Class and Ireland: Part 2
I’m standing at the corner of Cathal Brugha Street and Thomas Lane, waiting for my friend Lida to arrive. She’s starting up her own business soon, and wants me to write a blurb for the website. The buses are running a bit late but she gets here around 6.30pm and so we head off for something to eat. We go to a fairly busy Chinese restaurant on Cathedral Street where Lida outlines her plans and passes on to me the list of things she wants on the web page. She’s working full-time in a language course placement business, is finishing up a two-year part-time masters in media studies, and has just bought a house in Whitehall with her husband. I am in awe of her energy, focus, and direction.
After about an hour and a half we finish up in the restaurant and walk to the corner of O’Connell Street. We’re outside the Burger King that’s more or less across from one of the Julian Opie walkers. Lida’s going left, heading out towards Ballsbridge to meet some other friends, while I am turning right towards home. For once it’s not raining, so I decide to skip the bus stops and soak up the last of the evening light. I walk up North Frederick Street and past Maye’s Pub, and continue on towards the Mater and then Phibsboro. And not because of Lida, nor because of the evening, my mind returns to class. There’s a great joy in being alone with your thoughts on the streets of a crowded city. It allows you to chew over the issues, to reflect amid the rhythms of the ordinary, to find a conclusion or two that might otherwise slip away. And so my mind focuses on the subject that I have wrapped myself around: how to build a conceptual framework of class in the Republic, from the foundation of the Free State until the present day, that won’t fall apart two days later.
I’ve been looking at the issue of class and Ireland for about a year and a half now, on and off. It came about when I finished up my doctorate on organized labour and started focusing in on more social aspects of Irish history. The issues of housing, welfare, education, health, even sport, in all of them I was finding differences between what I was reading about with regard to the position of class in mainstream Irish historical analysis, and what I knew, first from the doctorate, then from the additional research I had undertaken. It was then I started to try to find a definition of class that corresponded to what I was coming across in the archives. In between all of this I left for Spain, (as you do), and while I was there my reading was based around two books: Michael Zweig’s Working Class Majority, and Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital. Since I got back to Dublin in April, however, I’ve been on a bit of a blitzkrieg. Thanks to David Harvey’s online lectures, I was able to finish volume one of Marx’s Capital. The beauty of the course is that it not only opens up one of the most important books of the 19th century, it opens up all the secondary reading as well. In other words, a firm understanding of Marxism, and the complexities and contradictions of Marxism, is not really possible without reading the original work itself. Capital is not just a critique of Capitalism; it also contains a methodology. Marx set out to observe Capitalism in motion. The conceptual framework he developed in order to observe Capitalism in this way remains a powerful analytical tool within the social sciences. It is a dialectical approach, one where the emphasis is on the interaction between forces, rather than one based on what coldly ’caused this’ to happen.
I have to remind myself that the use of classes in analysis did not begin with Marx, nor is the Marxist concept of class the only one in use. It seems strange to say this, but the greatest insight I gained from David Harvey’s course was that, for Marx, classes arise out of the social relationships that develop out of the Capitialist mode of production. Class is not a category, it is a relationship, a social relationship. And while we have social relationships forming in the marketplace, between consumers and sellers, it is the social relationships that form at the point of production that underline Marxist theory. The skeletal framework of Marxist class analysis is the analysis of the relationships that form when things are produced, rather than when they are consumed. Of course, there’s so much more going on in Capital, and indeed in Harvey’s lectures. But, for what I’m about these days, in my search for a conceptual framework that won’t fall apart two days later, that realization - that Marxist class definitions arise from social relationships entered into at the point of production, rather than from relationships entered into at the point of consumption - has proved to be vital to my subsequent reading on class analysis.
Of course, neither is mutally exclusive. Even the National Readership Survey places occupation at the heart of its categories, as does the CSO in its analysis of census returns. And social class surveys can tell us things about society that purely occupational class surveys cannot - and vice versa. This brings me to the second insight I’ve picked up - namely, that there are a lot of false arguments in the social sciences regarding class and class analysis, and many of these come from the assumption that there is only one, proper, type of class analysis, or that there exists a unified theory of class which will explain everything. (There is not).
