Published by Verso on 27 October 2026, Ewan Gibbs’s An Injury to All: The Unmaking of the British Working Class sets itself an important historical and political task. Verso describes it as a social history of the British working class since 1945, extending “from the picket lines of the Miners’ Strike to the Amazon warehouses of today”. Through first-hand testimony, the book follows the transformation of a class once concentrated in mines, shipyards, and other centres of heavy industry into one dispersed across call centres, warehouses, and the gig economy. Its culminating question is explicitly political: “who now speaks for labour?”
That question could hardly be more urgent. The old organisations that claimed for generations to represent the working class have undergone a protracted collapse. The Labour Party has moved ever further from the reformist programme it was historically identified with, while the trade-union bureaucracy increasingly functions as an apparatus for containing workers’ struggles. The destruction of manufacturing employment, the privatisation of state industries, the erosion of social provision and the growth of precarious employment have transformed the social landscape in which millions live.
Gibbs brings considerable knowledge to this subject. He is a Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow and describes his research interests as encompassing energy, industry, work and protest. His earlier book, Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialisation in Postwar Scotland, examined the decline of deep coal mining in Scotland and its consequences for work, communities, memory, class and nationhood. His subsequent research has extended into the political economy of energy and the problems associated with industrial transition.
The empirical virtues of this work should not be dismissed. Verso stresses the prominence Gibbs gives to first-hand accounts, while Rhian E. Jones praises the book specifically for “letting its subjects speak for themselves”. The recollections of miners, engineers and workers from communities devastated by industrial closure constitute important historical evidence. Such testimony preserves experiences that would otherwise be submerged beneath official statistics and the complacent narratives of politicians who have treated deindustrialisation as the unavoidable price of economic modernisation.
But the preservation of experience does not by itself provide a historical explanation. History must establish the relationship between experience and the social forces that produced it. It must explain not merely what happened, but why, which political forces intervened, what programmes they advanced, and what alternatives existed. It is precisely here that the concept of the “unmaking” of the British working class raises fundamental problems.
From the “making” to the “unmaking” of the working class
The title consciously echoes E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. The intellectual ancestry of the argument is made especially clear by Gibbs’s 2019 essay, “The Unmaking of the British Working Class: A Highly Provisional Thesis”. There he defined the “unmaking” primarily through the atrophy of what he called “Labourism”: the political and institutional world centred on organised labour and its attachment to the Labour Party. He linked this process to deindustrialisation, suburbanisation, the demise of collective action, and the political demoralisation visible in former industrial areas.
This is an important starting point because the decline of “Labourism” is not identical to the disappearance of the working class. The conflation of the two contains the central theoretical difficulty. The working class is not defined by living in a mining village, wearing overalls, possessing a particular regional accent or belonging to a trade union. It is defined fundamentally by its relationship to the means of production. Workers who do not own significant productive property must sell their labour power to live. Changes in technology, occupation and geography can profoundly alter the forms through which class consciousness develops without abolishing the underlying class relation.
Indeed, Verso’s own description of An Injury to All illustrates the contradiction. It describes a class once “forged in mines and shipyards” becoming one spread across call centres and gig-economy applications. But this is not, strictly speaking, the disappearance of the working class. It is a transformation in the occupational structure and geographical concentration of wage labour. What has been shattered is something different: an historically specific form of working-class organisation and consciousness that grew alongside nationally regulated capitalism and became politically subordinated to the Labour and trade-union bureaucracy.
The distinction is decisive. If the decline of mining, shipbuilding, steelmaking and large-scale manufacturing automatically meant the decline of the working class, then the pessimistic conclusions associated with post-industrial sociology might follow. But if capitalist restructuring destroyed certain concentrations of workers while simultaneously producing new ones, the historical problem changes entirely. We are no longer asking why the working class disappeared. We are asking why organisations created in its name proved incapable of responding progressively to this transformation.
