CLASS IN IRELAND: AN IMMODEST PROPOSAL
Sep 18th, 2007 by Conor McCabe
… the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells, above this frame of things
(Which, ‘mid all revolution in the hopes
And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged)
In beauty exalted, as it is itself
Of quality and fabric more divine. (Wordsworth. Prelude, 1805)
People are the greatest thing.
A point all too easily forgotten, I hasten to add. In the midst of markets and economic statistics, it is important to remember that people are at the heart of all wealth creation. Without people, nothing gets done. Those who work, make; those who administer, sell; those who own, benefit.
In Ireland, this point is not so much forgotten as altogether dismissed. Ireland, it seems, has an underclass/working class, a huge middle class, and, a small upper class of wealthy entrepreneurs. It begs the question: just who are the Irish middle class? In current Irish cultural expression, it is quite simple. The middle class, in the words of Bill Clinton, are those who “work hard and play by the rules.” An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. They work for a living. So. That leaves us with a working class that’s seen not in terms of above - a photo of a Dublin working class family on holiday - but in terms of below - a Dublin working class family on Mogadon.
The mistranslation of Irish working class experience into:
1) positive=middle class;
2) negative=working class/underclass;
has had a substantial effect on the way this society is managed, for it has given the impression that the needs and resources of the working class resonate with those of the middle classes and, indeed, the entrepreneurs. Nothing could be further from the truth, but before we tackle that, it’s important to arrive at a working definition of class and class structure in Ireland.
And here it is.
The dominant view of class in Ireland argues that one’s position in the social hierarchy is defined by personal income. The past ten years has seen an explosion in wage levels, and as a result, an expansion of the middle class. We have more money to buy more stuff. We go on more foreign holidays. Life is better. The good times, even with the caveats, are now.
But, what the last ten years has not seen is a significant change in the power structures within Irish society. At its heart, class is about power, not income, although there is a relationship between power and income. Unless there has been a significant change in the power structures within Irish society - the control of government policy and direction, cultural production, education and societal development - then what we have experienced is nothing more than a pay rise. We have more money, but we do not have more say.
The American economist, Professor Michael Zweig, has written extensively, and with much clarity, on the issue of class and power. Zweig challenges the view that ‘consumer sovereignty’ - the idea that “consumers rule the economy by expressing their desires for goods and services, which producers scramble to satisfy” - is somehow the great leveler in society; that consumption equals societal power.
The idea that we as consumers can exercise control over government in ways that we cannot do as workers or voters rests again on the idea of consumer sovereignty. But the fact is that consumers are not powerful in their relations with business in the market. corporations decide what to produce and limit the choices we find in the market. Advertisers manipulate us in ever more sophisticated ways, as advertising uses up ever greater shares of business budgets and creative talent. Even brand names, which give the appearance of promoting competition, actually work to limit competition. (The Working Class Majority, p.50)
Zweig is writing about the American experience, but the argument’s relevance to Ireland becomes much clearer when applied to that most Irish of ventures, the property market.
Despite having experienced a glut of housing, Ireland has seen the interests of the vast majority of the country decimated by powerful vested interests - landowners, banks, speculators, estate agents, and builders. Where prices should have fallen ,they have risen. Where government should have cried “halt!”, tax-breaks were given. Consumer power is way down on the list of those who have a say in the running of the property market. Not surprisingly, given their lack of influence, the consumer is the one left holding the bill. More wages, less power.
Zweig’s ideas on class and power, again, have much relevance to the Irish situation.
I define classes in large part based on the power and authority people have at work. the workplace engages people in more than their immediate work, by which they create goods and services. It also engages them in relationships with each other, relationships that are controlled by power. a relative handful of people have great power to organize and direct production, while a much larger number have almost no authority.
… The great majority of Americans form the working class. They are skilled and unskilled, in manufacturing and in services, men and women of all races, nationalities, religions. They drive trucks, write routine computer code, operate machinery, wait tables, sort and deliver the mail, work on assembly lines, stand all day as bank tellers, perform thousands of jobs in every sector of the economy. for all their differences, working class people share a common place in production, where they have relatively little control over the pace or content of their work, and aren’t anybody’s boss.” (Majority, p.3)
Working class and middle class, then, are defined more in terms of the amount of power and influence one has over one’s employment, rather then in terms of simple income alone.
We can understand the economic, political, and cultural role of each class if we see it in terms of its relationships to the others, in the textures of social power. This way - with power laid bare - the abstractions of class come to life.” (Majority, p.4)
The structures of a blog do not lend themselves to long and detailed articles. Its beauty is in its immediacy and simplicity. Next month will see the launch of a new online Irish left-wing journal, and it is there that I hope to expand on the ideas of class expressed by Zweig, and their possible translation to the Irish experience. For now, though, the focus is on what Zweig sees as the true middle class - that is, middle class in terms of cultural and political power, rather than in terms of SUVs and chilled white wine.
