Putting Marx in the Dock: Practice of Logic and Logic of the Practice

Abstract

The chapter focuses on emancipation theory in Bourdieu and Marx and discusses the Bourdieusian criticism of the Marxian perspective. At the core of Bourdieu’s theoretical and empirical work stands the analysis of the nature of domination and the mechanisms by which it reproduces social structures and makes them acceptable. The role played by the habitus and the body becomes increasingly central in Bourdieu’s theory of domination and is pivotal in the notion of symbolic violence. Therein we see Bourdieu’s radical anti-intellectualism. However, surprisingly, the body—and the concrete dominated subjects—disappear in his (rare) texts on the emancipation process, the achievement of which is assigned to discursive practices. More surprisingly, Bourdieu puts Marx in the dock, charging his philosophy of praxis with intellectualism. If we look at the theory of praxis which Marx develops at least from Theses on Feuerbach onwards, when he breaks with the idealist conception of the philosophical criticism and begins to develop a thought aimed at defining the features of a theory of practical transformation of the world, we realise that the Bourdieusian criticism is groundless. For Marx, emancipatory proletarian praxis is a dialectical relationship between the self-transformation of proletarians and the transformation of the objective circumstances. The consciousness—the target of Bourdieusian polemic against Marx—is not a set of dispositions which is in the order of representations alone, detached from effectiveness of practices, as Bourdieu claims. It is a mediation between the misery of proletarian life and praxis. The emancipation from unfreedom is a self-liberation, and the consciousness is interwoven with the proletarian praxis. Although both Bourdieu and Marx embark from similar criticism to intellectualism, they reach different outcomes. While Marx’s criticism turns into revolutionary praxis, in Bourdieu it remains anchored to the scientific rationality of discourse.