The exhaustion of national reformism
The postwar settlement in Britain emerged from definite international historical conditions. The Depression, fascism, and the Second World War had radicalised workers’ masses internationally. Britain emerged from the war economically weakened and increasingly subordinate to the United States. At the same time, the long postwar economic expansion provided the resources to make significant social concessions while preserving capitalist property relations.
Nationalisation, the National Health Service, expanded welfare provision, council housing, and collective bargaining did not abolish capitalism. They represented concessions made within it under the immense pressure of the working class. This was the environment within which Labourism acquired its postwar authority. The Labour Party claimed that Parliament could gradually transform capitalism while trade unions negotiated improvements within the existing economic order. The bureaucracy’s privileged position depended on its ability to mediate between workers and employers.
The breakdown of the postwar economic order increasingly undermined this arrangement’s foundations. The growing internationalisation of production brought national industries directly into competition within a globally organised system of production and finance. British capitalism responded by demanding wage restraint, rationalisation, closures, deregulation and attacks upon social spending. The Labour and trade-union bureaucracy confronted a historical choice. Either the working class had to challenge capitalist property relations, or its organisations had to accept British capitalism’s demands. They chose the second course.
This is the history that the language of “unmaking” threatens to obscure. Workers did not wake up one morning and decide that solidarity had become unfashionable. Collective institutions did not simply evaporate under the influence of individualism or suburbanisation. Nor was Thatcherism merely the ideological expression of an inexplicable change in national “structures of feeling”. A sustained political offensive targeted the working class, and the organisations through which workers traditionally fought increasingly became mechanisms for suppressing resistance. From the standpoint of Marxism, therefore, Thatcherism cannot be understood independently of the crisis of Labourism. The strength of the Conservative offensive ultimately depended on the political paralysis its existing leadership imposed on the working class.
The miners’ strike and the decisive historical defeat
The 1984-85 miners’ strike occupies an unavoidable position in any account of this transformation. Verso foregrounds the miners’ struggle in An Injury to All, describing its narrative as extending from the miners’ picket lines to contemporary Amazon warehouses. The strike represented a historic confrontation between the working class and the Thatcher government. The government understood that the miners represented far more than one occupational group. Their defeat would alter class relations throughout Britain.
But the decisive question is therefore not simply why the mines subsequently closed. It is why the miners were defeated. An explanation centred upon geographical restructuring or the weakening of industrial solidarities reverses cause and effect. The demoralisation that followed the destruction of the coalfields cannot adequately explain a defeat that helped produce that demoralisation.
Consequently, labour movement leadership becomes indispensable. The miners needed to mobilise the working class as a whole. Instead, their struggle remained confined to an industrial dispute, while the Labour and trade-union bureaucracy opposed any political mobilisation that could threaten the Thatcher government. The subsequent devastation of the coalfields was enormous. Jobs disappeared, communities lost their economic foundations, and decades of accumulated collective experience came under sustained pressure. But these consequences must be understood historically as the aftermath of a major political defeat.
Gibbs’s 2019 essay provides valuable evidence of the bitterness that survived in former coalfield constituencies. Discussing Bolsover, he noted hostile memories of the miners’ strike and how electoral allegiances subsequently fractured. He placed this within a broader trajectory of deindustrialisation, demobilisation, and declining attachment to the labour movement. But hostility towards the former institutions of the labour movement cannot be treated merely as evidence of weakening working-class identity. It must also be understood as the distorted product of decades of bitter political experience.
Workers repeatedly mobilised through organisations that claimed to represent them, only to discover that those organisations refused to wage a struggle against the social order responsible for declining living standards and industrial destruction. The resulting alienation did not mean class antagonism had disappeared. It showed Labourism’s growing inability to contain that antagonism within its traditional political forms.
Hobsbawm, Marxism Today and the retreat from the working class
The theoretical lineage behind the concept of “unmaking” therefore deserves closer examination. Eric Hobsbawm’s famous intervention, “The Forward March of Labour Halted?”, offered an influential formulation of the claim that the traditional working class was losing the social weight socialist politics had supposedly depended on. Such arguments subsequently became central to the Eurocommunist current associated with Marxism Today.
