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Subcontracting ultimately allows big firms to pass costs and risks down the system to the little men at the bottom, and there’s nothing the small firms can do about it because they are totally dependent on big capital for contracts. I have wanted to review the book for some time, and offer a somewhat different interpretation of the current class dynamics in Britain. There was a clear geographic dimension to Brexit reflecting the uneven economic fallout of deindustrialisation. Evans exhorts his young, left-wing readers to stop playing to Labour’s culture of ‘moralizing and careerism’ and instead to seize the initiative. The petty bourgeoisie — the insecure class between the working class and the bourgeoisie — is hugely significant within global politics.
The growth of this new class is a part of the process of deindustrialisation and the dominance of the services economy. 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. 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. 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.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. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’, it emphasises that class boundaries are lived through shared mentalities and values. Fresh off the back of his 2021 co-edited volume, The Welsh Way: Essays on Neoliberalism and Devolution , he now explores how the triumph of neoliberal capitalism in the 1980s obliterated the old working/middle class divide, replacing it with a new and unclear in-between class. The logic is that this would lead to the gradual erosion of class boundaries between the subordinate classes and help guarantee the formation of broad political alliances. 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 looks at the complicated class structure of modern Britain, how education and housing play a part in class, and considers the impact of individualism upon politics and the left.
Like the proletariat (and unlike the old petty bourgeoisie), they do not own means of production, but for reasons that are social, cultural, and ideological rather than economic, they are not of the proletariat. 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. The Left could thus benefit massively from harnessing petty bourgeois support, Evans maintains, but Labour has become too mired in managerialism and naff authenticity politics to even recognise this new and increasingly vocal class. 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. 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 .
most of the far-left activists and new union members are made up of elements of the new petty bourgeoisie – downwardly mobile graduates, often with humanities or arts degrees, often based in cities or university towns, stuck in dead-end jobs despite being the ‘smart kids’ from school. 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’. But this tells us little about the realities of the world of work and how class operates in everyday life. I would even go so far as to say that it is perhaps one the most important books of our contemporary, post Corbyn, multi-polar, brink of WW3 era. 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.
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.
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