note on reception of Bourdieu, with respect to Marx

mainstream marxist criticisms of bourdieu are biased...mainstream bourdieu receptions are terrible. outline for potential work

The General 'Economy of Practice-Forms' as a sociological continuation of the Critique of Political Economy (preliminary remarks).

First, Two Quotes from Bourdieu.

"It is well evident...that the economy is so embedded in the social...that the...object of a true economy of practices is ultimately nothing other than the economy of the conditions of production and reproduction of the agents and institutions of economic, cultural, and social production and reproduction, that is, the object of sociology in its most complete and general definition."

"Marx has sufficiently claimed for himself the title of a scientist so that the only tribute that can be paid to him is to make use of what he created...to go beyond what he thought he created."

Despite all the mutual distance between Bourdieu and "Marxism," even approaches to class analysis in the Marxian tradition can no longer avoid side glances and appropriations from Bourdieu. However, the theoretical convergences and mutual complementary potentials of both approaches have rarely been seen as clearly and used as productively as in Michael Vester and Andrea Lange-Vester’s work.

But, for the most part, Bourdieu's contribution was seen only as a more resolving instrument for the descriptive mapping of class situations, while its theoretical-analytical potentials with regard to understanding modern capitalist societies were explicitly negated or simply ignored.

Thus, more dyed-in-the-wool Marxists have judged Bourdieu (harshly, it may be added) systematically unable to develop an “ideology critique” specific to capitalism, precisely because his "avoidance” of the Marxian concepts of capital and value theory are said to prevent him from taking formation-specific mystifications as a starting point.

If such individuals have ultimately replaced a systematic discussion of Bourdieu with the accusation that the latter was not a Marxist, then others, for example, those who accuse sociology (as a whole) of having lost its object through the very concept of class, do not address Bourdieu's class analyses at all. Especially where Marxian questions about the functional determination of classes in social processes of production and reproduction were pursued further, the Bourdieu reception followed the aforementioned reduction of the analyses towards detailed descriptions.

While the approach could map social-structural differences and their relations to cultural practices rather well, at the same time it obscured the fundamental economic determinations of classes by relegating them to the universal competition for “scarce goods” and by performing, ultimately, an anthropologization of the concept of class.

Between a dominant sociological reception, which interpreted Bourdieu's analyses as a generalization of a utilitarian or neoclassical economic paradigm, and a line of reception following Marx, which appreciated the strong-resolution class model but rejected the theory behind it out of the same misunderstanding, the social-analytical content of Bourdieu's investigations has been missed, falling right through, out of consideration.

In contrast to these widespread lines of reception, it can be demonstrated that corresponding interpretations already miss the determinations and uses of the extended concept of capital, which remain committed to the Marxian concept even when transferred to other thematic fields. Likewise, they overlook Bourdieu's detailed analyses of the differences between capitalist and pre-capitalist formations of the economy and their respective specific mystifications.

Bourdieu's conceptualization of problems and subsequent analyses can only be adequately understood if they are not understood as a generalization of the paradigm of neoclassical economics, but as a link to Marx's critique of classical political economy. This is especially true for the theory of class, which is not formulated in the context of an abstract model of market and competition but is related to the analysis of social processes of production and reproduction in modern capitalist societies.

Although the mainstream sociological reception saw within the concept of class most likely the connective line between Marx and Bourdieu, the convergences of the underlying theories of both functional and social-structural reproduction were thus paid little attention.

In order to work out the connecting moments of both approaches to an analysis of capitalist socialization on the basis of class theory, these theoretical implications (which go far beyond a mere description of inequality) must be more sharply contoured.

Where the word "class" has not been used simply as a synonym of other words to denote socioeconomic inequalities, a long tradition, not only Marxist, has focused primarily on the social and political conceptual dimension of designating social and political interest groups, which, for example, in Ralf Dahrendorf were largely detached from their economic grounding. Two books of Dahrendorf come to mind: Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (1959) and Essays in the Theory of Society (1968).

In contrast, a dimension of the concept of class will be emphasized here that has been surprisingly rarely considered in the heated debates about its analytical relevance, even though it is central to both Bourdieu's and Marx's concepts of class.

The distinctive feature of the concept of class is that it is simultaneously an economic and sociological functional concept and a concept for analyzing inequalities, social movements, and conflict dynamics.

Since its beginnings, the semantics of class has not only served to designate or condemn social inequalities but was already regarded by Quesnay as an instrument for analyzing social processes of production and reproduction, for which the "countless individual acts of circulation" are summarized in such a way that they can be grasped in their characteristically social mass movement of “circulation between large, functionally determined economic classes of society.”¹

At the same time, the term captures relations between groups defined by their functional position in the processes of social reproduction, which are conditioned as political and social power relations in the economic functional dimension, without being reducible to it. The social characteristics of class relations and class conflicts, possess degrees of freedom vis-à-vis the economic functional logic, since they are influenced by other (political, legal or cultural) functional logics as well as by the symbolic representation and construction of class relations in the dimension of meaning and significance.

