Two books focused on Britain address shifting class configurations and go back to the drawing board on a hegemonic project.
Hegemony Now! How Big Tech And Wall Street Won The World (And How To Win It Back), Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams, Verso, 2022
A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Rise of the Petit Bourgeoisie, Dan Evans, Repeater Books, 2023
In 1996, as organiser of a student society at university, I arranged a coach trip to a coalmine in south Wales—Tower Colliery, a deep mine spared from closure by becoming a workers’ co-operative. A controlled decline of coal extraction in Britain, we now know, would have been entirely necessary and desirable, but successive Conservative governments under Margaret Thatcher pursued vindictive class warfare against mining communities after the 1984-85 miners’ strike. Following the radical tradition of south-Wales mining communities, Tower Colliery workers reinvested their redundancy money in a collective enterprise.
When we consider what it means to be working-class or middle-class and the role of technology in social transformations, images emerge of old smokestack industries, associated with battles won and lost for pay, rights and working conditions. When we arrived at the mine, however, while we did find a few people working underground, they were operating sophisticated drill equipment, with an integrated mechanism for transporting the extracted materials to the surface via trolleys and conveyors. A control centre above looked something like NASA mission control: miners wearing sandals—yes, sandals—monitored mechanical and geological sensors.
In such a context, what does the ‘labour movement’ comprise? Tower Colliery might have offered a glimpse of an alternative reality—an ideal of a solidaristic, high-technology workplace where qualified, experienced engineers and operatives practised industrial democracy with significant autonomy. But it is long closed and deep mining, once the heart of the industrial labour movement in Britain, has practically disappeared.
Given the expertise, self-management and investment in Tower Colliery, in what sense were its workers ‘working-class’ rather than ‘middle-class’ anyway? And can technology, and the resulting specialisation, ever result in socially beneficial outcomes?
Class, technology and politics
In different ways, these two books engage with these questions. To varying degrees, they focus on the relationships between class, technology and politics.
We need your support.
Keep independent publishing going and support progressive ideas. Become a Social Europe member for less than 5 Euro per month. Your help is essential—join us today and make a difference!
There was to be no renaissance of a co-operative or even a corporatist economy in the United Kingdom—not under ‘new’ Labour in the late 1990s nor any subsequent administration. Quite the opposite: the labour market arguably became yet more casualised, while what the Conservative prime minister John Major described as a ‘cascade of wealth passing through generations’ predictably locked prosperity into land and property, strengthening the rentier classes at the expense of the real economy, with the tacit approval of both major political parties.
The social and economic consequences of this are especially prominent in Dan Evans’ book, which is coloured by the experiences of the 2010s. As Labour leader in the 2015 general election, Ed Miliband advanced the idea of a ‘mansion tax’, a mild and selective wealth tax. In hindsight, it constituted a challenge to the smooth political consensus in the UK around an idealised property economy, associated with a petit bourgeois ideology, in which many might purportedly climb the ‘property ladder’. Nothing can be countenanced as mitigation for the myriad negative social impacts of this. The tax plan played a critical role in Miliband’s defeat.
The two books are important contributions to a conversation, which has been delayed or obfuscated for a long time, around the dynamic alignment of classes in the modern UK. This is all made more urgent by the growing success of the far right in conjuring up and prosecuting ‘culture wars’ in the context of high material inequality since the Thatcher era. There is a considerable overlap in the topics they raise—though obviously Hegemony Now! focuses more on ‘how’ a hegemonic social coalition is constituted, as well as in whose interests it functions. Gilbert and Williams highlight technology entrepreneurs as a new form of ruling class, while Evans locates them as a current within the evolving professional and managerial class and as bearers of an ‘aspirant’ ideology among the petite bourgeoisie.
A fractured society
Both books ultimately ask what we are seeking within current social conditions and both therefore fall, albeit with very different emphases, in a tradition moulded by the late Stuart Hall, a pioneer in cultural studies with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies he led in Birmingham. In his January 1979 article ‘The great moving right show’, anticipating the triumph of what he termed ‘Thatcherism’, Hall presciently highlighted apparently contradictory dynamics in Britain, with the fracturing of society succeeded by often-successful attempts to rally a ‘silent majority’ around conservative social standpoints.
