Representing Labour: Notes towards a Political and Cultural Economyof Irish Working- Class Experience

Loughlin, CJV

doi:10.1017/9781316570425.004

Representing Labour: Notes towards a Political and Cultural Economyof Irish Working- Class Experience

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Christopher Loughlin

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Abstract

Class is about the representation, linguistically, of a socio- economic phenomenon. In the Anglophone world the exact relationship between these terms vexed analysis of class in the last third of the twentieth century. Class, as the prefatory quotes which opened this chapter make clear, is also, however, about the politics of representation. This capacity of linguistic representation is, therefore, about cultural and political economy, and, according to Scott, the ‘power to define reality itself ’. In the following chapter I explicate some elements of the historical process by which knowledge was produced about class in Ireland. I contend that labour, the political and cultural expression(s) of the ‘subaltern classes’, has been represented in both urban and rural forms during the past 400 years. The first section charts some aspects of the emergence of the representation of labour in Ireland, 1603–1824, which is, in a broad sense, the age of manufacture,as Marx described it, or ‘proto-industrialisation’. The second section presents some evidence for the self- representation of labour in Ireland, 1824– 1998, the age of machinery. The final section of the chapter turns to the methodology underpinning the previous sections.