Above all, however, the social functional logics underlying the reproduction of specific class relations are themselves the product of individual and collective actions of the individuals socialized in these relations.

As correct as it is, therefore, to see the problem of the dynamics of development emanating from contradiction" of capitalist societies in Marx as a problem of the 'functional compatibility' of different structures, i.e., "not primarily as a conflict between groups or even classes" (see Claus Offe’s Strukturprobleme des kapitalistischen Staates, 1972), it is the social, political, and cultural class relations and class conflicts that determine the concrete form in which the functional relations and their processed contradictions are reproduced and changed.

The concept of class thus serves - in the sense of the linkage of the factual and social dimensions outlined above as characteristic of the approaches of Marx and Bourdieu - to analyze complex interdependencies between the structural antagonisms and developmental tendencies in the factual dimension of social functional logics, the symbolic representations on the level of social relations, and the actions and reactions on the level of political conflicts and struggles. Nevertheless, the following account will focus primarily on the function-logical aspects of class concepts and analyses in Marx and Bourdieu, since it is precisely this 'factual dimension' central to the theoretical and analytical 'use value' of the class concept that has been poorly understood in many connections and critiques. What is at stake here, therefore, is a focus on certain aspects of the respective class analyses, in which other moments that have hitherto been in the foreground in their reception are relegated to the background.

In Bourdieu's case, for example, this concerns distinctive cultural consumption, which is considered only insofar as it is relevant to the critical-functional orientation of his analyses. This is not to say that the connections directed at cultural consumption and lifestyle were missed or unproductive. It is merely a matter of a shift in emphasis that offers a corrective against the one-sidedness that resulted from the primary focus on distinction practices, without this being intended to lead to an oppositional oversimplifciation.² Likewise, it is a shift toward that important dimension of class analysis that primarily concerns questions about the constitution of what Marx called a 'class for itself'.

In addition to various varieties of Marxist 'class metaphysics' in which the economic structural dimension sets consciously acting groups quasi out of itself, there have been some important studies since the 1960s that examined the active social, political and symbolic construction of social and political classes, i.e. represented and active (or at least appearing to be activated) social and political groups operating under a class label, as a relatively independent process not mechanically traceable to economic determinants.

The work of Thompson and subsequently of Vester, with their historical analyses of the social constitution of the working class and the sociological model of learning cycles, provided the basis for a series of productive investigations into the practical constitution of social classes, to which numerous works from the environment of cultural studies following Gramsci also made important contributions.

If this line of analysis of the social, political and symbolic constitution of social classes initially plays a subordinate role in the present work, this is not only because Bourdieu certainly did not neglect this aspect but nevertheless assigned it a subordinate role compared to the more functional analyses of class relations³, but also because of historical shifts within the subject area of class analysis: Thompson himself described the form of class formation, as he had analyzed it exemplarily in the proletariat of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as a historical special case whose transferability to the changed constellations of capitalist socialization since the second half of the twentieth century can be considered doubtful, which also formed a background for the radical questioning of class theory since the 1970s.⁴

Since the theoretical-analytical content and the continued scholarly relevance of Marx's and Bourdieu's class concepts for understanding this changed constellation are quite desirable, it also makes sense in terms of argumentation strategy to initially exclude the special case of the constitution of a working class in the cycles of struggle and learning of the 19th century.

I have developed an outline of a potential work, perhaps to be carried out in the future, of what a definitive text comparing Marx and Bourdieu on Class would look like:

The following chapters would aim to reconstruct the class concepts in Marx and Bourdieu in their connection with functional principles and dynamics of change in capitalist societies. Precisely because the corresponding class concepts, class theories and class analyses have encountered extremely heterogeneous understandings, it would first be necessary to define them precisely in distinction to widespread (mis)understandings.

For this purpose, some 'confusions' around the concept of class are to be outlined from the outset, in order to subsequently address the history and constructive principles of class theories and the role of the linkage between the concept of class and the concept of capital.

In addition, the significance of the symbolic dimension of class relations will have to be clarified in order to finally discuss the question to what extent class relations are to be understood as structurally asymmetric relations of power and domination.

