Two cheers… maybe two and half… October 16, 2010
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Economy, Irish Politics.trackback
There’s a fair bit I don’t agree with Breda O’Brien on, though less than some might suppose. But on issues of equality she’s pretty damn good, albeit the tone isn’t necessarily to my taste. Good too to see though someone in the Irish Times making a few pointed connections and showing up the links between the supposed great and the good and the very institutions that cheerled us first into financial crisis and which are now cheerleading us towards an ‘austerity’ the depth of which I doubt anyone is still truly aware of.
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Its about time we stopped taking parasites like Peter Sutherland seriously. As the bubble was about to collapse he proclaimed in the Irish Times that there was no bubble.
Breda O’Brien quotes Senator Carl Levin as describing Goldman Sachs as “self-interested promoters of risky and complicated financial schemes that helped trigger the [global financial] crisis”.
“The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.”
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/12697/64796
That Ed Walsh, president of the university of Limerick, has proposed that Peter Sutherland be in a government of national unity is a sad commentary on higher learning in Ireland.
‘That Ed Walsh, president of the university of Limerick, has proposed that Peter Sutherland be in a government of national unity is a sad commentary on higher learning in Ireland.’
I agree with you there CL. Walsh is ex-president of UL though. Breda O’Brien had a good pop at him last year over school teachers working conditions.
Two cheers only, and because of this old mantra:
Perhaps what we need first in Ireland is a return to a respect for ethics and fairness
Appealing to the better nature of those who can afford to be ‘ethical’ and fair, rather than recognising them as a class who will never surrender their privilege – including their privileged ability to decide whether or not to be ‘fair’ – is the honey trap for the left: and one that vitiates our ability to organise and take what’s ours.
Yeah, it comes back to something that I believe ever more strongly, that when you cut away the cant what is left is ultimately class struggle, not in a raw form (although it can take that aspect in instances), but worse in many ways, a sublimated fashion where people won’t see the pools of privilege and indeed its opposite. We’ve had people on here argue that there’s no such thing, but you look at social mobility, you look at the ossified nature of class structures and the way in which generational issues enter the picture and away from certain areas (third level to an extent, some workplaces) you can see how embedded it is.
By the way, they’re winning at the moment. No way around that.
But the numbers of the loosing class self-identifying as such, grows dramatically. Don’t underestimate the extent to which the current crisis has been a disillusioning event for many middle class people, in the literal sense of the world.
That’s true. And it is interesting how strongly people who I wouldn’t have expected this are beginning to see this in class terms, albeit diffusely sometimes and from a middle class perspective. There are obvious dangers with that in terms of firmly pushing down with feet on the heads of those on the rung ‘below’. But opportunities as well…
Someone recently here was talking about the situation in some PS/NGO workplaces, with a substantial female cohort, where the lines between those working, essentially, for luxuries, while their partners paid the mortgage/ bills, and those who had become the sole earner, or who were single and struggling badly with a mortgage taken out on the strength of a salary that was 15-20% higher, were becoming stark. (can’t remember who, sorry)
My guess is that, whereas during the boom, it was possible for workplaces to socialise on a roughly equal basis, even if, often that ‘equality’ came through a credit card, rather than actual spare cash, when it comes to the party season this year, there will be a lot of people not going, or wondering why the Xmas party is in Athlone, involving a night in a hotel, and when they get to the actual gig, and have the first few glasses, the (micro-) class war will get dirty…
It’s on that extremely micro level that the effects start to manifest themselves….
“[...] where the lines between those working, essentially, for luxuries, while their partners paid the mortgage/ bills, and those who had become the sole earner, or who were single and struggling badly with a mortgage taken out on the strength of a salary”
I’d say there’s a sort-of generation thing going on there too. More recent mortgages depended on two incomes, older ones on just a single income.
Class issues are certainly bubbling up to the surface to an extent; but imo it will be a generation or two before the stark realities hit home for many, and the narrative will still be muddied very effectively by the capitalist rulers and their legions of enablers.
Having never really left my working class outlook behind (well, peasant/working class background really) I’ve still found it hard to identify concrete areas of solidarity over the years. Income is certainly a factor, or lack of it. Micro-geography plays a small part as does general attitude or outlook. But recently its been starkly brought home to me that educational attainment is a profound social barrier. Everyone, it seems, attaches the dominant social narrative that academic achievement makes you different or places you apart from others – even when the commensurate income isn’t being earned. This applies to people with academic achievement who immediately suppose you’re one of them (and share their often narrow viewpoints) or automatically sets you apart from working class individuals without qualifications who deem you some sort of other. When you don’t buy the Education = Money mantra, and indeed don’t value the capitalist debasement of education, you just tend to confuse everyone, everywhere, all the time.
The tory-boy third level educational program recently announced is of profound importance and sets the invidious narrative for the next several generations. They want working class individuals with talent to enter into third level education; albeit with substantial payments to the increasing rentier class. The few, very few, individuals that buy the capitalist narrative and become successful by capitalist standards will be held up as shining examples showing that working class individuals can overcome their inherent sloth and tendency to leech of their betters. For the vast majority, they will become debt monkies living in a capitalist twilight zone; never achieving their so-called dues but supporting the capitalist status regime through some sort of warped loyalty. Both the concrete mechanisms, mainly debt, and the narrative are very powerful instruments.
Very true re educational achievement, which cuts both ways as you say. That ‘otherness’ is a huge barrier, albeit one which is also bound up, as you note, in issues of class (or class aspiration).
The tory-boy third level educational program recently announced is of profound importance and sets the invidious narrative for the next several generations.
The effects of the Tory strike against third-level can’t be underestimated, as you say. The reasonable suspicion is that it’s a strategic move to ‘de-educate’ an entire class by using the current situation as an excuse.