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. Working class habitus is never simply an ‘artefact of elite domination’, but neither is it ever an entirely self-authored lifeworld. I think the problem is that Evans remains stuck in a political rather than a thoroughgoing class struggle mindset. A fascinating and accessible account of a social class that is too often neglected or misunderstood. There was a clear geographic dimension to Brexit reflecting the uneven economic fallout of deindustrialisation.

Here, he has managed to create something new – a functional definition of all those stuck in the ‘fractured middle’, the petty bourgeoisie both old and new. 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.Through a series of characters drawn from his own life in South Wales – the Porthcawl plasterer who was ‘culturally working-class’ but loved Thatcher, or the ‘incidental’ Cardiff landlord who was also a trade unionist – Evans skilfully demonstrates that class boundaries are far more complicated than you’d imagine. 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. 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. While a solely cultural analysis of class is clearly absurd, all too often the labour movement adopts an equally unhelpful position on class, which only looks at the macro-economic reltationship between who owns the ‘means of production’ and who does not.

stars for the excellent critique of the contemporary Western left, and the very helpful outlining of the petite bourgeoisie as a class defined by precarity and social mobility. 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.The “Network” model of Industrial Unionism was developed during the IWW’s foray into organising Deliveroo and JustEat riders in 2017-2018, through the IWW Couriers Network. 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. Just to give an example, he endorses Trotsky’s line of argument the petty bourgeoisie don’t support labour movements because they’re weak but argues that they’re weak because they’re dominated by the professional-managerial class…but the original argument is unrelated to that and its historical context was one where that domination didn’t exist.

Don’t forget: you can now sign up to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get news, features, interviews and reviews delivered direct to your inbox. I still highly recommend reading this work, because the basic framework it lays out and its diagnosis of the left’s failures are spot on. A brilliant examination of the life and ideology of the petty bourgeoisie, the silent majority of ‘normal people’ whose safe, suburban, newbuild lifestyle belies their huge political influence and violent history. The outsourcing of manufacturing from the Global North to the Global South, and the shift towards service driven economies in the former has been well documented, particularly in the case of Britain, where the loss of colonial holdings saw the fall of a global power, and the adaptation to a new role as the hub of global finance (documented in Tony Norfield’s tour de force, The City 5).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. 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’. Against the concept of the “99%” and the idea that “we are all workers now” in a constantly evolving working class – and drawing heavily on the work of Poulantzas - Evans argues instead that highly educated and precarious working people constitute a “new petit bourgoisie”. The growth of this new class is a part of the process of deindustrialisation and the dominance of the services economy.