White-Collar 'Shopkeepers"

 “A Nation of Shopkeepers - The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty-Bourgeoisie – by Dan Evans, 2023

I was excited to read this book because the topic is incredibly pertinent.  “Being your own boss,” starting your own business, entrepreneurialism and the wonders of small-scale capitalism and 'side gigs,' African-American & Latino capitalism as panaceas for racism are also heavily pushed in the U.S. and I’m sure it’s the same for Evans' dis-United ‘Kingdom.’  The growth of large professional and managerial strata are also apparent in many countries. Evans is correct in that the petit-bourgeois now have a massive influence in politics on both the right and his suspect idea of the ‘left,’ as they have grown with the development of capital. Evans, however, has a new definition of the petit-bourgeoisie.  And that is a problem.

Evans loosely defines class as your “economic relationship to capital, social position, function in the class structure, political ideology…” a definition that uses cultural markers.  Evans says he’s inspired by Marxist Nicolas Poulantzas, who thinks that the ‘professional-managerial’ class and white-collar workers are both now petit-bourgeois.  Evans disagrees, but claims the white-collar working class IS a ‘new petit-bourgeoisie,’ a new strata alongside the old one of shopkeepers, landlords, farmers, investors and other small owners.  Guy Standing invented the ‘precariat’ as a separate class out of a similar group.  Other British leftists think that only blue-collar workers who make physical commodities are workers, and Evan’s idea seems to coincide.  Evans theoretically disappears white-collar, pink-collar and service workers in the process. He also ignores the PMs – a group that has very high salaries, owns investments, can hire and fire and sometimes owns businesses and/or real estate.  He does hold that ‘contradictory class position’ and class movement are possible however, as class complexity is real.

The term means ‘small bourgeois’ – i.e. a small owner.  Evans claims he rejects the idealist idea that class is primarily defined by culture; or that it is just one identity among many.  He discusses the ‘professional-managerial’ strata (PM), but thinks it is not part of the orthodox petit-bourgeoisie, so he does not include it in his new definition.  He rejects the idea that just because you ‘work’ you are working-class.  Capitalists and small business owners ‘work’ too - some of the latter even exploit themselves.  Class knowledge like this sends the inaccurate ‘1% versus the 99%’ understanding into the dumpster, as these numbers ignore intermediate and pro-capitalist classes below the billionaires.  He does not use terms like ‘proletarianization’ or ‘bourgeoisification’ as qualifiers.  An old phrase like ‘aristocracy of labor’ is foreign to him.  He talks about the (lower) ‘middle class’ and leaves them undefined, except as a separate entity from the petit-bourgeois. (?) Intellectual property is never mentioned, nor are knowledge commodities, though much white collar work now results in that kind of commodity.  After all, what is digital code, for instance, but intellectual property produced by mental labor? He even has the weird idea that a third of the U.S./U.K. are in the 'ruling class' because of how many managers of any type there are.  

Nor is ‘self-exploitation’ understood by him – the mode of many independent contractors, the ‘self-employed’ and very small businessmen.  He thinks the standard definition of petit-bourgeois is ‘having no employees’ when that is only one strata.  Anyone who has 1 employee he calls ‘small capital’… which seems almost identical to the petit-bourgeois, just a different strata within the class.  Most shopkeepers don’t just use their family as labor – many also hire a ‘shop girl.’  Farmers hire seasonal labor at least.  Nearly every real small business owner I know tries to have paid help.  As you can see, Evan’s analysis is somewhat of a hash.

The petit-bourgeoisie?

WHO ARE THEY?  

Evans thinks all ‘tradesmen’ - like plumbers and electricians - are petit-bourgeois, thus combining blue collar and independent business men in his language.  So are freelancers and hairdressers, white collar and service workers, call center workers, teachers, nurses, firemen and public sector workers. (p.23)  Other 'petit bourgeois' categories he mentions later are technicians, retail workers, office clerks, servants, even a generalized category of 'builders' - i.e. construction workers.  This is almost idiotic.  Most of these workers function as adjuncts to the labor or capital processes, or are engaged in social reproduction – nearly all selling their labor-power to a boss.  In large construction, many - even in the U.K. - come from union hiring halls like electricians, carpenters, plumbers, steel and iron-workers, masonry and the like - they are not just individual contractors. Working for a public entity does not make one petit-bourgeois either. Certainly having an education and being ‘comfortable’ – a house, a car, debts and maybe a snow-mobile – changes consciousness, as do all work conditions.  But that does not change class position. At least that is the orthodox Marxist position to my mind. 