The consequences were far-reaching. Rather than examining the betrayals the working class suffered and the need to build an alternative revolutionary leadership, this tendency increasingly treated changes in capitalism’s occupational composition as evidence that class politics itself had to be supplemented or replaced by broader democratic politics organised around diverse social constituencies.
The political development eventually contributed to an intellectual climate in which accommodation to the market could be presented as realism. What had begun as an argument about changes within the working class became an argument for abandoning the working class as the central revolutionary agency of socialist politics.
It is significant in this respect that Gibbs opened his 2019 essay with Hall’s formulation from “Gramsci and Us”: “You lose because you lose because you lose.” The phrase encapsulates the danger of converting political defeats into sociological inevitabilities. Workers lose. Industrial communities decline. Labour loyalties disintegrate. Nationalism or right-wing populism fills the vacuum. History becomes an accumulation of defeats whose explanation resides increasingly in transformed identities, cultures and geographies. But Marxism must ask a different question: why did they lose?
Who led these struggles? What political programme did that leadership defend? What alternatives were suppressed? Why did enormous demonstrations of working-class militancy repeatedly terminate in retreats brokered by organisations that claimed to represent the workers? Once those questions are posed, the history of postwar Britain assumes a profoundly different shape.
The working class was transformed, not abolished.
The central empirical fact confronting the “unmaking” thesis is that capitalism has not transcended wage labour. It has enormously extended it. The old industrial landscape has certainly disappeared in many areas. The pit head, shipyard and steelworks that once dominated entire towns have closed. Millions no longer work in enterprises around which dense occupational cultures developed over generations. But capitalism replaced them with other forms of proletarian labour.
Hospitals, schools, logistics depots, supermarkets, telecommunications networks, warehouses, call centres and digital platforms depend upon vast numbers of wage workers. Privatisation has transferred former public services into corporate hands while retaining workers whose labour remains socially indispensable. The important historical transition, therefore, is not from a working-class society to a post-working-class society. It is from one configuration of the working class to another.
The social character of production has meanwhile become vastly more international. A worker employed in a warehouse or logistics depot in Britain participates in production and distribution systems that extend across continents. Components, data, finance and commodities cross national borders continuously. Capital already organises production internationally. Labour remains politically divided by national institutions. This contradiction is crucial because it suggests that nationally based Labourism cannot accommodate it. The development of globalised production did not destroy the material basis for international working-class solidarity. It strengthened it.
The turn towards nationalism
Here the Scottish dimension of Gibbs’s political outlook becomes especially revealing. In his 2019 New Socialist essay, he argued that Labour’s future in Scotland required breaking with its commitment to the unitary British state. He described nationalism as having “displaced Labourism” in Scotland, supported recognition of the right to another independence referendum and advocated pressure upon the Scottish government to defy Westminster. He suggested that such confrontation could be accompanied by civil disobedience. An important democratic question concerns opposition to coercive attempts to suppress national aspirations. But that does not settle nationalism’s class character or establish it as a progressive alternative to Labourism. The Marxist starting point must be the independent interests of the working class.
A worker in Glasgow does not have fundamentally antagonistic social interests to a worker in Liverpool, Newcastle, Cardiff or London. They confront the same capitalist ownership structures, financial institutions, and, increasingly, the same multinational corporations. Nationalism translates capitalism-generated social grievances into political demands organised around national territory. It thereby offers another national programme precisely when capitalist development has made economic life more internationally integrated than ever before. The answer to the exhaustion of British national reformism therefore cannot be Scottish national reformism.
Changing the constitutional boundaries within which capitalist property relations operate does not abolish those relations. Neither does exchanging administration from Westminster for administration from Edinburgh resolve the contradictions between wage labour and capital. If the decisive historical development since the 1970s has been the internationalisation of capitalist production, the socialist response cannot consist of creating smaller national frameworks within which workers continue competing for investment. It must politically unify workers across national boundaries against globally organised capital.