Class systems underline modern capitalist societies, but they are not petrified. We have a class system, not a caste one. To go back to an earlier point, class is not a category, it is a relationship, one that can only be understood in motion. Because of this, a class analysis needs to wear its clothes somewhat loose around the belt. Now, class remains important to any understanding of modern capitalist economics and societies, but we need to avoid the trap of a determinist frame of thinking. We need to always see class not in terms of causality, but in terms of relations. It is not “this leads to this, which leads to this, which leads to this”, but rather “when these two unequal forces interact, this is what emerges”.
Which brings me to Rosemary Crompton and her primer, Class and Stratification.
Crompton’s book has been the best general introduction to contemporary issues of class analysis that I have come across so far. As with much of what I’ve read since April, there’s a lot more going on than I can cover here. But the insight I take from Crompton is that there are two broad camps in sociology with regard to class analysis, both alike in dignity, and both with merits and faults.
A common feature of pseudo-debates in class analysis is that they often stem from a major, if unacknowledged, dichotomy within the field - between, in the one hand, approaches which take ‘classes’ to be occupational or employment aggregates and, on the other, the socio-historical investigation of the process of class structuring and their consequences. Thus, in a fairly straightforward fashion, a wide range of theoretical debates within class analysis have been treated as capable of being resolved by the correlation of attitudinal and other variables against occupational - or employment- class aggregates. This would be a viable strategy if such aggregates did actually represent ‘classes’ in a theoretical sense, or if there were general agreement as to the empirical definition of the class concept - but neither of these conditions applies. The sociological convention of treating occupational or employment aggregates as ‘classes’ has had, and continues to have, many fruitful applications, but it has also been a major source of confusion.” (Class and Stratification, pp. 113-4)
There’s a lot going on even in this quote, but what I find interesting is the idea of two camps - one that sees classes as defined by occupational groupings (as with the CSO, and the sociological writings on Irish social classes by Richard Breen and Christopher T Whelan), and those who see class analysis as “the socio-historical investigation of the process of class structuring and their consequences”. Each a very broad church, but nonetheless, in contemporary sociology this be the dichotomy with regard to class analysis. And given the nature of my research, the camp that sees class analysis in terms of a “socio-historical investigation of the process of class structuring” is the cloth that seems most suited to my particular cut. Occupational aggregates from the 1926 to 2006 censuses, correlated and charted, will not a class analysis give. In order to see the dynamics of class within Irish society over an eighty-year period, you’d need to utilize the types of conceptual frameworks that have developed out of the view of class analysis as a socio-historical investigation of the process of class structuring.
Luckily, for me, there have been studies done which have used such a conceptual framework - the most notable of which I have found so far is Dr. Chris Eipper’s 1986 work, The Ruling Trinity: Community Study of Church, State and Business in Ireland. A quick quote from the introduction:
Class is not this or that interest, but the friction of interests’ which characterizes the structure of society and its institutions. Conceived in this way, class is not a static strategy. Rather, as a delineation of modes of social relationship, it possesses ‘a fluency which evades analysis’ if not approached from an historical perspective.” (p.11)
Eipper is himself quoting E.P. Thompson, the English Marxist historian whose book, The Making of the English Working Class is an essential work of social history and, indeed, historiography.
I’ll come back to Eipper again as his book - a class analysis of Bantry town and the oil refinery industry - is a fascinating mixture of theory and analysis. (On a similiar subject, in the 1970s the research section of Sinn Fein, the Workers’ Party produced The Great Oil & Gas Robbery: A Case Study of Monopoly Capital, written, I believe, by Eamonn Smullen. I’m working my way through it at the moment, and again, fascinating stuff.)
Ok, it’s gotten late, and I think my brain is full.
More on this tomorrow.
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