We live in a moment when the working class is fractured along a great many lines. Gone are the days of solidarity built around a shared experience of factory work that formed the bedrock of Karl Marx’s analysis of class struggle – and his vision of emancipation. Meanwhile in the halls of power, elites in our politics have failed for decades now to really grasp what people in Britain care about and need – resorting to lame stand-ins such as ‘Mondeo man’ and ‘Stevenage woman’, Farage’s new favourite: ‘alarm clock Britain’.
What are they missing? Lived experience, apart from anything else. On Downstream this week, Ash Sarkar sat down with campaigner and author Jonas Patrick Marvin to discuss his new book ‘The Breaking of the English Working Class’. Weaving autobiographical detail with political theory, Marvin tackles head-on the class forces that have shaped his own life.
Why can’t people born in London afford to stay and build lives there? Who gets to define themselves as working class, and on what grounds? How should the left respond to rising anti-immigration politics? Why has the working class become so fragmented, and what can be done to repair it?