‘A Nation of Shopkeepers’: The egotism of the petty bourgeoisieA Nation of Shopkeepers is a 2023 book by (ostensibly) Marxist academic Dan Evans. It is an attempt to develop our understanding of the ‘petty bourgeoisie’ or middle class, which the author perceives as an ignored part of society. Evans argues that the petty bourgeoisie – the intermediate class of small business owners and independent professionals, squeezed between the working class and the big capitalists, – has in fact grown to the point where it constitutes a third of the British population (23 million). This, he argues, nullifies the analysis of Marx and Engels, who wrote in the Communist Manifesto that: “[t]he lower strata of the middle class – the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants – all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.” Deindustrialisation, Evans argues, has changed the nature of work, and therefore has undermined the classical Marxist understanding of class. The mentioned claims of a swelling in the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie is explained by the creation of what Evans labels the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’. Within this ‘new petty bourgeois’ class is included “[d]eclassed graduates, call centre workers, teachers and teaching assistants, salesmen, estate agents, nurses, firemen, public sector workers and more”. In terms of their relations to work, this ‘new’ class is identical to the working class, in that they must sell their capacity to work in order to live, and in fact work side by side with workers. What separates the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ from the working class, Evans tells us, is that they aspire to “social mobility”; they dream of better things for themselves – and so are therefore individualistic – whereas the working class is happy with its lot. By changing the definition of class to a set of cultural values, Evans has managed to perform a magic trick, by pulling a completely new class out of thin air! Rather than seeing things such as classes in their process of historical development, Evans takes them as a finished product, a checklist of c
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