Jonas Patrick Marvin’s The Breaking of the English Working Class is an interesting and broad history of the changing modes of ‘population management’ inflicted upon and resisted by England’s working class since the 1980s. Focusing especially on the crisis decades of Thatcherism and New Labour, Marvin traces how successive regimes organized people for capitalist accumulation, dividing England’s working class into oppositional categories of race, geography, productive and parasitic in so doing. Marvin argues that Thatcher tore apart strong proletarian ‘lifeworlds’ that had characterized the post-war decades, and that this ‘breaking’ was consolidated by New Labour and deepened by the austerity governments of the 2010s. It is a story of ‘abandonment’, organized and disorganized, but there are important moments of mass uprising, resistance, and hope for the future too. It is also, as the writer China Miéville notes on the back blurb, a beautifully written book.

The story begins in the present, in the city of Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, West Midlands. Marvin has recently relocated there from London, priced out by exorbitant housing costs that are somewhat less exorbitant up in Stoke. His experiences of living, seeing and campaigning in London and Stoke are threaded through the book as personal testimony, and the narrative jumps between past and present here and there. This is one of the book’s great strengths: tying grand political manoeuvres of the recent past to their consequences in the author’s present; everyday experiences that could be yours or mine.

Stoke-on-Trent is a conglomeration of six towns that were once home to a range of traditional industries, especially ceramics – its nickname is ‘The Potteries’. Stoke saw great uprisings in support of the Chartist movement for universal male suffrage in the mid-nineteenth century, and militant trade union activism in the early twentieth. ‘Modernization’ after the Second World War brought drastic change. Shelton Bar steelworks was nationalized in 1952 and the huge Wolstanton ‘super pit’ was sunk. A dual carriageway ripped through the city and the colossal Bentilee housing estate was built, one of the largest in Europe. Privatization from the 1980s attempted to undo much of local associational life. Marvin consults a range of sources to tell this next part of the story, and the testimonies here present complex narratives of both destruction and resistance. Oral histories with a stalwart local trade unionist and a younger community activist and artist offer insights into how locals have grappled with the withdrawal of funding for community facilities, and the coming and goings of insulting public initiatives. One, the Pathfinder scheme launched by John Prescott in the 2000s, sold council homes in the Porland Street Estate for £1 in an attempt to lure back young professionals who had left, and to cleanse the estate from those deemed ‘undeserving’. Today, Marvin argues, ‘Stoke-on-Trent is a city of sick proletarians.’ It is characterized by high deprivation, a desolate environment and poor health, mental and physical. The workers in greatest demand here are nurses.

The book goes on to understand how we got here through a detailed history of British politics and policy, and their effects, since the 1980s. An important part of Marvin’s framing is Marx’s general law of capital accumulation, which insists that crises in capital accumulation are met by stratifying the working class further to increase competition between them – both in the formal workplace, and at home and in communities. Marvin charts the austerity decade of the 2010s as one of ‘disorganised abandonment’ that spurred revolts such as the 2011 riots in major cities, and votes for Brexit in ‘rustbelt provinces’ like Stoke. The preconditions here are to be found in the crisis of Keynesianism and organized abandonment of the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher and the New Right. That regime saw the selling of public assets such as council houses and public services; it deliberately deindustrialized industries with the strongest unions like mining; and it blamed the social consequences on racialized groups. Marvin argues that the social losses were assuaged by other outcomes of liberalization: cheap credit, cheap mortgages and lower consumer prices. New Labour consolidated and accelerated the deep change that Thatcherism pioneered through their policies and clever rebranding. It shed public welfare provision further, accelerated privatization and created the racialized category of the ‘asylum seeker’ that placed severe restrictions on how and where these refugees could live and work. In the final chapter, ‘Whither gravediggers?’, Marvin reflects on differences between Marx’s nineteenth-century proletariat and our own.

Central to Marvin’s argument is that these changing forms of population management have in turn changed our thinking. They have made us lonelier, sicker and suspicious of each other; more likely to see ourselves in terms of non-class categories pertaining to region and race. Whilst the plurality of a thing like subjectivity, indeed the trickiness of systematizing it, could have been considered in more depth, overall this is a well-researched and timely history of class that will appeal to a popular audience.