Downstream: Multiculturalism Will Save the Working Class w/ Jonas Patrick Marvin

**Ash Sarkar** (0:08)
Who speaks for the working class?
The likes of Nigel Farage and JD Vance in America would say that it's them, its right-wingers who understand and articulate the damage that mass immigration has wreaked on the white working class. And recent elections and polls would suggest that increasing numbers of voters agree with them. Reform UK aren't just popular with shyer Tories, they've been able to pick up vast numbers of votes in Britain's post-industrial Rust Belt too. But my next guest, Jonas Patrick Marvin, whose new book, The Breaking of the English Working Class is out now, argues that this isn't just an oversimplification, it's actively misleading. It's a lie whose purpose is to break down the bonds of solidarity and therefore political possibility that exists for working class people the world over. His analysis of class in the two cities he's made home, London and Stoke-on-Trent lays bare a 60-year project of class fragmentation, in which different fractions of the working class are set against each other in competition. Rooted in both research and firsthand experience, it's a ferocious defense of class solidarity, radical struggle and working class multiculturalism. I hope you enjoy the interview.
Jonas Patrick Marvin, welcome to Downstream. Are you professionally including the middle name to distinguish yourself from other Jonas Marvins?

**Jonas Patrick Marvin** (1:47)
Oh, you know, it's the...
Cause that's my married name technically, Marvin. Patrick is like my family name. So my granddad's a Patrick. I've got several uncles that are Patricks. And when I got married, I was like, I still want to make sure that kind of Irish name is in there.

**Ash Sarkar** (2:02)
Yeah, I think that's good.

**Jonas Patrick Marvin** (2:03)
Yeah, yeah, me too.

**Ash Sarkar** (2:04)
I know someone who has Murphy as their middle name from their mom and then married a Murphy. So Murphy Murphy, Murphy Murphy, but like other surname in the middle. So I was like, maybe it should be Murphy squared.

**Jonas Patrick Marvin** (2:18)
Very good.

**Ash Sarkar** (2:20)
She was like, no, that's going to make me feel ridiculous. So you're here because you're book The Breaking of the English Working Class is out, but haters are calling this the least ambitious crossover event in podcast history because you are also one third of the life of the party.
And so we're also going to be talking about British politics at this particular moment. But to start with the book, it offers a really interesting provocation, which is to say that class has been redefined as a kind of identity, which invites us to frame it in racial terms, geographic terms, educational terms, cultural terms more broadly. But actually, it's a matter of struggle and it's a matter of your place in the struggle. So could you just tell me a little bit about your journey to that place intellectually?

**Jonas Patrick Marvin** (3:14)
Yeah. Well, I think one of the first things was like actually trying to make sense of my experience in life, and trying to make sense of what was a massive schism in experiences of class. So like in 2016, we had like the Brexit referendum, right? And in the Brexit referendum, you had two big sides, you had the leave side and you had the remain side. And on one side, you had loads of working class people mostly concentrated in the post-industrial north and the West Midlands. And on the other side, you had loads of working class people concentrated in the bigger cities, London, Manchester Leeds. And I wanted to get to the bottom of why is there this big schism in working class imaginaries and working class politics? If you go back to the 80s, there was a sense of commonality and solidarity in working class communities, right? The London mobilized really strongly for the miners' strike, for example.
Miners would go down to London to Notting Hill Carnival, and they'd have badges which say, we oppose police violence. And there's a discussion there between different communities who experience different forms of oppression. But the kind of world that I feel like I grew up into, we lost the language of class. We lost the language of class as, like you say, both struggle but also as like power and domination, and the sense that across different experiences of time and space, depending on where you live and what kind of jobs you do or what kind of jobs you don't do, we lost the sense of unity between different sections of the working class. And part of the book was trying to explain that schism, trying to explain why different experiences of class as eroded the class language and a shared sense of unity and commitment to a horizon. And I think for me, it was like, I've gone through a succession of social movements, like I went through, I was late to the student movement. I didn't do the student movement, but I was sympathetic to it from the sides.