3551. Marx's Abstract Theory of Value and Money in Capital Volume 1

 By Fred Moseley, December 16, 2020

3550. Marx’s Value Theory and the Value Form Interpretation

From Michael Robert's Blog, December 23, 2023

As I mentioned in a recent blog, at the Historical Materialism conference in London in November, there was a book launch for Fred Moseley’s new book Marx’s Theory of Value in Chapter 1 of Capital: A Critique of Heinrich’s Value-Form Interpretation. Michael Heinrich and Winfried Schwarz (a German Marxist who is also critical of Heinrich’s interpretation) participated in the book launch.

Moseley’s book is an examination of Marx’s theory of value in Chapter 1 of Capital, almost paragraph by paragraph in Sections 1 and 2, and a detailed critique of Heinrich’s value-form interpretation of Chapter 1, as presented in his 2021 book How to Read Marx’s Capital, which is a translation of his 2018 book Wie das Marxsche Kapital Lesen?

Heinrich is a well-known German Marxist who has published widely on his value-form interpretation of Marx’s theory of value, and his work is influential not only in Germany, but also in the UK and other countries in Europe and around the world.  He criticises the traditional interpretation of the labour theory of value, according to which the value of commodities is determined solely in production, and he argues that value is created only when it is converted into money through the sale of commodities on the market.

Moseley is one of the foremost scholars in the world today on Marxian economic theory. He has written or edited many books on Marxist theory.  He reckons instead that Marx presented a labour theory of value according to which the value of commodities is determined solely in production by the socially necessary labor time required to produce the commodities.  And Moseley argues in his book that the textual evidence in Chapter 1 overwhelmingly supports the labour theory of value interpretation of Marx’s theory of value.

The relevance and importance of this debate may seem obscure to many readers of Marx.  So Fred Moseley kindly agreed to be interviewed on his new book and the controversy with Heinrich.

MR:  How did this book come about?

FM: ”First of all, I want to thank you for the opportunity to discuss my book with you and your many readers.

Heinrich’s book cited above is a detailed textual study of the first seven chapters of Capital.  Heinrich is not very well known in the US, but he is very influential in Germany and other European countries.  He is something like a David Harvey of Europe.  But I am convinced that Heinrich’s book is a fundamental misinterpretation of Marx’s theory, so I decided to engage critically with Heinrich’s book. 

I started by writing a paper on Chapter 1, the foundation of Marx’s theory and Heinrich’s interpretation.  I presented this paper in a Zoom conference in June 2021 sponsored by Gyeongsang National University in South Korea.  An assistant editor of Palgrave’s Marx, Engels and Marxism series, Paula Rauhala, watched the my presentation and she contacted me and suggested that I write a longer version of my paper as a Palgrave Pivot book.  A Pivot book is a new initiative by Palgrave of short books, with a limit of 50,000 words (which I exceeded by 10,000 words!).  I am grateful to Paula for that suggestion and this little book is the result.”

MR:  Please give us an overview of your book

FM: “My little book is a detailed textual study of Marx’s Chapter 1 and Heinrich’s interpretation of Chapter 1.  The book consists of only 4 chapters. 

Chapter 1 of this book presents my interpretation of Marx’s theory of value in Chapter 1 of Capital, including a section on each of the four sections of Marx’s Chapter 1. Chapter 2 presents Heinrich’s interpretation of Chapter 1 of Capital and my detailed critique of Heinrich’s interpretation 1, with the same four sections.

Chapter 3 is about a 55-page manuscript that Marx wrote in 1872 in preparation for the 2nd German Edition of Volume 1, which is mainly about Section 3 of Chapter 1, entitled ‘Additions and Changes to the First Volume of Capital’, which Heinrich has emphasised in his book and in previous works to provide textual support for his ‘value-form interpretation’ of Chapter 1.  This important manuscript has not yet been translated into English.  A translation of a 4-page excerpt of this manuscript is included in Heinrich’s book as an appendix.  So Chapter 3 of my book presents my interpretation of this manuscript and a critique of Heinrich’s interpretation.  A translation of this entire manuscript should be a high priority of Marxian scholarship.

My book is very abstract theory, about the most abstract part of Marx’s theory, the beginning of Marx’s theory in which he presents the foundation of his labour theory of value. Marx said in the Preface to the 1st edition of Volume 1 of Capital that “beginnings are always difficult in all sciences”, and that is certainly true of Marx’s theory.  The best way to read my book is to have Heinrich’s book and Volume 1 of Capital close at hand.”

MR:  How would you summarise the main conclusions of your book?

FM: “The main conclusions of my book are the following:

1. The subject of analysis of Chapter 1 is the commodity, not a separate, isolated commodity, but a representative commodity, a commodity that represents all commodities and the properties that all commodities have in common (use-value and exchange-value). In the Preface to the 1st edition, Marx described the commodity as the “elementary form” or the “cell form” of capitalist production.  So Marx analyses the properties of a representative commodity similar to the way cellular biology analyses the properties of a representative cell.  It’s like putting a commodity under a microscope and analysing its main properties.

Marx’s representative commodity in Chapter 1 is assumed to have been produced, but not yet exchanged.  This is crucial for the critique of Heinrich’s interpretation.  According to Heinrich, the subject of analysis of Chapter 1 is not the properties of a representative commodity, but instead is what he calls an “exchange relation” between two commodities, which he argues is the end result of two actual exchanges between the two commodities and money on the market. 

2.  The value of commodities is derived in Section 1 of Chapter 1 from the property of the exchange-value of the representative commodity (i.e. from the property that each commodity is equal to all other commodities in definite proportions).  And this general relation of equality between each commodity and all commodities requires a common property that is possessed by all commodities and that determines the proportions in which different commodities are equal. 

Marx argued that this common property of all commodities that determines their exchange-values is the objectified abstract human labour contained in commodities. And this is the result of the abstract human labour expended in production to produce the commodities.

According to Heinrich, on the other hand, the value of commodities is not derived from a relation of equality between all commodities, but instead is derived from an analysis of an “exchange relation” between two commodities, which he argues presupposes actual exchanges of the two commodities with money on the market.

3.  The magnitude of the value of each commodity is “exclusively determined” (p. 129) by the quantity of socially necessary labour-time expended in production to produce each commodity.  Heinrich argues, on the other hand, that the magnitude of value of a commodity depends in part on the relation between supply and demand for the commodity on the market.  This is the best-known assumption of the value-form interpretation of Marx’s theory of value.

4.  The labour that produces commodities has a dual character in production:  both concrete labour and abstract labour are characteristics of the same labour process in production.  Section 2 of Chapter 1 in particular presents very strong textual evidence to support this interpretation of the dual character in production of labour that produces commodities.  

Weaving and tailoring are Marx’s two examples in Section 2.  The labour process of weaving produces the use-value of linen, its dual character also being abstract human labour that produces the value of the linen.  The same dual character is true of the labour process of tailoring (and all other particular labour activities).  The values of the linen and the coat are compared by comparing the labour-time required to produce each one of them and nothing is said in this about exchange in this section.

Heinrich argues, on the other hand, that labour in production is only concrete labour and is not yet abstract labour.  Abstract labour comes to exist only in exchange, and thus the dual character of the labour that produces commodities comes to exist only in exchange. According to Heinrich’s interpretation, tailoring and weaving (and any other labour process) possess only a single character in production, not a dual character.  This interpretation is clearly contradicted by Section 2.”

MR:  Please say more about Heinrich’s interpretation of “exchange relation”.  That seems to be a central concept in Heinrich’s interpretation.

FM: “Heinrich’s concept of “exchange relation” is completely original with him.  No one else puts so much emphasis on this term and defines it the way he does.  And it is a new concept in his interpretation; it was not included in his 2012 book Introduction to Marx’s Capital.  And unfortunately, he does not explain this very well in this book, especially for such a fundamental concept.  There is nothing in his Introduction about this concept; there are only 1½ pages in an appendix in the back of the book on the abstractions that result in this concept (which he doesn’t refer to once in the rest of the book) and 1½ pages in his first discussion of this concept on pp. 53-54.  And from then on, he just presumes his interpretation of exchange relation and applies it to different passages in Marx’s text. 

I am pretty sure that most readers of Marx (especially beginning readers) will not understand the meaning and significance of Heinrich’s concept of exchange relation in his interpretation.  A young Marx scholar from Australia wrote a 2000-word review of Heinrich’s book for Marx and Philosophy and she didn’t mention the concept of exchange relation at all.  I myself had to work pretty hard to understand it because it is so poorly presented.

Heinrich defines exchange relation as an exchange between two commodities.  To take one of his examples that is borrowed from Marx: 

1 quarter of wheat is exchanged for x boot-polish.

