Does Bourdieu “Extend” Marx’s Concept of Capital?

Abstract

Bourdieu had a fraught and ambivalent relationship to Marxism. In this chapter, I consider one particularly common interpretation of the relationship between Bourdieu and Marxism: that by extending the critical scope of the capital concept to include a variety of forms beyond economic capital, Bourdieu transcended the narrow economism of the Marxist concept of capital. Indeed, Bourdieu himself claimed to do exactly this. However, I argue that such a claim must be rejected for at least four reasons. First, Marx’s concept of capital is not economistic to begin with, denoting as it does the social and historical relations of class exploitation concealed by the fetishized economic forms of capitalism. Second, while Bourdieu’s earlier formulations of the concept of cultural capital could plausibly be seen as complementary to a Marxist theory of class reproduction, his concept of capital in fact became much less compatible with Marx’s as he developed it over time. Third, though Bourdieu relies on a superficially marxisant language to define his concept of capital, his definition ends up being ambiguous and confused from a Marxist point of view. Fourth, Bourdieu tends to take the economic field and economic capital for granted, evacuating the latter of any specific understanding of the capitalist form of exploitation, which Marx’s concept of capital was of course meant to reveal. I thus conclude that if Bourdieu’s different forms of capital are but extensions of economic capital, the concept of capital—and thereby the critical problematic—he extends is not a Marxist one. Consequently, we must also reject the notion that Bourdieu transcended Marxism’s economism. Rather, it is Bourdieu’s treatment of the economy that is itself liable to charges of economism. I end the chapter by suggesting that a more fruitful way of thinking about the relationship between Bourdieu and Marxism would be to abandon grandiose and totalizing claims of Bourdieu having transcended or surpassed Marxism and to look more modestly for possible points of articulation.