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The Breaking of the English Working Class
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Ebook
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What has become of the English Working Class in the 21st Century?
Class is more central to understanding what is happening in the UK than it has been for decades. But what does it mean to be working class today? And how should we define it? For some, it is a cultural definition, untethered from its traditional links to labourism. For others, the divisions are found between generations based around the opportunities of home ownership.
Jonas Marvin argues that such simple definitions are not enough. Visiting two communities - Tottenham in north London, and Stoke in the Midlands, he shows that while there is a common experience of work, the differences in housing and everyday life are palpable, resulting in a profound bifurcation in proletarian consciousness. Ultimately, the book charts the demolition of the conscious, political subject whose emergence E.P. Thompson traced more than half a century ago: the English working class.
Reviews
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A profound navigation of heartbreak, fury, and radical horizon, The Breaking of the English Working Class announces Jonas Marvin as a vital political voice – as well as a beautiful writer
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A breath-taking phenomenology of class life in twenty-first century Britain. From the potbanks of the Potteries to the gig economy’s algorithmic discipline, from mass unemployment to managed abandonment, Jonas Marvin charts the tragedy of the British working-class and its decomposition — and possible revival — with impressive empirical and theoretical rigour. This is socialist history at its best, a history that seeks to retrieve from the rubble of past defeats the means of future victories.
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A reminder that class remains central to British capitalism. Marvin persuasively argues that so-called "left behind" areas of the UK are at the forefront of new modes of exploitation, and shows the relatively better off their likely futures. Unless we urgently forge a new class politics that embraces the diverse realities of lived working class experience that can take capital and its representatives on.