Questioning the Legacy of Class Structure in Australian History : An Australian "Historical" Class Analysis?

Connell and Irving’s Class Structure in Australian History remains the authoritative text on class formation in Australia. Following the “death of class” of the late 1990s, class analysis has abandoned a historical orientation; replacing previous modes of class analysis with the theories of Pierre Bourdieu. This article attempts to re-historicise the study of class in Australia through a critique of Connell and Irving’s classic work. Connell and Irving claimed to have developed a genuinely “historical” reading of class in Australia, which purportedly relates categories such as the “working class” and “ruling class” to rich documents. Their work has been remembered as if it was a foundational analysis on which subsequent decades of research could rest. This article contends that, despite the rhetoric of its introduction, Class Structure in Australian History in fact reproduces a priori Marxist narratives without evidencing them. This article uses the narrative arc of the proletariat
as its case study, through which it dismantles the authors’ claims to have generated their concepts out of historical documentation. This article concludes that the task of “historical” class analysis is still necessary, but that it is only possible through greater clarity over the a priori assumptions that are brought to it.

© Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 2016