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The Breaking of the English Working Class
What has become of the English working class in the twenty-first century?
After a decades-long absence, class is once again central to our understanding of ailing Britain. But what does it mean to be working class today? As Jonas Patrick Marvin shows, questions of class have often been replaced by talk of race and geography. Meanwhile, a collective identity capable of pushing for change has become increasingly weakened and sidelined.
Retelling the story of the working class over the last forty years — from Thatcher’s war against the unions to New Labour neoliberalism – Marvin shows how power and capital have combined to shatter a radical identity into many parts: white, male, northerner, homeowner, immigrant, unemployed, disabled. These fragments are then set in conflict against each other. Blending political analysis with an account of his own experiences of class in London and the rustbelt Midlands, Marvin shows how the working class have been demonised and managed into impotence.
The working class is more than just an identity. As Marvin argues, it embodies a collective will to demand change, one that can — and must — be rekindled.
After a decades-long absence, class is once again central to our understanding of ailing Britain. But what does it mean to be working class today? As Jonas Patrick Marvin shows, questions of class have often been replaced by talk of race and geography. Meanwhile, a collective identity capable of pushing for change has become increasingly weakened and sidelined.
Retelling the story of the working class over the last forty years — from Thatcher’s war against the unions to New Labour neoliberalism – Marvin shows how power and capital have combined to shatter a radical identity into many parts: white, male, northerner, homeowner, immigrant, unemployed, disabled. These fragments are then set in conflict against each other. Blending political analysis with an account of his own experiences of class in London and the rustbelt Midlands, Marvin shows how the working class have been demonised and managed into impotence.
The working class is more than just an identity. As Marvin argues, it embodies a collective will to demand change, one that can — and must — be rekindled.
192 pages, Paperback
Published August 18, 2026
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August 24, 2026A nice, thoughtful overview of the past few decades that have brought us to our current moment, that has been aptly described by the US-based Communist Caucus as one of "proletarian disorganisation".
To the initiated, much of this history in this book will feel familiar, but Marvin expands well on this to find fresher insights into the consequences of the breaking of the form of working-class organisation that arguably reached a peak in this country in the 1970s. He is particularly in his element when discussing health and the growing spectre of sickness that afflicts contemporary Britain. The early chapter on Stoke is probably my personal highlight, perhaps in part because of its name dropping of various small towns across the county border in Cheshire where I used to play Sunday league football as a kid.
At times, the narrative can feel somewhat like these actions were inevitable, rather than hotly contested (although Marvin makes clear in the conclusion that these developments in capitalism were and are a response to working-class resistance). In this sense, a greater detail on the struggles around these changes would have been helpful, similar to the how many of the macro-changes in British capitalism are explained with precision within the text. I would also differ somewhat in my analysis of the changes during the 1990s - where I think the relationship between the state and trade unions in many senses became closer despite struggles by the rank-and-file for a different direction.
The question of which contemporary subjects able to reconstitute an insurgent socialist movement is an important one. I suspect I differ somewhat from Marvin in how far outside the working-class -as a global class whose leverage by-and-large lies in a large section of its ability to both refuse labour and reshape it in a new direction - that I think the answer to this question lies. However, he is right to focus on how the collapse of world-building cultures within working-class communities has huge consequences for the state of working-class organisation, both in and outside the workplace.
His conclusion hints the real problem we face here: it is not as if the left is absent from these activities (organising the provision of food, support, care, music, culture, etc.) in the present day within our communities and class, but the fact that these isolated activities currently do not result in a wider political movement capable of challenging the state and capital.
When you read the reflections of those who partook in the year-long miners strike of 1984-45, it is clear that that action was possible not just because of those workers' organisation and determination, but also in large part because of the working-class and/or socialist organisational ecology that was able to step in when capital rescinded those resources, to provide the means the reproduction of hundreds of thousands of lives over a prolonged period, even offering a vision of a different society in the process. To put it bluntly, capital by its very nature, is so brutal in its structure, that to come up against it in any meaningful sense, even for just a few days, requires the participation of large numbers of people and an organisational infrastructure that is willing and able to contest the state as a dual power.
