Was at the fiscal crisis meeting in Summerhill in Dublin city centre last night and I made the point that we shouldn’t concede economics to the Right, that economics is way too important for the Left to walk away from, and we should start answering our own questions about economics, should as: what would a democratic banking system actually look like? Afterwards a woman came up to me and said that I was right because we must stop governments from ’simply printing money’ and I said to her “well, of course governments print money, how do you think money is created?” I said that the problem is not so much ‘printing money’ but what that money (or credit) is used for - and in the past 20 years it was used mainly for asset price speculation. She and her partner just kind of nodded and walked away as their ‘BUT THEY ARE JUST PRINTING MONEY!’ scare tactic wasn’t working on me. I found out later that she is in Libertas. That really tickled me. Really made my day.
There were a couple more right-wingers in the audience and they were doing what right-wingers always do in Ireland - keeping an eye on the working class and doing their best to funnel them into taking the route of hiring lawyers as advocates, to use lawyers to make the arguments for them. Fucking vampire squids.
You are no doubt reffering to Caroline Simons ( a lawyer) rather than myself
Haha! Oh jesus yes Ghandi. Present company DEFINITELY excluded!
It’s the middle classes elbowing their way in and saying “oh we’ll take care of this” that I don’t trust at all. Irish history’s full of it, as you know.
Interesting article in the latest Socialist Voice about the class distribution within the Dail, very heavily dominated by people from a middle-class professional background.
Not that I’m 100% happy with that categorisation either. I mean, I’m an IT “professional” myself, and I guess I could self-categorise as either middle-class or working-class. Ghandi is a lawyer, he could choose to be middle-class if he wanted to, move out to a leafy ‘burb, get himself a Merc’ and join the local golf club. Like there’s an element of subjective self-categorisation at play in terms of coupling class with employment, a charade that a lot of “professional middle-class” people maintain to keep up appearances. Two people from the same background, same education, same profession, one could join FG and spend their free time playing golf, another could join the WP and spend their free time reading Left-wing blogs. I’m certainly not trying to defend those who choose to look up the social ladder for their meaning in life, but it does get a bit messy in that grey area.
I don’t see it as messy myself. I’ve a real problem with using social class as a definer of economic class relations (and vice versa) anyway, as class is not a category, it’s a social relation.
Take the States for example. In the States secondary school teaching is a working class occupation - working class wages and working class terms and conditions. In Ireland it still has middle class terms and conditions and status, but not for much longer if things carry on as they are going. It’s not that long ago that secondary school teaching in Ireland was effectively a job with working class wages but middle class status - a bit like university tutoring today, which in terms of work conditions and pay is not much better than McDonalds.
The person I was talking about, Ghandi identified for me. I didnt know her from Adam, which made finding out she was libertas all the more fun.
This is what I mean about middle class coming to save the working class!
http://www.carolinesimons.ie/Home.html
Just in terms of wages and conditions, I think there are a lot of people in Ireland today who thought they were middle class until September 2008 - I think they now know who the middle class in Ireland really are, and it’s not a household on 40,000 a year - not in terms of economic class relations anyway. Those that have their broker on speed-dial, this is what we’re talking about in terms of actual genuine social, political and economic power.
Bloody hell. C. Simmons is on the warpath. I love the way you describe it, as soon as she cottoned on that you weren’t saying what she wanted you to say she just stopped listening.
Re September 2008. That’s very very true. I also don’t think it’s coincidental that we’ve seen an enormous push by the organs of the middle class, whose names I won’t bother mentioning, subsequent to that to try to convince people even harder that they are middle class when - as you say - in economic class relations they’re just nowhere near it.
Also +1 re teachers. That’s been a bit of a yo yo ride for them. And perhaps a wake up call for more than a few of them.
I agree with you, it shouldn’t be at all messy. But the Socialist Voice article doesn’t segregate on the basis of economic class relations:
“The professional class represents those with an ownership, managerial or professional status. The working class represents those who work and sell their labour, up to and including the skilled-labour category. The farming class represents those engaged in farming, fishing, forestry, or agriculture.
These classes are not meant to rigidly box in certain occupational groups to a certain class but are used merely to differentiate the type of relationship between the owner-worker (class) cleavage and the type of trends that these present.”
Your point about the false consciousness of many people who previously considered themselves “middle class” is spot on. They’re the ones I was referring to in the grey area.
‘Interesting article in the latest Socialist Voice about the class distribution within the Dail, very heavily dominated by people from a middle-class professional background.’
I haven’t seen the article yet but as far as I remember, (and I should bloody remember because I teach it!) there was nobody in the first Dáil from a manual working class background. About 65% of the first batch of Sinn Féin TDs were ‘professionals’ of some sort or another.
@WBS, yeah I think she thought I’d go “oh yes, printing money, sure we all know that’s mad” but I didn’t and instead gave both her and her partner a two-minute crash course in securitisation and asset price bubbles. All done quite innocently as I didn’t have a clue as to who she was so I was genuinely trying to explain that the direction of credit is as important as its wholesale production. Short enough conversation but fun when Ghandi pointed out to me on the night that she is with Libertas. you have to take your little joys when they come your way as lord knows they’re short on the ground these days.
That’s an interesting point there Brian as certainly in the 1910s and 1920s there was less of a grey area between occupation and class relations as today. There was even legislation which defined what was working class - it formed part of the housing of the working class acts.
Are poor professionals considered working class, unemployed university graduates from traditionally working class areas. What is working class?
I am from Tallaght, consider myself working class, but I’m quite well off now
Aisling, why do you think class is a category? It’s a social relation and I don’t know how a social relation can be explained in terms of atomised experience. Can you explain that to me, how it is possible to define a social relation in terms of one-sided atomised experience?