While this previous section would primarily serve as a necessary work of reconstruction, the following chapter ought to serve as the theoretical core of the comparative study. There, the specific intertwining of a theory and analysis of functional differentiation and a theory and analysis of social differentiation in the class concepts of Marx and Bourdieu is elaborated. While it is generally accepted that Bourdieu's theory and analysis of differentiated “fields” takes into account the importance of functional differentiation for modern societies, Marx has often been accused of an economic reductionism that virtually excludes such a differentiation of relatively autonomous, objectified spheres of social practice.

In contrast, it will be shown here that capitalist societies are necessarily 'functionally differentiated' societies for Marx and that within his theory the first systematic reflection on a mode of differentiation primarily organized in the material dimension can be encountered. From this perspective, it would be highly desirable to elaborate Marx and Bourdieu in comparative contrast to Niklas Luhmann's systems theory.

Since this theory of functional differentiation in its theoretical construction as well as in individual analyses demonstrates many convergences with Marxian and Bourdieu observations with regard to the 'factual dimension', but at the same time represents one of the most theoretically demanding attempts to refute class-theoretical analyses, it is possible here to elaborate particularly succinctly analytical deficits into which the neglect of the functional causes and the functionally logical position of the class structure in modern (capitalist) societies inevitably entails.

Subsequently, it should be shown why systems theory, in view of its theoretical premises, actually 'has nothing more to say' about questions of social-structural differentiation, i.e. why it can neither adequately analyze nor explain corresponding phenomena. This becomes clear in Luhmann's later turn to these questions, in which he tried to capture inequality phenomena with the (problematic) concept of 'exclusion'.

In contrast to systems theory, the subsequent chapter ought to show that Marx's theory still allows for an analytically more precise analysis and explanation of social-structural relations of inequality and their historical developmental tendencies from fundamental functional contexts of a differentiated capitalist economy.

Although the central economic function of reproducing and transforming class structures in capitalism can be demonstrated in this way, the question as to how corresponding relations are also consolidated or diversified, overtime, as social and political forms, can hardly be answered with Marx alone. Indeed, both Marx and Engels themselves admit as much.

Bourdieu's approaches can contribute here not only in the often-discussed dimension of symbolic legitimation in distinctive practices and struggles, but also his analytical concept of differentiated fields offers an explanation of the dynamic reproduction of class structure in the interplay of the relatively autonomous functional logics of economic, political and cultural production.

Against the determinism Bourdieu is often accused of and the suggestion that it is a model of endless static reproduction of the same relations, the next chapter should then deepen the understanding of the change of class relations in a dynamic capitalist society, in which radical change and the continuity of fundamental features of the class structure are not mutually exclusive but mutually dependent. Since the economic mode of reproduction of capitalist societies forces a dynamic reproduction on a constantly expanding scale, the class relations in their concrete characteristics and internal differentiations must also be repeatedly overturned (revolutionized).

In this context, it will also be necessary to return to the results of the historical-genealogical part of this work, and here it is to be clarified what precisely Marx means when he describes capitalism as itself being a revolutionary force.

1. “Quesnay's Tableau économique shows in a few broad strokes how an annual result of national production, determined by value, is distributed through circulation in such a way that, all other things being equal, its simple reproduction can proceed, i.e. reproduction upon the selfsame ladder [same degree]. The starting point of the production period is appropriately the last year's harvest. The innumerable individual acts of circulation are immediately summarized in their characteristic social mass movement - the circulation between large, functionally determined economic social classes. What interests us here: A part of the total product - like every other part of it as an object of use, a new result of the elapsed annual labor - is at the same time only a carrier of old capital value reappearing in its own natural form. It does not circulate, but remains in the hands of its producers, the tenant class, in order to begin its service to capital, there again. In this constant capital part of the annual product, Quesnay also includes improper elements, but he hits the main point, thanks to the limits of his horizon, in which agriculture is the only surplus-value producing sphere of investment of human labor, thus, according to the capitalist point of view, the only really productive one. The economic process of reproduction, whatever its specifically social character, always intertwines in this field (of agriculture) with a natural process of reproduction. The tangible conditions of the latter clarify those of the former and keep away the confusion of ideas which only the dazzle of circulation produces.” - Marx, Capital Volume II, Section III (The Reproduction and Circulation of Total Social Capital), Chapter 19 (Earlier Representations of the Subject), I. The Physiocrats.

2. Fortunately, the connections to Bourdieu that have focused on consumption, lifestyle, and cultural distinction-practices have done such fundamental work that there is little new to add to it, making it seem much more productive to open up other dimensions of his work.

3. Bourdieu and Thompson, in their approving mutual references, advocated a concept of academic division of labor, whereby the different emphases and modes of analysis are precisely not mutually exclusive.

4. It is important to take note of the literature regarding the dissolution of classical forms of class culture and class representation, which occurred at the latest in the course of the change from Fordist to post-Fordist modes of capital accumulation and capitalist socialization.