11. Capital

Abstract

Chapter Eleven ("Capital"): Transnational capitalism has, as The Manifesto of the Communist Party says, "simplified" the question of social inequality by dividing the world between a class of "haves" whose material needs are met only because the majority "have not" the means to do so as these means have been privatized. This ruthless binary of class in global capitalism has produced a new wave of anti-capitalist struggles that has given renewed urgency to the question: what is the place of the intellectual in contemporary social relations? It is as one answer to this question that a new global intellectual has emerged, featured most prominently in the writings of Pierre Bourdieu. In this chapter I rehearse how Bourdieu's texts seeks to go beyond the dominant notion of the "local intellectual" required by an earlier, more regulated, phase of capital accumulation that traces itself in the writings of Foucault, Lyotard and de Certeau, to name a few. And yet, Bourdieu's concept of a collective intellectual, while breaking rhetorically with Foucault's local intellectual, returns in the end to the same reformist conclusions that alibi capitalism. This is because Bourdieu makes "class" an outcome of struggles over "symbolic capital" in a plurality of "fields" that exceed conceptual reduction. What Bourdieu's "field" theory of class struggle does is segregate the social into autonomous zones lacking in systemic determination by the social structure of private property so that everyone is considered to be equally in possession of "capital." Bourdieu opposes Marx's labor theory of value with a value theory of class that posits class as an after-effect of the past symbolic struggles of intellectuals over "cultural capital." What the reduction of "class" and "capital" to cultural conflicts cannot explain is the systemic primacy of the production of surplus-value in unpaid-labor, the basic condition of the global majority, which determines that their needs are not being met and which economically compels them into engaging in collective class struggles. Keywords: Bourdieu; capital; class; intellectual; capitalism; cultural theory; neoliberalism.