Heinrich comments that this definition seems like direct barter exchange between the two commodities, but he states that this is not so, because direct barter seldom actually happens in capitalism.  Instead, Heinrich interprets the exchange relation between two commodities as the end result of two actual acts of exchange between the two commodities and money on the market. Thus…

1 qtr. of wheat is sold for 10 shillings and 10 shillings is used to purchase x book-polish

The important point is that Heinrich’s concept of exchange relation between two commodities presupposes actual exchanges between these two commodities and money on the market. Heinrich does not clearly specify whether these acts of exchange that are presupposed in his interpretation of the exchange relation are assumed to be actual acts of exchange on the market.  However, they must be actual acts of exchange in order to be consistent with Heinrich’s general value-form interpretation, according to which commodities possess value only if they have been actually exchanged on the market. 

Before actual exchange, according the Heinrich’s interpretation, commodities do not possess value (indeed, products are not even commodities) before exchange.  Products of labour become commodities and commodities come to possess value only as a result of actual exchanges on the market.  Therefore, since the commodities that Marx analyses in Section 1 (e.g. wheat and boot-polish) are assumed to possess value, in order to be consistent with Heinrich’s general value-form interpretation, he must also assume that these commodities have been actually sold and bought on the market.  If the commodities have not been actually exchanged on the market, then these commodities would not possess value, according to Heinrich’s general value-form interpretation.

However, there is absolutely no textual evidence in any of Marx’s several drafts of Chapter 1 to support Heinrich’s idiosyncratic interpretation of the exchange relation between two commodities – that it presupposes actual acts of exchange between these two commodities and money on the market.  This interpretation is Heinrich’s invention.  He does not cite any other authors with a similar interpretation of exchange relation, because there are none. And the exchange relation is the most important concept in Heinrich’s interpretation of Chapter 1. If his fundamental concept of exchange relation is a misinterpretation of Marx’s theory, then the rest of Heinrich’s interpretation of Chapter 1 is a misinterpretation and is unacceptable.

I think it is clear that the subject of analysis of Chapter 1 is the commodity, a representative commodity that is used to analyse the properties that all commodities have in common – use-value and value.  Chapter 1 is not about exchange at all.  The commodity that is analysed in Chapter 1 has been produced, but not yet exchanged.  Exchange is not considered until Chapter 2 (“The Process of Exchange”).

In recent weeks, while preparing for the HM conference and for this interview, I have come to realise more clearly that there is a fundamental contradiction in what Heinrich is trying to accomplish in his recent book.  In his previous works, he has presented (many times and all over the world) a strong value-form interpretation of Marx’s theory of value, according to which the value of a commodity exists only as a result of an actual exchange on the market. Before exchange, a commodity does not possess value (it only possesses use-value).  For the textual evidence to support this interpretation, he has used a handful of key passages that are taken from various texts in isolation and out of context.  As we know, one can always find passages that seem to support almost any interpretation of Marx’s theory.  And Heinrich is very good at this quotation game.

However, his most recent book is different; it is an attempt to interpret the first seven chapters of Volume 1, especially Chapter 1, as a value-form theory – and that Marx was the original value-theorist!  Heinrich goes from page to page in Chapter 1 and consistently tries to interpret key passages in a value-form way.  This is a very difficult task because there are so many passages in these chapters, especially Chapter 1, that contradict a value-form interpretation.  Indeed, in my view, Heinrich’s task is an impossible task.  My book follows his detailed commentaries point by point and exposes the errors in his value-form interpretation.”

MR:  What was the main disagreement between you and Heinrich in your book launch at the recent Historical Materialism conference?

FM: “Not surprisingly, the main disagreement in the session was over the meaning of exchange relation in two paragraphs in Section 1.  He argued that I misinterpreted Marx’s concept of exchange relation, not as an act of exchange between two commodities, but as a relation of equality between two commodities, and that I just substituted my meaning of exchange relation for Marx’s meaning in the two passages.  And he argued that these two passages are proof that that Section 1 analyses individual commodities as part of an exchange relation.

But that is not true.  I did not just substitute my meaning of exchange relation for Marx’s meaning in these paragraphs.  Rather, I argued that the exchange relation in these paragraphs is a synonym for exchange-value. The exchange-value of each commodity is defined in the preceding paragraphs in Section 1 as the property of each commodity that is equal to all other commodities in definite proportions that are mutually consistent. That implies that all commodities possess a common property that determines the proportions in which different commodities are equal.  Therefore, the exchange relation between two commodities in these paragraphs is also a relation of equality between two commodities, which implies the necessity of a common property possessed by each one of them.

Instead I argued that Heinrich is the one who misinterprets Marx’s concept of exchange relation with his strange definition as the end result of actual exchanges between the two commodities and money on the market,. There is absolutely no textual evidence to support this interpretation of actual market exchanges presupposed in Chapter 1.  My interpretation of exchange relation as a relation of equality between commodities is much more reasonable and plausible than Heinrich’s complicated and idiosyncratic interpretation of the end result of actual exchanges between commodities and money on the market. “

MR:  Are there other points that you would like to emphasise?

“I also want to mention Heinrich’s unusual interpretation of the word “common” in Marx’s derivation of value in Section 1 – that value is the common property of commodities that determines their exchange-values – because it is an important point in his interpretation that he has emphasised in all his writings, including in the book I am criticising. 

Take the concluding paragraph of Marx’s derivation of value on p. 128: “All these things now tell us is that human labour-power is expended to produce them, human labour is accumulated in them.  As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values – commodity values. ” I argue that Marx’s meaning of “common to them all” in this passage is the usual meaning of “common” , namely that the same property is possessed by each individual commodity by itself, on its own.

Heinrich argues, on the other hand, that the meaning of “common” in this passage and in other passages is ambiguous – i.e. it could also mean a property that each individual commodity possesses, not by itself, but only together with another commodity in an exchange relation (exchange relation again!), and this is what Marx means here and elsewhere when he says that value is a common property of commodities.  According to Heinrich, outside of an exchange relation, an individual commodity does not possess the ‘common property’ of value.

However, I don’t think Marx’s meaning of “common to them all” is ambiguous at all; Marx states that the common property of commodities is the human labour accumulated in them as a result of the labour expended to produce them (each one of them), prior to and independent of its exchange with another commodity.  Nothing is said about exchange and exchange relation in this key concluding passage.

Three paragraphs before the passage just quoted, Marx presents a geometric example of area as a common property of different geometric figures.  Area is a ‘”common property” of each figure, independent of its comparison to the area of another figure.  The similarity between the area of geometric figures and the value of commodities is that, in both cases, the objects possess a common property independently of a quantitative comparison between them.  Heinrich does not comment on this illuminating geometric example which contradicts his interpretation that the common element of value is created in the exchange itself.  Clearly, the area of geometric figures is not created by a comparison of their areas.

One other point I want to mention.  In working on this book, I noticed for the first time that Marx repeatedly used the phrase the “own value” of an individual commodity in Section 3 of Chapter 1 (seven times); for example, the “own value” of 10 yards of linen or the “own value” of a coat (see pp. 100 and 104-06 of my book).  The own values of the linen and the coat are compared and equated, but nothing is said about exchange.  These passages are clear and unambiguous textual evidence that each individual commodity possess its “own value”, independent of acts of exchange between commodities and money on the market. This directly contradicts Heinrich’s interpretation that an individual commodity possesses value only if it has been actually exchanged with money on the market.  Heinrich quotes only 3 of these 7 ‘own value’ passages and presents little or no commentary on any of them. Twice he quotes the adjoining sentences, but not these revealing sentences.”

MR:  What difference does this debate over the details of Marx’s value theory make in the bigger picture?

FM: “I think it is important to get the details of Marx’s theory of value straight, because it is the foundation for Marx’s theory of surplus-value as a theory of exploitation in Volume 1.  And the theory of value is also the foundation of his theory of the falling rate of profit and crises that you have presented so well in your own work. In the Preface to the 1st edition of Capital, Marx stated: “To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms [the commodity-form of the product of labor and the value-form of the commodity] seems to turn upon minutiae.  It does in fact deal with minutiae, but so does microscopic anatomy.” Microscopic anatomy is necessary for the understanding of organic bodies, and similarly Marx’s theory of value is necessary for an understanding of the capitalist economy.

My book is specifically about Heinrich’s book, but it applies to the value-form interpretation of Marx’s theory in general.  And my conclusion is that Marx’s theory of value cannot be reasonably be interpreted as a value-form theory.  I think that is an important conclusion.  We should move on from the value-form interpretation of Marx’s theory.

I worry about Heinrich’s influence on the understanding of Marx’s theory.  His interpretation is very influential in Germany and elsewhere in the world, especially among young people.  And I am convinced that it is a fundamental misinterpretation of Marx’s theory.  So I think it is important to engage with his popular but mistaken interpretation. I hope that my book will be read especially by young people and it will encourage them to make a deeper study of Marx’s theory of value in Chapter 1 of Capital and beyond.

Let me add my pennyworth to what I think are the wider issues arising from this debate between Heinrich and Moseley (MR). 

Marx put it this way: “As the commodity is immediate unity of use value and exchange-value, so the process of production, which is the process of the production of a commodity, is the immediate unity of process of labour and process of valorisation.”  So, for Marx, it’s the process of production, the exertion of human labour that creates value.  As Marx once put it: “Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish. And every child knows, too, that the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labour.”