Indeed, this has subsequently become an almost uninterrupted cycle. Brutally applied ‘market modernity’, labelled as reform, engenders anxiety. This is followed by repression (especially well-represented by Gilbert and Williams) as new factions and manifestations of cultural dominance emerge. Particularly forceful is the discourse around a ‘feckless’ working class, which became characteristic of the 2000s and played an important, if often unwitting, role in spearheading attacks on the supposed generosity of the (actually parsimonious) UK welfare state in the last years of ‘new’ Labour, ultimately contributing an ideological basis to the ‘austerity’ of the 2010s. The result? A manifold increase in child poverty.
Evans integrates elements of ethnography—providing an analysis of the lower-middle classes as a critical set of social groupings, an approach in some ways similar to the Mass Observation experiments in the Britain of the 1930s. Indeed, if we take Evans’ fascinating historical descriptions of how the bourgeoisie’s continued existence and growth has frustrated political expectations at different points, then it seems more like a reaffirmation of the world of the lower-middle-class clerks and apprentices who inhabit HG Wells’ interwar novels. With the decline of the postwar welfare settlement and the evaporation of many forms of universal provision, Britain may rather resemble a 1930s social paradigm—an era also marked by massive technological innovation, alongside crisis.
Evans identifies the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, about how we belong, as critical. In a positive sense, the British (and indeed European) labour movement survives, yet as a sort of diaspora, rooted emotionally in a shrunken industrial working class. But the subjective political goals of a social base comprised of the precariat may be shrouded in obfuscation, Evans suggests. They may be closer to a potentially radical petit bourgeois anxiety than anything that would identify them as part of a new working class.
Chauvinism and xenophobia
Evans however advances his arguments on social geography too far. In A Nation of Shopkeepers he advises that it is often better to stay in the place where one grew up, as an alternative to the rootless life of a young professional. Yet migration, between and within countries, is intrinsic to modernity, for better or worse. There will always be places individuals would wish to escape from and places to which to flee. The main contributor to exacerbating this process in Britain has not been an excess of ambition or education, but rather the property economy: the sell-off of social housing since Thatcher, speculation and the associated inflation of house prices.
Evans seems to be saying socialists and trade unionists should build social provision for all, so reducing the insecurity which undermines any concept of the common good. But A Nation of Shopkeepers might inadvertently provide some support for insular forms of social democracy, which invariably lead to chauvinism and xenophobia becoming the main political drivers. Not only does Evans appear unconcerned at the (somewhat overgeneralised) phenomenon of working-class voters in former industrial areas voting for ‘Brexit’. He seems positively to welcome this and uninterested in how racism—or, at least, particular interpretations of ‘immigration’—may have contributed to it.
In a working-class area he observed, Evans remarks, while younger activists were campaigning on the affordability of housing, older, long-term residents were more focused on crime. It is possible that the latter concerns were valid but equally possible that mass media had inflated them and successfully conflated them with ‘foreigners’. Older people spend more time on the internet and that appears to have contributed to support for reactionary opinions among senior citizens in Britain. Gilbert and Williams highlight the algorithms used by ‘social media’ platforms, which can ultimately be connected to attempts by the radical right to create a hegemonic bloc.
Hall was very specific on how crime became part of a right-wing, dog-whistle discourse, covered extensively in his 1978 book (with colleagues), Policing the Crisis, which took off from a ‘moral panic’ associated with a ‘mugging’ in a mainly black working-class neighbourhood of Birmingham. It is hard to understand why Evans simply regards the concerns of his interlocutors—and the more obvious xenophobia surrounding the Brexit vote—as automatically legitimate and community-generated.
Brexit and immigration
Evans is a socialist who is obviously opposed to the European Union and would not like at any point for the UK to attempt to rejoin. Following the influential writings of the late Peter Mair and Wolfgang Streeck, he is part of a British left which sees the EU as dominated by a politics which is all about the professional-managerial class—a class whose interests runs contrary to those of a working-class coalition. Yet the 2016 Brexit vote was in no way a referendum on the socialist policies which the EU might, in theory, have prohibited: the Leave campaign was focused almost entirely on immigration and the purported need to control Britain’s borders.