Perhaps in our current moment, it is the fact these campaigns and projects that could provide the basis for a socialist world-building within the working-class take place in isolation, outside of a wider mass political movement. Rather than being tied together and made possible through the active contributions of millions of people, they are instead forced to stay alive through institutional means - NGOs structures, funding applications, bureaucratic manoeuvrings - or via the dedication of small groups of activists who will inevitably burnout or be forced to move on. This book then is useful for reminding us how question of how we build the levels of organisation and cultures of mass participation - both in the long term and in our day-to-day struggles - must be at the forefront of our minds.
To the initiated, much of this history in this book will feel familiar, but Marvin expands well on this to find fresher insights into the consequences of the breaking of the form of working-class organisation that arguably reached a peak in this country in the 1970s. He is particularly in his element when discussing health and the growing spectre of sickness that afflicts contemporary Britain. The early chapter on Stoke is probably my personal highlight, perhaps in part because of its name dropping of various small towns across the county border in Cheshire where I used to play Sunday league football as a kid.
At times, the narrative can feel somewhat like these actions were inevitable, rather than hotly contested (although Marvin makes clear in the conclusion that these developments in capitalism were and are a response to working-class resistance). In this sense, a greater detail on the struggles around these changes would have been helpful, similar to the how many of the macro-changes in British capitalism are explained with precision within the text. I would also differ somewhat in my analysis of the changes during the 1990s - where I think the relationship between the state and trade unions in many senses became closer despite struggles by the rank-and-file for a different direction.
The question of which contemporary subjects able to reconstitute an insurgent socialist movement is an important one. I suspect I differ somewhat from Marvin in how far outside the working-class -as a global class whose leverage by-and-large lies in a large section of its ability to both refuse labour and reshape it in a new direction - that I think the answer to this question lies. However, he is right to focus on how the collapse of world-building cultures within working-class communities has huge consequences for the state of working-class organisation, both in and outside the workplace.
His conclusion hints the real problem we face here: it is not as if the left is absent from these activities (organising the provision of food, support, care, music, culture, etc.) in the present day within our communities and class, but the fact that these isolated activities currently do not result in a wider political movement capable of challenging the state and capital.
When you read the reflections of those who partook in the year-long miners strike of 1984-45, it is clear that that action was possible not just because of those workers' organisation and determination, but also in large part because of the working-class and/or socialist organisational ecology that was able to step in when capital rescinded those resources, to provide the means the reproduction of hundreds of thousands of lives over a prolonged period, even offering a vision of a different society in the process. To put it bluntly, capital by its very nature, is so brutal in its structure, that to come up against it in any meaningful sense, even for just a few days, requires the participation of large numbers of people and an organisational infrastructure that is willing and able to contest the state as a dual power.
Perhaps in our current moment, it is the fact these campaigns and projects that could provide the basis for a socialist world-building within the working-class take place in isolation, outside of a wider mass political movement. Rather than being tied together and made possible through the active contributions of millions of people, they are instead forced to stay alive through institutional means - NGOs structures, funding applications, bureaucratic manoeuvrings - or via the dedication of small groups of activists who will inevitably burnout or be forced to move on. This book then is useful for reminding us how question of how we build the levels of organisation and cultures of mass participation - both in the long term and in our day-to-day struggles - must be at the forefront of our minds.
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August 22, 2026Nice readable summary answering ‘how did we get into this mess?’ Pulls together lots of disparate threads with some eclectic intellectual resources (from Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams to Joshua Clover/Endnotes and Ruth Wilson Gilmore) which was cool. You could give it an engaged friend or colleague without them being bored or scared off. The opening chapter on Stoke was my favourite and illustrated the general argument in quite concrete terms.
The question of how we get out of this mess (primarily the identity of the ‘we’) is still an open question. If there is a weakness to the book it’s that it doesn’t apply the same holistic social, political, economic understanding of subject formation to new emancipatory subjects that it does to the previous ones. I suppose it’s hard to know where green shoots will spring from in advance, but wish there was more space to expand on the epilogue where it gestures at answering these questions. It was very good at the beginning in outlining the four ‘archetypal’ emancipatory subjects of the twentieth century so wish there was more to this ‘lifeworld’ aspect from a comparative perspective.
