Thinking Allowed on Class
The proper meaning of class, as it is used in an analysis of political economy and sociology internationally, is not much discussed in Ireland either in academia or more broadly, despite the overriding fact that so much of how the economic crisis has played out and how the government here has chosen to deal with it, cleave along class lines. The ERSI claim that the changes in the two most recent budgets have taken the most from the middle classes, yet the cuts to public services and the effects of the levies and cuts in public service pay on low and middle incomes and the reduction in social welfare reduces the standard of living of those on lower incomes more significantly.
The highly suspect argument that reducing wages across the board boosts employment is used to attack wages levels, while avoiding any discussion of less deflationary measures (while also providing straw man arugments deployed to avoid the conclusions of their own study) illustrates the class basis of their analysis. In addition, as Sean O’Riain has shown, the impact of the recession in terms of increased unemployment has been much more significant for working class people.
In Ireland, if class is referred to at all, it is expressed in either simplistic, commonly understood terms, as a social category based on the National Readership Survey and income levels taken from CSO (or even more simplistically, on where people live), or as a stock phrase devoid of anything resembling an accurate definition. Two recent examples of the latter include the surge of references to the No voting ‘working class’ who apparently made up the majority of the electorate after the Lisbon Treaty Referendum in the 2008, despite only a year previously comprising that cohort of workers who could be referred to as ‘new middle class’ in the run up to the 2007 election campaign.
In a recent post, published in ILR Conor McCabe made the following point about class relations in Ireland when talking about how in a study of Bantry, County Cork, the Australian anthropologist Chris Epper used an understanding of these relations to explore the economic and social structure of the town:
“Class, in order to be understood, needs to be analysed in motion, that is, over time, and it needs to be grasped in both ideological and material terms. It reveals itself not only through the economic relations of capital and labour, but also through societal relations. Similarly, the local town, the micro level, can only be understood when it is seen that the macro-level structures and class relations do not impinge from outside, but rather are interwoven with the very fabric of the local community and parish. ‘A central feature of the nexus between church, state and business in Éire is that it has been forged and exerts its influence simultaneously locally as well as nationally’ writes Eipper. ‘In fact, the nexus is itself a product of, and in turn reproduces, the complex but continuous imbrication of nationally-general and locally-specific forces and events’.
Given that such an ideological and theoretical framework is out of step with the mainstream of Irish academic discourse, it is not surprising that the class relations revealed in Holy Trinity bear but little relation to the former’s virtually classless, but nonetheless socially stratified, world.”
Or as Erik Olin Wright puts it in a recent article:
“Both among sociologists and among the lay public, class is principally conceived in terms of individual attributes and life conditions. Attributes such as sex, age, race, religion, intelligence, education, geographical location, and so on, are held to be consequential for a number of things we might want to explain, from health to voting behaviour to childrearing practices. Some of these attributes are acquired at birth, others later in life; some are stable, others quite dependent upon a person’s specific social situation, and may accordingly change over time. In the stratification approach, people can also be categorized by the material conditions in which they live: squalid apartments, pleasant suburban houses or mansions in gated communities; dire poverty, adequate income or extravagant wealth, and so on. ‘Class’, then, identifies those economically important attributes that shape people’s opportunities and choices in a market economy, and thus their material conditions. Class should neither be identified simply with people’s individual attributes nor with their material conditions of life; rather, it is a way of talking about the interconnections between these two.”
Neither of these two are definitions. Yet both are closer understandings of class than we normally get. For more on this see Conor’s other posts on class in ILR.
So a proper understanding of class relations in Ireland has barely begun here. Instead, when issues of class are mentioned it is in an entirely dismissive way. Take former PD hack Stephen O’Byrne’s recent poke at trade unions in the Irish Times. In it he complained that…
‘We need critical analysis, not hackneyed class rhetoric.’
As Michael Taft pointed out, O’Byrne’s piece avoided critical analysis completely. Instead it illustrated that when it comes to class rhetoric, only one class is allowed to deploy it.
However, Ireland is not alone in the increasing, ill-informed references to class within popular political debate. In Britain, issues of ‘class’ previously banned to the margins by the neo-liberal orthodoxy, are now getting more of an airing, but in a way that is often misleading, particularly when connected with issues of identity (as in the increasing use of the term “white working class”). As Mark Fisher has pointed out in a post about the BBC’s ‘White Season’, which aired in 2008, the use of the phrase “white working class” displaces class to race. But this displacement is…
“…more than an error; it is part of a logic - an ethnologic - that substitutes ethnicity for class. While systematic, this logic is best understood in terms of dreamwork, with all of the telling elisions, substitutions and compressions that psychoanalysis has taught us to be alert to. The most revelatory compression is the title of the season itself: a season ostensibly devoted to the ‘white working class’ ends up being called ‘White’, as if ‘white’ and ‘working class’ are synonymous. This identification - this conversion, precisely, of class into ‘identity’ - has strange implications. Is there no non-white working class? And are the upper and middle classes not white? And in a time when ethnic discontent is as likely to be organized around religion and nationality as skin colour, what purchase does the category of ‘whiteness’ have even on current ethnic resentments?”
In order to deal with some of this misunderstanding Laurie Taylor has used his most recent edition of his BBC Radio 4 program Thinking Allowed to tease out the significance of this renewed debate on class. It provides a very interesting discussion that, with the dearth of proper analysis of class here, can provide some understanding of class dynamics in general, although the situations in the two countries have some very marked differences, obviously.
Where there is a similarity is in the representation of the working class, the difference between how it is referred to and described in the media and how this does or more often, does not correspond to people’s actual experiences. Also the issue of social mobility is discussed in the context of the expansion of third-level education.
The panel discussing the issues raised include:
Lynsey Hanley, Guardian journalist and author of Estates - an Intimate History; Richard Reeves, Director of the think tank Demos; Danny Dorling Professor of geography at Sheffield University and by Dick Hobbs, sociologist at the London School of Economics.
Audio file embedded below.
Discussion
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Comment by: Eoin O\'Mahony
Jan 6th 2010 at 16:01
You can see the deeply embedded way that Eipper talks about class in Ireland but the way it is discussed on the Radio 4 programme goes against the ways that class is embedded within and represented by groups of people. One of the few ways in which class is used in this latter fashion is the analysis of school leavers by Greaney, V. and Kelleghan, T. (1984), Equality of Opportunity in Irish Schools and later reanalysed by Raftery and Hout. This is within the education field and again later studies by Pat Clancy on the social class of school leavers is interesting but….
If we look at the ways in which the CSO and the ESRI use class, it is epiphenomenal. Their Living in Ireland surveys and Growing up in Ireland surveys amongst others do not grasp the lived-in ways that class is constructed and reinforced; as if class in Ireland was something that was imported like sex and television. Class is useful for large scale analysis except when it applies to those doing that analysis.
Is class in Ireland not possible in the public imagination because we all still believe ourselves to be tied to the land, the alleged leveller of opportunity and outcome? Is class only seen in working class people and ignored for everyone else because ‘we’ are the ‘normal’ ones?
I think that we need to rethink a class analysis of the society as it is unfolding right now, especially in a recession because there are many contradictory messages about ‘all pulling together’ and how the ‘high public sector wages are bleeding the economy dry’. We could do worse than starting to think about access to and use of market resources.