CLASS AND IRELAND, (p.1)
Sep 4th, 2008 by Conor McCabe
It is not the poverty
Of soil in Leitrim that makes me raise my hat
To fools with fifty pounds in a paper bank” (Lough Derg, Kavanagh)
A friend of mine is fond of saying, “he who tires of Bray, tires of life”. And there’s more than a line of truth in that one. As for myself, today I’m wandering among the charity shops of Phibsboro, brushing shoulders with the bargains, sheltering from the rain showers that have pockmarked the days since I got back to Dublin. Not that there’s much to pick up - so far only a Paul Robeson LP and a Spanish Lingaphone course on vinyl have caught my less than browsing eye. It’s hardly the fault of the shops, though. My mind is somewhere else, and has been for the last couple of months, ever since I put together a research proposal on a housing estate on Dublin’s Northside and realized that, in order to crack that nut, I would have to construct a working model of Class in Ireland - if not quite for the island itself, certainly in terms of the Free State and its jurisdiction. A micro-study can work only when there’s a macro-level framework in place to contextualize it - you need to see both at play in order to make sense of each.
This cannot be done with the type of causal-based methodologies which form the backbone of Irish historiography. In order to see the dynamics, you need to bring a dialectical conceptual framework to the table. Questions of the power dynamics within the Irish economy, the capitalist nature of that economy, and the type of work and societal relationships that develop out of that economy, cannot be approached from causality alone. So much of Irish historical writing is saturated with this snooker game approach - where one event sparks off another, which sparks off another, and so on and so on. And while this approach has its strong points, in terms of trying to pin down the power relations within a capitalist economy such as that of the South, it leaves a lot to be desired. The eye remains on the snooker balls, so to speak, while the rules, (the actual power dynamics), remain somewhat obscured. We see the effects, the dramas, the tragedies, but as far as the power structures go, well, we know something is up but it remains blurred and every so slightly off the stage.
I want to look at the life of a housing estate in Dublin, from its inception in 1945 up to 1995, and the lives of the people who lived there during that period. The estate was part of a distinct government policy to house the working class. The employment in the area came out of distinct government economic policy to attract foreign investment, while education and community development were influenced enormously, again, by government policy. Yet, a look at the dealings of the Dáil and the personalities of the political players will only go so far in explaining the power dynamics behind the political, economic, social and cultural life of the State. To understand these type of dynamics, a dialectical methodology is required. Causality can only go so far. And the principal dynamic within a capitalist economy (although by no means the only dynamic) is the interaction between classes of unequal power and influence. To tease out these dynamics, a class-based analysis is required.
Which brings me back to my current dilemma. How do you build a class-based analysis of the Irish state, preferably one which won’t fall apart two days later?
Class analysis is not new to Irish society. The census, for example, has its seven social classes constructed around occupation. These are:
1. Professional workers
2. Managerial and technical
3. Non-manual
4. Skilled manual
5. Semi-skilled
6. Unskilled
7. All others gainfully occupied and unknown
Furthermore, the census states that
The occupations included in each of these groups have been selected in such a way as to bring together, as far as possible, people with similiar levels of occupational skill. In determining social class no account is taken of the differences between individuals on the basis of other characteristics such as education. Accordingly social class ranks occupation by the level of skill required on a social scale ranging from 1 (highest) to 7 (lowest).” (Census 2006, Volume 8, Occupations. appendix, p.3)
The census gives no definition of “skill”, but a look at its breakdown of occupation reveals a somewhat Victorian view of “skill” and social class. A plumber, for example, is lower on the social scale (4. skilled manual) than a clerical worker (3. non-manual), even though in terms of “skill” it can take four years to qualify as a plumber, whereas there is no special training involved for clerical work, outside of basic typing and calculation. With regard to the Census, the difference in work is not skill-based or educational. Rather, it is about work environment - the clerical worker is higher up on the social scale because the clerical worker is based in an office. In a social scale version of “rock, sissors, paper”, the clerk is paper to the plumber’s rock. On top of that, the census social classes are somewhat “eclectic” in terms of the occupations grouped under each particular heading. Again, they serve a purpose, but in terms of shining a light on the type of class dimensions inherent in a capitalist economy, it’s simply not there.
More commonly, we have the ABC1 C2DE breakdown of consumption patterns on social class lines, again with occupation serving as the main divider. Here we have the divisions as follows:
A - Upper middle class. Higher managerial, administrative or professional
B - Middle Class. Intermediate managerial, administrative or professional
C1 - Lower middle class. Supervisory or clerical, junior managerial, administrative or professional
C2 - Skilled working class. Skilled manual workers
D - Working class. Semi and unskilled manual workers
E - Those at lowest level of subsistence. State pensioners or widows (no other earner), casual or lowest grade workers.