Suppose big gap is in what form these new emancipatory subjects that are described in largely sociological terms can be organised in the absence of the richer and deeper ‘lifeworlds’ of industry and the labour movement. Sadly this is a problem with reality rather than the book. Million dollar question!
The question of how we get out of this mess (primarily the identity of the ‘we’) is still an open question. If there is a weakness to the book it’s that it doesn’t apply the same holistic social, political, economic understanding of subject formation to new emancipatory subjects that it does to the previous ones. I suppose it’s hard to know where green shoots will spring from in advance, but wish there was more space to expand on the epilogue where it gestures at answering these questions. It was very good at the beginning in outlining the four ‘archetypal’ emancipatory subjects of the twentieth century so wish there was more to this ‘lifeworld’ aspect from a comparative perspective.
Suppose big gap is in what form these new emancipatory subjects that are described in largely sociological terms can be organised in the absence of the richer and deeper ‘lifeworlds’ of industry and the labour movement. Sadly this is a problem with reality rather than the book. Million dollar question!
October 3, 2026
On 3 October 2026, China Miéville singled out Marvin's book in the Guardian as one of his more worthwhile recent reads. He characterised it as 'an indispensable — and beautifully written — essay on decades of structural, economic, and psychic violence'. I also found it worthwhile in order to gain a better understanding of what happened during the forced transition from 'industrial citizenship' (Wolfgang Streeck) to consumerist and home-owning neoliberalism of the Thatcher years and the consolidation of this regime in "asset-based welfare" (mortgage as pension and safety net) under New Labour. But 'beautifully written'? No, quite the contrary. The first couple of chapters were written in quite a personal voice and were easy to follow. However, as the book progresses it drifts into rather turgid academicism. Take a sentence like this: "We need a socialist politics which reclaims human beings made surplus to capital’s requirements as an integral component of our coalitions. Only by confronting head-on the racialised and classed portrayal of crisis so pervasive within British culture, through stories and organising experiences of popular community, decarcerality and empowerment, can we begin to rearticulate the declinist reading of national entropy as one of abandonment." What is this? An LLM parroting cultural studies articles from the 1990s? Or a debut author keen to outsermonise his Marxist forebears? An elegant statement of a political program it is not. But then Miéville likes this sort of stuff. In his notes on the Communist Manifesto he came up with statements like this: "All of which is to say that in this Marxian model, alongside the imbrication of powerful social norms and structures must be added the question of another, concomitant and connected relation, though one definitionally less socially dominant: oppositional bottom-up political strategies."
October 26, 2026
The title of this book suggests homage to E.P. Thompson’s classic account of the making of the English working class, but with a different trajectory for proletarian power since the time of the original opus, back in 1963.
Thompson scrutinised a small segment of time, covering the activity of English Jacobins in the 1790s and concluding with the moment when Chartism came on the scene in the 1830s. He explained how a working class movement was built over the course of these decades, unifying the fragments of radical artisans with the agitation of labourers against the rise of the oppressive factory system.
Marvin’s book shows the same process in apparent reverse. His subject is the late twentieth century through to the present day. All the component parts of society were in rapid motion over this time and capitalism was continuing to evolve in ways that shaped the development of class consciousness. The focal point for the emergence of the deep sense of oppression shifted from the factory to the urban city itself. It was in neighbourhoods organised as sites where relative affluence sat adjacent to ‘just-getting-by’ households, and more hard-pressed districts made up of people struggling to pay rent that the political moods of the day were generated.
He provides a usual approach to the question of housing and understanding how it has come to shape responses to the way the world is now set up which often seems more important than one’s place in the workforce. Among several sources for his analysis of alienation and arrhythmia, including the Marxists Raymond Williams and Henri Lefebvre, he discusses the contributions of the British sociologist, John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood, who offered a view which saw a shift in the attitude to work on the part of wage-earners, regarding it as instrumental rather than fundamental to their lives Jjobs had become a financial means to home-centred, consumerist lifestyles.
This vision appealed to the postwar planners and social democratic politicians for whom a semi-detached house with a Morris Minor on the driveway would mark the desired end of politics. But it was upended by the deindustrialisation that started in the 1970s, leading to the loss of well-paid jobs and the fantasy of unending consumerism.
