Burawoy, Michael

Gramsci Meets Bourdieu

It would be easy to enumerate the features of the life-style of the dominated classes which, through the sense of their incompetence, failure or cultural unworthiness, imply a form of recognition of the dominant values. It was Antonio Gramsci who said somewhere that the worker tends to bring his executant dispositions with him into every area of life. Bourdieu (1984 [1979]: 386) It's like when these days people wonder about my relations with Gramsci - in whom they discover, probably because they have [not] read me, a great number of things that I was able to find in his work only because I hadn't read him .... (The most interesting thing about Gramsci, who in fact, I did only read quite recently, is the way he provides us with the basis for a sociology of the party apparatchik and the Communist leaders of this period - all of which is far from the ideology of the 'organic intellectual' for which he is best known.) Bourdieu (1990 [1986]: 27-28) This is an additional reason to ground the corporatism of the universal in a corporatism geared to the defense of well-understood common interests. One of the major obstacles is (or was) the myth of the 'organic intellectual,' so dear to Gramsci. By reducing intellectuals to the role of the proletariat's 'fellow travelers,' this myth prevents them from taking up the defense of their own interests and from exploiting their most effective means of struggle on behalf of universal causes. Bourdieu (1989: 109) If there is a single Marxist whom Pierre Bourdieu had to take seriously, it has to be Antonio Gramsci. The theorist of symbolic domination must surely engage the theorist of hegemony. Yet I can only find passing references to Gramsci in Bourdieu's writings. In the first reference above, Bourdieu appropriates Gramsci to his own thinking about cultural domination, in the second he deploys Gramsci to support his own theory of politics, and in the third he ridicules Gramsci's ideas about organic intellectuals. Given the widespread interest in Gramsci's writings during the 1960s and 1970s, when Bourdieu was developing his ideas of cultural domination, one can only surmise that the omission was deliberate. Bourdieu's allergy to Marxism here expresses itself in his refusal to entertain the ideas of the Marxist closest to his own perspective.

Language	eng
Names	[author] Burawoy, Michael
Subjects	Bourdieu, Pierre Sociologia Bourdieu, Pierre Sociology