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

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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. 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. 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. However, a lot of work needs to be done to spread our relevance to other sectors, partcularly those dominated by the TPB and those that combine self-employed workers with wage-labourers, such as in construction, where historic projects such as the Australian Builders Labourers Federation could provide inspiration.

A society where bottom-up democratic Industrial Unions govern production and distribution could be a way of meeting our basic creative human needs in a way that follows the maxim, from each according to ability to each according to need. 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. The TPB hates stifling bureaucracy and State meddling, it hates the Welfare State because it rewards idleness. 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.

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. Ultimately for the workplace organiser the fluffy distractions of party politics and the latest fad issues of the day do not matter.

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 economic conditions of the TPB, the torn position of owning Means of Production whilst being financially dependent on their own labour, influences everything that the TPB does and thinks. Such notions can readily merge with middle-class liberalism’s ‘dependency on working-class “backwardness” for its own claim to modern multicultural citizenship’. 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. 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.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. 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. 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’. 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. It is the function and the “social mobility and hence precarity” of the NPB that distinguishes them from the working class below them and the PMC above them.