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

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Dan Evans examines these two parallel sub-classes in forensic detail. Drawing on a mixture of political theory and personal experiences from his hometown of Porthcawl, he carefully traces their historical development since the Industrial Revolution, discusses their key features and behaviours, and finally compares their differing positions with regards to the case study areas of education and housing. Over the course of the book, he gradually reveals that – despite some major differences – the two petty bourgeoisies are in fact remarkably similar.

A Nation of Shopkeepers: Trade Ephemera from 1654 to the 1860s in the John Johnson Collection by Julie Anne Lambert (Oxford, Bodleian Library, 2001)I remember going to my first socialist meeting as an undergraduate. Halfway through, an audience member raised their hand and asked the panel to define the ‘working class’. One speaker, true to his Marxist principles, responded: ‘everyone who doesn’t own the means of production.’

The author dismisses the widely understood myth that class is about wages and instead proceeds with the Marxian understanding of being about one's social relationship at work and ownership of the means of production After all, imperialism is a capitalist imperative that benefits not only the ruling classes, but every class in the imperial core, even the most exploited ones. Perhaps because he is British, he is unaware of how strongly the desire to attain and retain the objective and subjective power of being an American motivates people’s politics. Even the working class in the imperial core *does* have something to lose — the massive privilege and power that simply being a part of the empire affords us. This fuels reactionary politics across all classes as strongly as domestic conditions do, if not even moreso. (For instance, the traditional petite bourgeoisie in the US has long identified China as a source of competition, which leads them to support right-wing politicians who are more willing to engage in openly racist denunciations of China, which in turn prompts the Democrats to try to match their “tough on China” rhetoric, thus ratcheting the entire Overton window even further towards racist, imperialist reactionary politics).

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Evans argues that we should treat class as “active relationships” within capitalism and the “function” that different workers and agents play in the system. For example, the function of a low-paid supervisor is to discipline the workforce, giving them proximity to management and alignment with their interests. This helps to reproduce cultural, social, and ideological positions – such as anti-collectivism, opposition to trade union organising, rugged individualism, promotion-seeking and upward mobility. The organisation supports reading groups and community libraries around the UK. Reading groups provide an inclusive and accessible space to debate political ideas and strengthen community networks. It also organises online events, where you can put your questions to authors and special guest speakers. Left Book Club is also building a network of reading groups, and it can help you get your own group off the ground.

because ‘working class’ means anyone who eats chips and has an accent (which of course can be anyone), ‘middle class’ has similarly become an almost totally useless term to describe a set of nebulous behaviours and ‘posh’ consumption practices which can include anyone from the petty bourgeoisie, to comfortable professionals, right the way up to the actual Royal family.” Walter Benn Michaels, author of The Beauty of a Social Problem “An incisive, erudite and provocative analysis of the changing class composition and dynamics in Britain. A Nation of Shopkeepers will be central to future debates on class in Britain and further afield.” The phrase may have been part of standard 18th-century economic dialogue. It has been suggested that Napoleon may have heard it during a meeting of the French Convention on 11 June 1794, when Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac quoted Smith's phrase. [8] But this presupposes that Napoleon himself, as opposed to Barère alone, used the phrase. A later, explicit source is Barry Edward O'Meara, who was surgeon to Napoleon during his exile in St. Helena. [3] If O'Meara is to be believed, Napoleon said: Book Review: Dan Evans “A Nation of Shopkeepers: The unstoppable rise of the petty bourgeoisie” (2023) 8 th February 2023A Nation of Shopkeepers sheds a light on this mysterious class, exploring the class structure of contemporary Britain and the growth of the petty bourgeoisie following Thatcherism. It shows how the rise of home ownership, small landlordism and radical changes to the world of work have increasingly inculcated values of petty bourgeois individualism; how popular culture has promoted and reproduced values of aspiration and conspicuous consumption that militate against socialist organizing; and, most importantly, what the unstoppable rise of the petit-bourgeoisie means for the left.’ There's a veiled criticism in this saying, that the English are fit for little else, and it comes as no surprise that the two contenders who might claim coinage of it come from two nations with some disdain for the English - the Scots and the French.

This analysis is much more helpful than a purely cultural or a rigidly economic one, as it allows us to get to grips with divisions in the workplace and society and the comlex relationships of power involved. It helps us understand the ‘intermediary classes’ between proletariat and capitalist, with whom this book is primarily concerned. Evans thinks of the middle class or the petit bourgeoisie as a “DNA double helix” with two distinct fractions; the Traditional Petit Bourgeoisie and the New Petit Bourgeoisie, which have arisen due to profound changes to the economy over the last fifty years but have not yet been adequately examined by the Left. What is the ‘Traditional Petit Bourgeoisie’? 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. These gig-economy workers were technically “self-employed” and thus had no trade union rights and competed against one another for work. The Network was a way to bring these atomised workers together into an Industrial Union to develop common demands that would make work-life better for them all. It had lots of local successes in various cities (particularly Cardiff and Glasgow) and culminated in the large #FFS410 strike in October 2018. Though the project unfortunately derailed, for reasons that can be found in this piece by FW Pete Davies, it is a model that could be adapted and practiced in different circumstances.The North America-based IWW Freelance Journalists Union is a similar project aiming to unite isolated workers, and there are conversations in UK and Ireland to form an organisation by and for freelance artists. Some writer, I forget who, says that Holland is no longer a nation but a great shop and I begin to think it has no other principles or sentiments but those of a shopkeeper. Reappropriation [ edit ] Dan Evans’ book is good for theorising the various conundrums we have been witnessing on the ground. The storming final chapter of the book is worth the price of admission itself, and it strongly argues for the Left to find ways to build alliances among the downtrodden classes. Thankfully, there are aspects of the IWW’s organising model that are suited to some of the issues raised. This exhibition (curated by Senia Paseta) drew extensively on material from the John Johnson and John Fraser collections. The Season for Love: A collection of choice valentines from the John Johnson Collection, February 2010Just 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. So there must be another reason why labour movements are weak or another reason the petty bourgeoisie don’t support them. To me the latter seems more plausible chiefly because of arguments *Evans convincingly made earlier in the book*. 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”. Roughly speaking he sees the petit bourgeoisie (new and old) as today constituting as much as a third of society. Dan Evans knows his readers are probably members of the ‘new’ petty bourgeoisie (he remarks that he has spent most of his adult life among them). As such, the book’s political message feels directed at them. Evans exhorts his young, left-wing readers to stop playing to Labour’s culture of ‘moralizing and careerism’ and instead to seize the initiative. He calls on them to begin building political alliances with their ‘traditional’ petty bourgeois counterparts, based on a shared interest in redrawing economic structures to end precarity. 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. Also, while Evans isn't entirely wrong about liberal identity politics (Middle class people *do* use it as a way of asserting their position in the class hierarchy), to give a crude example of the extent to which the book engages with race -- surely a matter of some significance to the contemporary UK class structure -- the word 'race' (the social category) never appears in the book. 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. Hmm. As an example of the kind of content you can expect with a membership, October’s book was the hugely acclaimed A Nation of Shopkeepers by Dan Evans. A Nation of Shopkeepers