Re-engineered social space transformed Marvin’s home town of Stoke-on-Trent into a satellite for neighbouring cities which have undergone real estate-led regeneration, turning into a place where expensive housing could be built for better-off workers employed in places like Manchester and Birmingham. This is a capitalist model that advances through what Marvin calls “disorganised abandonment” where rent-seeking becomes “more important than development and, ultimately, life.”
The shrewd political operators of the early 19th century came up programmes of action which forged unity between radical artisans the social force represented by Luddite stocking knitters and handloom weavers whose livelihoods were being undermined by factory machines. But the rising political moods of the present day seem better characterised by divisions seeking scapegoats to carry the blame for the sense of decline and abandonment which prevails across many neighbourhoods. Immigrants and other racialised minorities to the forefront on this score.
Can what has been broken be mended? Marvin points to the lack of structural power held by the working class of today, once exemplified by groups like miners and car and steel workers. But today’s proletarians have what he calls associational power. By this he means they have leverage over market networks and supply chains which allows them to be a focus for a politics centring on the organic inter-connectiveness of society. The English working class will have to be remade, if it ever is, by a social movement which speaks to 33 million, thirteen per cent of whom are self-employed, including “disempowered proletarians in services or the platform economy and impoverished but classically petty-bourgeois small business owners.”
Marvin has done a good job at explaining the disintegrative forces that have produced the breaking of the English working class over the last four decades. What he has to say about associational power is less clear on the way to reverse a now deeply entrenched trend. He discusses the power of disruption, extending to outright rioting as a means in which class power might reappear in the future. At this point it seems most fruitful to return to Thompson got a guide, explaining how the early 19th working class moved on from Luddite machine-breaking to mass political action through trade unions and Chartism.
Thompson scrutinised a small segment of time, covering the activity of English Jacobins in the 1790s and concluding with the moment when Chartism came on the scene in the 1830s. He explained how a working class movement was built over the course of these decades, unifying the fragments of radical artisans with the agitation of labourers against the rise of the oppressive factory system.
Marvin’s book shows the same process in apparent reverse. His subject is the late twentieth century through to the present day. All the component parts of society were in rapid motion over this time and capitalism was continuing to evolve in ways that shaped the development of class consciousness. The focal point for the emergence of the deep sense of oppression shifted from the factory to the urban city itself. It was in neighbourhoods organised as sites where relative affluence sat adjacent to ‘just-getting-by’ households, and more hard-pressed districts made up of people struggling to pay rent that the political moods of the day were generated.
He provides a usual approach to the question of housing and understanding how it has come to shape responses to the way the world is now set up which often seems more important than one’s place in the workforce. Among several sources for his analysis of alienation and arrhythmia, including the Marxists Raymond Williams and Henri Lefebvre, he discusses the contributions of the British sociologist, John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood, who offered a view which saw a shift in the attitude to work on the part of wage-earners, regarding it as instrumental rather than fundamental to their lives Jjobs had become a financial means to home-centred, consumerist lifestyles.
This vision appealed to the postwar planners and social democratic politicians for whom a semi-detached house with a Morris Minor on the driveway would mark the desired end of politics. But it was upended by the deindustrialisation that started in the 1970s, leading to the loss of well-paid jobs and the fantasy of unending consumerism.
Re-engineered social space transformed Marvin’s home town of Stoke-on-Trent into a satellite for neighbouring cities which have undergone real estate-led regeneration, turning into a place where expensive housing could be built for better-off workers employed in places like Manchester and Birmingham. This is a capitalist model that advances through what Marvin calls “disorganised abandonment” where rent-seeking becomes “more important than development and, ultimately, life.”
The shrewd political operators of the early 19th century came up programmes of action which forged unity between radical artisans the social force represented by Luddite stocking knitters and handloom weavers whose livelihoods were being undermined by factory machines. But the rising political moods of the present day seem better characterised by divisions seeking scapegoats to carry the blame for the sense of decline and abandonment which prevails across many neighbourhoods. Immigrants and other racialised minorities to the forefront on this score.