Grangemouth and the limits of “just transition”
Gibbs’s recent work on Grangemouth provides a contemporary expression of these issues. His University of Glasgow profile describes his research into energy and industrial transition and records his involvement in work on the Grangemouth refinery closure. His publications include “Workers’ perspectives on an unjust transition: place, history, and workplace closure at Grangemouth oil refinery, Scotland”, “The Grangemouth oil refinery closure: lessons for ‘just transition’ governance” and, in 2026, “Scotland’s unjust transition: the view from Grangemouth”. Grangemouth sharply frames the conflict between social need and private ownership.
The fundamental question is not whether workers should be consulted more effectively about industrial transition. It is who controls the productive resources upon which entire communities depend. Workers possess enormous accumulated technical knowledge. Yet under capitalist ownership, the continued operation or closure of productive facilities ultimately depends on profitability. Decisions affecting thousands of lives appear as the private prerogative of corporations and investors. A genuinely rational transition to sustainable energy production would begin from entirely different premises. Society would determine energy investment according to environmental need and human welfare rather than private profit. Workers displaced from environmentally damaging production would be guaranteed decent employment, training and living standards as productive resources were redirected. But such planning immediately raises the property question. Who owns the energy industry? Who controls investment? Who determines whether a refinery, power station or industrial plant operates? Who decides what replaces it?
These are class questions rather than merely problems of governance. A socialist programme would therefore fight to place major energy corporations and strategic industries under public ownership and democratic workers’ control as part of an internationally coordinated transformation of production.
“Who speaks for labour?”
We can now return to the question Verso asks in An Injury to All: “who now speaks for labour?” The wording itself can mislead. The fundamental problem confronting workers is not discovering somebody willing to “speak for” them. Labour politicians have spoken in workers’ names for generations. Trade-union officials do so every day. The real issue is political leadership. A class becomes an independent political force only when it understands its historical interests and develops organisations capable of fighting for them. No amount of sociological reconstruction can substitute for this task.
The old labour organisations developed within the nation-state framework. Their bureaucracy mediated between working people and national capital. When capitalist production became globally integrated, these organisations did not become internationalist. Instead, they defended the national economy more explicitly. The consequences followed inexorably. If British companies had to become “competitive”, wages and conditions had to be restrained. If investment might move elsewhere, workers had to accept concessions. When factories faced closure, union leaders sought agreements to persuade corporations that production would remain profitable.
The worker thereby ceased to be represented as a member of an international class and instead became a cost on the balance sheet of “our” national economy. This transformation cannot be understood merely as weakened solidarity. It was the political bankruptcy of nationalism and reformism under conditions of globally organised capitalism.
Not the unmaking of the working class, but the collapse of Labourism
This is ultimately the conceptual problem contained in the title An Injury to All. What disappeared was real and historically significant. Mining communities were devastated. Manufacturing towns were hollowed out. Trade-union membership declined. Labour loyalties weakened. Institutions through which generations of workers had expressed a collective identity deteriorated.
But none of this established that the working class ceased to exist. What collapsed was the identification of working-class politics with a particular set of national institutions. This distinction completely changes the historical perspective. If the working class has been “unmade”, socialist politics becomes an exercise in assembling coalitions among fragmented identities, regions and social movements. Politics moves from class towards culture, nationality and electoral sociology.
If Labourism has been exhausted while the working class itself has been objectively enlarged and internationally integrated, an entirely different conclusion follows. The problem becomes one of revolutionary leadership. The central lesson of the last half century is not that workers possessed too much belief in class struggle. Rather, enormous manifestations of class struggle remained politically subordinated to organisations committed to defending capitalism. The task therefore cannot be to recreate the labour movement of the 1950s.
Nor should socialists romanticise the industrial communities that have disappeared. Their solidarity and collective traditions represented tremendous achievements, but national reformism, trade-union bureaucracy, and, in important areas, Stalinism also dominated their political life. The future cannot be built by reconstructing the past’s institutional arrangements.
An injury to one is an injury to all.
