Dublin Opinion

I’m sitting in a hotel room in PIttsburgh, shifting my laptop from side to side, trying to get a signal. It’s just gone 6am and I’ve been awake for three hours, my body still working from Dublin time. I arrived in New York on Tuesday and left at 3pm the next day on a 60-seater American Eagle flight with a complementary glass of coke and no hassles. I’m here for three days and I’m hoping to make it out to Monroeville Mall on a pilgrimage of sorts, but really the reason I’m in Pittsburgh is to give a paper at the biennial conference of the American Working Class Studies Association. The conference, entitled ‘Class Matters’, is being held over three days, with my paper due for presentation on Friday. I’ve gotten about eighty per cent of it written. I’ll spare you the details but eighty per cent’s not bad. I’ve seen people speak for thirty minutes without notes - not because they knew their subject so well, but because they hadn’t any notes. Me, I tend to use overheads as a structure, using each one to spark off around three to four minutes of spiel. My talk is on the Irish cattle industry, from 1922 to 1975, and how its dynamics reveal the deeper class structures within Irish political and economic life. It will not deal with class consciousness, nor the revolutionary potential of the working class, or the class dynamics which permeate Irish cultural and intellectual discourse. Nor is it a work of economic determinism. Rather, it recognises that in order to get at the other strands of class dynamic in Irish society, first we have to get at the basic economic structures which run the machine. An essay on the class dynamics of the Irish cattle industry will not explain why the TV drama Prosperity was shite, but it may go towards explaining why southern Ireland never built up a strong indigenous industrial class, and why Dublin constantly suffered from unemployment.

But here I am giving you the details, even though I promised I wouldn’t. My apologies.

And I’ve been a long time preparing this talk, although it is by no means finished. This is part of a wider project: an attempt to write a detailed study of class relations in Ireland since 1860. My presentation tomorrow is not the product of a conclusion, it is very much a work in progress. However, I feel that by coming here and presenting a paper I’m forcing myself to sharpen up some of its rough edges, to subject it to a bit of criticism, and, hopefully, to walk away with a better understanding of what I am trying to achieve. That may seem a bit, well, meta of me - to write a paper on class relations in order to work out how to write a paper on class relations - but that’s the way to get these things written. In order to write you have to write, and in order to present an analysis you have to present an analysis. I remember hearing once that Lee Mavers of The Las spent five years recording the band’s debut album, and even then he was not happy with the finished result. The songs did not sound the way they sounded to him in his head. On one level I admire the stubborness and dedication, while another part of me feels like Father Ted, screaming at Dougal to “Just play the f**king note.” I don’t have the stubborness and/or patience to write the great materialist history of Ireland, but I have got the stubborness and patience to actually produce one. Whether it will end up looking like Homer’s Car, or Harry Beck’s map I don’t know. Sometimes you’ve just have to play the fucking note.

Did I say no details? Oh dear. Sorry about that. When something is on your mind it’s hard to shake it off, no? And this subject, this topic, this method of analysis, it has really chewed up my days. It wasn’t supposed to work out that way. At the start, this was supposed to be an analysis of Edenmore housing estate, of how it came to be constructed, and of the lives people led there - the types of work and cultural expressions, the family and friendship links, the day-to-day of getting things done. It was to be a micro-study, but one placed firmly within the wider class relations in Ireland. I thought by looking at both in motion, in relation to each other, the micro and macro, it would be possible to achieve a detailed understanding of Irish class dynamics. The problems came when I went looking for macro-level analyses of class relations in Ireland. The ones available were inadequate, I thought, and although I have come across substantial pieces of work since then - most notably Chris Eipper’s seminal work, The Ruling Trinity, and the Ripening of Time journal - nonetheless I felt that there was a need for a detailed historical treatment of the issue. Irish intellectual discourse around class is centered on a Weberian view of the subject, that class relations are formed at the point of consumption, not at the point of production. This led me deeper into the economic works of Marx and, by extension, Marxism. It may seem a strange thing for a Labour historian to say, but I only began to study Marxist economics after I had finished my doctorate. I went looking for a conceptual apparatus to help me make sense of the things I had come across during my years of research. Marxist political economy, as well as the forms of class analysis which grew out of it, have helped me to glimpse a tantilising level of clarity regarding the complex social relations which make up our world.

And that’s the thing about Marxism. It is revolutionary - that is, it remains revolutionary - because it is a methodology, an analytical tool to help us gain insight into the way the machine works, ‘the heat, the thundering noise’ as E.P. Thompson calls it. There are conclusions, yes, but its relevance lies not in its conclusions as such - conclusions can easily become dogma to an unquestioning mind - but in the fact that it is methodical, and relational. It looks at how things relate with each other. So much of modern economics is caught up in modelling where the complex and relational are removed, with linear causality alone encrusted within its brittle assumptions.

I better go and work on the rest of my paper. As I said, there’s still a good twenty per cent of it left to write, and I’m working off Dublin time in Pittsburgh which means I’m starting to get tired again. All that is left, though, is the period from 1958 to 1975, when the Irish small farmer got well and truly f**ked over by both the graziers and the banks. The period from 1922 to 1945 saw agrarian capital setting the economic agenda. The post-war period saw a substantial rise in the presence of American finance capital, and this was seen by the local bourgeoisie in the civil service and banks as a way of industrializing Ireland without having to revert to tariffs and protectionism. In other words, the agrarian interests continued to be protected, while the job of constructing industries necessary to absorb the rural population displaced by agricultural capitalism was handed over to American corporations. It took until the 1950s for the Irish bourgeoisie to realise that you need to hang on to your population as emigration doesn’t solve your problems, it only shrinks your economy. (Of course we’ve forgotten that again, but that’s for another day.)

All this new money, of course, gave the banks more capital, and the way banks make money is through debt. As an aside, there’s an episode in the Sopranos when Tony gives a childhood friend of his a loan to gamble with, Tony knowing that the friend will fuck up and will be in debt, and debt is how moneylenders make money. The same principle, and essentially the same practice, was undertaken by banks in Ireland during the 1960s, when they worked hand in hand with the government to give out loans to small farmers to invest in calves and land. The pay-off, they argued, would be seen through greater exports of cattle to Europe and Britain (yes, they are not the same). But of course, in terms of banks and their profit, the debt IS the payoff. That’s the game.

I better go off and catch some other presentations. It’s not every day you get to hear three days of papers arising out of working class studies. I’m going to tape a few and I’ll put them up when I get home.

Hasta Luego.