The value-form approach of Heinrich is implicitly a simultaneist approach. Its characteristic feature is the belief that value comes into existence only at the moment of realisation on the market. Consequently, production and realisation are collapsed into each other and time is wiped out. But the process of production and circulation (exchange) is not simultaneous, but temporal.  At the start of production there are inputs of raw materials and fixed assets from a previous production period.  So there is already (constant or ‘dead labour’) value in the commodity before exchange. Then production takes place to make a new commodity using human labour. This creates ‘potential’ new value, which is realised later (in a modified quantity) when sold.

But why does all this matter?  For me, Marx’s value theory is about showing the fundamental contradiction in capitalism between production for social need (use-value) and production for profit (exchange value). Under capitalism, units of production are commodities that have a dual character which epitomises this contradiction. 

For Marx, money is a representative of value, not value itself. If we think that value is only created when selling the commodity for money and not before, then the labour theory of value is devalued into a theory of money. Then, as mainstream neoclassical economics argues, we don’t need a labour theory of value at all because the money price will do. Money prices are what mainstream economics looks at, ignoring or dismissing value by human labour power – and therefore the exploitation of labour by capital for profit. It removes the basic contradiction of capitalist production. 

Also, it leads to a failure to understand the causes of crises in capitalist production. It is no accident that Heinrich dismisses Marx law of profitability as illogical, ‘indeterminate’ and irrelevant to explaining crises and instead looks to excessive credit and financial instability as the causes. Heinrich even claims that in later years, Marx dropped his law of profitability although the evidence for that is non-existent.

If profits (surplus value) from human labour disappear from any analysis to be replaced by money, then we no longer have a Marxist theory of crisis or any theory of crisis at all.

3549. Christmas Greetings from Bethlehem

Popular Resistanace, December 14, 2023

Greetings from Bethlehem:

We have been writing annual Christmas messages of peace, for human rights, and relating sometimes what happened in the passing year for decades. Since I returned to Bethlehem in 2008, these messages have been special. Since founding the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS) in 2014, we also added greeting from PIBS.  This year writing seems tougher than ever considering the ongoing and unprecedented genocide/holocaust occurring in Palestine. In the ten weeks before Christmas, more than 20,000 civilians (>8000 of them children) were killed. 2.3 million people were denied food, water and medicines while all means of life around them was systematically targeted. Palestinians (Muslims and Christians) are literally starving to death and dying from lack of medical care. 65% of Gaza residential buildings were destroyed or heavily damaged. Israel also targeted schools, hospitals, clinics, churches, mosques, bakeries, sewage and water facilities, electrical, communication and other infrastructure.

Rubble Nativity scene in Lutheran Church, Bethlehem

 We local Christians cannot “celebrate” or do decorations while injustice persists.  The Church of Nativity during this season usually received hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. Today it is shrouded in dark cloud. We can only pray and meditate on the need for peace and justice in the birthplace of the prince of peace. We native Christian Palestinians (the first Christians) reflect that some 2.5 billion human beings believe in a message that originated with a Palestinian baby born in a manger here. We reflect on the real message of Jesus of love and caring for the oppressed and the suffering. The harsh reality on the ground reminds us of our responsibility to shape a better future. Bethlehem is home to 260,000 Palestinian Christians and Muslims including over 60000 refugees. We natives are limited to live in only 13 percent of our district while over 150000 colonial Jewish settlers live on stolen Palestinian lands of the district.  Bethlehem is besieged and blockaded. Bethlehem University like other universities is mostly offering courses online due to the apartheid system. Bethlehem is isolated from its urban twin city Jerusalem (5 miles away) via an apartheid wall destroying the economy for Palestinians on both sides of the wall. Israeli Jewish settlers and soldiers move freely and have taken over most of our land and natural resources and regularly attack us.

Nativity Square 2022

Nativity square 2023

Eight million of the 15 million Palestinians in the world are refugees or displaced people thanks to a meticulous Western-backed program of ethnic cleansing. The vast majority of Palestinians who remain are living in concentration camps like Bethlehem, Jenin, and Gaza under a ruthless apartheid fascist Israeli regime. Despite all of this, we are still hopeful because we take a long view of history. Some 100,000 years ago humans migrated from Africa using Palestine as the passageway to Western Asia and then the rest of the world. This is where our ancestors first domesticated plants and animals (agriculture and pastoralism) some 11 millennia ago. This allowed development of the earliest civilizations (in the Fertile Crescent), the first writings and the first thoughts of deities. Our Canaanite ancestors spoke a language we refer to now as proto-Aramaic. From this language and its first alphabet came the Arabic, Syriac and Hebrew languages and alphabets. Aramaic was the language of Jesus. Phoenician Canaanites evolved the Latin alphabet delivered it to Europe and it is the alphabet you are reading now. ‘A’ is from Aramaic Alleph (turn upside down to be the symbol of the bull) and ‘b’ from Beit (house) turn to side to see a domed house and so on.

People lived in relative harmony here with nature and with each other for thousands of years. Thankfully very few attempts to transform Palestine from a mixed society of various religions and backgrounds to make it monolithic. The latest such foolish attempt was to transform Palestine into a “Jewish state” (apartheid and ethnocentric chauvinistic state), a state that is failing though with significant bloodshed.

As we reflect this Christmas from Bethlehem, we aspire to a certain future when refugees
are allowed to return and all people of all religions live in equality and justice. Jerusalem/Bethlehem will then become a true light unto the world. We are grateful that there has been tremendous growth of actions by civil society around the world to push for human rights and justice in this “Holy Land”. This has included some significant actions for boycotts divestments and sanctions (BDS) from Israel in the same way we did with Apartheid South Africa.

So this Christmas we remember what Jesus said: “Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are they that have been persecuted for righteousness’ sake for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Luke 6). So think of us Palestinians as you think of Christmas and do boycott products that aid the occupation/oppression, see bdsmovement.net

History teaches us that injustice cannot last long especially when so many people join the struggle. We in this land will continue to struggle and yearn for freedom. We at at PIBS, Bethlehem University ask for your prayers and for your support (time and money) which helps us expand our work with thousands of Palestinians especially from marginalized communities (see palestinenature.org). And do come visit us or at least email us/stay in touch. Such are the best of of Christmas gifts.

May 2024 bring us closer to peace with justice.

3548. Washington, D.C. Bi-Partisan “March for Israel” Rally Supports Zionist Genocide in Gaza!

 By Barry Sheppard and Jeff Mackler, Socialist Action, November 23, 2023

From left, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson of La., left, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of N.Y., Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of N.Y., and Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, right, join hands at the March for Israel on Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2023, on the National Mall in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

The November 14, Washington, D.C. “March for Israel” in support of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza had all the earmarks of a US government-backed affair.  In comparison to the largely ignored or barely mentioned unprecedented in size and breath pro-Palestinian antiwar mass actions over the past five weeks, the Zionist-backed event was widely covered by the corporate media.

Organizers claimed that 200,000 attended from across the country; others put the numbers at closer to 50,000, perhaps 100,000.

The rally had the informal imprimatur of the U.S. government. Senate Democratic Party Leader Chuck Schumer was a featured rally speaker representing President Joseph Biden. Schumer reiterated to cheers that the whole U.S. government was completely backing Israel’s war.

Also speaking was the new House Republican speaker and Donald Trump supporter, Mike Johnson.

A big contingent from Christian white nationalist evangelicals was also present and notably the Zionist rightest anti-Semite, anti-LGBTQI Christian Pastor, John Hagee, who was a prominently featured speaker. 

John Hagee

Like other white nationalists, Hagee and his ilk play on the fears of many whites that they are being “replaced” by Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, and others in movements financed behind the scenes by Jews.

The white Christian nationalists add their special viewpoint that Zionism is right, and Jews should leave America and “return” to Israel in order to fulfill the biblical prophecy of the return of Jesus.

Two days after the pro-Israeli war rally, Democracy Now! discussed Mike Johnson’s history and politics as well as Hagee’s, who once said “God sent Hitler to help Jews reach the Promised Land.”

Of course, Hagee didn’t repeat that or similar arguments at the rally, but he did blurt out things like “As Prime Minister Netanyahu says so well, this is a fight between light and darkness, between civilization and barbarism.”

Sarah Posner, author of How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind, was on the Democracy Now! program.

She explained that Hagee only talks about his total support for Israel to gatherings like the November 14 rally, but before churches he says “according to biblical prophecy, that one day Jesus will return and fight a very bloody battle [in Israel], which will result in Jews, and Muslim’s too, either converting to Christianity or dying” and Jesus will rule the world.

Democracy Now!’s co-host, Juan Gonzalez asked her, “What does Israel and its staunchest defenders get from this alliance?”

Posner responded: “What Israelis and American Jews who embrace Hagee’s support get is a huge movement, much larger than the number of Jewish Americans, that has the ear of the Republican Party, that is enmeshed in the Republican Party.

“Hagee’s organization, Christians United for Israel (CUFI),” Posner continued, “has juice on Capitol Hill.  It is more than that. It is common among [white] evangelicals, even if they are not members of CUFI, to share these ideas about Israel and Bible prophecy and the return of Jesus. What they do is they bring this huge constituency to Republicans, many of whom, like Speaker Johnson, believe all this themselves.

