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 specific government economic policy designed 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 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 this out, 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 similar 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 analysing, 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.

But I’ll leave it there for the moment. More on this tomorrow.