id="ulink_c31b13c0-a2f3-584c-97d0-5e27d82b1a42">Marx Meets Bourdieu
The historical success of Marxist theory, the first social theory to claim scientific status that has so completely realized its potential in the social world, thus contributes to ensuring that the theory of the social world which is the least capable of integrating the theory effect – that it, more than any other, has created – is doubtless, today, the most powerful obstacle to the progress of the adequate theory of the social world to which it has, in times gone by, more than any other contributed.
Bourdieu (1991 [1984]: 251)
What is Bourdieu saying here? The historical success of Marxism is to have constituted the idea of class out of a bundle of attributes shared by an arbitrary assemblage of people, what he calls ‘class on paper’. Aided by parties, trade unions, the media and propaganda – an ‘immense historical labor of theoretical and practical invention, starting with Marx himself’ (Bourdieu, 1991 [1984]: 251) – Marxism effectively called forth the working class as a real actor in history, an actor that otherwise would have had only potential existence. However, Marxism did not see itself as constituting the working class, but as discovering and then reflecting the prior existence of an objective class that was destined to make history in its own image. Marxism did not have the tools to understand its own effect – ‘theory effect’ – without which there would be no ‘working class’. In short, Marxism did not comprehend its own power – the power of its symbols – and thus missed out on the importance of symbolic domination.
But why does Marxism constitute such a ‘powerful obstacle to the progress of the adequate theory of the social world’ (Bourdieu, 1991 [1984]: 251) now, if before it had been so successful? Here I conjecture the answer to be as follows. In failing to recognise the symbolic world, Marxism fails to anticipate the emergence of fields of symbolic production – fields of art, literature, science, journalism – that engender their own domination effects, overriding and countering Marxism’s symbolic power. Marxism cannot understand that a classification or representational struggle has to precede class struggle, i.e. classes have to be constituted symbolically before they can engage in struggle. Unable to compete in the classification struggle, Marxism loses its symbolic power and the working class retreats back to a class on paper, no longer the effective actor that it was. When the economic was being constituted as an autonomous field in 19th-century Europe, Marxism had a firm grasp of reality, but with the rise of cultural, scientific and bureaucratic fields, Marxism lost its grip on reality and its theory became retrograde.
Bourdieu never examines his claims about Marxism, but that is precisely what we will do, starting with Marx himself. I will let Marx respond through a dialogue with Bourdieu, taking as my point of departure their common critique of philosophy. From there I construct a conversation that reveals their divergent theories, showing how the one ends up in a materialist cul-de-sac and the other in an idealist cul-de-sac. Each breaks out of the prison he creates, but in ways he cannot explain, which becomes the paradox of the gap between theory and practice.
THE CRITIQUE OF PHILOSOPHY
Uncanny parallels join Marx and Engels’ critique of the ‘German Ideology’ (Marx & Engels, 1978 [1845–46]) and Bourdieu’s critique of ‘scholastic reason’ in Pascalian Meditations (2000 [1997]). In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels settle accounts with Hegel and the Young Hegelians, just as in Pascalian Meditations Bourdieu settles his scores with his own philosophical antecedents. Both condemn philosophy’s disposition to dismiss practical engagement with the world. As Marx writes in the first Thesis on Feuerbach, the German philosophers elevate the theoretical attitude as the ‘only genuinely human attitude’, while practice is only conceived in ‘its dirty-judaical manifestation’. Bourdieu’s immersion in the Algerian war of independence and his experience of the raw violence of colonialism made nonsense of his philosophical training at the École Normale Supérieure.
Still, Pascalian Meditations is Bourdieu’s culminating theoretical work in which Pascal is presented as an inspirational philosophical break with philosophy, centring the importance of the practice of ordinary people, emphasising symbolic power exercised over the body and refusing pure philosophy emanating from the heads of philosophers. The German Ideology, by contrast, is not a culminating work, but an originating work that clears the foundations for Marx’s theory of historical materialism and materialist history. The different titles reflect their different location in the biography of each of their authors, but the argument against philosophy is, nonetheless, surprisingly similar.
Let us begin with Marx and Engels scoffing at the Young Hegelians who think they are making history, when they are but counter-posing one phrase to another:
As we hear from German ideologists, Germany has in the last few years gone through an unparalleled revolution. The decomposition of the Hegelian philosophy … has developed into a universal ferment into which all the ‘powers of the past’ are swept. … It was a revolution besides which the French Revolution was child’s play, a world struggle beside which the struggles of the Diadochi appear insignificant. Principles ousted one another, heroes of the mind overthrew each other with unheard-of rapidity and in the three years 1842–45 more of the past was swept away in Germany than at other times in three centuries. All this is supposed to have taken place in the realm of pure thought (Marx & Engels, 1978 [1845–46]: 147).
Here is Bourdieu’s attack on modern and postmodern philosophers:
Now, if there is one thing that our ‘modern’ or ‘postmodern’ philosophers have in common, beyond the conflicts that divide them, it is this excessive confidence in the powers of language. It is the typical illusion of the lector, who can regard an academic commentary as a political act or the critique of texts as a feat of resistance, and experience revolutions in the order of words as radical revolutions in the order of things (Bourdieu, 2000 [1997]: 2).
The argument is the same: we must not confuse a war of words with the transformation of the real world, the things of logic with the logic of things.
But how is it that philosophers mistake their own world for the real world? The answer lies in the fact that they are oblivious to the social and economic conditions under which they produce knowledge. For Marx, it is simply the division of mental from manual labour that permits the illusion that ideas or consciousness drives history:
Division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears. From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of ‘pure’ theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc. (Marx & Engels, 1978 [1845–46]: 159; emphasis added).
Emancipated from manual labour, upon which their existence nevertheless rests, philosophers imagine that history is moved by their thought. ‘It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers’, Marx and Engels (1978 [1845–46]: 149) write, ‘to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material surroundings.’ In identical fashion, Bourdieu argues that philosophers fail to understand the peculiarity of the material conditions that make it possible to produce ‘pure’ theory:
But there is no doubt nothing more difficult to apprehend, for those who are immersed in universes in which it goes without saying, than the scholastic disposition demanded by those universes. There is nothing that ‘pure’ thought finds it harder to think than skholè, the first and most determinant of all the social conditions of possibility of ‘pure’ thought, and also the scholastic disposition which inclines its possessors to suspend the demands of the situation, the constraints of economic and social necessity (Bourdieu,
