Date: Sat, 15 Nov 1997 17:15:17 -0800 (PST)
From: Dennis R Redmond <dredmond-AT-gladstone.uoregon.edu>
Subject: M-TH: Re: Some Bourdieu and a pinch of RegSchool


On Mon, 17 Nov 1997, Dave Bedggood wrote:

> Following the tradition of euro"marxist" sociology, B can employ very 
> marxisant type language in order to coopt marxism back into radical 
> pre-marxist bourgeois ideology. Its interesting that B almost 
> reinvents Althusser, who himself was reinventing Gramsci and 
> western marxism for the post 1956 "de-stalinisation",  but in a 
> quite different untainted language necessary to distance itself  
> from even de-stalinisation. So B becomes the "sexy" de-marxised, or 
> marx-excised, sociology of the neo-liberal reaction. 

Huh? Bourdieu as the mouthpiece of that evil, scheming French petite
bourgeoisie? Shopkeepers don't run the French economy today; Total, Oreal,
Alcatel and the Eurobourgeoisie do. This is a very different antagonist
from the British Empire faced by Marx, or the Nazi regimes fought by
Gramsci and the Frankfurt School. Bourdieu's point is that multinational
capital has to be fought multinationally, and that the working-class
already does this on countless micro-levels: culturally, in terms of
sports and entertainment (the snobs vs. the slobs); politically, in terms
of the fights over redistribution and state pension funds which exploded
into the 1995 December strikes; socially, in terms of the struggle for
multicultural justice and hip hop democracy instead of Le "Pig" Pen's vile
neofascism and the RPR-UDF's stomping of immigrants and refugees, etc.
etc. etc. Bourdieu had the guts in '95 to go to the picket lines and tell
the strikers that they were the mighty fist of the world proletariat, and
backed them all the way, and he trained and assisted a whole generation of
Left sociologists and radicals in the notoriously conservative and
Rightwing French university system. Or do you have concrete evidence to
the contrary?

-- Dennis



     --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---