Mike Phipps reviews A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie, by Dan Evans, published by Repeater

Growing up in Porthcawl, a small seaside town half way between Cardiff and Swansea, Dan Evans returned from University to find that many of his school friends, who had left school at 16, were better off than him. They were usually manual workers, but often owning their own small business, their home and their own transport. Evans, meanwhile, and other graduates like him, found themselves burdened with student debt, stuck in private rented accommodation and finding that the lucrative careers a university degree was supposed to make available were actually quite scarce.

Evans believes that both he and his self-employed friends represent different fractions of Britain’s powerful petty bourgeoisie. Both wings are usually isolated from each other, with very divergent political outlooks – the leftish urban-based graduate, often Remainer, liberal and even pro-Corbyn, unable to comprehend the outlook of the self-employed Boris Johnson-backing Brexiteer. This is what his book is about: it aims “to make sense of the changing class structure and the petty bourgeoisie’s place within it.”

Traditional Marxist analysis sees the petty bourgeoisie as a transitional class, its members seeking to join the bourgeoisie proper, but with the triumph of monopoly capitalism and increasing class polarisation, more likely to be driven down into the ranks of the working class. “This did not happen,” suggests Evans. “Far from dying out, the petty bourgeoisie survived. It has played a major role in every revolution and counter-revolution throughout the last few centuries and was central to the creation of both social democracy and fascism.”

The petty bourgeoisie is growing. It has provided the social base for most of the new political movements in recent years, be they of left or right. Yet the left has traditionally used the designation as an insult – which may reflect its declining understanding of class more generally.

That said, Evans’ own analysis – that we are living through a period “staggering class dealignment”, where “professionals, managers and university graduates now comprise the bulk of the ‘progressive’ forces in society, while the lower middle classes and working classes have been sucked into the orbit of right populist movements” – already looks a bit dated, to put it mildly.

One problem is the growing tendency to see class as a cultural identity rather than a fundamentally economic relationship. Another is to see the working class as the 99%, counterposed to the 1% – useful for propaganda purposes, but not helpful for analysis or strategy when it comes to constructing class alliances.

Evans drills down into the history and the current composition of the petty bourgeoisie. If the post-war years saw an explosion of white collar workers, professionals and mangers, there has equally been a more recent mushrooming of the self-employed, up from 7% in the UK in 1975 to double that today – over 4 million people.

This rise has been driven almost entirely by “solo self-employment”, a huge change from 1975, when nearly half of the self-employed had employees. Elsewhere, the jump has been even more marked: in Greece and Chile, where neoliberalism has had a savage impact, the solo self-employed constitute nearly 25% of the total workforce.

In Britain, this category includes over 1 million workers in the ‘gig economy’. This complicates the picture: this ‘self-employment’ “is widely seen as bogus: it is simply beneficial to the bosses to categorize employees in this way so as to cut costs and maximize profit.” Even without these direct demands from employers, there are many informal pressures. A recent IFS report found that “the solo self-employed are increasingly those with poor alternative options.”

There are many reasons for the continued co-existence of self-employed businesses alongside big capital, not least that sub-contracting to smaller organisations, particularly in construction, lowers costs and avoids unionisation.

The most striking characteristic of the petty bourgeoisie is its heterogeneity, both economically and politically. If the ranks of the self-employed have grown under neoliberalism, the rise of the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ in the post-industrial ‘information economy’ has been even more pronounced, outnumbering the traditional working class. Evans notes the increasing proletarianisation of this layer but is unhappy about seeing it as ‘working class’. To make the point, he cites Marx and several Marxists, but I did not find this appeal sufficiently conclusive.

Evans contends that it is precisely the precarity of the new petty bourgeoisie – lower middle class white collar workers -that drives its members “to live a life of isolated, atomized individualism vis à vis other workers, who are viewed purely as competition or a threat.” I’m not sure this is actually the case, and if it were, it’s unclear how that is significantly different from non-unionised workers hired by the day, as used to be the case on the docks and in construction, where workers literally lined up to compete for work. Yet the impact of competition of this kind in lower middle class jobs is disparaged as “status anxiety”.

The strength of Evans’ book is to see Britain’s class structure as something permanently changing, never static. He discusses the impact of educational reforms, the most significant of which was probably the huge expansion of higher education under New Labour. Promoted as improving equality of opportunity, its main effect was to create a funding crisis, which was ‘resolved’ by the abolition of maintenance grants and the introduction of tuition fees. Thus “the door for working-class social mobility slammed shut almost as soon as it had been opened.”

The magnified class divide in higher education happened just as austerity cuts were widening the class gap in attainment in schools. Privatisation too has meant that poorer children are far less likely to get good GCSEs compared to those with more affluent parents.

For the petty bourgeoisie, “more important than GCSEs or A-Levels is learning the rules of how to succeed in the white-collar world: not just how to pass exams but the importance of exams themselves, the value of hard work and delayed gratification, working to deadlines, completing tasks on your own in isolation… achieving these targets are more important for what they say about your loyalty and adherence to a set of values.”

