Hmmm. I guess it's all relative. But the Korean working class never had its own party to speak of, said nothing about partition (in which case the Irish working class was way ahead of them) and yielded up so vast a mass of surplus value with little more than an occasional scream of pain. The exaggerated role of the students indicates a limited self- awareness on the part of the workers.
>
>Not all of the Irish boom can be written off as a price-transfer scheme by
>Intel. Some parts are real: EU aid averages 5-6% of Irish GDP, money which
>gets invested in education, telecoms and infrastructure; apparently, EU
>funding and social democratic-style institutions also helped spur an
>indigenous software industry.
The power of EU aid depends on the conditions of investment. Throughout the seventies and eighties the problem was that companies would set up get the grant, then close shop and run off with the cash. I don't know enough to say about the software industry, but there is a booming call- centre industry as there is in much of the impoverished North East of England.
I'm not sure what 'social democratic institutions' could mean in the Irish context. After partition, the nearest thing to social democracy (the Labour Party having been still-born) was the machine politics of Fianna Fail - in which hospitals, welfare and schools were all tied up with the church as much as the state. The state sector grew up under that tutelage more than on the social-democratic model of trade union involvement.
Ironically the success of Dick Spring's Labour party and the 'democratic Left' was more indicative of the collapse of the old arrangements and a disaggregation of statism in southern Ireland. Much was written at the time about Ireland's 'normalisation' as it transcended the politics of nationalism and rejoined the politics of left v right - but of course these were disintegrating themselves, anyway.
>The most you can say is that the
>Eurobourgeoisie, for whatever reason, are investing for the long haul in
>their semiperipheries, which suggests that the Visegrad economies are
>going to take off like a rocket.
I see that the moves to closer integration at the centre are provoking a considerable complaint of bad faith from the East Europeans who are being denied entry.
-- James Heartfield
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