Evans’s focus, though, is on the left’s failure to grapple with Britain’s reconfigured class composition post-deindustrialisation, describing the left’s understanding of class since the 1980s as one step forward, two steps back. It emerged out of ‘traditionalist’ factions in the original Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) aligned to the trade union Broad Left and opposed to the neo-Gramscian intellectuals of Marxism Today who embraced the new social movements. A chance for self-reflection for those of you, like myself, who grew up not feeling like you were truly working class, pushed to achieve as highly as possible in school, get a degree, and then find a career. The bulk of the book looks at how neoliberalism has produced a New Petite Bourgeoisie (NPB) in the ‘developed’ world. 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 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. The Network was a way to bring these atomised workers together into an Industrial Union to develop common demands that would make work-life better for them all.Downplaying the challenges posed by neoliberal class segmentation, Wood contended that white-collar workers are, by virtue of their waged-labour, straightforwardly part of a diversified proletariat. Big thanks to Dan Evans for eloquently expressing the profound sentiments that many of us may not have been able to articulate like here did here. It’s worth noting that Evans does grasp this cleavage, and he exhibits a sharp understanding of the distinction between the structural underpinnings of class, and how class is articulated in reality (Evans frames this distinction in terms of objective and subjective class).

As one reviewer identifies, Evans’ account of Corbynism as irredeemably middle class flattens the ‘messy bloc it really was’. Most questionable of all are the intellectual gymnastics Evans deploys to suggest that gig economy workers, on zero-hours contracts and often receiving below the minimum wage, have a tenuous claim to membership of the working class because they are ‘self-employed’. Such notions can readily merge with middle-class liberalism’s ‘dependency on working-class “backwardness” for its own claim to modern multicultural citizenship’.

One class reductionist framework is that in which class is fundamentally determinant at the structural level (meaning that we can identify the objective structural antagonisms at the level of class - the point of production), whilst acknowledging that political interests may not map along class lines. One of the great cons of the New Labour era was the promise of a white collar, “knowledge economy” career for everyone who earned a degree. It is not a surprise that education is the largest industrial section of the union, encompassing many Higher Education workers and students. Tangentially, their class backgrounds and education reveal the limits of Evans’ culturally determined boundary between the ‘new’ and ‘old’ petty bourgeoisies.