Can what has been broken be mended? Marvin points to the lack of structural power held by the working class of today, once exemplified by groups like miners and car and steel workers. But today’s proletarians have what he calls associational power. By this he means they have leverage over market networks and supply chains which allows them to be a focus for a politics centring on the organic inter-connectiveness of society. The English working class will have to be remade, if it ever is, by a social movement which speaks to 33 million, thirteen per cent of whom are self-employed, including “disempowered proletarians in services or the platform economy and impoverished but classically petty-bourgeois small business owners.”
Marvin has done a good job at explaining the disintegrative forces that have produced the breaking of the English working class over the last four decades. What he has to say about associational power is less clear on the way to reverse a now deeply entrenched trend. He discusses the power of disruption, extending to outright rioting as a means in which class power might reappear in the future. At this point it seems most fruitful to return to Thompson got a guide, explaining how the early 19th working class moved on from Luddite machine-breaking to mass political action through trade unions and Chartism.
September 25, 2026
A solid explanation of the intentional destruction of working class lifeworlds through a policy of class warfare, that we know as neoliberalism.
The exploration of Stoke and the potteries was by far the best part of the book.
At times I struggled with understanding at whom exactly this book was aimed. The analysis throughout is correct, but it is similar to arguments I've heard before, especially from people in the orbit of Salvage such as Barnaby Raine. Is this meant to be intervening in a current political discussion? If so what are the actual political proposals? If not, and it's more an attempt to popularise a particular analysis of the transformation of the British working class, then the prose and vocabulary is far too specialist in my opinion.
Still the argument about the breaking of the working class, and disorganised abandonment are useful models for understanding changes in Britain's politics since 1985.
The exploration of Stoke and the potteries was by far the best part of the book.
At times I struggled with understanding at whom exactly this book was aimed. The analysis throughout is correct, but it is similar to arguments I've heard before, especially from people in the orbit of Salvage such as Barnaby Raine. Is this meant to be intervening in a current political discussion? If so what are the actual political proposals? If not, and it's more an attempt to popularise a particular analysis of the transformation of the British working class, then the prose and vocabulary is far too specialist in my opinion.
Still the argument about the breaking of the working class, and disorganised abandonment are useful models for understanding changes in Britain's politics since 1985.
September 1, 2026
4.5
A much needed re-evaluation of the English working class today.
I wouldn't say there is *that* much in this that is especially revelatory (at least for me), but the way Jonas talks about class today and how we got here makes for a fast, astute read.
I am especially drawn to how Jonas talks about his move to Stoke-On-Trent and how in five years he has developed such a detailed portrait of the city. As someone who moved away from an increasingly unaffordable city to where I am now, it resonated with me that tenacity to deliberately engage with the profile of a new place.
Aside from that, Jonas provides a compact, yet comprehensive analysis from the shift of welfare capitalism post-WW2, to the decline of the 1970s to the neoliberal reconfiguration of '(dis)organised abandonment' that defines our working lives today. This is where some parts will be familiar to readers, other details might surprise you too though.
But I find how Jonas proposes a socialist politics of freedom and the 'good life' to be especially important. Jonas is aware of the importance of on the ground mobilisation (via things such as community organising, social spaces, mutual aid, etc.) and the pursuit towards a political socialist movement. Both are required to develop an effective opposition to capitalism against the breaking of the working class.
A much needed re-evaluation of the English working class today.
I wouldn't say there is *that* much in this that is especially revelatory (at least for me), but the way Jonas talks about class today and how we got here makes for a fast, astute read.
I am especially drawn to how Jonas talks about his move to Stoke-On-Trent and how in five years he has developed such a detailed portrait of the city. As someone who moved away from an increasingly unaffordable city to where I am now, it resonated with me that tenacity to deliberately engage with the profile of a new place.
Aside from that, Jonas provides a compact, yet comprehensive analysis from the shift of welfare capitalism post-WW2, to the decline of the 1970s to the neoliberal reconfiguration of '(dis)organised abandonment' that defines our working lives today. This is where some parts will be familiar to readers, other details might surprise you too though.
But I find how Jonas proposes a socialist politics of freedom and the 'good life' to be especially important. Jonas is aware of the importance of on the ground mobilisation (via things such as community organising, social spaces, mutual aid, etc.) and the pursuit towards a political socialist movement. Both are required to develop an effective opposition to capitalism against the breaking of the working class.
