work by the light of our social reality has the potential not only to generate new insights in our own research, but also to unsettle metropolitan sociology and shake up its master categories, contributing to a robust engagement – whether in the form of combat sport or dialogue – between centre and periphery, North and South, the West and ‘most of the world’, as Partha Chatterjee puts it.
These conversations with Bourdieu are set up essentially as a series of dialogues between Marxists and Bourdieu, choreographed by a Marxist, Michael Burawoy. This too resonates with South African sociology, which in its most creative and prolific wing – that is to say, its progressive wing – is Marxist or Marx-inspired. This sociology has concentrated on social transformations, colonisation and its impact on traditional society, industrialisation, state formation, agrarian transformation, urbanisation, class formation, patriarchy, changing labour regimes, trade unionism, urban resistance and so on. This is a rich sociology of transition, transformation and struggle. Why, then, contemplate a conversation with Bourdieu? Surely we have within the Marxist sociological tradition in South Africa and within the broader international resources of Marxism sufficient conceptual apparatus to wrestle with our reality?
Our Marxism tends to suffer from a similar problem to our sociology. It too works with master categories through which capitalism is analysed – schemas of change and assumptions about transitions between modes of production, revolution and reform, classes and state, class struggle and ideology, capitalism and socialism, social movements and resistance – which too often are mapped quite crudely onto our social reality. Marxism tends towards reductionism in its analysis of such salient features of our history and our present as colonialism, racism and ethnicity.
Many South African Marxists are currently so intent on finding the signs of a class movement and the prospects for an alternative future that they grapple insufficiently with the contradictions, ambiguities and complexity of the present. The workings of democracy, state efforts at redistribution and development, far-reaching policy innovations, and, on the other hand, working-class xenophobia, popular prejudice, racial and ethnic identities, the intractability of patriarchy, repertoires of violence, social fragmentation, lawlessness, the fragility of authority – these remain little explored, and so the sociology of change seems disconnected from the actual social changes taking place all around us.
To take one example: Marxist analysis of post-apartheid society tends towards a ritualistic denunciation of neoliberalism and the neoliberal state – concepts that are assigned tremendous and far-reaching explanatory power, but which quite ignore other, equally important, dimensions of state functioning. Post-apartheid South Africa has seen an explosion of redistributive social spending by the state, with the building of 2.3 million houses and the dramatic expansion of social grants from 2.5 million recipients in 1996 to 14.5 million in 2010 constituting two of the most obvious achievements. On the other hand, sections of the state are increasingly dominated by processes of elite formation, including patronage and corruption, and by its status as the symbolic site for the assertion of African sovereignty (Von Holdt, 2010a). Neither of these dimensions can be reduced to ‘neoliberalism’.
Given these weaknesses within current sociological Marxism in South Africa, dialogue between Marxism and Bourdieu, with his concentration on symbolic domination and the reproduction of social order, may contribute to the regeneration of South African Marxism, inviting it to rethink its assumptions and its ways of seeing.
There is something else as well. Bourdieu, with his emphasis on the construction of scholarly fields and on the necessity for reflexivity regarding scholarly practices, invites us to consider a matter to which we are too often blind: the racial structure of South African sociology and what this may mean for the nature of the analytical narratives it establishes.
The canonical authorities of South African sociology are virtually all white. It may be responded that the white authors of mainstream sociology are mostly progressive and Marxist, aligning themselves broadly with the interests of the oppressed and on the side of democracy. These points may be true as far as they go, but what is the significance of the racial structure of this field for the production of knowledge and the search for truth? Is it not necessarily the case that most white scholars, lacking the experience of racial oppression – and not only that, but experiencing the structures of racial oppression as dominants, and therefore as beneficiaries and protagonists of its symbolic violence – are likely to have a limited feel for its place in social reality and therefore in the scholarly analysis of social reality? To take this point further, white scholars have a direct stake, emotional as much as material, in continuing to underplay the significance of racial power.
And indeed, Marxist sociology (in contrast to the communism of the South African Communist Party) has tended to treat national oppression, racism and racial discrimination as epiphenomena in relation to the narrative of capitalist accumulation, class domination and class struggle – something that Marxism allows all too well. Thus, Black Consciousness and the national liberation movement were regarded with a profound scepticism: their focus on epiphenomena was an index of their petty bourgeois class base. In the 1970s many in the white student Left, rejected as ‘liberal’ by black students who were developing the theories and practices of Black Consciousness at the time, turned to Marxism and involvement in the fledging trade union movement (Ally, 2005). Progressive white scholars took an analogous turn in the scholarly field, writing against white liberal historiography, on the one hand, and the national liberation movement and its associated communist movement, on the other.
It is not only the question of race that is important, however; it is also a question of the extent to which the scholarly field reproduces the hegemony of the Western canon, and with it the symbolic violence of hegemonic rationality against the rest of the world – what Bourdieu calls the imperialism of reason. In this logic, South Africa becomes simply the local site of a global logic of development or, in its Marxist manifestation, of capitalist accumulation and reproduction. This question is not entirely separate from the racial one, since there are a multitude of reasons why white scholars with a settler background might feel more at ease reproducing the Western canon – in which Bourdieu, of course, is a towering figure – than seeking a position of critique founded in the ‘periphery’. What is required, in the words of Suren Pillay (2009), is not only a deracialisation of knowledge production, but its decolonisation.
The power of white scholars to define the stakes and rules of the scholarly field, and to shape its analytical narratives, its curricula and its themes may appear to be invisible, but is all too visible to many black students and staff. The symbolic violence of white seniority and authority is alive and replicated in the academy. The scholarly establishment may comfort itself that the new generation of black scholars and researchers will confine themselves to amplifying the sanctified narratives through their better ability to conduct research in townships and workplaces, but already they are subverting, contesting and reconstructing the dominant narratives.3 Race plays a critical part in this, as do new narratives about our colonial history and post-colonial reality, and a reconsideration of the canon itself, including Bourdieu. New forms of combat in the scholarly fields of sociology and its sister disciplines should therefore be anticipated and welcomed.
NOTES
1See the responses of Anderson (2002), Duneier (2002) and Newman (2002) to Wacquant’s (2002) attack on their work.
2There is, of course, an element of combat in Parsons too, for example, in the way he deals with Marx at a time when Marxism was enjoying a certain renaissance in US sociology: ‘[J]udged by the standards of the best contemporary social-science theory, Marxian theory is obsolete’ (1967: 132). Marx was a ‘social theorist whose work fell entirely within the nineteenth century … he belongs to a phase of development which has been superseded’ (1967: 135).
3For recent interventions, see Ally (2005), Buhlungu (2006), Naidoo (2010) and Pillay (2009).
CONVERSATION 2
THEORY
