunning of history, the new left critiques of social-democratic paternalism – with its race, gender, and disability exclusions – were slyly conscripted into the neoliberal project. New Labour’s ‘neoliberalism with a human face’ placed issues like anti-racism and sexual equality onto the government-sanctioned terrain of ‘community cohesion’ and cultural pluralism, whilst diverting attention away from glaring economic inequalities. State-authorised multiculturalism was accompanied by imperialist warmongering and intensifying state racism, but political elites were quick to blame enduring societal discontent on excessive ‘tolerance’, and the failings of ‘progressive’ neoliberalism were ascribed to the left. Thus we get the perverseness that Starmer, Mr. PMC personified, is able to portray himself as speaking to ‘authentic’ working-class concerns spurned by out-of-touch Corbynistas.
Evans believes the left should revisit classical libertarian concern for individual freedoms, like free speech, and ditch the politics of privilege he suggests has produced ‘unhinged modes of human interaction’. (p. 286) It is one thing to say the left should be far more introspective about how our norms of engagement are shaped by educated middle-class habitus, but Evans’ call for ‘an overdue confrontation with identity politics’ in which there ‘can be no half measures’ (p. 297) is suspect at a time when there is a coordinated assault on trans rights being carried through under the veneer of a politics of ‘reasonableness’ and ‘common sense’. The confected moral panic about a free speech ‘crisis’ seems above all concerned with sparing from censure reactionary views which threaten the social freedoms of marginalised groups. Freedom to express anti-establishment beliefs without fear of state repression is, of course, a vital social gain won historically by the working class. 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. In the 1930s, leading British communist Rajani Palme Dutt derided the liberal opinion that ‘workers must listen like docile, obedient sheep in regimented silence whenever a noble, respected bourgeois chooses to get on his hindlegs to air his caste-theories and generally put them in their place’.5
Asad Haider, the author of Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, points out that the class-reductionist left has itself fallen victim to a kind of ‘anti-woke’ identity politics: ‘speakers are simply denounced as PMCs in a discourse that ultimately amounts to the injunction to “check your privilege.”’ Though Evans distinguishes the upper-middle class PMC from the nouveau petty bourgeois cadres of the left, he reproduces the logic Haider refers to. It is a logic which has of course been leapt upon by the contemporary right, as most recently seen in British academic Matthew Goodwin’s ravings about the country’s enthralment to a ‘leftist elite’.
When Evans goes so far as to say that the working class’s rejection of the left ‘is an entirely rational one’, (p. 294) it has to be wondered whatever happened to Marx and Engels’s seminal insights on ideology and ‘false consciousness’, or Gramsci’s writings on hegemony and the production of what passes as ‘common sense’ in a given social formation. The ruling ideas of society, in the Marxist view, are above all those of the ruling class bloc who exert broad control over the ideological state apparatus (education, the media, the government and legal system). Working class habitus is never simply an ‘artefact of elite domination’, but neither is it ever an entirely self-authored lifeworld. The Thatcherite counterrevolution and the international setbacks suffered by socialism have cast a long shadow, but it is not the job of the left to merely adapt to the regressive ideological terrain. Evans, by neglecting ‘the little matter of the ruling class’6 in the left’s current predicament and realities of class dealignment, reneges on his promised return to a materialist diagnostics.
No Shortcuts to Socialism
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. Evans though, like Poulantzas, expresses an overly functionalist and ideologically determinant view of class. It is not always the case that public sector workers – e.g., teachers, social workers, and nurses – are state loyalists. During the notorious Winter of Discontent in 1978-9, Labour prime minister James Callaghan’s senior advisor referred to the ‘feverish madness’ that was ‘infecting industrial relations’ in the state sector, which disproportionately employed women and racialised minorities. Historian of trade unionism Robert Taylor has emphasised the ‘violence’ of members of NUPE (the public employees’ union, which merged into UNISON in 1993), and the ‘anarchy’ which gripped Britain ‘in the last phase of Labour corporatism’.7 Significantly, they built alliances with core sections of the industrial working class, as well as ancillary porters and cleaning workers. Their militancy continued in the ’80s, and whilst white-collar unions were effectively tamed by New Labour managerialism,8 there are emergent signs of a renewed combativity that could, in time, translate into proletarian collectivism as opposed to narrowly sectional struggles of ‘educational professionals’.
