03.07.2025
Rising middle classes?
Mike Macnair reviews Dan Evans A nation of shopkeepers: the unstoppable rise of the petty bourgeoisie Repeater Books, 325pp, £10.99
Last week we printed Ben Lewis’s translation of Karl Kautsky writing in 1899 on how Marxists should analyse the ‘new middle class’ in imperial Germany.1 Dan Evans’s book offers a 2023 attempt to address a slightly broader issue. The middle class/es, including the ‘classic’ petty-bourgeoisie of small businesses, are, in his view, rising rather than declining; and how this should be analysed in Marxist terms. As well as using early 21st century British data and impressions, Evans uses 1970s attempts to analyse the employed middle class - in particular the Marxist (or Marxisant) versions of Nicos Poulantzas and of John and Barbara Ehrenreich.
Comrade Evans begins with a certain amount of personal history, of growing up in a family and locality intermediate between the working class and (employed) middle class. Since his argument is that today’s left is middle class and fails to understand the working class, I should, I guess, respond with an open avowal of my own class background: I am of more unambiguously (perhaps ‘upper’) middle-class family background, with my father and both my grandfathers regular army officers, and was educated at private boarding schools and Oxford University. I am one of those 1970s student leftists who dropped out and went to work in factories - in my case two years on a car assembly line, and nine months a bit later in a tin can factory. Afterwards, my family and educational background meant that I was let back in to university and to professional middle class existence, and I ended up teaching law in universities until retirement.
Lawyers are an old professional middle class group (going back to the 1200s in England) and law teachers as old (going back to 1100s Bologna); army officers as an ‘employed middle class’ group go back to the New Model Army of the 1640s-50s and its successors.2
It is worth, however, ending this ‘confession’ with an old joke about the Sino-Soviet split. Nikita Khrushchev says to Zhou Enlai: “Comrade Zhou, there is a fundamental difference between us: I am the son of a poor peasant, and you are the son of a mandarin.” Zhou Enlai replies: “Yes, Comrade Khrushchev, but we have something fundamental in common: we are both traitors to our fathers’ classes.”
It is probably not the original point of the joke, but there is something important to be drawn from it: not all political differences are class differences, and seeing them automatically as class differences produces merely the ‘trashing’ of opponents and consequent endless splintering of the 1970s western Maoist movement. Equally, the argument that the ‘true’ representatives of the working class are socially conservative trade union officials, as opposed to the ‘intellectual’ left, goes back to the debates in the German SPD around 1900, in which Kautsky was intervening.
Comrade Evans’ argument is at the end of the day for the left to take a different path to that which it has taken in the recent past: more clearly in his November 2024 New Socialist article, ‘Is the working class back?’, than in the book, though the outline of the argument is present in the conclusion (pp273-302).3 The characterisation of the policy he opposes as an aspect of the Bourdieuvian ‘habitus’ of the ‘new petty-bourgeoisie’ has the same function as the class characterisations of opponent positions by 1970s western Maoists or by 20th century conservative trade union officials.
As it happens, I agree with part of comrade Evans’ diagnosis of the problems of the left (but not with other parts). But the class characterisation has to be treated with caution. The book needs to be used primarily for descriptive, rather than prescriptive, purposes: it has things to tell us about the prominence of both the ‘classic’ petty bourgeoisie and the employed middle classes, in late 20th/early 21st century Britain.
Traditional
The first chapter of the book is a “potted history of the petty bourgeoisie”. Evans is professionally a sociologist, not a historian, and his “potted history” rests on quite limited historical depth: Ellen Meiksins Wood representing the ‘political Marxist’ school of the theory of the origins of capitalism, Christopher Hill on the Levellers, and otherwise generally a ‘short chronology’ interpretation, which starts in the 19th century. The effect of this is to spin the narrative towards the non-decline of the petty producer class and to make the ‘formal subsumption of labour to capital’ - that is, the ‘putting-out system’, in which merchant-financiers controlled household production - disappear. The effect is, by shortening the transition from feudalism to capitalism, to downplay the sheer scale of household-scale production in feudalism and the degree of proletarianisation involved in the rise of capitalism.
