Forgotten Faces of Capitalism in Ireland, Agriculture and Fishing
As with the first article in this series, forgotten faces is more of a discussion piece than a finished analysis. It’s only in the later issues of The Ripening of Time, especially nos. 11 and 13 which date from 1979 and 1980 respectively, that we get a full and detailed Marxist analysis of Ireland in the 20th century. As a result, the early articles are more akin to blog pieces than anything else. It’s almost like they should have a collection of comments after them, teasing out and expanding on the analysis.
[Click on image to read online. A pdf of the article is available to download here.]
The introduction states that
in putting this analysis of agriculture and fishing forward, it is intended to redress the tendency among Marxists and socialists in Ireland to focus their attention exclusively on the working class struggles to the detriment of other dominated and exploited classes and layers of the society.
This is as relevant today as it was 34 years ago. The glaring, and somewhat embarrassing, omission from Irish Marxist analysis is an understanding of the capitalist structure and dynamic of agriculture in Ireland. I’m still trying to work out why this is the case, but my suspicions at the moment are falling on the idea in British Marxism that agriculture is a form of proto-capitalism, the stage of accumulation, the precursor to the industrial stage and ‘true’ capitalism. Now, that’s me guessing, but it’s what I’m thinking at the moment. Certainly the strongest influence on Irish Marxism has come from the British left, and conclusions drawn from Manchester may not necessarily work for Tullamore. Both places are different parts of the same machine, but that inter-connectness seems to have been lost over the years. Certainly it was there in the 1930s when Brian O’Neill wrote War for the Land in Ireland, yet Irish Marxists will quote Connolly on agriculture quicker than O’Neill. Why, again, I don’t know.
Forgotten faces places Irish agriculture firmly within modern capitalism. It does not treat it as a stage, or as some form of archaic mode of production, but as the supplier of raw material for the metropolis, in this case, England.
Under generalised commodity production, the small holder and small producer becomes a link in a production process over which he has no control, and inside of which the division of labour allocates him an increasingly smaller part of the process which turns raw material into a processed-ready-packed-frozen consumer good. This fragmented production process ties the calf producer of the west to calf rearers in other regions to the cattle fatteners on the estates of Meath or the grazing plains of England to the meat factory [My emphasis]. A division of labour and production such as this fosters internal regional differences; in a dominated society: a regional underdevelopment. (p.53)
The division of labour in Irish cattle production was highlighted by by Ray Crotty in his 1974 pamphlet, The Cattle Crisis and the Small Farmer, and by Paul Bew in his 1979 book, Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858-82, yet this simple fact of Irish agricultural production, and what such a system of production says about Irish economic, social and political life, is virtually absent from Irish Marxism, certainly since the 1960s anyway.
Forgotten faces also talks about Irish fishing, highlighting the subservient role it has played in the Irish economy, and asserting that it is due in no small part to the absence of a native bourgeoisie within fishing which could have fought for its place at the table.
Class relations in fishing are somewhat different from those in manufacturing industry or agriculture in Ireland. The ease with which international capital has penetrated the fishing industry is a feature of the lack of a big, native bourgeois class controlling fishing in this country. In agriculture, as we see, there is a definite presence of a big bourgeois or rancher class, fractions of which have certain contradictions with international capitalism.
Again we see The Ripening of Time feeling its way through the dynamics of Irish economic relations, in this case with regard to fishing and agriculture. The journal comes back to these areas later on in the series, expanding and refining the tentative conclusions presented here.
More from Ripening of Time during the week
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