Gibbs’s title is therefore ironic. “An injury to one is an injury to all” contains a conception far more radical than nostalgia for industrial Britain’s vanished institutions. It expresses the elementary internationalist truth that workers share fundamental interests arising from their common relationship to capital. Today that proposition possesses an objective material foundation on an unprecedented scale.
The worker in a British warehouse is integrated into the same international production and distribution processes as workers throughout Europe, Asia and North America. The nurse confronting deteriorating public services, the teacher facing declining real incomes, the delivery worker controlled through an application and the engineer employed by a multinational corporation occupy different workplaces but confront the same fundamental relationship between labour and capital.
Capitalism has globalised production while preserving private ownership and the nation-state system. It has created the material foundations for international working-class unity while continuously mobilising nationalism to prevent that unity from assuming conscious political form. That contradiction, rather than the disappearance of the proletariat, defines the present historical period. Gibbs has accumulated valuable material concerning the experience and memory of deindustrialisation. His previous work demonstrates sustained engagement with the workers and communities most immediately affected by industrial restructuring. His research encompasses precisely the terrain upon which some of the central class conflicts of modern Britain have unfolded. But An Injury to All cannot ultimately be resolved through oral history, electoral sociology, or the politics of national reconstruction. “Who speaks for labour?” is the wrong question if it means searching among the remains of Labourism for another institutional representative. The working class must speak for itself.
Doing so requires a political movement independent of the Labour Party and the trade-union bureaucracy, hostile to every attempt to divide workers by nationality, and consciously based on the international character of modern capitalist production. The British working class was not “unmade”. A historically specific labour movement based upon national reformism has undergone a profound degeneration and collapse. The distinction is not semantic. It determines whether the defeats of the past half century are seen as evidence of the disappearance of working-class politics or as historical experiences from which a new socialist movement must draw lessons.
The mines closed. Shipyards disappeared. Council estates were sold. The institutions associated with Labourism decayed. But labour did not disappear. Capital could not survive for a single day without it. The historical question is therefore not how to reconstruct the Britain of the postwar settlement. It is how the enormously expanded and internationally interconnected working class can transform itself from an objective social force into a conscious political force. In that sense the old slogan remains entirely contemporary: an injury to one is an injury to all. But taking those words seriously means following them beyond Labourism and nationalism to their necessary political conclusion: the international unity of the working class in the struggle for socialism.
Bibliography
Gibbs, Ewan. An Injury to All: The Unmaking of the British Working Class. London: Verso, 2026. [versobooks.com]
Gibbs, Ewan. Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialisation in Postwar Scotland. London: University of London Press, 2021. [gla.ac.uk]
Gibbs, Ewan. “The Unmaking of the British Working Class: A Highly Provisional Thesis.” New Socialist, 19 December 2019. [newsocialist.org.uk]
Hobsbawm, Eric. “The Forward March of Labour Halted?” Marxism Today, September 1978.
Hall, Stuart. “Gramsci and Us.” Marxism Today, June 1987. Gibbs uses Hall’s “You lose because you lose because you lose” as the epigraph to his 2019 essay. [newsocialist.org.uk]
Nairn, Tom. The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism. London: New Left Books, 1977.
Shibe, Riyoko and Ewan Gibbs. “The Grangemouth oil refinery closure: lessons for ‘just transition’ governance.” Journal of the British Academy, 13 (1), 2025. [gla.ac.uk]
Marsden, Chris and Julie Hyland. “Britain: 20 years since the year-long miners’ strike.” World Socialist Web Site, 5 March 2004. This is particularly relevant to your argument because it links the miners’ defeat to the roles of Labour and the TUC and connects the exhaustion of national reformism to the globalisation of production. [wsws.org], [wsws.org]
Marsden, Chris and Julie Hyland. “Forty years since the British miners’ strike.” World Socialist Web Site, 5 March 2024. The article places the 1984-85 struggle within the international shift toward deregulation, global investment, and internationalised production, and argues that the reformist and Stalinist organisations’ betrayals were decisive in this period’s defeats. [wsws.org]