Though Evans does flag the fact that Marx’s and Engels’ writings certainly did not ignore the petty bourgeoisie and also remarked on tendencies within capital to increase intermediate strata (pp142‑44), the ‘Marxological’ aspect of Evans’ argument is weakened by failure to use Hal Draper’s Karl Marx’s theory of revolution (Vol II: The politics of social classes),4 which is really indispensable for an accurate assessment of their arguments.
Chapter 2, ‘Superstar tradesmen: the return of the traditional petty bourgeoisie’, is the most solid of the book. Self-employment, Evans argues, has risen from 7% of the British workforce in 1945, and 8% in 1975, to 14% of the workforce in 2019.5 (The 1945 figure is from a 2019 ONS study, which in fact shows sharp falls during World War I and II, with self-employment continuing limited during the cold war, but returning to 1909 levels by 1988, with further rises since then reaching slightly above 1861 levels in 2019.6)
Evans notes that these are smaller businesses than in the past, with ‘self-employed with employees’ having fallen from 4% of the workforce in 1975 to 2% in 2020. Of course, a business large enough to have employees is, since the 1980s, much more likely to be formally incorporated: banks demand incorporation in order to obtain priority of floating charges, over the revenue and the employees as preferred creditors in insolvency, and, meanwhile, employing people requires increasing levels of bureaucracy, which both incentivises ad hoc subcontracting arrangements rather than employing people and, if you are to employ people, makes the bureaucracy of incorporation proportionately less onerous. Self-employment figures thus probably understate the number of small businesses.7
As Evans points out, quite a lot of the ‘solo self-employed’ are actually cases of ‘sham self-employment’ (p89). But he argues that the persistence of small business is more extensively a matter of fractionating supply chains with a view to the political advantage of capital. (The claim that there are actual economic efficiency gains is merely an appearance created by tinkering with the legal regime to incentivise subcontracting, and by ignoring, in particular, the advertising, legal and other ‘transaction costs’.)
From displaying the growth of self-employment relative to the cold war period, Evans proceeds to the ‘ethnography’ of the classic petty bourgeoisie, and its general condition of precarity and clinging to status at the expense of income. That said, he also points out that quite a lot of the growth of self-employment results from “push factors”: that is, that people are forced into self-employment by the absence of employment opportunities or of non-shit jobs.
New PMC
Chapter 3, ‘The new petty bourgeoisie and class analysis (or, why we are not the working class)’ turns to the employed middle classes. Here, there is much less in the way of hard numbers, and some tendency to use declining union density as a ‘proxy’ for class structure (pp134-35). It is worth noting that the Trotskyists’ 1938 Transitional programme contained the statement: “Trade unions, even the most powerful, embrace no more than 20% to 25% of the working class and, at that, predominantly the more skilled and better paid layers.”8
“Professionals,” comrade Evans tells us, “are now the single biggest occupation group in British society, consisting of 5.7 million people or 21% of the workforce, while managers constitute nearly 10%, or nearly 3.5 million people across all categories (larger than the skilled working class)” (p135). These are seriously slippery categories. Nurses, for example, are professionals - but better characterised as skilled workers. ‘Facilities manager’, as described by an apprenticeship definition, is again a role which need not actually involve managing subordinates.9
Comrade Evans’ solution to this problem of indeterminacy is to deploy the arguments of left Eurocommunist and Althusserian theorist Nicos Poulantzas (from 1971, translated into English in 1978) and of US Democratic Socialists John and Barbara Ehrenreich (from 1977). Poulantzas’s argument is that the new middle class is part of the petty bourgeoisie, because its precarity leads it to individualism, to try to climb the greasy pole to avoid falling into the proletariat. In contrast, the Ehenreichs defined the “professional-managerial class” (PMC) very broadly in terms of a function in relation to the “reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist social relations”, so that nurses and teachers are also PMC members.
