The Breaking of the English Working Class

Reviews / Votes

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 -- China Mieville, author of <i>A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto</i> 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. -- Richard Seymour, author of <i>Disaster Nationalism</i> 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. -- Phil Burton Cartledge, author of <i>The Party's Over</i>