Welsh Journals

1. THE NEW WORKING CLASS AND POLITICAL CHANGE IN WALES David Adamson The concept of class has been central to political analysis and has traditionally constituted the primary tool of the political scientist and political sociologist. However, in recent years the validity of connect- ing class too closely with political practices has been challenged. Traditional studies, which associated electoral behaviour directly with social and occupational class, have been replaced by more complex analyses of class and partisan de-alignment, issue-based voting and sectoral cleavages (Sarlvik and Crewe, 1983; Dunleavy and Husbands, 1985).1 Similarly, for the political sociologist, class and politics have become more distantly connected and for some recent contributors there is no connection at all.2 Both Marxist theories of class and Weberian analysis of status groups and political forces have been forsaken in favour of theories which see politics as a chaotic and anarchic pluralism in which discrete power groups, determined by sexual, racial, ethnic and religious criteria, compete with one another. Such is the force of the rejection of class analysis that one recent contributor can claim: 'Now there is certainly much that class analysis cannot deal with in the modem world. But in contrast to the various forms of that argument, I make the stronger claim that classes are not social forces at all, and that they never have been. I have suggested that class analysis involves an inconsistent combination of gestural reductionism on the one hand and treatment of crucial political phenomena as irreducible on the other.' (Hindess, 1987, p.8) Here in Wales, the connection between class and politics has always been difficult to decipher. A fundamental aspect of nationalist ideology has been the maintenance of the myth of a classless gwerin: a people united by culture and language, regardless of their economic position and status. Yet class struggles have been fought in Wales that have had significance for the whole of Britain and nationalism has