“They have morphed together this idea of supporting Israel with being a good American Christian. They believe that God has commanded America as a country, not just them as Americans, to support Israel.”

And Posner concluded: “In their minds supporting Israel involves supporting the occupation, supporting the Israeli military no matter what it does. It doesn’t mean supporting Israel from the standpoint that some day, Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace. That is not part of the equation.”

Democracy Now!’s host, Amy Goodman, then said “I want to play another clip. In 2008 John McCain [Republican candidate for President] rejected John Hagee’s endorsement, after the pastor said God sent Hitler to help Jews get to Israel.

“This is a clip from Hagee’s sermon: ‘Then God sent a hunter. A hunter is someone who comes with a gun, and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter.’’’

Posner said in more recent statements [Hagee] “is saying that God has punished Jews throughout history as part of his plan to get them to return to Israel, which is a pre-condition of Jesus’ return.”

Speaker Mike Johnson’s reactionary background

The new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, worked for an organization now called Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). “It’s a major Christian right legal organization that sees itself as a Christian counterweight to the ACLU,” Posner told Democracy Now! “It is behind many Supreme Court cases, including Dobbs, which overturned Roe v. Wade; and Masterpiece Cakeshop, involving the anti-gay baker [who refused to serve same sex couples].”

Posner had interviewed Johnson in 2007, when “he laid out for me the organization’s ambition to eviscerate the separation of church and state at the Supreme Court and to create a legal framework in which conservative Christians could object to things like LGBTQ rights in the name of religious freedom.

“Everything he said to me back in 2007, ADF has pretty much done and accomplished or is well on its way to accomplishing — undermining church-state separation, elevating religious freedom to conservative Christians who oppose LGBTQ and reproductive rights….

“He also believes that God created civil government and that government should be run from what Christian nationalists would call a biblical worldview. So his entire ideology and framework and way of looking at the world, in particular, are very classic, to the T, of the right, of Christian nationalists … believing that their biblical worldview is what should dictate law and policy in the United States.”

Christian Zionists are both anti-Semitic and pro-Israel. They want Jews to get out of the United States, their anti-Semitism — and by going to Israel, their Zionism.

Zionism’s reactionary origins

To better understand this connection, a brief overview of the history of the connection between Zionism and anti-Semitism helps. An article by Joseph Massad, Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History that appeared on Al Jazeera provides a sketch.

While there were some Zionists in Europe in the 19th century, Theodore Herzl is recognized as the founder and of what became modern Zionism, in reaction to anti-Semitism in the European Christian nations.

He led the creation of the Zionist Organization (now World Zionist Organization) at a conference of European Zionist groups in Basel, Switzerland in 1897.

He and his followers insisted that it is the presence of Jews in these countries that caused anti-Semitism, and that the solution was for the Jews to leave Europe and form their own nation.

He said in his foundational pamphlet, written in 1896, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), “The governments of all countries scourged by anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want.”

Herzl said in his Diaries that “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.”

In its early years, Zionism would invoke, along with the Protestant millenarian Christians, that European Jews were linked historically to Palestine to which they should “return” to re-establish Biblical Israel.

The Zionists understood this could only be realized through a settler-colonial project, which could be achieved through an alliance with European colonial powers. The Arab people who already lived there would have to be driven out. One of these colonial powers was Great Britain.

The 1917 Balfour Declaration

In 1905, there was a revolution in Russia. When it was defeated, there were mass pogroms against Jews organized by the Tsarist regime. At the time, Arthur Balfour, a well-known anti-Semite, was Prime Minister of Great Britain. He sponsored the Aliens Act that prevented Jews fleeing the pogroms from entering the country.

Balfour was the Foreign Secretary of the British government during the First World War. In 1917, as the war came to an end, Britain was set to take over Palestine from the defeated Ottoman Empire. The Balfour Declaration was issued by the British government. It advocated the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and the Zionists embraced him.

When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, the Zionists, sharing Herzl’s understanding that an anti-Semitic state could become an ally of Zionism, were the only Jewish group that would collaborate with them — all other German Jews recognized the Nazis as the Jews’ bitterest enemy.

Zionists saw an opportunity to strengthen colonization of Palestine. In 1933, Zionists signed the Transfer Agreement with the Nazis. Under it, Germany would compensate German Jews who emigrated to Palestine for their lost property by exporting German goods to the Zionists there.

Between 1933 and 1939, 60 percent of all capital invested for Jews in Palestine came from German Jewish money brought in under the Transfer Agreement.

German Zionists supported Nazi anti-Semitic laws

In 1935, the German branch of Zionism supported the Nazi anti-Semitic and racist Nuremberg Laws, and was the only non-Nazi party still allowed to publish its own newspaper, the Rundschau.

Nazi officials visited Palestine as guests of the Zionists in 1934 and in 1937. In the later year, it was none other than Adolf Eichmann, who became a major architect of the Holocaust, who was among those who arrived in the country, and visited a Jewish colonial settlement. Eichmann was found and brought to Israel in 1961, where he was hung for his crimes.

In 1938, the Nazis organized a pogrom of Jews across Germany, known as Kristalnacht, Crystal Night — the “night of broken glass” for the destruction of Jewish property. All Jews, including the Zionists, were targeted, and the German Zionists were crushed.

The defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War, and the horrors of the Holocaust, put an end to anti-Semitic regimes in Europe. But not an end to collaboration between Zionism and anti-Semites, as was seen on the stage of the pro-Israeli war mobilization in Washington November 14.

Formation of the Zionist state in 1948

With the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, Britain ruled Palestine from 1918 until 1947. Britain was one of the Western victors of the Second World War, and was instrumental in forming a Jewish state in Palestine in 1948, backed by the other Western imperialist powers, including the United States. Stalin’s Russia also voted for the UN’s 1948 partition of historic Palestine that granted 52 percent to the Zionist colonizers, of course, against the wishes of the dispossessed Palestinians and virtually all of the region’s Arab nations. British arms were turned over to the Zionist’s already formidable military apparatus. 

The main countries which backed Israel’s formation were colonial Britain and France. Later the United States took on that role. Western imperialism, led by the U.S., backed Israel economically and militarily in all its wars with the Arab countries and the Palestinians from 1948 onward up to today, as a bulwark against the Arab anti-colonial struggle, and against the Soviet Union which supported that struggle (how effectively is another question).

Zionism, from its inception, could and can only achieve its goals by relying on imperialism, as Herzl understood. Until World War II Zionism was a minor and reactionary current among persecuted Jews worldwide. Vast numbers stood in solidarity with revolutionary socialist currents everywhere, including in the 1917 Russian Revolution that overthrew Czarism and capitalism and formally abolished all their anti-Semitic laws and practices. Indeed, Russian Jews were among the central leaders of the Great Russian Revolution of 1917.

That today’s twin parties of US imperialism effectively back a screaming reactionary pro-war Zionist rally in Washington stands in sharp contrast to the inspiring antiwar mobilizations that have been organized around the world. Tens of millions, if not billions of humanity’s best, today rally in unprecedented numbers against the US-backed Zionist genocide in Gaza. The U.S. and its imperialist government allies stand isolated and exposed everywhere.

The world demands an immediate CEASEFIRE and an end to the GENOCIDE while the U.S. Congress votes additional billions to replenish Israel’s undeniable weapons of mass destruction, including its U.S.-supplied bunker buster bombs, the largest non-nuclear weapons on earth. And now Zionism’s “leaders” openly talk of using nuclear weapons!

End All Aid to US-backed Apartheid Israel!

To the Streets!

Ceasefire now!

For the Right to Resist!

Free Palestine From The River to the Sea! For a Democratic, Secular Palestine with the Right of Return of All Dispossessed Palestinians! For a Socialist Palestine Where All Can Live Together As Equals!

3547. Biden Senate Speech on Israel and the United States

 

By Senator Joseph Biden, 1986

In his Senate floor speech, Joseph Biden call the $3 billion a year giveaway to Israel the best U.S. investment and proclaims if Israel did not exist, the United States had to invet it! 

3546. Pierre Bourdieu: The Forms of Capital

By Pierre Bourdieu, In J. Richardson (Ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, 241-258, 1986

Pierre Bourdieu

The social world is accumulated history, and if it is not to be reduced to a discontinuous series of instantaneous mechanical equilibria between agents who are treated as interchangeable particles, one must reintroduce into it the notion of capital and with it, accumulation and all its effects. Capital is accumulated labor (in its materialized form or its ‘incorporated,’ embodied form) which, when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor. It is a vis insita, a force inscribed in objective or subjective structures, but it is also a lex insita, the principle underlying the immanent regularities of the social world. It is what makes the games of society – not least, the economic game – something other than simple games of chance offering at every moment the possibility of a miracle. Roulette, which holds out the opportunity of winning a lot of money in a short space of time, and therefore of changing one’s social status quasi-instantaneously, and in which the winning of the previous spin of the wheel can be staked and lost at every new spin, gives a fairly accurate image of this imaginary universe of perfect competition or perfect equality of opportunity, a world without inertia, without accumulation, without heredity or acquired properties, in which every moment is perfectly independent of the previous one, every soldier has a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, and every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything. Capital, which, in its objectified or embodied forms, takes time to accumulate and which, as a potential capacity to produce profits and to reproduce itself in identical or expanded form, contains a tendency to persist in its being, is a force inscribed in the objectivity of things so that everything is not equally possible or impossible.^[1] And the structure of the distribution of the different types and subtypes of capital at a given moment in time represents the immanent structure of the social world, i.e. , the set of constraints, inscribed in the very reality of that world, which govern its functioning in a durable way, determining the chances of success for practices.