Housing too has had its impact. The rise in home ownership, which peaked in 2002 at 70%, was intended by Thatcherite ideologues to achieve the ‘embourgeoisement’ of the working class. But recently that figure has fallen and today’s housing crisis demarcates the petty bourgeoisie, happy to see the value of their sole asset rise, from the increasingly propertyless working class. Of course, not all the working class is propertyless, which helps explain why age and geography are increasingly salient factors in elections, a point that is not fully explored here. And equally, a lot of the younger, ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ are renting, and are highly exploited in the process, which has its own electoral impact.

But the book’s biggest weakness is that the author’s focus on the petty bourgeoisie blinds him to important shifts and differentiations within the working class. This leads to inaccurate generalisations, such as: “The working class has largely withdrawn from politics into a seething, resentful, yet nonetheless still hugely powerful mass.” If this is a reference to the transitory support that older white people from a working class background lent to Johnson in 2019, or workers in other countries to populist movements, it is pretty misleading. It overlooks the progressive instincts of workers from other ethnic backgrounds, younger and urban workers especially, and misses entirely the recent rise in trade union struggles.

Nor can these battles be artificially cordoned off from other social struggles that involve layers from a lower middle class background – service users, renters, etc. The post-2010 anti-austerity campaigns underlined the potential for such apparently sectoral action to constitute a movement. As Michael Chessum has argued, it was this movement that laid part of the basis for Corbynism.

Evans misses this. For him, the Corbyn movement had the petty bourgeoisie firmly in control, both in terms of people and agenda, and attempted to pull the working class into action behind it. It failed because of its supposedly unappealing petty bourgeois priorities and because of “the absence of an organized labour movement” and “the mass disengagement of the working class.”

But this was not so. Without key trade unions, and trade union personnel at all levels, there would never have been a Corbyn movement, and without the votes and active backing of millions of working class people across the country, especially in the rallies preceding the 2017 general election, and the election itself, the movement could never have been sustained over the following two and a half years.

Evans really reveals his prejudices in his Conclusion. Dismissing the concerns of renters as “massively overstated”, he writes:

“When push came to shove in the UK, the majority of the new petty bourgeoisie supporting Corbyn threw their lot in with the professional-managerial classes over the EU, reflecting both a rational calculation regarding the positive role of the EU, and globalization as a whole in their own life plans for social mobility, as well as a latent fear of the ‘nativist’ working class, which repeatedly emerged during Brexit and the subsequent fall out.”

Neglecting to see that the working class itself was divided over Brexit, Evans attributes a Remain vote to petty bourgeois class selfishness. But what of the Leave vote? Far from this being an authentic expression of proletarian power, it might be that a section of the working class was harnessed to an essentially exclusionary nationalist, anti-migrant project by part of the ruling class. Sadly, Evans overlooks this and prefers to follow the New Left Review line of characterising the Brexit debate as socially liberal Remainers versus a Brexit-based return to social democracy. This is, to put it kindly, a wild over-simplification in any circumstances: to pose it in such crude class terms only muddies the waters further.

But it’s not just Brexit. The prioritisation by the Corbyn movement of social justice issues could apparently never appeal to the working class, who were entirely preoccupied with economic issues.

This picture of a movement dominated by selfish middle class liberals – “a collection of frustrated Individuals” – hell-bent on attempting to manipulate working class interests is not one I recognise. It overlooks the working class component of Corbynism across the country and the huge amount of work Corbyn and his allies did on social and economic equality. It neglects too the fact that large sections of the working class are not fixated exclusively on bread and butter issues but actually are concerned about social justice too – especially women and ethnic minorities, who can also be working class, by the way.

By the end, sober analysis is replaced by wild accusations against the evil petty bourgeois left. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, swathes of the British left fell back on snobbery and authoritarianism, calling for ever stricter lockdowns and wringing their hands at those who did not follow the rules to the letter…” Really? Was it snobbish to hope that rules regarding the transfer of infected patients to care homes might be adhered to so that lives could be saved? Should we mock those who grieve when their loved ones died unnecessarily?

His conclusion that “the wholesale working-class rejection of the left is an entirely rational one” is bizarre. Moreover, “The reason the small petty bourgeoisie supports big capital against their interest, why they have often gone over to the right, is because they know that the labour movement is pathetic.” These lines perhaps reflect Evans’ own individualistic impatience with big movements he can’t fully grasp. Fortunately, they are also false. A warning, however: those who embrace such ideas often travel speedily down the ‘authentic’ route of national-populism.

“Many may well now be reading this and vehemently disagreeing with me,” writes Evans. Well, he got that right. But, leaving aside his intemperate Conclusion, while some of the data analysed here is useful, it’s hard to see where it all leads. Perhaps it’s a bit reductionist of me to want to look at shifts in class from the standpoint of what we might predict about electoral behaviour. But without this, for all the grand talk about what this teaches us about building class alliances, the discussion feels strangely directionless.

Mike Phipps’ new book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.