What is the middle class in the middle of? If we answer this question in terms of power instead of income, we see that the middle class is in between the two great social forces in modern society, the working class and the capitalist class. These two classes are connected at work, in the production of goods and services. but they have sharply opposing interests, in production and in politics. The middle class is caught in the middle of these conflicting roles and interests. In the context of the sharp conflicts that arise between labor and capital, the middle class is caught in the crossfire. (Majority, p.20)
For Zweig, the middle class is comprised of small business owners, supervisors, and professional people. “Small business owners” writes Zweig, “are caught in the middle. They share with working people a common vulnerability to market forces dominated by large corporations, but they share with those same big businesses an interest in keeping the power of working people to a minimum.” With regard to supervisors and managers, “this person is the company’s front line of management, there to make sure the work gets done, responsible for pushing the workforce to perform.” On the last section of the middle class, the professionals, Zweig has this to say:
A third section of the middle class is made up of… professional people such as doctors, lawyers, college professors and accountants. These people tend to have considerable authority and flexibility in their jobs, whether they are self-employed or work in a corporate department. They often put in long hours, and they do their work in accordance with rules that guide their actions. but on the whole they function within professional associations that exert considerable influence in setting the rules and standards to which the members of the profession are subject. In this way, the discipline professionals face is not the same at that experienced by workers. (Majority, p.23-4)
So. If you’re not a professional, if you are not part of management, and if you do not run a small business, in workplace terms you’re part of the working class. This is because power within one’s workplace is what matters. Finally, this power is reflected in the wider society, as the interests of those classes with the power to influence policy gain dominance over those who do not.
This power relationship has not changed in the past ten years, even as incomes have risen. This is mainly because ALL incomes have risen. The working class are not better off when compared to their contemporaries in the middle class, who’ve also benefited from the prosperity. They are only better off when compared to the ghosts of the past, the “shriveled dragons” as Joe Cleary calls them. Their position within the workplace and within society remains the same.
The reason why we have a need for unions and a working class political party is to address this power imbalance. The need for a political party to protect the interests of working people has not gone away, because the blatant rip-off within society has not gone away. In fact, it is barely challenged. The work to tackle that imbalance is both political and cultural. The idea that wage begets influence allows for discriminatory tax breaks and the privatization of public services. It needs to be challenged, and challenged now. The pictures may have faded, but the power relations remain the same.
Excellent article Conor. Really looking forward to the launch of the journal you’ve mentioned. The mainstrem (media and academia) seem to have no interest or no energy when it comes to class in Ireland.
It seems a decision to rely on lazy cliches was taken some years back and is being kept to fanatically.
It seems that amongst ordinary working people the connection between their lack of any relationship with power and the fact that issues that really matter to them are never dealt with or addressed in earnest by government needs to be pointed out.
cheers, Donal. It is incredible that, in Ireland, to be working class is a label of shame, whereas, to be David McWilliams is to be taken seriously.
Man, that’s one fucked-up culture.
Oddly though, McWilliams, for all the patronising ‘breakfast roll man’ guff, does take the working class seriously and is quite astute about the real class structure in this country - at least he knows where the workers live and what they do, and knows the conventional models of irish society - left and right - are 30 years out of date. There’s everything wrong with his politics, but he has a clearer picture of what the country looks like than much of the left, still wedded to an imaginary old fashioned industrial working class. What Rabbite was fumbling towards with his ‘new middle- class’ stuff does need to be taken seriously; as you rightly point out the supposed expansion of the middle- class is equally a proletarianisation of the old middle class; the removal of their job security in the name of competitiveness, the removal of the exclusiveness of their access to credit and so on takes away the only worthwhile signifiers of their social distinction. Nevertheless, those born into the urban working class, but who now find themselves with kids in university, owning their own homes and driving new cars will never taking kindly to any political party that reminds them that they’re still proles despite it all.
I agree. That’s why any approach has to be not just in the political arena, but also in the cultural and educational arenas as well. you cannot expect a political party to fight a cultural battle. That’s why you need alliances, links with cultural commentators, a cross-societal movement, not just the labour party quoting Connolly.
talk of a left-alliance in Ireland usually centres around a political alliance. I feel there needs to be a cultural, economic, educational, political, and trade union alliance - to start building an alternative consensus la a Gramsci.
with regard to the working class parents of students in third level - will that mean more middle-class, or more people chasing the same pool of middle class jobs? If everyone goes to university, it just means that you’ll need a degree to become a filing clerk. what I’m saying is that the power relations within the workplace won’t change, although there’ll be a lot of pissed-off arts graduates doing work beneath their educational status- but sure, isn’t that the case at the moment anyway? (Having said that, education does remain the one sure way of changing expectations.)
If people are being screwed - which I think they are, - then that’s what needs to be hit home.
what we’re talking about when we think of people being reminded that they are proles is a cultural battle. in fairness it’s not up to the labour party alone to fight that one - it’s up to cultural commentators and educators and creators to counter the blanket coverage of the working class as poor, tracksuit-wearing, wasters.
It’s going to be a long, long battle. so be it.
