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

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Though the original supposed usage by Napoleon was meant to be disparaging, [10] the term has since been used positively in the British press. 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. Book Review: Dan Evans “A Nation of Shopkeepers: The unstoppable rise of the petty bourgeoisie” (2023) 8 th February 2023

A Nation of Shopkeepers explores 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 huge changes to the world of work have promoted individualism and conspicuous consumption – and what this means for the left.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. This book introduces a way of looking at class that is much more comprehensive and useful than simply proletariat vs bourgeoisie, given the complex class structures of the UK and US in which the “intermediary classes” (the petite boug & the PMC) are more numerous and more politically active than the working class.

Fernand Braudel, 1982. The Perspective of the World vol III of Civilization & Capitalism, 15th–18th Century At least eight members of the 1945 Labour cabinet were Left Book Club authors, including Clement Attlee. Another famous club author was George Orwell, as it published the original edition of The Road to Wigan Pier. This exhibition showcased the collection (transferred from OUP in 1968) to the world. The catalogue remains the standard work on the collection and its formation, and is available online (PDF, 1.6MB). A Nation of Shopkeepers, 2001 Reading this book was a bit like marking a mathematical solution where the pupil gets every step wrong but somehow gets to the right answer at the end. Evans does this in a storming final chapter that excoriates Labourism and left wing activism - for both their disconnect from and contempt for working class people - and ultimately suggests a return to the workplace. 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.Dan Evans’ new book cuts through the nonsense and provides useful working definitions for fractions of the Middle Class and their role in the capitalist system. Building on the work of thinkers such as Poulantzas, Bourdieu and Marx, his analysis challenges syndicalists to learn how to build alliances with those fractions with whom we share common interests. Initially identified as a powerful political force by theorists like Marx and Poulantzas, the petit-bourgeoisie was expected to decline,as small businesses and small property were gradually swallowed up by monopoly capitalism.Yet, far from disappearing, structural changes to the global economy under neoliberalism have instead grown the petite-bourgeoisie, and the individualist values associated with it have been popularized by a society which fetishizes “aspiration”, home ownership and entrepreneurship. So why has this happened?

Relying on a structuralist Marxist framework, leaning heavily on the work of Poulantzas, they propose that neoliberalism has changed the class structure from one that was relatively simple, with a large working class, small middle and small ruling class; to one that is far more complex, with a bloated intermediate class and a more heterogeneous ruling class. The intermediate, middle class is then best understood when split into two - the "upper" professionals may be classed as the professional-managerial classes, while the "lower", which is frequently degraded and proletarianised, may be classed as the new petty bourgeoisie, with the lower section being much larger than the upper Haven't fully 'read' this to my satisfaction yet, but marking as such so I can write some thoughts here. I'll admit, I don't read much Marxist literature, and it will take study for me to fully understand this book. But from what I do understand, I like the critiques of the media's inability to understand the existence of people living in 'working class' towns who are not actually working class in terms of their social position, despite having accents/not having degrees from Oxbridge/etc. I also like the critiques of the snobbery and insularity of the English Left. 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.” But it is not just those employed as white collar serivce workers or supervisors that encompasses the NPB, which is probably the more controversial claim of Evans’ text. One of the great cons of the New Labour era was the promise of a white collar, “knowledge economy” career for everyone who earned a degree. 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. Education is a mark of distinction, the key “social mobility elevator” where relations of competition and individual superiority are bred into children throughout their time at school, and the drive to get young people into university sealed their ideology to that of the petit bourgeoisie. ‘We worked hard at school so we deserve good careers, a nice home and fancy car; we do not deserve crappy jobs like the lazier working class kids.’

So, why is all this important for us? The contemporary UK Left is dominated by the NPB. As Evans puts it: The number of self-employed workers in the UK is hard to believe, over five million in 2019! Many self-employed workers came to this situation from unemployment following the 2008 financial crisis. As Evans writes: “Crucially, this rise has been driven almost entirely by ‘solo self-employment’, i.e., own-account workers without employees, who comprise the absolute majority of the total self-employed. This is a huge change: in 1975, nearly half of the self-employed had employees.” One third of all employment growth since 2008 has been in solo self-employment, including over one million gig-economy workers.

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. But it is just plain wrong to speak of the “working class” without considering the global division of labor, and where the Western working class fits into that. However, a significant amount of the TPB has actually done okay in recent years; successful tradespeople buy the new-build house, get the nice car and flash the money about after their 70-hour work week – Evans even has a section named ‘In Defence of Deano’, about the infamous meme satirising ‘vulgar’ nouveau-riche petit bourgeois comsumer tastes. The TPB is, to a significant extent, upwardly mobile, though this is certainly not a permanent or universal feature of this class. What is the New Petite Bourgeoisie? The Traditional Petit Bourgeoisie (TPB) is a diverse class, made up largely of self-employed workers who tend to be clustered in the service economy but comprise a huge range of activty – shopkeepers, tradespeople, small landlords, freelancers, farmers, management consultants, personal trainers, tutors etc. They can range from wealthy entrepreneurs, graduates, or people who left school at sixteen.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