Introduction

The foundation of this chapter is inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who spent his life exposing the unfairness and the damage that is done to society through a structured and structuring classified system. In The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, an in-depth collection of case studies, Bourdieu (1999) pulls together the lived experience of working-class people from around the globe at the end of the last century. They also connect the logic and practice of people, groups and institutions purposefully depriving the working class of the subjective social, cultural, symbolic and economic capital that is passed on and inherited, thus reproducing an unjust and highly structured society. For that reason, throughout this chapter the term ‘breaking’ is describing a purposeful process, or as Bourdieu would argue ‘a logic of practice’, a structured and structuring system unfairly advantaging some simultaneously and unfairly disadvantaging others.

As the neoliberal economy has matured and globalized there is undoubtedly a growing and distinct group of people (or agents in the context of this book) throughout Europe (and globally) that are faring badly. The first two decades of this century have been dominated by the term and the experience of wealth inequality – in Britain wealth inequality is ever widening the gap between people at the top and those at the bottom of society. It has expanded and for the working class, life has become far more precarious (Savage, 2015). This globalized neoliberal economic system has been disastrous for European working-class people but unlike previous generations they have little in the way of self or state organized stability, from trade unions, political parties or from culture, networks and identities once connected to their employment.

Social goods have always been important to agents of the working class. However, over the last 30 years there has been a marked retreat from the postwar consensus and a definite policy of ‘rolling back’ public-owned and public-run social services. These policies have been purposeful, and have been guided through a de-valuing process of Britain's working class.