According to Dan Evans, I am a member of an emergent social class he calls the new petty bourgeoisie.

Evans’s thesis is that the new petty bourgeoisie has been the driving force in left politics and populism over the past decade or so. It effectively set the agenda for the Corbyn movement and perhaps precipitated its downfall too. This is surprising as left orthodoxy would tend to see left-wing political movements as originating in the proletariat and not a fraction of the middle class.

Those who made Corbynism the phenomenon it was were primarily not the working class, although plenty of working class people supported it, but graduates. Specifically, graduates who felt hard done by and that they were getting a poor deal. They deserved better. After all, they’d put in the hard work, got good marks and what did they have to show for it?

This was the author’s experience as a poor academic whose peers from his home town hadn’t gone to university, instead staying local with a trade, but were firmly on the property ladder, had wives, cars and were respected in their community. I suppose it was also mine; promised a vertiginous rise through the ranks of multinational companies with the golden ticket of a degree giving access to the great glass elevator of a graduate scheme. The author’s mates from back home and his graduate university peers represent, in his view, two distinct fractions of the petty bourgeoisie: the old and the new.

Traditionally Marxism has dismissed the petty bourgeoisie as inherently reactionary and incapable of socialist revolutionary action.  In the 20^th century, this group was the most significant popular base supporting fascism. The orthodox view of this sub-class was that of dismissal and disdain. Dan Evans seeks to challenge that oversimplification in his new book A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie. In part, it is a historical analysis, but only insofar as historical analysis is necessary to understand the present situation of the class and its possible future trajectory.

“New petty bourgeois” or even plain “petty bourgeois” is not commonly a self-identifier. Most Britons when surveyed will claim a working class or lower middle class heritage. Class in Britain is about cultural identifiers; where you grew up, what your parents did, how you speak, your tastes and the way you dress. In Evans’ view, this is all wrong. Class is fundamentally about social relations – how you work and your relationship to the means of production. Except, it is not that simple. What and where are the means of production in a society overwhelmingly dominated by the service economy? Is the burger flipper who started at Mcdonald’s straight out of school at 16 (and realistically before this) really in the same social class as the graduate who has returned to their home town to a near-minimum wage job because they couldn’t get degree-requisite employment? They are in the same job, so why not in the same class? Evans sets out to explain. The answer has to do with socialisation and the aspiration inherent in new petty bourgeois ideology.

Barbarism may begin at home but new petty bourgeois-ism begins at school – and perhaps the way we are brought up to think about school. At school, we are taught on a meta level that if you work hard and do well in exams, you will do well in life. The qualifications and credentials you accrue will directly correlate to the status and income you will achieve. Striving and self-discipline now will be rewarded in future. The ladder of success is climbable, rung by rung, with enough dedication and diligence. The world of work is a perfect meritocracy with the best and brightest in all the top roles through sheer hard work and brilliance. These rules apply to all equally, no matter where you come from. Everyone is capable of getting there. Play by the rules and it can all be yours.

The system, such as it is, being fair and self-justifying may require you to shun those who by their actions don’t appear to subscribe to it. You find yourself ignoring and drifting away from former friends who are a “bad influence”. You internalise a sense of superiority to them. You inculcate a deep shame where you might fall foul of the school’s frequently arbitrary rules and discipline which must at heart be correct if it is part of this egalitarian system to ensure the clever ones get what they deserve.

When graduates from the new petty bourgeoisie get out of university often this is when they first realise that this Weltanschauung does not reflect reality. Yet, Evans points out, their reaction is still formed by the ideology in which they have been socialised. Instead of throwing out the conception of a credentialist meritocracy which has been demonstrably proven false, disappointed petty bourgeois graduates are likely to believe they have been cheated. I got the first class degree, therefore I am entitled to a graduate, high-paying job. That was the deal – the contract has not been fulfilled. The anger is at the level of the individual – I deserve better, I have a certificate to prove it. I was mis-sold.

On an objective basis, graduates have been mis-sold, as university education is increasingly commodified. But the greater lie is the ideology that they have failed to transcend. Taking a step back, the key to understanding the new petty bourgeois graduate’s predicament is an underlying hyper-anxiety about social mobility. This manifests positively in the fervent desire to get ahead in life and to move up in the world relative to where they started. It manifests negatively in the fear of falling down. Essentially, the fear of proletarianization.

Evans is at pains to point out that when Marx initially began writing politically he saw society as essentially comprising two classes: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. While acknowledging the existence of an intermediate petty bourgeoisie of small producers owning their own means of production, Marx thought that as industrial capital got bigger and bigger in scale, the small producers would be eaten up and the petty bourgeoisie would become proletarian, sinking down into the working class. This is not what happened. Although our high streets are dying (becoming increasingly homogenised) and independent businesses go bust all the time, the petty bourgeoisie refuses to breathe its last. In fact, self-employment is at the highest level it ever has been. There is a desperate need for a new theory to explain and analyse the political distinctiveness of this increasing proportion of the population. Shopkeepers makes a valuable contribution towards addressing this necessity.

Evans’s analysis of self-employment is fascinating and could have been a book in its own right. The self-employed, in his conception, come under the umbrella term of the old petty bourgeoisie. However, there is nothing particularly old about the new forms of self-employment that are increasingly prevalent in modern Britain. The most obvious example is with casual couriers/takeaway delivery workers and the number of personal training businesses, which has also massively increased. It is hard to say if any valuable synthesis of the material conditions and ideology of this socio-economic stratum and disappointed graduates can be made. Here I think perhaps the scope of the book could have been narrowed to one or the other.

The class structure with the lid of the bourgeoisie proper and the base of the proletariat has further ingredients to add to the sandwich, however. Between the petty bourgeoisie, the main subject of Evans’s book, and the bourgeoisie is another socio-economic layer very much in vogue on the intellectual left: the professional managerial class or PMC.

The professionals of the PMC are the traditional lawyers, doctors and perhaps top-level university lecturers, accountants, career politicians etc. The managers are, as the name would suggest, managers, but not the shift manager or “team leader” who gets paid an extra pound an hour, but rather the boss who is one or two above your immediate line manager whose salary is tens of thousands above yours.

The PMC likes to see itself as on the cultural cutting edge. According to Evans, and many left intellectuals, this is the class from which “woke” originates, for lack of a better term. This class does not need to strive to be taken seriously – after all, they are the credentialed lawyers, doctors and managers, the deference of those below them is expected. To go back to our striving, diligent new petty bourgeois graduate at the beginning of this article, it is obvious that they would wish to imitate the cultural posturing of such a class to get ahead and eventually join their ranks. In this way, PMC cultural ideology is perpetuated because it is a status marker and there is no class more obsessed with status than the increasingly numerous new petty bourgeoisie. Such is Evans’s argument.

Overall, Shopkeepers contains many useful insights into the complex middle strata of our society. It lays bare many misconceptions that the modern left has when it comes to class analysis, particularly on housing. It does not leave me hopeful when I look to contemporary political parties or trade union culture, but from the perspective of an ideological critique of the class I de facto belong to (i.e. the new petty bourgeoisie), it has touched a nerve and made me re-examine thought patterns I had not been fully conscious of prior to reading. Will non-proletarians on the left ever stop their striving for status and participation in the cultural capital arms race? It seems unlikely, but recognition is the first step to change.