Neither of these approaches actually solves the indeterminacy problem. As far as Poulantzas is concerned, the problem is that, with the end of the cold war, there has been a new creation of precarity, affecting what are on any terms working class jobs: for a single example, it became transparent during Covid that the BMW Cowley car factory has a small permanent core workforce and a substantially larger group of insecure ‘agency workers’. No doubt that is the case much more widely. The end of ‘full employment’ has created an underclass, into which ordinary workers are at risk of falling … and Evans’ chapter 2 actually displays some of the dynamics. To say, then, that “the working class is collectivist because it is a static class” would have been wildly unrealistic before 1948 - and became wildly unrealistic after the 1990s.
As far as the Ehrenreichs are concerned, the role of the “reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist social relations” is far too broad to be analytically useful.10 It is played, for example, by every parent … And the “dull compulsion of economic relations” as self-reproducing capitalist social relations is wholly omitted - unsurprisingly, given that these 1970s authors were writing in a regime of highly regulated capitalism as a mode of organising concessions to workers in the ‘global north’ designed to make the ‘Soviet bloc’ unattractive. “Petty domination”, which comrade Evans uses as a device to ‘cash’ the Ehrenreichs’ approach (pp161-65) is equally over-broad, potentially catching the whole of sexism, racism, queer-bashing and so on, and just low-level bullying.
Chapter 4, ‘The educational elevator: education in the modern class structure and the creation of the new petty bourgeoisie’, represents comrade Evans’ critical move in making the separation between the working class and the “new petty bourgeoisie”. The argument is essentially that formal education is the separator (as Kautsky argued, though, of course, comrade Evans is unlikely to have come across this bit of Kautsky). The sorting, he argues, already takes place at school. I felt strong echoes of Pink Floyd’s 1979 Another brick in the wall here:
We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teacher, leave them kids alone
Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone
All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall
All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall
Very 1970s (as also are comrade Evans’ reliance on Poulantzas, the Ehrenreichs, Andre Gorz, and so on). The idea that formal education separates the working class from the new middle class is in Kautsky about credentialism - and hence leads to proletarianisation of the new middle class, as the credentials get devalued. In Evans it is about his theory that the working class is collectivist, because it is socially immobile (having no further to fall) - and open to the same objections.
In addition, the idea that this is the line of separation between the working class and the middle class is to ignore the whole history of worker-autodidacts and of workers’ education efforts, and the campaigns of the workers’ movement to demand free education in the later 19th century and the first half of the 20th. Comrade Evans appears here to have swallowed a slave-mentality response to the phenomenon of class oppression and thus made the acceptance of subordination in the social order into the marker of being a proletarian.
Back to the point made earlier - that missing from comrade Evans’ comments on Marx is Hal Draper on the politics of social classes. Among other things comrade Evans would have got from using Draper is the perception that classes are inherently fuzzy categories, and the fuzziness of the petty bourgeoisie is matched by that of the proletariat. The central case of a proletarian is one who, having no property, is forced to work for wages. But proletarians can have some limited property - in particular, skilled workers possess informal intellectual property rights - and thus overlap potentially with both the ‘classic’ petty bourgeoisie and with the employed middle class.
This fuzziness does not mean (contrary to the left against which comrade Evans is polemicising) that there is no employed middle class, with all of the employees being proletarians. The problem is that failure to recognise the overlaps produces unhelpful sharp edges - in particular in relation to white-collar and public-sector trade unionism.
Petty rentiers
The last substantive section of the book before the conclusion is chapter 5: ‘Housing and the class structure: a nation of landlords’. Here comrade Evans is engaged in a largely justified polemic against those leftists who argue that the main class divide is between homeowners and landlords, on the one side, and those (chiefly the young) who have to rent, on the other. The capsule sketch of “housing and the class structure throughout history” (pp230-37) has the problem, as with that of the history of the petty bourgeoisie, of effectively starting with the 19th century.11 Beyond this, the chapter is an almost entirely valid negative critique of the thesis that freehold-mortgage tenure makes you middle class.
That said, there is here a missing term: the petty rentier class. It is certainly true that the long-term logic of the Tories’ reforms to housing law will be the creation of a new petty landlord class, like that of the 18th and ‘long 19th’ centuries. But equally important as a component of the middle classes is the restoration of a class which lives off small capital investments through one or another sort of investment scheme. The major component of this class is the retired recipients of private pensions. This class is largely concentrated in the countryside and at seaside towns. It is probably more strongly Tory-voting than the working petty bourgeoisie or employed middle class.
