CLASS AND IRELAND

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Conor McCabe, from Dublin Opinion (dublinopinion.com) has published the first part of an analysis of class structures within Ireland on his blog. Conor and Donagh usually post excellent social analysis related to Ireland from a socialist, or at least a leftist, perspective. Check it out.


CLASS AND IRELAND, (p.1)

Sep 4th, 2008

""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 distinct government economic policy 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 type of 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 out these dynamics, 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?


""


dublinopinion.com/2008/09/04/class-and-ireland-p1/

[Stallit 2 de Halfo]

And a comment from Conor at the bottom:


"Cheers Michael. The conceptual framework of class that I’m using is the same one that’s in your comment - i.e. a dialectical reading of a capitalist economy reveals the class antagonisms inherent in such a structured economy. That structure, far from being the workings of a “hidden hand” is one maintained and enforced through the full participation of the state - its legislation, judiciary, and police - as well as by the allocation of resources by the state to such a venture. Out of that structure - i.e. a complex economy underwritten by the capitalist mode of production - grows a certain type of society, and culture. The economic dimension does not by any means explain everything - that’s simply impossible given the complexity of human thought and activity - but in order to get a handle on the type of culture and society, value system, etc, that does exist, we need to have a clear understanding of the way capitalist economies utilize the full resources of the state in order to maintain the inequalities and waste that such a mode of production demands in order to replicate, and expand. There is not a complete causal relationship - capitalist cultures differ - but when we look at the power relations within those cultures we begin to see a commonality. That’s because the type of inequalities that a capitalist economy requires in order to exist provide that commonality.

In Ireland, Nationalism is used by historians to explain the state, and the development of the state - that the antagonisms which have shaped the state are based on a continued, albeit truncated, form of a nationalist civil war that took place eighty years ago. There is no mention of the Irish capitalist economy (never called “capitalist”, always called “small, open”) at all, nor of the class dimensions inherent in such an economy - in effect, what Irish historiography has done is come to a conclusion that, although class antagonisms lie at the heart of the capitalist mode of production, in Ireland we can ignore these antagonisms - indeed, such antagonisms are, at best, peripheral - because Dev and Collins disagreed in the Mansion House on Dawson Street in 1922 over a treaty. Not only that, the disagreement and subsequent civil war gives Irish historians a certain swagger, a “get out of dialectics” card. We don’t have to look at the Irish capitalist economy, its history and society, because, well, Collins and Dev, man.

And because of that, it’s quite hard to find a dialectical reading of the Irish economy with the type of historical sweep needed to contextualize the analysis of a small housing estate over a fifty year period. I’m going to have to to it myself - not to a huge degree, but with enough of a skeletal framework to allow me to continue with my research. That means a reading of the southern Irish economy from 1922 to the present that takes on board the significant social, economic, and cultural forces that have developed out of the type of capitalist mode of production utilized by the state during that period. Nationalism plays a huge role in the shaping of culture and society, but it is one factor, albeit a strong one, within a dynamic where class antagonisms are not a result of the mode of the production, they are hotwired into the very mainframe of that particular mode of production.

The Irish Labour politician who said that Labour has to be the party of the millionaires and paupers showed a fundamental ignorance of the way things get made, of the way things happen. In a small way it´s not his fault (even though a member of a left-wing party should, you’d hope, know better), as in Ireland we’ve gotten the social forces that shape society confused with the productive forces that drive that society. We have to stop thinking of social forces with a causality frame of mind, and start to see them in a dialectal way, to start to observe these forces “in motion” as opposed to as mounted butterflies on a causality blackboard.

Something like that, anyway.

With regard to Class and Class analysis, the difference between analysising social forces and productive forces is one at the heart of the difference between Weberian and Marxian readings of Class. Both have merits, depending on the scale and scope of the research project. for me, though, with regard to an historical reading, the Marxian model is the one as it looks at class antagonisms at the level of the mode of production, as opposed to “social class” categories that develop out of consumption at the marketplace. There is a relationship between both, but the Marxian model helps to explain how the society ticks with an historical breadth, while the Weberian model is more focused on what develops after people clock out and, well, go shopping."

[Stallit 2 de Halfo]

Second part:

dublinopinion.com/2008/09/11/class-and-ireland-p2/