What Is To Be Done?

A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petite Bourgeoisie. Dan Evans. 2023.

Okay to answer my own title: I don’t know. If I knew what to do do you think I’d be here, writing this blog?

Here’s where we’re at: within the west, most working people don’t actually make anything. The industrial base is, for the most part, elsewhere. An increasing number of us, in the US and the UK where Evans is based, are doing some kind of service or knowledge work. This work takes many forms, and commands varying levels of respect. A teacher with an MA, a hospital custodian, a cop, a bank clerk, a home healthcare aide, a secretary at a law firm and a lawyer at a law firm are all doing service work, rather than industrial labor. They do not create value, but rather support the system that organizes the value. They also do not work for themselves; they do not own capital, but instead trade their labor for wages. So what class are they?

Some Marxists would argue that everyone who makes a living trading their labor for wages is working class. Though these people (us) do not create surplus value, as the traditional industrial working class does, they are in another sense creating value for their bosses in that their labor is what allows the boss to profit off of whatever it is that the boss owns. They may, in different ways, help capitalism function, but as people who do not own capital they cannot be considered aligned with it; they are exploited by it like other workers are. We can see educated knowledge workers in the US becoming increasingly proletarianized; what Ehrenreich called the PMC is beginning to understand that a college education and corresponding resume will not automatically lead to wealth and power, and that those who have them are better off acting and bargaining collectively with their co-workers.

Evans would say: no, they are not working class at all. They are, instead, part of the growing petite bourgeoisie. Their jobs are essentially to manage the real working class, or to manage the flow of capital. There are differences among this large group, but they are not working class. The working class in the west is shrinking, not growing. The growing petite bourgeoisie is often precarious, but their relation to capital is different. Evans doesn’t explicitly say this, but it’s implied: the bulk of the working class, now, is elsewhere. It’s in the third world, where we don’t have to see it. That leaves the problem of what you do call, and how you organize, the bulk of working people in the west who may not be technically working class but are in many cases downwardly mobile, living lives of increasing precarity, and becoming politically radicalized in various directions.

I don’t know, and what makes this book a little annoying is that Evans transparently doesn’t either. And I don’t blame him! Maybe it’s okay to just write a book naming a problem. But an issue with this one is that Evans is clearly (at least partially) writing out of his own anger and resentment against peers he finds annoying. Some of the class assignments he makes are a little arbitrary, too - I’d call farmers and construction contractors small capital, not freelancers, and like all small business owners they tend to be the vanguard of reaction and the left shouldn’t follow them. It feels like kind of cheat to me as well to say that a cafeteria worker at a hospital is of broadly the same social class as somebody in charge of medical billing at that hospital, just because they both support the hospital’s work. Evans can’t seem to see past his own sentiment for certain kinds of work, and it leads him to make class distinctions that are more based on emotional history than material reality. He doesn’t really spend time discussing care work or reproductive labor, except to designate it as inherently non-working class. Some understanding of how gender determines what kinds of work people are sorted into, and how that influences class formation, would have been appreciated by me.

And honestly, there are only so many times you can approvingly cite Catherine Liu before I put you in the Pay No Mind pile. She is so transparently someone who bases her class analysis on which of her peers and colleagues she finds personally irritating, that I can’t help but suspect that Evans, in admiring her, might be doing the same thing.