The petty rentier class is part of the key to understanding the gradation between the employed middle class proper, and skilled workers. Members of the employed middle class proper are more able to parlay their collective skill monopolies into investment assets.
Chapter 5, the conclusions, argues that the modern left (Corbynism, etc) is based on a section of the “new petty bourgeoisie” (ex-students). Not a new story, since it was told to the far left by ‘official communists’ and the Labour and trade union right in the 1960s-70s. With Corbynism defeated, Labour is dominated by the PMC - within which the trade union bureaucracy becomes invisible. The left identifies itself with this hated class through speech norms and identity politics. The first half of this point (speech norms) is true; the second - ‘identity politics’ - involves fictionally identifying the conservative trade union bureaucracy as the ‘true representative’ of the working class, and erasing the anti-racism and advocacy of women’s emancipation of the mass parties of the Second and Third Internationals.
Comrade Evans argues for turning instead to an alliance of the traditional petty bourgeoisie and the working class against the PMC. But then we arrive at this:
To achieve it, ‘politics’ must be moved away from parliamentarism and back to workplaces and communities, so workers themselves can lead it rather than professional politicians and leftist celebrities. It therefore has to involve a break with Labourism and electoralism …
It turns out, then, that the solution is to be … Cliffism!
In the 2024 New Socialist article, the solution looks rather more like the Eurocommunists’ New Times - understandably, given the 1970s Eurocommunist theorists on whom comrade Evans has relied for the purposes of analysis.
I said at the outset that Evans could be used for his descriptive work, but not for his prescriptions. I should add that, as I said about Kautsky last week, Evans’ book is completely characterised by methodological nationalism. In the last chapter this shifts into actual nationalism - a ‘Lexiteering’, which was, in fact, the common position of a lot of the organised far left. The descriptive work is still useful, however, for seeing the reality of the significance of the middle classes in today’s Britain.
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‘Completely different foundations’ Weekly Worker June 26: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1544/completely-different-foundations.↩︎
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M Macnair, ‘Doing war differently’ Weekly Worker May 28 2015: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1060/doing-war-differently: what came before the New Model Army was the idea of aristocrats as ‘natural commanders’.↩︎
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New York 1978.↩︎
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Evans (p88) cites G Giupponi and X Xu What does the rise of self-employment tell us about the UK labour market? London 2021 (table on p5).↩︎
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www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/uksectoraccounts/compendium/economicreview/april2019/longtermtrendsinukemployment1861to2018#employees-and-self-employed-workers.↩︎
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Between 2010 and 2024 “the number of sole proprietorships (an unincorporated business run by one self-employed person) increased by 323,000 (12%) and the number of companies increased by 793,000 (62%)” (www.gov.uk/government/statistics/business-population-estimates-2024/business-population-estimates-for-the-uk-and-regions-2024-statistical-release).↩︎
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skillsengland.education.gov.uk/apprenticeships/st0484-v1-3.↩︎
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On the PMC, compare the debate in M Macnair, ‘American “Blue Labour”?’ Weekly Worker April 15 2021 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1343/american-blue-labour), F de Haan, ‘Appeals of class society’, May 20 2021 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1348/appeals-of-class-society), M Macnair, ‘Centrality of class’ June 3 2021 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1350/centrality-of-class-mike-macnair-replies-to-foppe-), P Demarty, ‘Manufacturing consensus’, September 2 2021 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1361/manufacturing-consensus), F de Haan, ‘Addressing the central issues’, September 30 2021 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1365/addressing-the-central-issues), F de Haan, ‘On capitalism and class rule: moving beyond the “PMC debate”’ Cosmonaut February 9 2024 (cosmonautmag.com/2024/02/on-capitalism-and-class-rule-moving-beyond-the-pmc-debate).↩︎
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Some references to the earlier history in ‘Stunts, problems and solutions’ Weekly Worker May 5 2022 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1394/stunts-problems-and-solutions).↩︎