Yes, the socialist left in the EU overall is indeed in a bad state and this may partly be due to the perceived professionalisation of politics, where social-democrat politicians are remote and seem to operate according to their own interests as part of a political elite. The resentment towards ‘new’ Labour, which slowly engulfed UK politics in the 2000s, was founded in such sentiment, while the disastrous social consequences of the 2010s Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition preceded Brexit (with a correlation between municipalities more affected by welfare austerity and those voting disproportionately for the UK Independence Party as a proxy).
Exceptions to this rule—the coalition in Spain, for example—have shown an ability to change leaders and present less stagnant, more targeted political options to working-class electorates. Evans is right to highlight the political class as an issue. But his political imagination sometimes seems confined by the cage of UK politics and its desperately populist discourse.
Bad-faith argument was certainly in evidence in the 2016 referendum. The promise of more money for the National Health Service, in return for a Leave vote, reflected unscrupulous manipulation by a particular set of power interests. And the UK’s subsequent divergence from the EU on labour and environmental standards now seems an inevitable consequence of the excoriation by the Leave campaign of ‘Brussels red tape’—when actually this regulation is often inadequate, being hotly contested by big capital.
Social dynamic
But Gilbert and Williams’ focus is the social dynamic of Brexit: who voted for it in 2016? Accurately, they highlight the generation gap: age was the most important determiner of the Leave-Remain split. Rather than emphasising the working-class areas that narrowly voted for Brexit, they identify the core in the elderly, asset-owning middle classes. This was the social coalition which in 2015—stunning even David Cameron, the then prime minister—provided the austerity-era Conservatives with an overall majority in the UK parliament.
Gilbert and Williams argue that consumption always represented part of a (potentially Faustian) Thatcherite bargain: sacrifice of certain freedoms, such as drastic curtailment of workplace democracy or the continued injustices of the UK’s electoral system, was compensated for by the accessibility of material goods. They reflect on how collective freedoms have been affected by political and social tendencies—Hall highlighted the harnessing of the word ‘free’ instead to ‘markets’—building to hegemonic outcomes. As Hall wrote in 1987, ‘… politics does not reflect majorities. It constructs them.’
Debt, as a source of income and as a motor for economic activity, has become crucial in maintaining consumption in Britain. According to Gilbert and Williams, the reluctance to trace these material dependencies properly is built into a system designed to shield Britons from the sources, and the consequences, of their consumption patterns. In effect, it is part of a process in which neoliberalism—a raw ideology based around the application of markets to just about every sphere of life—has evolved and changed.
Big Tech has been a crucial part of this evolution. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Google are built around a neoliberal model: the quantification of ‘likes’, the comparison of users with other users and, in the background, the monetisation of user data. Meanwhile, ‘disruptive’ platforms such as Uber or Spotify openly destroy existing operating models. There is no neutrality to technology—neoliberalism is incorporated, at a very fundamental level. Yet Gilbert and Williams argue that platforms are not themselves the source of a radical new manipulation of human behaviour. It is capitalism, somewhat transformed but still very recognisable, which hangs over Big Tech, from the venture funds which initiate its projects to the ease with which financial transactions can now be conducted.
Evans connects to this at a different point, examining the social outcomes associated with a large and heterogenous bloc of lower-middle-class groups. His argument about the contested and fractious middle classes is underpinned implicitly by his depiction of a country where some people are simply not included within the normal provision of essential services: a lot of working-class children in Britain end up with nothing from school, which tends not to be the case in other developed European economies. What has happened to the working classes helps us define the middle classes. Increasingly extreme outcomes have affected the overall prognosis—and, of course, individual perpectives—for all but the highest social classes in the UK.
Legacy of neoliberalism
Evans describes a situation where the so-called ‘middle classes’ are more numerous and maybe more influential than ever—and this is where hegemony comes in. But at the same time, a concept of the ‘middle’ is becoming harder to define.
Again, the analysis offered by Gilbert and Williams is crucial. They refer to the processes of technological change which have resulted in new forms of platform capitalism, together with an alarming concentration of industrial ownership. In a sense, Hegemony Now! is very true to a particular type of Marxist analysis. Yes, the authority of neoliberalism has eroded in the spheres of media narrative, political discourse and popular consent, but the infrastructures remain largely untouched—and, indeed, any discussion of post-neoliberalism takes place in a territory defined by its legacy.
