The Absence of Class Politics in Northern Ireland

These are scarcely auspicious times for the left. An unfortunate confluence of recent social and political trends has conspired to question seriously the value of materialist interpretations of the world. The reconstruction of western societies out of the debris of the economic crises of the nineteen seventies has led to the emergence of increasingly intricate class hierarchies. Changed work practices and accelerated consumption have both served to blur the boundaries between previously distinct social strata. The increasingly complex and dynamic nature of contemporary bourgeois society has invited predictable and indeed opportunistic responses from neoliberal critics. Most famously the political scientist Francis Fukuyama (1989, 1992) has declared that we are living through the end of history. The unprecedented material wealth and optimal political freedom that global capitalism has allegedly afforded humanity have ensured, Fukuyama insists, that the notion of social class has effectively ceased to have real meaning