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

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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.

to embrace and accept downward social mobility, to realise one can have an identity and meaning without a “career”, and that there is nothing wrong with staying rooted and not leaving your small town. In 2021, in the EU, there were twenty-one million micro-businesses, making up 93% of all companies within the bloc, employing over eighty million people. In the UK, 96% of all businesses are micro-businesses, and 76% of all businesses have no employees … it is small firms that account for the majority of new jobs created in the British economy.” 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 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?With every gift membership this Christmas the Left Book Club will send you – the gift buyer – a set of three foiled bookmarks. Plus, if you choose to pay annually, new members will also receive an extra free book and membership pin in their first parcel. Dan Evans, A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie, Repeater Books 2023. Buy a copy here. Thought this was great until the conclusion, at which point Evans made a few claims that were larger than justified or poorly argued. A brilliantly readable exploration of the difficulties and the necessity of class analysis for any imaginably successful left politics.”– Walter Benn Michaels, author of The Beauty of a Social Problem

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 petty 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? 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. 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*. 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.This confused me. I remember thinking that there must be plenty of people who didn’t ‘own the means of production’, but who also wouldn’t qualify as ‘working class’. My parents were teachers with no power over the curriculum, but they were hardly proletarian. I flipped the problem round. Tradespeople controlled their own ‘production’, but I wouldn’t have called a plasterer or electrician ‘bourgeois’. Well-meaning though the speaker had been, I felt like his simplistic interpretation of class made little sense. Book Review: Dan Evans “A Nation of Shopkeepers: The unstoppable rise of the petty bourgeoisie” (2023) 8 th February 2023 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

The physical exhibition closed on 31 August 2021. The online exhibition includes images of all exhibits with captions. Napoleon would have been correct in seeing the United Kingdom as essentially a commercial and naval rather than a land based power, but during his lifetime it was fast being transformed from a mercantile to an industrial nation, a process which laid the basis for a century of British hegemony after the Battle of Waterloo. Although the UK had half the population of France during the Napoleonic Wars, there was a higher per capita income and, consequently, a greater tax base [ citation needed], necessary to conduct a prolonged war of attrition. The United Kingdom's economy and its ability to finance the war against Napoleon also benefitted from the Bank of England's issuance of inconvertible banknotes, a "temporary" measure which remained from the 1790s until 1821. [7] Origin of phrase [ edit ] 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. 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 2010 Napoleon I, who was familiar with Smith's work, is reported as later using a French version to dismiss England's preparedness for war against France:

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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.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? Though the original supposed usage by Napoleon was meant to be disparaging, [10] the term has since been used positively in the British press. Mike Savage, author of The Return of Inequality “A brilliantly readable exploration of the difficulties and the necessity of class analysis for any imaginably successful left politics.”