The ABC1 C2DE comes from the National Readership Survey (NRS). It was developed over fifty years ago for the purpose of analysising, well, readership patterns among the working population. Since then it has become widely popular among the media as a means of highlighting social classes. However, its focus remains one of consumption patterns, of trends exhibited within the market place on the part of the consumer - that, even though the ABC1 C2DEs are classified according to occupation, it is one’s relationship with goods and services at the point of consumption, rather than one’s relationship to those goods and services at the point of production, that provides the focus for each particular social class. The dynamic expressed is one of the market place, rather than of the workplace - even though it takes one’s place in the point of production as the criteria for an explanation of consumption patterns.
Furthermore, as with the census social classes, there is an assumption that one’s occupation can be used to define one’s role within society - that occupation leads to general trends in consumption.
This idea of social class as something that is born out of the workplace, but really only manifests itself in the marketplace, is one with a strong pedigree within sociology, particularly with the ideas of Max Weber.
It’s getting late now (it’s 2.24am), so I think I’m going to go to bed and come back to this later on tonight.
Talk to you then.
In the wake of the last election the Left, in particular Labour, was treated to ‘hepful’ advice from columnists in the mainstream newspapers - all suggesting that it was existing in a time-warp; that it had not caught up with the fact that the vast majority of us are now part of the ‘new’ middle class, or the ‘aspiring’ middle class; that the Left had to become the party of the wealth generators. That we probably won’t hear much of that in the near future given the economic decline doesn’t take away from the vapidness of such phrasing. And because the Left is not grounded in a clear understanding of how work, life-style, consumption, credit and aspiration all exist within a broad economic framework that means, for most people (the vast, vast majority), livelihoods are almost wholly dependent on work, the job, employment - with supervisors and executives and owners and shareholders all hovering above us; that most people have nothing left to fall back in the event that they lose their job. Because we haven’t got that straight in our heads, we lack the clarity in all the diversity of a complex, modern economy, we are trapped in outdated models or in ones supplied to us by the Right. We end up saying, as one Left politician said shorter after the last general election ‘We must become the party of the millionaires and the marginalised’; in other words we end up saying nothing at all.
Therefore, Conor, many of us can only wish you well and urge you to hurry in your work. For we certainly need some help on this most basic of issues.
Cheers Michael. The conceptual framework of class that I’m using is the same one that’s in your comment - i.e. a dialectical reading of a capitalist economy reveals the class antagonisms inherent in such a structured economy. That structure, far from being the workings of a “hidden hand” is one maintained and enforced through the full participation of the state - its legislation, judiciary, and police - as well as by the allocation of resources by the state to such a venture. Out of that structure - i.e. a complex economy underwritten by the capitalist mode of production - grows a certain type of society, and culture. The economic dimension does not by any means explain everything - that’s simply impossible given the complexity of human thought and activity - but in order to get a handle on the type of culture and society, value system, etc, that does exist, we need to have a clear understanding of the way capitalist economies utilize the full resources of the state in order to maintain the inequalities and waste that such a mode of production demands in order to replicate, and expand. There is not a complete causal relationship - capitalist cultures differ - but when we look at the power relations within those cultures we begin to see a commonality. That’s because the type of inequalities that a capitalist economy requires in order to exist provide that commonality.
In Ireland, Nationalism is used by historians to explain the state, and the development of the state - that the antagonisms which have shaped the state are based on a continued, albeit truncated, form of a nationalist civil war that took place eighty years ago. There is no mention of the Irish capitalist economy (never called “capitalist”, always called “small, open”) at all, nor of the class dimensions inherent in such an economy - in effect, what Irish historiography has done is come to a conclusion that, although class antagonisms lie at the heart of the capitalist mode of production, in Ireland we can ignore these antagonisms - indeed, such antagonisms are, at best, peripheral - because Dev and Collins disagreed in the Mansion House on Dawson Street in 1922 over a treaty. Not only that, the disagreement and subsequent civil war gives Irish historians a certain swagger, a “get out of dialectics” card. We don’t have to look at the Irish capitalist economy, its history and society, because, well, Collins and Dev, man.