It is in fact impossible to account for the structure and functioning of the social world unless one reintroduces capital in all its forms and not solely in the one form recognized by economic theory. Economic theory has allowed to be foisted upon it a definition of the economy of practices which is the historical invention of capitalism; and by reducing the universe of exchanges to mercantile exchange, which is objectively and subjectively oriented toward the maximization of profit, i.e., (economically) self-interested, it has implicitly defined the other forms of exchange as noneconomic, and therefore disinterested. In particular, it defines as disinterested those forms of exchange which ensure the transubstantiation whereby the most material types of capital – those which are economic in the restricted sense – can present themselves in the immaterial form of cultural capital or social capital and vice versa. Interest, in the restricted sense it is given in economic theory, cannot be produced without producing its negative counterpart, disinterestedness. The class of practices whose explicit purpose is to maximize monetary profit cannot be defined as such without producing the purposeless finality of cultural or artistic practices and their products; the world of bourgeois man, with his double-entry accounting, cannot be invented without producing the pure, perfect universe of the artist and the intellectual and the gratuitous activities of art-for-art’s sake and pure theory. In other words, the constitution of a science of mercantile relationships which, inasmuch as it takes for granted the very foundations of the order it claims to analyze – private property, profit, wage labor, etc. – is not even a science of the field of economic production, has prevented the constitution of a general science of the economy of practices, which would treat mercantile exchange as a particular case of exchange in all its forms.

It is remarkable that the practices and assets thus salvaged from the ‘icy water of egotistical calculation’ (and from science) are the virtual monopoly of the dominant class – as if economism had been able to reduce everything to economics only because the reduction on which that discipline is based protects from sacrilegious reduction everything which needs to be protected. If economics deals only with practices that have narrowly economic interest as their principle and only with goods that are directly and immediately convertible into money (which makes them quantifiable), then the universe of bourgeois production and exchange becomes an exception and can see itself and present itself as a realm of disinterestedness. As everyone knows, priceless things have their price, and the extreme difficulty of converting certain practices and certain objects into money is only due to the fact that this conversion is refused in the very intention that produces them, which is nothing other than the denial (Verneinung) of the economy. A general science of the economy of practices, capable of reappropriating the totality of the practices which, although objectively economic, are not and cannot be socially recognized as economic, and which can be performed only at the cost of a whole labor of dissimulation or, more precisely, euphemization, must endeavor to grasp capital and profit in all their forms and to establish the laws whereby the different types of capital (or power, which amounts to the same thing) change into one another.^[2]

Depending on the field in which it functions, and at the cost of the more or less expensive transformations which are the precondition for its efficacy in the field in question, capital can present itself in three fundamental guises: as economic capital, which is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the forms of property rights; as cultural capital, which is convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the forms of educational qualifications; and as social capital, made up of social obligations (‘connections’), which is convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the forms of a title of nobility.^[3]

CULTURAL CAPITAL

Cultural capital can exist in three forms: in the embodied state, i.e., in the form of long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body; in the objectified state, in the form of cultural goods (pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, machines, etc.), which are the trace or realization of theories or critiques of these theories, problematics, etc.; and in the institutionalized state, a form of objectification which must be set apart because, as will be seen in the case of educational qualifications, it confers entirely original properties on the cultural capital which it is presumed to guarantee.

The reader should not be misled by the somewhat peremptory air which the effort at axiomization may give to my argument.^[4] The notion of cultural capital initially presented itself to me, in the course of research, as a theoretical hypothesis which made it possible to explain the unequal scholastic achievement of children originating from the different social classes by relating academic success, i.e., the specific profits which children from the different classes and class fractions can obtain in the academic market, to the distribution of cultural capital between the classes and class fractions. This starting point implies a break with the presuppositions inherent both in the commonsense view, which sees academic success or failure as an effect of natural aptitudes, and in human capital theories. Economists might seem to deserve credit for explicitly raising the question of the relationship between the rates of profit on educational investment and on economic investment (and its evolution). But their measurement of the yield from scholastic investment takes account only of monetary investments and profits, or those directly convertible into money, such as the costs of schooling and the cash equivalent of time devoted to study; they are unable to explain the different proportions of their resources which different agents or different social classes allocate to economic investment and cultural investment because they fail to take systematic account of the structure of the differential chances of profit which the various markets offer these agents or classes as a function of the volume and the composition of their assets (see esp. Becker 1964b). Furthermore, because they neglect to relate scholastic investment strategies to the whole set of educational strategies and to the system of reproduction strategies, they inevitably, by a necessary paradox, let slip the best hidden and socially most determinant educational investment, namely, the domestic transmission of cultural capital. Their studies of the relationship between academic ability and academic investment show that they are unaware that ability or talent is itself the product of an investment of time and cultural capital (Becker 1964a, p. 63-66). Not surprisingly, when endeavoring to evaluate the profits of scholastic investment, they can only consider the profitability of educational expenditure for society as a whole, the ‘social rate of return,’ or the ‘social gain of education as measured by its effects on national productivity’ (Becker 1964b, pp. 121, 155). This typically functionalist definition of the functions of education ignores the contribution which the educational system makes to the reproduction of the social structure by sanctioning the hereditary transmission of cultural capital. From the very beginning, a definition of human capital, despite its humanistic connotations, does not move beyond economism and ignores, inter alia, the fact that the scholastic yield from educational action depends on the cultural capital previously invested by the family. Moreover, the economic and social yield of the educational qualification depends on the social capital, again inherited, which can be used to back it up.

The Embodied State

Most of the properties of cultural capital can be deduced from the fact that, in its fundamental state, it is linked to the body and presupposes embodiment. The accumulation of cultural capital in the embodied state, i.e., in the form of what is called culture, cultivation, Bildung, presupposes a process of embodiment, incorporation, which, insofar as it implies a labor of inculcation and assimilation, costs time, time which must be invested personally by the investor. Like the acquisition of a muscular physique or a suntan, it cannot be done at second hand (so that all effects of delegation are ruled out).

The work of acquisition is work on oneself (self-improvement), an effort that presupposes a personal cost (on paie de sa personne, as we say in French), an investment, above all of time, but also of that socially constituted form of libido, libido sciendi, with all the privation, renunciation, and sacrifice that it may entail. It follows that the least inexact of all the measurements of cultural capital are those which take as their standard the length of acquisition – so long, of course, as this is not reduced to length of schooling and allowance is made for early domestic education by giving it a positive value (a gain in time, a head start) or a negative value (wasted time, and doubly so because more time must be spent correcting its effects), according to its distance from the demands of the scholastic market.^[5]

This embodied capital, external wealth converted into an integral part of the person, into a habitus, cannot be transmitted instantaneously (unlike money, property rights, or even titles of nobility) by gift or bequest, purchase or exchange. It follows that the use or exploitation of cultural capital presents particular problems for the holders of economic or political capital, whether they be private patrons or, at the other extreme, entrepreneurs employing executives endowed with a specific cultural competence (not to mention the new state patrons). How can this capital, so closely linked to the person, be bought without buying the person and so losing the very effect of legitimation which presupposes the dissimulation of dependence? How can this capital be concentrated-as some undertakings demand-without concentrating the possessors of the capital, which can have all sorts of unwanted consequences?

Cultural capital can be acquired, to a varying extent, depending on the period, the society, and the social class, in the absence of any deliberate inculcation, and therefore quite unconsciously. It always remains marked by its earliest conditions of acquisition which, through the more or less visible marks they leave (such as the pronunciations characteristic of a class or region), help to determine its distinctive value. It cannot be accumulated beyond the appropriating capacities of an individual agent; it declines and dies with its bearer (with his biological capacity, his memory, etc.). Because it is thus linked in numerous ways to the person in his biological singularity and is subject to a hereditary transmission which is always heavily disguised, or even invisible, it defies the old, deep-rooted distinction the Greek jurists made between inherited properties (ta patroa) and acquired properties (epikteta), i.e., those which an individual adds to his heritage. It thus manages to combine the prestige of innate property with the merits of acquisition. Because the social conditions of its transmission and acquisition are more disguised than those of economic capital, it is predisposed to function as symbolic capital, i.e., to be unrecognized as capital and recognized as legitimate competence, as authority exerting an effect of (mis)recognition, e.g., in the matrimonial market and in all the markets in which economic capital is not fully recognized, whether in matters of culture, with the great art collections or great cultural foundations, or in social welfare, with the economy of generosity and the gift. Furthermore, the specifically symbolic logic of distinction additionally secures material and symbolic profits for the possessors of a large cultural capital: any given cultural competence (e.g., being able to read in a world of illiterates) derives a scarcity value from its position in the distribution of cultural capital and yields profits of distinction for its owner. In other words, the share in profits which scarce cultural capital secures in class-divided societies is based, in the last analysis, on the fact that all agents do not have the economic and cultural means for prolonging their children’s education beyond the minimum necessary for the reproduction of the labor-power least valorized at a given moment.^[6]

Thus the capital, in the sense of the means of appropriating the product of accumulated labor in the objectified state which is held by a given agent, depends for its real efficacy on the form of the distribution of the means of appropriating the accumulated and objectively available resources; and the relationship of appropriation between an agent and the resources objectively available, and hence the profits they produce, is mediated by the relationship of (objective and/or subjective) competition between himself and the other possessors of capital competing for the same goods, in which scarcity – and through it social value – is generated. The structure of the field, i.e., the unequal distribution of capital, is the source of the specific effects of capital, i.e., the appropriation of profits and the power to impose the laws of functioning of the field most favorable to capital and its reproduction.

