A Nation of Shopkeepers offers a provocative analysis of Britain’s culturally mediated class structure and critique of the educated ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ of the left. But Evans’s rigid and ahistorical opposition of working-class and identity-based political claims, based on a misreading of Sivanandan, fails to grasp the necessity of uniting demands for economic redistribution and social justice.

A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie
Dan Evans
Repeater Bookers, 2023
9781913462697

Like Orwell, Paul Mason has fallen victim to a kind of fatalism: the belief that in the end hope lies not with the proles, but with the bourgeois state that is able to overcome fascism - reflecting trends within the British left unable to contain their admiration for Starmer’s ‘ruthless pragmatism’.

How to Stop Fascism: History, Ideology, Resistance
Paul Mason
Penguin Books, 2022
9780141996400