It should be conceded that Poulantzas’s more orthodox Marxist critics like Ellen Meiksins Wood overstated the extent that class relations are simply ‘given’ in the realm of economic exploitation.9 Downplaying the challenges posed by neoliberal class segmentation, Wood contended that white-collar workers are, by virtue of their waged-labour, straightforwardly part of a diversified proletariat. But the (real) ideological divisions between mental and manual labour stressed by Poulantzas can equally be exaggerated. For Evans, Corbynism was so thoroughly imbued with the narrow parti pris of the new petty bourgeoisie that it can be conceptualised ‘as part of the process of [inter-class] distinction, rather than as a genuine socialism or fundamental polarisation towards the working class.’ (p. 223) This is bending the stick too far. 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. Corbynist political culture was decidedly collectivist and anti-monopoly, and contained a significant (if ideologically lukewarm) anti-capitalist strain. It is quite possible to be concerned with ‘socially liberal issues of “social justice”’ as well as economic justice, and this fusion was the Corbyn movement’s strongest element which the left could build upon. Indeed, it was precisely the convergence of internationalism and economic redistributionism – no matter how mild – that drew such ruling-class opprobrium. As one reviewer identifies, Evans’ account of Corbynism as irredeemably middle class flattens the ‘messy bloc it really was’. 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’.
Evans’ political conclusion is that the left needs to harness the anti-bureaucratic, anti-parliamentarian and anti-globalisation instincts of the traditional petty bourgeoisie, whose mobilising potential was demonstrated in the French Gilets Jaunes protest movement. His prescription has precedents in ideas of a broad ‘anti-monopoly alliance’ formulated within the communist movement during the historical Popular Front compromises. In the 1970s, the concept was elaborated into a permanent neo-Gramscian strategy known as ‘Eurocommunism’ – of which Poulantzas was a prominent but heterodox theorist. The idea was that, in an era of industrial working class retreat, an alliance must be brokered between the trade unions – the major force neglected in Evans’ account of Corbynism – and intermediate social classes. It suggests a form of democratic socialism making a simultaneous appeal to the petty bourgeoisie’s ambivalent attitudes to big business and the union bureaucracy’s national-reformist proclivities. The very real problem is that such a cross-class alliance in Britain would coalesce around the ready-made formula of social imperialism, a ‘socialism’ that perpetuates a violently racist border regime and unequal economic exchange at the international level.
An illustrative example is the 2012 Alternative Economic and Political Strategy published by the British Communist Party-affiliated Manifesto Press, whose authors included two of Corbyn’s prominent advisors, Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray.10 Calling for an alliance ‘to defend industries and services and the thousands of small and medium businesses’, it argues that Britain unshackled from the EU could benefit from its ‘historic links’ with Commonwealth markets. The historic ties in question refer, of course, to colonialism, and in lieu of addressing unequal exchange, the pamphlet in some senses anticipated the Tories’ post-Brexit economic fantasy of ‘Empire 2.0’. A left hegemonic strategy is not just about building a popular movement but a popular emancipatory one, ranged against gross economic and social inequality both nationally and internationally. 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.
What A Nation of Shopkeepers recognises is that there is an internal class factor to the prolonged crisis of the left. In Britain the intellectual retreat from class was spearheaded by those post-Marxist trends, with which Sivanandan had sparred, who derided the Miners’ Strike whilst expressing ‘barely concealed admiration’ for the neoliberal counterrevolution and ‘the celerity of the “New Times” of which it was an expression.’ An implicit concern of Evans’ book is the current left’s tendency to consign our old pre-’68 antecedents to the ‘condescension of posterity’, to use E.P. Thompson’s powerful phrase. For all the importance of the second-wave feminist and anti-racist critiques of the archetypal socialist agent as cloth cap-wearing miners or steelworkers, it is now clear that the trade union ‘Broad Left’ of the postwar decades was a vital defensive bulwark of the working class whose absence is sorely felt. And as Sheila Rowbotham’s memoirs highlight, it was not at all the case that the militant class struggles of the 1960s–70s were entirely cut off from the new social movements.11 What is important is to remember the processes by which alliances were constructed.
As labour historians John McIlroy and Alan Campbell remind us, throughout the twentieth century ‘division and difference was endemic, the class structure was fluid and fractured, unity was painstakingly constructed out of diversity, only for sectionalism to resurface’.12 Class solidarity was never automatically given in the economic relations of (re)production as capitalism’s reliance on divisions and exclusions rule out things being so simple. While faced with novel structural issues, we would do well to return to Sivanandan’s conception of solidarity – decidedly not the liberal metaphor of ‘intersecting’ oppressions, but the ‘forging and reforging’ of a socialist coalition whose most oppressed fractions are among its ‘richest political seams’. There are today encouraging signs of renewed labour mobilisation accompanying street-level protest, but what remains absent is an anti-systemic party, unhindered by Labourism, that is capable of articulating and clasping together the complementary seams of anti-capitalist struggle.
The book does offer a provocative attempt to analyse Britain’s ideologically based class segmentation, with a strong argument about the political weight of intermediate social layers. Translating the theoretical insights of Poulantzas to the concrete social realities of post-Blairite Britain, it deserves to be widely read among leftists on that merit – alongside a growing corpus of scholar-activist works on the expanding gig economy and the quasi-lumpenised poverty class.13 That Evans lacks awareness of the most difficult and pressing task facing the British left is clear, however: of programmatically harmonising economic redistribution and democratic participation with rightful demands for social justice and recognition.
References
A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie
Dan Evans
Repeater Bookers, 2023
9781913462697