But the most powerful principle of the symbolic efficacy of cultural capital no doubt lies in the logic of its transmission. On the one hand, the process of appropriating objectified cultural capital and the time necessary for it to take place mainly depend on the cultural capital embodied in the whole family – through (among other things) the generalized Arrow effect and all forms of implicit transmission.^[7] On the other hand, the initial accumulation of cultural capital, the precondition for the fast, easy accumulation of every kind of useful cultural capital, starts at the outset, without delay, without wasted time, only for the offspring of families endowed with strong cultural capital; in this case, the accumulation period covers the whole period of socialization. It follows that the transmission of cultural capital is no doubt the best hidden form of hereditary transmission of capital, and it therefore receives proportionately greater weight in the system of reproduction strategies, as the direct, visible forms of trans- mission tend to be more strongly censored and controlled.

It can immediately be seen that the link between economic and cultural capital is established through the mediation of the time needed for acquisition. Differences in the cultural capital possessed by the family imply differences first in the age at which the work of transmission and accumulation begins-the limiting case being full use of the time biologically available, with the maximum free time being harnessed to maximum cultural capital – and then in the capacity, thus defined, to satisfy the specifically cultural demands of a prolonged process of acquisition. Furthermore, and in correlation with this, the length of time for which a given individual can prolong his acquisition process depends on the length of time for which his family can provide him with the free time, i.e., time free from economic necessity, which is the precondition for the initial accumulation (time which can be evaluated as a handicap to be made up).

Cultural capital, in the objectified state, has a number of properties which are defined only in the relationship with cultural capital in its embodied form. The cultural capital objectified in material objects and media, such as writings, paintings, monuments, instruments, etc., is transmissible in its materiality. A collection of paintings, for example, can be transmitted as well as economic capital (if not better, because the capital transfer is more disguised). But what is transmissible is legal ownership and not (or not necessarily) what constitutes the precondition for specific appropriation, namely, the possession of the means of ‘consuming’ a painting or using a machine, which, being nothing other than embodied capital, are subject to the same laws of transmission.^[8]

The Objectified State

Thus cultural goods can be appropriated both materially – which presupposes economic capital – and symbolically – which presupposes cultural capital. It follows that the owner of the means of production must find a way of appropriating either the embodied capital which is the precondition of specific appropriation or the services of the holders of this capital. To possess the machines, he only needs economic capital; to appropriate them and use them in accordance with their specific purpose (defined by the cultural capital, of scientific or technical type, incorporated in them), he must have access to embodied cultural capital, either in person or by proxy. This is no doubt the basis of the ambiguous status of cadres (executives and engineers). If it is emphasized that they are not the possessors (in the strictly economic sense) of the means of production which they use, and that they derive profit from their own cultural capital only by selling the services and products which it makes possible, then they will be classified among the dominated groups; if it is emphasized that they draw their profits from the use of a particular form of capital, then they will be classified among the dominant groups. Everything suggests that as the cultural capital incorporated in the means of production increases (and with it the period of embodiment needed to acquire the means of appropriating it), so the collective strength of the holders of cultural capital would tend to increase – if the holders of the dominant type of capital (economic capital) were not able to set the holders of cultural capital in competition with one another. (They are, moreover, inclined to competition by the very conditions in which they are selected and trained, in particular by the logic of scholastic and recruitment competitions.)

Cultural capital in its objectified state presents itself with all the appearances of an autonomous, coherent universe which, although the product of historical action, has its own laws, transcending individual wills, and which, as the example of language well illustrates, therefore remains irreducible to that which each agent, or even the aggregate of the agents, can appropriate (i.e., to the cultural capital embodied in each agent or even in the aggregate of the agents). However, it should not be forgotten that it exists as symbolically and materially active, effective capital only insofar as it is appropriated by agents and implemented and invested as a weapon and a stake in the struggles which go on in the fields of cultural production (the artistic field, the scientific field, etc.) and, beyond them, in the field of the social classes – struggles in which the agents wield strengths and obtain profits proportionate to their mastery of this objectified capital, and therefore to the extent of their embodied capital.^[9]

The Institutionalized State

The objectification of cultural capital in the form of academic qualifications is one way of neutralizing some of the properties it derives from the fact that, being embodied, it has the same biological limits as its bearer. This objectification is what makes the difference between the capital of the autodidact, which may be called into question at any time, or even the cultural capital of the courtier, which can yield only ill-defined profits, of fluctuating value, in the market of high-society exchanges, and the cultural capital academically sanctioned by legally guaranteed qualifications, formally independent of the person of their bearer. With the academic qualification, a certificate of cultural competence which confers on its holder a conventional, constant, legally guaranteed value with respect to culture, social alchemy produces a form of cultural capital which has a relative autonomy vis-à-vis its bearer and even vis-à-vis the cultural capital he effectively possesses at a given moment in time. It institutes cultural capital by collective magic, just as, according to Merleau-Ponty, the living institute their dead through the ritual of mourning. One has only to think of the concours (competitive recruitment examination) which, out of the continuum of infinitesimal differences between performances, produces sharp, absolute, lasting differences, such as that which separates the last successful candidate from the first unsuccessful one, and institutes an essential difference between the officially recognized, guaranteed competence and simple cultural capital, which is constantly required to prove itself. In this case, one sees clearly the performative magic of the power of instituting, the power to show forth and secure belief or, in a word, to impose recognition.

By conferring institutional recognition on the cultural capital possessed by any given agent, the academic qualification also makes it possible to compare qualification holders and even to exchange them (by substituting one for another in succession). Furthermore, it makes it possible to establish conversion rates between cultural capital and economic capital by guaranteeing the monetary value of a given academic capital.^[10] This product of the conversion of economic capital into cultural capital establishes the value, in terms of cultural capital, of the holder of a given qualification relative to other qualification holders and, by the same token, the monetary value for which it can be exchanged on the labor market (academic investment has no meaning unless a minimum degree of reversibility of the conversion it implies is objectively guaranteed). Because the material and symbolic profits which the academic qualification guarantees also depend on its scarcity, the investments made (in time and effort) may turn out to be less profitable than was anticipated when they were made (there having been a de facto change in the conversion rate between academic capital and economic capital). The strategies for converting economic capital into cultural capital, which are among the short-term factors of the schooling explosion and the inflation of qualifications, are governed by changes in the structure of the chances of profit offered by the different types of capital.

SOCIAL CAPITAL

Social capital is the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition – or in other words, to membership in a group^[11] – which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectivity-owned capital, a ‘credential’ which entitles them to credit, in the various senses of the word. These relationships may exist only in the practical state, in material and/or symbolic exchanges which help to maintain them. They may also be socially instituted and guaranteed by the application of a common name (the name of a family, a class, or a tribe or of a school, a party, etc.) and by a whole set of instituting acts designed simultaneously to form and inform those who undergo them; in this case, they are more or less really enacted and so maintained and reinforced, in exchanges. Being based on indissolubly material and symbolic exchanges, the establishment and maintenance of which presuppose reacknowledgment of proximity, they are also partially irreducible to objective relations of proximity in physical (geographical) space or even in economic and social space.^[12]

The volume of the social capital possessed by a given agent thus depends on the size of the network of connections he can effectively mobilize and on the volume of the capital (economic, cultural or symbolic) possessed in his own right by each of those to whom he is connected.^[13] This means that, although it is relatively irreducible to the economic and cultural capital possessed by a given agent, or even by the whole set of agents to whom he is connected, social capital is never completely independent of it because the exchanges instituting mutual acknowledgment presuppose the reacknowledgment of a minimum of objective homogeneity, and because it exerts a multiplier effect on the capital he possesses in his own right.

The profits which accrue from membership in a group are the basis of the solidarity which makes them possible.^[14] This does not mean that they are consciously pursued as such, even in the case of groups like select clubs, which are deliberately organized in order to concentrate social capital and so to derive full benefit from the multiplier effect implied in concentration and to secure the profits of membership – material profits, such as all the types of services accruing from useful relationships, and symbolic profits, such as those derived from association with a rare, prestigious group.