Both books highlight that the UK labour market still includes a large working class. But some jobs, which once were formally working class, have become more and more specialised—so specialised that the workers, having experienced waves of implementation of new technology, are partially protected from the application of casualisation, as finding and training their replacements would be extremely difficult. The relaxed and cheerful ‘miners’ of Tower Colliery come to mind.
Yet the specialisation of many occupations has not only made the threat of unemployment more potentially severe. Perhaps it has also made it harder to organise in the way trade unions mobilised in the 1970s—in particular, to combine with other occupations which have not been subjected to similar waves of technical change. For example, food, care, retail and hospitality are plagued by zero-hour contracts, with an implicit employer right to deny hours to individuals without prior justification. Such application of employer power, without redress, has become stamped on modern Britain—part of what Gilbert and Williams describe as the ‘deliberate engineering of this situation of precarity’. Evans’ chapter on the professional-managerial class is a particularly powerful depiction of the practical exercise of social inequality.
Should this specialisation be welcomed? Should it become the basis of a new ‘guild socialism’? And to what extent do we want to project ideals of how society should be? If we build new social housing, do we state clearly, as a century ago, that this is for an elevated humanity—neuen Menschen as the socialists of Vienna put it? Evans might not suggest this but was socialism not always about improving the nature of humanity, rather than preserving one’s sense of class identity?
Perhaps the biggest question now is: if we are to prevent the worst excesses of climate change, does this mean that everything—who we are, the way we live—needs to change? In the light of these admittedly wide questions, the electoral promise of Britain’s Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn in 2019—that access to all further and higher education should be free for life—seems to gain a kind of historical prominence.
From mourning to moving on
In recent years on the UK left there has been considerable progress. Policy has been developed, and this has moved things on significantly from the programmes of the 1970s and 1980s. Accompanying this, there was also some progress, for a time, in convincing the population that socialism was not a swear word.
Yet for those of us with politics anywhere to the left of the ‘new’ Labour leader, Tony Blair, these are bleak times. The shadow of Corbyn’s defeat, the resulting ‘hard’ Brexit and, perhaps worse, the preceding breakdown of the movement associated with Corbyn and its sudden evaporation, left many in a state of mourning. The organised left is weak. In both of these books one can still detect this loss between the lines. But these are different attempts, not to recapture what was lost but to diagnose the misapprehensions which may have led to defeat and ultimately to move on.
Evans writes especially convincingly about the need to work within trade unions, to focus on building common cause with the different fractions of the working class and some of the petit bourgeois groupings. For example, many in construction understand how workers can be mistreated and that unions do have a role to play in protecting them against exploitation and unbridled management power. For Evans, provision of collective security should be the main focus.
We may disagree with some of his conclusions, especially on Brexit, and questions of race and identity, but Evans writes with bravery and openness. It is not enough to rely upon disaffected graduates: a wider coalition is required. He wants to create micro-socialisms—to embed an alternative discourse in the workplace.
Gilbert and Williams, meanwhile, wage a complex propaganda battle on multiple levels over ‘common sense’—in which Antonio Gramsci saw hegemony as being secured. For them, this is geared to new alliances among different social groups and an ‘expansion of consciousness’ for radical change. Despite the quite trenchant Marxist analysis in Hegemony Now!, their recommendations are pluralist, even leaning towards liberalism.
Both books are relevant to the shared challenges across Europe’s developed core, with a ruthless, populist right threatening core working-class constituencies. They are stimulating and thought-provoking and can kickstart much-needed further debate.
Neither is a simple guide to winning over a large, complex population to a socialist project and neither explicitly lays foundations that could pave the way for the UK to rejoin the EU—in fact, Evans would be completely opposed to such a plan. But these are the first, tentative steps, after a series of setbacks, in restoring coherence and a sense of purpose to a democratic-socialist project in the UK, whose wider role in the world would also here need to be considered.
One can only hope we all have the time we need to absorb and reinterpret these ideas—before events, potentially related to the phenomena these books describe, overtake and even submerge us.
Carl Rowlands is a teacher and writer based in Budapest and Vienna.