File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/97-05-14.000, message 71


Date: Sat, 10 May 1997 10:19:04 -0800
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari)
Subject: Re: BHA: The primacy of social class & Bhaskar's Critical 	  Realism



>>Analytically, the primacy of class is not reductionist, because it is a
>>method for understanding how society functions, which must be reconstructed
>>logically by following a certain method.  Abstract class schematism which we
>>know through Stalinism and other unfortunate manifestations in the history
>>of the labor movement is, conceptually, a schematic imposition of an
>>abstraction upon concrete reality, without reconstructing the richness of
>>the concrete itself as a concept.  Organizationally, it comes about because
>>this form of procrustean abstraction is also a social process by which
>>capitalism functions, and so the labor movement itself takes on certain
>>characteristics imposed by the capitalist mode of being.

Wow! Yes, yes, I began reading Vaihinger's *The Philosophy of As if*.

I find most helpful here Bourdieu's conceptualization of why a class-based
model of reality should not be confused with the reality of the class-based
model. But Bourdieu does more than point out the logical error; he attempts
to explain exactly why it is the model of reality does not fit the actual
categories of perception in actual social space.
"Distinction--in the ordinary sense of the word--is the difference written
into the very structure of the social space when it is perceived in
accordance with the categories adapted to that structure; and the Weberian
Stand, which people so often like to contrast with the Marxist class, is
the class adequately constructed when it is perceived through the
categories of perception derived from the structure of that space. Symbolic
capital--another name for distinction--is nothing other than capital, of
whatever kind, when it is perceived by an agent endowed with categories of
perception arising from the incorporation of the structure of its
distribution." Language and Symbolic Power, p. 238

Now to make this point concrete, I offer this simple example. Carchedi
attempts to demonstrate the incoherence of the blue and white collar
distinction in the identification of classes. So he constructs a
class-based model of reality, which is able to include some white collar
workers in the working class and classifies others as agents of capital.
But because  the bourgeoisie imagines itself over and above material
production, all white collar workers, sharing these bourgeois categories of
perception, may feel themselves to share in the same devaluation of the
material transformation process , no matter how *objectively*
proletarianized they really are. Of course the point could be made much
more precisely. Rosemary Crompton has done so in Economy and Class
Structure.

All the best,
Rakesh





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