In the 1970s, the concept was elaborated into a permanent neo-Gramscian strategy known as ‘Eurocommunism’ – of which Poulantzas was a prominent but heterodox theorist. 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’.

We want labour to be a place where we engage in meaningful work that is socially useful and makes us happy, where we have agency and autonomy in how we carry out tasks, where we make decisions collectively about what we do and where it goes. You can be a ‘working class’ landlord from Rotherham leasing a flat to a ‘middle class’ tenant who graduated from university five years ago and works behind a till. In this way, top-down nationalisation of industries is not satisfactory, and neither is a retreat to isolated self-employment. This helps to reproduce cultural, social, and ideological positions – such as anti-collectivism, opposition to trade union organising, rugged individualism, promotion-seeking and upward mobility. It is nonetheless the case, as Evans emphasises, that ‘the agglomeration of certain industries and jobs in urban areas – universities, the media and culture industry, the political bureaucracy, the civil service and so on – means that the “progressive classes” … are overwhelmingly clustered in the cities.Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’, it emphasises that class boundaries are lived through shared mentalities and values. One speaker, true to his Marxist principles, responded: ‘everyone who doesn’t own the means of production. It helps us understand the ‘intermediary classes’ between proletariat and capitalist, with whom this book is primarily concerned.

It suggests a form of democratic socialism making a simultaneous appeal to the petty bourgeoisie’s ambivalent attitudes to big business and the union bureaucracy’s national-reformist proclivities.His prescription has precedents in ideas of a broad ‘anti-monopoly alliance’ formulated within the communist movement during the historical Popular Front compromises. The North America-based IWW Freelance Journalists Union is a similar project aiming to unite isolated workers, and there are conversations in UK and Ireland to form an organisation by and for freelance artists. It shows how the rise of home ownership, small landlordism and radical changes to the world of work have increasingly inculcated values of petite-bourgeois individualism; how popular culture has promoted and reproduced values of aspiration and conspicuous consumption that militate against socialist organizing; and, most importantly, what the unstoppable rise of the petit-bourgeoisie means for the left.