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

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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. 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.

I'll admit, I don't read much Marxist literature, and it will take study for me to fully understand this book. The subconscious commitment to upward social mobility could be holding many members back from committing themselves to organising in their own workplaces right now. 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). The TPB possesses a radical individualism which is often hostile to collectivism, rooted in their isolated conditions of work.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. In the preface, Evans admits to having always been confused by his own class position, which lay somewhere between ‘working’ and ‘middle’.

Many self-employed workers came to this situation from unemployment following the 2008 financial crisis. A must-read for anyone interested in social class, political economy, or trade unionism and the Left in the UK.I suspect that Evans does not delve into issues of nationality because of his stated hostility toward identity politics - a fair stance given liberalism’s successful co-optation of potential sources of genuine radicalism (race in particular) into toothless, individualized points of interpersonal grievance. 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. Dan Evans’ book is good for theorising the various conundrums we have been witnessing on the ground. 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. Working class habitus is never simply an ‘artefact of elite domination’, but neither is it ever an entirely self-authored lifeworld.