[…] WorldbyStorm in Class, Ireland, Social Policy, Society. trackback Reading Conor’s excellent post today on Dublin Opinion about how class (following propositions by U.S. economist Michael Zweig) is […]
Brilliant and worrying post. And you’re dead right, it does come back down to a broader battle across various fronts. Gramsci, anyone?
If we continue to get such clear analysis as this we will be in danger of breaking out into rational political discussion. With Bank of Ireland’s Private Banking telling us that the top 1% own 34% of all financial wealth, we not only fall back on Gramasci, as WBS suggests, but even Connolly (though I know he is really out of fashion) when he talks about all workers, whether by hands or by brains. With the CSO Census volume on occupations and social class coming out tomorrow (September 20th), hopefully Conor you will continue your work in this area. We’ll all benefit.
All very interesting. But can you explain how the imbalance in power should be addressed? If it is all about power, is it true that everyone should have equal amounts? Take business for example, how would company function if the CEO only had the same level of power as a line worker? Who would make the decisions? How would they be made? Should a line worker with less experience and less ability be allowed equal power to make decisions as an experienced entrepreneur who created the business and the jobs in the first place?
Somehow, I think we have been here before.
The idea of power is not about having the right to make decisions in a business context. It is rather about affecting the values that underpin the society and ensuring that when it comes to distributing the wealth that they get their fair share. They can only do this if, firstly they realize that they do not form part of the professional middle class (no matter how much their house is going for on the open market) and secondly that, as a group, they have to start acting together to influence the thinking that underpin the economic values of the society as a whole.
Well-presented argument, Conor, but it seems to be just reworking the definitions. The people you ascribe to the working class category aren’t going to alter their thinking on that basis. Irish people are congenitally aspirational - wasn’t it the backbone of our politics for about 400 years? If class isn’t just about money, can it be said to be just about power either? Does the non-management office worker move from working class to middle class the minute he gets a promotion? Nobody expects to be in a position like that for ever, so how do you politicise such a diverse and transitional body of people? Does using a methodology of class even help when trying to represent their interests?
McWilliams might be an annoying ‘celebrity intellectual’ but he is smack on the money when he brings the generational aspect of the power structure into play. The people who benefitted from the boom were by and large people who had assets before the economy ignited - people in their late 20s and upwards who naturally had houses or small businesses set up by 1997 with no cognition of the economic transformation that was to take place - what McWilliams terms ‘accidental millionaires’, but also a large group of people who benefitted more modestly but still quite significantly as the value of their assets rocketed.
These are the people the government and for the most part of the mainstream media have been representing for the past 10 years, the people who’ve been telling us we’ve never had it so good. If/when the economy turns they will still be relatively unscathed; those who were trailing in their wake, the ones that have been trying to clamber up the ladder for the past few years and putting up with spiralling house prices and inflation will be left wondering what they had been chasing all along. The big shame will be that the social services that should have been put in place to lead us out of the boom have not.
I think it would be a huge omission to discuss class along the lines of where people were born or how much they earn without bringing age into it. It’s not just a case of class being some identifying mark that defines you from birth to death, but whether you should trust anybody over 40.
thanks Niall. you hit the nail on the head with the “people aren’t going to alter their thinking on the basis of that argument.” That’s why I’m calling for a Gramscian approach. This is only part of it.
As for the idea that the Irish people are “congenitally aspirational” and “wasn’t it the backbone of our politics for about 400 years?” the answer to that is, well, no.
Hi Litter, you’re getting syndicalism mixed up with social democracy. But, the answer to how power is addressed is actually quite simple - it’s called parliamentary democracy in politics, and trade unionism in the workplace. The idea of a strong union movement and a strong, representative, working class party, is to fight your corner. It’s not about taking over and setting up a socialist republic. It’s actually something a lot more simple. It’s called social democracy. and we do not have that in Ireland. Yet.
The problem, I think, with ideas around working class in Ireland, is that the usage and terms of debate have been set by the far-left and the right-wing conservative middle class. to talk of even social democracy is to be alligned with Joe higgins in this country. and joe higgins would call me a sell-out.
I’m talking about the establishment of a genuine social democracy in Ireland, on par with the Eurpoean model. mixed economy, liberal social agenda. Decent public services in education, health, transport, and pensions.
In order for that to happen, you need a parliamentary deomcracy run on class lines cos, guess what, that’s how capitalist economies work. class lines.
[…] Tuesday, and again on Thursday, this blog turned to the ideas of Michael Zweig, in an effort to throw some […]
Hi Conor,
Excellent debate.
I just wanted to agree with your argument that the only way to make the progress is by effective parliamentary democracy. i.e one which is representative, efficient, transparent, accountable, and where integrity is a core value. But I think building that democracy will require a cultural foundation which appears to be absent: i.e people think Bertie is lying or corrupt but still vote for him etc. Plus the vicious circle - in order for the system to be revectored to represent those who are empowered the latter have to vote and vote smartly. But they won’t vote, or simply vote along parish pump of clientelist lines, because the ’system’ as they see it, does’nt really work for them. But yes, I suppose we have to start somehwere.
should read ‘revectored in order to represent those who are disempowered.
Thanks, tomaltach. Much appreciated.