September 26, 2026
This is a wonderful book. At its centre it asks a vitally important question: why in the Brexit referendum did the working-class line up divided between two sections of the ruling class – the Brexiters of Johnson and Farage, and the Remainers under Cameron. To tell that story the author traces the history and defeats of the English working class since the heyday of our power in the 1960s and 1970s through the rust belt city of Stoke-on-Trent and London’s Tottenham. He does it through both a personal tale of his family history and through a look at the way the Tories in the 1980s defeated the most organised sections of the proletariat and deliberately deindustrialised England in order to destroy the communities and life worlds and the power the miners, steelworkers, car workers had. He draws particular on the thinking of Black Marxism in Britain and looks not just at production but at the family, health (‘we are a nation of sick proletarians’), social life – through social reproduction. At first it was ‘organised abandonment’ of the deindustrialising areas by the Thatcherites and New Labour but now is simply ‘disorganised abandonment’ by the ruling class.
It is in that abandonment that Farage and the far right have stepped in with their narrative of declinism. He marks as a key moment in this process the multiracial uprisings of 2011 when the right-wing historian David Starkey said on TV ‘the whites have become black’. It is at that point the political class and the medias ‘discovered’ the ‘white working class’ (as a racial, not a class category) in order to break the multiracial unity of 2011.
For me this book retells the history of my lifetime as a revolutionary socialist from the days of ’68 that radicalised me for ever to the depressing situation today. A situation made worse by the suicide of the ‘Your Party’ leaders and destruction of one possibility of creating a genuine alternative to the far right.
But Jonas also provides hope in his account of Stoke, a city where reform rule the roots, of multicultural sociality from below, and the creating of spaces where we can organise to put a vision of the ‘good life’ as an alternative to the viciousness and despair of Farage and the far right
It is in that abandonment that Farage and the far right have stepped in with their narrative of declinism. He marks as a key moment in this process the multiracial uprisings of 2011 when the right-wing historian David Starkey said on TV ‘the whites have become black’. It is at that point the political class and the medias ‘discovered’ the ‘white working class’ (as a racial, not a class category) in order to break the multiracial unity of 2011.
For me this book retells the history of my lifetime as a revolutionary socialist from the days of ’68 that radicalised me for ever to the depressing situation today. A situation made worse by the suicide of the ‘Your Party’ leaders and destruction of one possibility of creating a genuine alternative to the far right.
But Jonas also provides hope in his account of Stoke, a city where reform rule the roots, of multicultural sociality from below, and the creating of spaces where we can organise to put a vision of the ‘good life’ as an alternative to the viciousness and despair of Farage and the far right
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
This book is long overdue. It is a rigorous and in-depth engagement with class in Britain over the last few decades. Despite the massive scope of such a topic, it manages to remain both personable and engaging.
There are so many threads it raises which mark it above many similar engagements with class; the consideration of the spatialisation of class (taking from Neel's Hinterlands and reinvigorating the concept in Britain), the attention to the bodily and health aspects of class over decades (building on Winant's excellent studies in this area too), and finally its conception of 'disorganised abandonment' as a way to articulate the related processes of change. There are so many threads he has opened up for those both thinking and organising in Britain at this moment.
Jonas Patrick Marvin, occasional podcaster and lifelong gooner, will I'm sure continue to build on such work.
There are so many threads it raises which mark it above many similar engagements with class; the consideration of the spatialisation of class (taking from Neel's Hinterlands and reinvigorating the concept in Britain), the attention to the bodily and health aspects of class over decades (building on Winant's excellent studies in this area too), and finally its conception of 'disorganised abandonment' as a way to articulate the related processes of change. There are so many threads he has opened up for those both thinking and organising in Britain at this moment.
Jonas Patrick Marvin, occasional podcaster and lifelong gooner, will I'm sure continue to build on such work.
October 27, 2026
This is an excellent book that offers a valuable and cogent account of class life in 21st century Britain. It is a timely reminder that class is absolutely central to British capitalism and acts as a guide to taking on the representatives of capital and the ruling class. The website I edit, Left Field, has a great review of the book at the link below.
https://leftfield.org.uk/articles/fro...
https://leftfield.org.uk/articles/fro...
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