Given that Corbynism was centred around the Labour Party, drew in Trotskyist groupings as well as the likes of Open Labour, and necessarily entailed working with Labour Party MPs and members with politics hostile to that of Corbyn (for example, the aforementioned Owen Smith), one might describe Corbynism as analogous to a popular front, rather than anything more coherent. 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. Corbyn himself was justly critical of the EU’s ‘failed neoliberal policies’, but in the 2019 general election prioritised a sham party unity at the expense of both his own principles and political credibility.

The TPB is, to a significant extent, upwardly mobile, though this is certainly not a permanent or universal feature of this class. The ruling ideas of society, in the Marxist view, are above all those of the ruling class bloc who exert broad control over the ideological state apparatus (education, the media, the government and legal system). We want labour to be a place where we engage in meaningful work that is socially useful and makes us happy, where we have agency and autonomy in how we carry out tasks, where we make decisions collectively about what we do and where it goes. Into the eighties, Sivanandan became concerned by the co-optation of legitimate identity-based claims away from socialist coalitional politics and into individualised and culturalist cul-de-sacs. And it has personality, with Dan Evans weaving in his own experiences and generally departing from the convention that seems to exist where books engaging with the sociology of class must be unreadably dense and leave most readers feeling too stupid for the subject OR be dumbed down to the point where you doubt the author's credibility.We are somewhat (though certainly awkwardly) aware that loud Leftists, despite all the tough talk, do not tend to be good workplace organisers. For instance, the traditional petite bourgeoisie in the US has long identified China as a source of competition, which leads them to support right-wing politicians who are more willing to engage in openly racist denunciations of China, which in turn prompts the Democrats to try to match their “tough on China” rhetoric, thus ratcheting the entire Overton window even further towards racist, imperialist reactionary politics). It was only from the late 1960s, when wider class militancy challenged a prevailing corporate and political paternalism, that Black radicals were able to form (critical) alliances with trade unionists as well as new left activists. The excision of class and materialism and the relentless focus on individuals, coupled with the shift in the understanding of power, paved the way for the left to be subsumed wholesale not just by identity politics, but by the infantile liberal view of the world in which people are no longer moulded by structural forces beyond their control, but are now essentially innately good or bad, either reactionary or progressive - particularly racist or non-racist”. The IWW model of workplace organising, where all workers are given the responsibility and power to run their own union and direct their own struggle, directly opposes the managerialism and bureaucracy that all workers despise.

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 individualism is also influenced by the relative autonomy in their labour that many TPB workers exercise, and perhaps even those who do not, such as modern gig-economy workers who are tethered to an algorithm instead of a looming supervisor. Perhaps one of the few things all socialists (however loosely one chooses to define the latter term) can agree on is that a tension exists between different social groups within capitalism. As always, just don’t consider it in isolation — it must be synthesized with other, more globally minded paradigms. Crucially, it is class anxiety that often drives the TPB towards far-right politics because their economic situation is precarious and they fear downward mobility into the working class.And more importantly, what effect would this petty bourgeois outlook have, considering most Labour Party and/or Momentum members had little capacity to affect the direction Corbynism took, beyond turning up to Labour Party meetings and knocking on doors? Perhaps because he is British, he is unaware of how strongly the desire to attain and retain the objective and subjective power of being an American motivates people’s politics. To correct the new middle class bias of the left, says Evans, what is needed is an anti-establishment appeal to working-class and ‘old’ petty-bourgeois communities, whose hostility to ‘globalisation and big capital’ reflect material interests that are not reducible to being ‘innately reactionary or racist’. It should be conceded that Poulantzas’s more orthodox Marxist critics like Ellen Meiksins Wood overstated the extent that class relations are simply ‘given’ in the realm of economic exploitation. Inspired by the work of Marxist thinkers such as Nicos Poulantzas, Evans terms this emergent class the ‘petty bourgeoisie’.

Moving on from the inadequate binary of workers and bosses, he turns to the Greco-French Marxist sociologist Nicos Poulantzas’s analysis of class fractions. 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. it has to be wondered whatever happened to Marx and Engels’s seminal insights on ideology and ‘false consciousness’, or Gramsci’s writings on hegemony and the production of what passes as ‘common sense’ in a given social formation. The TPB hates stifling bureaucracy and State meddling, it hates the Welfare State because it rewards idleness.Thankfully, there are aspects of the IWW’s organising model that are suited to some of the issues raised.