And because of that, it’s quite hard to find a dialectical reading of the Irish economy with the type of historical sweep needed to contextualize the analysis of a small housing estate over a fifty year period. I’m going to have to to it myself - not to a huge degree, but with enough of a skeletal framework to allow me to continue with my research. That means a reading of the southern Irish economy from 1922 to the present that takes on board the significant social, economic, and cultural forces that have developed out of the type of capitalist mode of production utilized by the state during that period. Nationalism plays a huge role in the shaping of culture and society, but it is one factor, albeit a strong one, within a dynamic where class antagonisms are not a result of the mode of the production, they are hotwired into the very mainframe of that particular mode of production.
The Irish Labour politician who said that Labour has to be the party of the millionaires and paupers showed a fundamental ignorance of the way things get made, of the way things happen. In a small way it´s not his fault (even though a member of a left-wing party should, you’d hope, know better), as in Ireland we’ve gotten the social forces that shape society confused with the productive forces that drive that society. We have to stop thinking of social forces with a causality frame of mind, and start to see them in a dialectal way, to start to observe these forces “in motion” as opposed to as mounted butterflies on a causality blackboard.
Something like that, anyway.
With regard to Class and Class analysis, the difference between analysising social forces and productive forces is one at the heart of the difference between Weberian and Marxian readings of Class. Both have merits, depending on the scale and scope of the research project. for me, though, with regard to an historical reading, the Marxian model is the one as it looks at class antagonisms at the level of the mode of production, as opposed to “social class” categories that develop out of consumption at the marketplace. There is a relationship between both, but the Marxian model helps to explain how the society ticks with an historical breadth, while the Weberian model is more focused on what develops after people clock out and, well, go shopping.
Sociology of Ireland by Hilary Tovey, Perry Share includes a useful chapter reviewing work on Inequality, Poverty and Class that provides a solid bibliography of various work by sociologists on the subject. Kieran Allen’s work is worth looking into, as are some older empirical studies like the Limerick Rural Survey. I’ve always considered JJ Lee a perceptive reader of the class dynamic in Ireland, esp notable for his take on the dead weight of ‘the possessor class’, though I suspect you’d be less enamored of his take on how that class should *(should have?) been sidelined in Ireland 1912/1985. Is there not a danger in seeking out a framework for your analysis ahead of doing the work that you could be putting the cart before the horse?
cheers for that Londoner, I hadn’t heard of the Limerick Rural Survey. I must check it out tomorrow in the library. With regard to the danger of putting the cart before the horse, it’s a fair comment. and it happens a lot, especially when it comes to Class and Ireland. For myself, all I can say is that this is a postdoctoral research project that I’m undertaking, and that the search for a conceptual framework has come out of my interaction with the facts over what is now nearly seven years of archival work (two years of an M.Litt, three years of a PhD, and two years free-lancing). My doctorate ended up taking something of a traditional causality approach, albeit one that uncovered a level and sophistication of class consciousness among the Irish members of the NUR during the period 1889-1924 that up to then had been somewhat ignored (with the notable exception of the work of Peter Rigney of the IRRS, and Emmet O’Connor’s flagging of the union in his history of Syndicalism in Ireland). It was the experience of writing the doctorate that led me to seek out a working model of class in Ireland. For the period under discussion (my doctorate) I was able to draw on the work of historians such as Emmet O’Connor, Henry Patterson, Tom Crean, and Fergus Campbell, among others. With regard to social history from 1945-1995, well, we’re looking at a different situation. And even with that, with the exception of Fergus Campbell’s work - which is quite social in context - the other works draw heavily on trade union and traditional labour history. In a recent article on the layout of labour/working class history in Ireland, Emmet O’Connor wrote that we are still waiting for such a history - and this form the man who wrote, “A Labour History of Ireland”. So, within that context, my desire to construct a conceptual framework is one that has arisen out of my experience of dealing with evidence that I have come across over the years, and the dynamics that I see in that archival material, rather than finding a conceptual framework and setting off, laptop in hand, to construct a thesis.
With regard to rural material, easily my weak spot at the moment, I’m quite intrigued by the Limerick Rural Survey. what was it?
The Limerick rural survey was a fairly long running piece of empirical research surveying attitudesand personal histories in rural Limeick in the late 50s early 60s, including lots of personal anecdotes looking backward from that point, it includes details on homes and public spaces (pubs & churches, creameries etc) and can provide lots of telling detail. It was commisioned by Munitir na Tire as far as i know and the ultimate editor of the final report was one J Newman, later a forlorn and pretty tragic bishop of Limerick, so it is what it is, but its a significant piece of research.
Cheers Londoner. I’m only getting to head off to the library now - it’s absolutely pissing down here in Dublin - but it certainly sounds like the type of stuff I’m after.