The existence of a network of connections is not a natural given, or even a social given, constituted once and for all by an initial act of institution, represented, in the case of the family group, by the genealogical definition of kinship relations, which is the characteristic of a social formation. It is the product of an endless effort at institution, of which institution rites – often wrongly described as rites of passage – mark the essential moments and which is necessary in order to produce and reproduce lasting, useful relationships that can secure material or symbolic profits (see Bourdieu 1982). In other words, the network of relationships is the product of investment strategies, individual or collective, consciously or unconsciously aimed at establishing or reproducing social relationships that are directly usable in the short or long term, i.e., at transforming contingent relations, such as those of neighborhood, the workplace, or even kinship, into relationships that are at once necessary and elective, implying durable obligations subjectively felt (feelings of gratitude, respect, friendship, etc.) or institutionally guaranteed (rights). This is done through the alchemy of consecration, the symbolic constitution produced by social institution (institution as a relative – brother, sister, cousin, etc. – or as a knight, an heir, an elder, etc.) and endlessly reproduced in and through the exchange (of gifts, words, women, etc.) which it encourages and which presupposes and produces mutual knowledge and recognition. Exchange transforms the things exchanged into signs of recognition and, through the mutual recognition and the recognition of group membership which it implies, reproduces the group. By the same token, it reaffirms the limits of the group, i.e., the limits beyond which the constitutive exchange – trade, commensality, or marriage – cannot take place. Each member of the group is thus instituted as a custodian of the limits of the group: because the definition of the criteria of entry is at stake in each new entry, he can modify the group by modifying the limits of legitimate exchange through some form of misalliance. It is quite logical that, in most societies, the preparation and conclusion of marriages should be the business of the whole group, and not of the agents directly concerned. Through the introduction of new members into a family, a clan, or a club, the whole definition of the group, i.e., its fines, its boundaries, and its identity, is put at stake, exposed to redefinition, alteration, adulteration. When, as in modern societies, families lose the monopoly of the establishment of exchanges which can lead to lasting relationships, whether socially sanctioned (like marriage) or not, they may continue to control these exchanges, while remaining within the logic of laissez-faire, through all the institutions which are designed to favor legitimate exchanges and exclude illegitimate ones by producing occasions (rallies, cruises, hunts, parties, receptions, etc.), places (smart neighborhoods, select schools, clubs, etc.), or practices (smart sports, parlor games, cultural ceremonies, etc.) which bring together, in a seemingly fortuitous way, individuals as homogeneous as possible in all the pertinent respects in terms of the existence and persistence of the group.

The reproduction of social capital presupposes an unceasing effort of sociability, a continuous series of exchanges in which recognition is endlessly affirmed and reaffirmed. This work, which implies expenditure of time and energy and so, directly or indirectly, of economic capital, is not profitable or even conceivable unless one invests in it a specific competence (knowledge of genealogical relationships and of real connections and skill at using them, etc.) and an acquired disposition to acquire and maintain this competence, which are themselves integral parts of this capital.^[15] This is one of the factors which explain why the profitability of this labor of accumulating and maintaining social capital rises in proportion to the size of the capital. Because the social capital accruing from a relationship is that much greater to the extent that the person who is the object of it is richly endowed with capital (mainly social, but also cultural and even economic capital), the possessors of an inherited social capital, symbolized by a great name, are able to transform all circumstantial relationships into lasting connections. They are sought after for their social capital and, because they are well known, are worthy of being known (‘I know him well’); they do not need to ‘make the acquaintance’ of all their ‘acquaintances’; they are known to more people than they know, and their work of sociability, when it is exerted, is highly productive.

Every group has its more or less institutionalized forms of delegation which enable it to concentrate the totality of the social capital, which is the basis of the existence of the group (a family or a nation, of course, but also an association or a party), in the hands of a single agent or a small group of agents and to mandate this plenipotentiary, charged with plena potestas agendi et loquendi,^[16] to represent the group, to speak and act in its name and so, with the aid of this collectively owned capital, to exercise a power incommensurate with the agent’s personal contribution. Thus, at the most elementary degree of institutionalization, the head of the family, the pater familias, the eldest, most senior member, is tacitly recognized as the only person entitled to speak on behalf of the family group in all official circumstances. But whereas in this case, diffuse delegation requires the great to step forward and defend the collective honor when the honor of the weakest members is threatened. The institutionalized delegation, which ensures the concentration of social capital, also has the effect of limiting the consequences of individual lapses by explicitly delimiting responsibilities and authorizing the recognized spokesmen to shield the group as a whole from discredit by expelling or excommunicating the embarrassing individuals.

If the internal competition for the monopoly of legitimate representation of the group is not to threaten the conservation and accumulation of the capital which is the basis of the group, the members of the group must regulate the conditions of access to the right to declare oneself a member of the group and, above all, to set oneself up as a representative (delegate, plenipotentiary, spokesman, etc.) of the whole group, thereby committing the social capital of the whole group. The title of nobility is the form par excellence of the institutionalized social capital which guarantees a particular form of social relationship in a lasting way. One of the paradoxes of delegation is that the mandated agent can exert on (and, up to a point, against) the group the power which the group enables him to concentrate. (This is perhaps especially true in the limiting cases in which the mandated agent creates the group which creates him but which only exists through him.) The mechanisms of delegation and representation (in both the theatrical and the legal senses) which fall into place – that much more strongly, no doubt, when the group is large and its members weak – as one of the conditions for the concentration of social capital (among other reasons, because it enables numerous, varied, scattered agents to act as one man and to overcome the limitations of space and time) also contain the seeds of an embezzlement or misappropriation of the capital which they assemble.

This embezzlement is latent in the fact that a group as a whole can be represented, in the various meanings of the word, by a subgroup, clearly delimited and perfectly visible to all, known to all, and recognized by all, that of the nobiles, the ‘people who are known,’ the paradigm of whom is the nobility, and who may speak on behalf of the whole group, represent the whole group, and exercise authority in the name of the whole group. The noble is the group personified. He bears the name of the group to which he gives his name (the metonymy which links the noble to his group is clearly seen when Shakespeare calls Cleopatra ‘Egypt’ or the King of France ‘France,’ just as Racine calls Pyrrhus ‘Epirus’). It is by him, his name, the difference it proclaims, that the members of his group, the liegemen, and also the land and castles, are known and recognized. Similarly, phenomena such as the ‘personality cult’ or the identification of parties, trade unions, or movements with their leader are latent in the very logic of representation. Everything combines to cause the signifier to take the place of the signified, the spokesmen that of the group he is supposed to express, not least because his distinction, his ‘outstandingness,’ his visibility constitute the essential part, if not the essence, of this power, which, being entirely set within the logic of knowledge and acknowledgment, is fundamentally a symbolic power; but also because the representative, the sign, the emblem, may be, and create, the whole reality of groups which receive effective social existence only in and through representation.^[17]

CONVERSIONS

The different types of capital can be derived from economic capital, but only at the cost of a more or less great effort of transformation, which is needed to produce the type of power effective in the field in question. For example, there are some goods and services to which economic capital gives immediate access, without secondary costs; others can be obtained only by virtue of a social capital of relationships (or social obligations) which cannot act instantaneously, at the appropriate moment, unless they have been established and maintained for a long time, as if for their own sake, and therefore outside their period of use, i.e., at the cost of an investment in sociability which is necessarily long-term because the time lag is one of the factors of the transmutation of a pure and simple debt into that recognition of nonspecific indebtedness which is called gratitude.^[18] In contrast to the cynical but also economical transparency of economic exchange, in which equivalents change hands in the same instant, the essential ambiguity of social exchange, which presupposes misrecognition, in other words, a form of faith and of bad faith (in the sense of self-deception), presupposes a much more subtle economy of time.

So it has to be posited simultaneously that economic capital is at the root of all the other types of capital and that these transformed, disguised forms of economic capital, never entirely reducible to that definition, produce their most specific effects only to the extent that they conceal (not least from their possessors) the fact that economic capital is at their root, in other words – but only in the last analysis – at the root of their effects. The real logic of the functioning of capital, the conversions from one type to another, and the law of conservation which governs them cannot be understood unless two opposing but equally partial views are superseded: on the one hand, economism, which, on the grounds that every type of capital is reducible in the last analysis to economic capital, ignores what makes the specific efficacy of the other types of capital, and on the other hand, semiologism (nowadays represented by structuralism, symbolic interactionism, or ethnomethodology), which reduces social exchanges to phenomena of communication and ignores the brutal fact of universal reducibility to economics.^[19]

In accordance with a principle which is the equivalent of the principle of the conservation of energy, profits in one area are necessarily paid for by costs in another (so that a concept like wastage has no meaning in a general science of the economy of practices). The universal equivalent, the measure of all equivalences, is nothing other than labor-time (in the widest sense); and the conservation of social energy through all its conversions is verified if, in each case, one takes into account both the labor-time accumulated in the form of capital and the labor-time needed to transform it from one type into another.