Capital wants to reduce the strength of the working class by hiring temp agency employees, the self-employed, individual sub-contractors and contractors, ‘illegals’ and piece-workers; classifying some as supervisors not subject to overtime, treating white-collars as superior and legally calling whole categories of workers like Uber drivers ‘independent contractors.’  It is an overall attempt to disperse, isolate, split and dilute the class so as to make it weaker.  His theory reflects this process of splitting and weakening the class. Evans cites Poulantzas, E.P. Thompson, Eric Olin Wright and Pierre Bourdieu as to class being more than an economic role, with cultural or work conditions becoming a determining factor.  So his sociological naming adopts a form of ‘culturalism,’ confusing class and economics with politics and culture – important as they are. 

THEORY?

Evans tracks the history of small farmers and town artisans being decimated by the rise of large scale capitalist industry and farming in the UK in the early 1800s. He quotes Marx, Engels and Lenin as to the vacillating and ultimately treacherous nature of European petit-bourgeois radicalism in its fight with the large capitalists in the middle 1800s.  They could be both allies and enemies. Trotsky and Gramsci note the role of the angry and ruined petit-bourgeois in fascism’s development in the early & mid-1900s, echoes of which we see in the growth of right-wing authoritarian movements like Trump, Brexit, Orban, Erdogan, etc.  The old petit-bourgeois are now mostly a prop to capital according to Evans. In the 1900s traditional small businessmen were joined by a huge growth in white-collar, professional and service workers in the center countries. Both New Labour and the Democrats later moved to principally base themselves on PM votes, promoting ‘meritocracy’ and ‘education’ while abandoning most sections of the working class. 

The 'old' petit-bourgeois shopkeeper

Evans has a chapter on the functioning of the ‘old’ petit-bourgeoisie.  In it he tries to make the desperate case that even precarious workers who are ‘self-employed’ with gig companies, employment agencies or work remotely - are petit bourgeois.  This brings up the issue of ‘exploitation’ – if someone is exploiting your labor to make profits, then you are a proletarian.  He claims small businessmen are also exploited – but they can exploit their customers or employees in turn.  In addition, self-exploitation is a different beast, so they are not the same.  He admits the self-employed are many times pushed into the situation from stable employment, their incomes lower, their conditions even more precarious.  This actually makes the case for this labor strata being below regular employees – part of the increasing degradation of capital forced on bereft workers. 

Evans admits there is a lumpen proletariat but never makes a case that drug dealers and thieves are really small businessmen.  To him somehow the proletariat still exists in the bottom reaches of society in a damaged form, but not above. His theory seems to rely on isolation and individualism as the real markers of class.  Women or men who take care of children in an isolated home – the reproduction of the working class – by his real theory are also petit-bourgeois.  So are other care workers.  He discounts membership in a trade union, which seems to contradict his underlying narrative that individualism is key. Perhaps we have to understand this differently, that ‘petit-bourgeois’ individualist conditions at jobs impact the kind of worker you are, and the strength and coherence of the class and its various fractions and strata.   It would have been a more useful book if this had been his real tack.

Evans has further chapters on his ‘new’ petit-bourgeois; on the role of education and housing in the creation of this strata; and finally their modern political roles for the Right and what he calls the Left.  

The benefit of this book is that it focuses on the huge growth and variations of the petit-bourgeois in a modern economy – and also attitudes that mimic that class among white-collar or service workers.  He claims most leftists ignore intermediate layers of society, which I think is untrue.  The book’s problem is that his definitions are not fully grounded in material or economic reality, but instead zig-zag all over the place, reflecting a somewhat ‘British’ sociological fetish with blue-collar labor as the only working-class.  As Marxist economist Michael Roberts says "Modern capitalism is no longer dominated by making things for profit.  Capital now needs to expropriate knowledge or mental labor, and to commodify the product of that labor." Evans himself works as a college contract adjunct and a bartender, which perhaps explains the problem on a personal level.

Come in and buy the book, as we ordered a group of them.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “The Making of the English Working Class” (Thompson); “Chavs,” “The Sinking Middle Class” (Roediger); “Understanding Class” (Wright); “The Precariat” (Standing); “Rich People Things,”  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

May 8, 2023