It has been seen, for example, that the transformation of economic capital into social capital presupposes a specific labor, i.e., an apparently gratuitous expenditure of time, attention, care, concern, which, as is seen in the endeavor to personalize a gift, has the effect of transfiguring the purely monetary import of the exchange and, by the same token, the very meaning of the exchange. From a narrowly economic standpoint, this effort is bound to be seen as pure wastage, but in the terms of the logic of social exchanges, it is a solid investment, the profits of which will appear, in the long run, in monetary or other form. Similarly, if the best measure of cultural capital is undoubtedly the amount of time devoted to acquiring it, this is because the transformation of economic capital into cultural capital presupposes an expenditure of time that is made possible by possession of economic capital. More precisely, it is because the cultural capital that is effectively transmitted within the family itself depends not only on the quantity of cultural capital, itself accumulated by spending time, that the domestic group possess, but also on the usable time (particularly in the form of the mother’s free time) available to it (by virtue of its economic capital, which enables it to purchase the time of others) to ensure the transmission of this capital and to delay entry into the labor market through prolonged schooling, a credit which pays off, if at all, only in the very long term.^[20]

The convertibility of the different types of capital is the basis of the strategies aimed at ensuring the reproduction of capital (and the position occupied in social space) by means of the conversions least costly in terms of conversion work and of the losses inherent in the conversion itself (in a given state of the social power relations). The different types of capital can be distinguished according to their reproducibility or, more precisely, according to how easily they are transmitted, i.e., with more or less loss and with more or less concealment; the rate of loss and the degree of concealment tend to vary in inverse ratio. Everything which helps to disguise the economic aspect also tends to increase the risk of loss (particularly the intergenerational transfers). Thus the (apparent) incommensurability of the different types of capital introduces a high degree of uncertainty into all transactions between holders of different types. Similarly, the declared refusal of calculation and of guarantees which characterizes exchanges tending to produce a social capital in the form of a capital of obligations that are usable in the more or less long term (exchanges of gifts, services, visits, etc.) necessarily entails the risk of ingratitude, the refusal of that recognition of nonguaranteed debts which such exchanges aim to produce. Similarly, too, the high degree of concealment of the transmission of cultural capital has the disadvantage (in addition to its inherent risks of loss) that the academic qualification which is its institutionalized form is neither transmissible (like a title of nobility) nor negotiable (like stocks and shares). More precisely, cultural capital, whose diffuse, continuous transmission within the family escapes observation and control (so that the educational system seems to award its honors solely to natural qualities) and which is increasingly tending to attain full efficacy, at least on the labor market, only when validated by the educational system, i.e., converted into a capital of qualifications, is subject to a more disguised but more risky transmission than economic capital. As the educational qualification, invested with the specific force of the official, becomes the condition for legitimate access to a growing number of positions, particularly the dominant ones, the educational system tends increasingly to dispossess the domestic group of the monopoly of the transmission of power and privileges-and, among other things, of the choice of its legitimate heirs from among children of different sex and birth rank.^[21] And economic capital itself poses quite different problems of transmission, depending on the particular fonn it takes. Thus, according to Grassby (1970), the liquidity of commercial capital, which gives immediate economic power and favors transmission, also makes it more vulnerable than landed property (or even real estate) and does not favor the establishment of long-lasting dynasties.

Because the question of the arbitrariness of appropriation arises most sharply in the process of transmission – particularly at the time of succession, a critical moment for all power – every reproduction strategy is at the same time a legitimation strategy aimed at consecrating both an exclusive appropriation and its reproduction. When the subversive critique which aims to weaken the dominant class through the principle of its perpetuation by bringing to light the arbitrariness of the entitlements transmitted and of their transmission (such as the critique which the Enlightenment philosophes directed, in the name of nature, against the arbitrariness of birth) is incorporated in institutionalized mechanisms (for example, laws of inheritance) aimed at controlling the official, direct transmission of power and privileges, the holders of capital have an ever greater interest in resorting to reproduction strategies capable of ensuring better-disguised transmission, but at the cost of greater loss of capital, by exploiting the convertibility of the types of capital. Thus the more the official transmission of capital is prevented or hindered, the more the effects of the clandestine circulation of capital in the form of cultural capital become determinant in the reproduction of the social structure. As an instrument of reproduction capable of disguising its own function, the scope of the educational system tends to increase, and together with this increase is the unification of the market in social qualifications which gives rights to occupy rare positions.

NOTES

1. This inertia, entailed by the tendency of the structures of capital to reproduce themselves in institutions or in dispositions adapted to the structures of which they are the product, is, of course, reinforced by a specifically political action of concerted conservation, i.e., of demobilization and depoliticization. The latter tends to keep the dominated agents in the state of a practical group, united only by the orchestration of their dispositions and condemned to function as an aggregate repeatedly performing discrete, individual acts (such as consumer or electoral choices).

2. This is true of all exchanges between members of different fractions of the dominant class, possessing different types of capital. These range from sales of expertise, treatment, or other services which take the form of gift exchange and dignify themselves with the most decorous names that can be found (honoraria, emoluments, etc.) to matrimonial exchanges, the prime example of a transaction that can only take place insofar as it is not perceived or defined as such by the contracting parties. It is remarkable that the apparent extensions of economic theory beyond the limits constituting the discipline have left intact the asylum of the sacred, apart from a few sacrilegious incursions. Gary S. Becker, for example, who was one of the first to take explicit account of the types of capital that are usually ignored, never considers anything other than monetary costs and profits, forgetting the nonmonetary investments (inter alia, the affective ones) and the material and symbolic profits that education provides in a deferred, indirect way, such as the added value which the dispositions produced or reinforced by schooling (bodily or verbal manners, tastes, etc.) or the relationships established with fellow students can yield in the matrimonial market (Becker 1964a).

3. Symbolic capital, that is to say, capital – in whatever form – insofar as it is represented, i.e., apprehended symbolically, in a relationship of knowledge or, more precisely, of misrecognition and recognition, presupposes the intervention of the habitus, as a socially constituted cognitive capacity.

4. When talking about concepts for their own sake, as I do here, rather than using them in research, one always runs the risk of being both schematic and formal, i.e., theoretical in the most usual and most usually approved sense of the word.

5. This proposition implies no recognition of the value of scholastic verdicts; it merely registers the relationship which exists in reality between a certain cultural capital and the laws of the educational market. Dispositions that are given a negative value in the educational market may receive very high value in other markets-not least, of course, in the relationships internal to the class.

6. In a relatively undifferentiated society, in which access to the means of appropriating the cultural heritage is very equally distributed, embodied culture does not function as cultural capital, i.e., as a means of acquiring exclusive advantages.

7. What I call the generalized Arrow effect, i.e., the fact that all cultural goods- paintings, monuments, machines, and any objects shaped by man, particularly all those which belong to the childhood environment – exert an educative effect by their mere existence, is no doubt one of the structural factors behind the ‘schooling explosion,’ in the sense that a growth in the quantity of cultural capital accumulated in the objectified state increases the educative effect automatically exerted by the environment. If one adds to this the fact that embodied cultural capital is constantly increasing, it can be seen that, in each generation, the educational system can take more for granted. The fact that the same educational investment is increasingly productive is one of the structural factors of inflation of qualifications (together with cyclical factors linked to effects of capital conversion).

8. The cultural object, as a living social institution, is, simultaneously, a socially instituted material object and a particular class of habitus, to which it is addressed. The material object – for example, a work of art in its materiality – may be separated by space (e.g., a Dogon statue) or by time (e.g., a Simone Martini painting) from the habitus for which it was intended. This leads to one of the most fundamental biases of art history. Understanding the effect (not to be confused with the function) which the work tended to produce – for example, the form of belief it tended to induce – and which is the true basis of the conscious or unconscious choice of the means used (technique, colors, etc.), and therefore of the form itself, is possible only if one at least raises the question of the habitus on which it ‘operated.’

9. The dialectical relationship between objectified cultural capital – of which the form par excellence is writing – and embodied cultural capital has generally been reduced to an exalted description of the degradation of the spirit by the letter, the living by the inert, creation by routine, grace by heaviness.

10. This is particularly true in France, where in many occupations (particularly the civil service) there is a very strict relationship between qualification, rank, and remuneration (translator’s note).

11. Here, too, the notion of cultural capital did not spring from pure theoretical work, much less from an analogical extension of economic concepts. It arose from the need to identify the principle of social effects which, although they can be seen clearly at the level of singular agents – where statistical inquiry inevitably operates – cannot be reduced to the set of properties individually possessed by a given agent. These effects, in which spontaneous sociology readily perceives the work of ‘connections,’ are particularly visible in all cases in which different individuals obtain very unequal profits from virtually equivalent (economic or cultural) capital, depending on the extent to which they can mobilize by proxy the capital of a group (a family, the alumni of an elite school, a select club, the aristocracy, etc.) that is more or less constituted as such and more or less rich m capital.

12. Neighborhood relationships may, of course, receive an elementary form of institutionalization, as in the Bearn – or the Basque region – where neighbors, lous besis (a word which, in old texts, is applied to the legitimate inhabitants of the village, the rightful members of the assembly), are explicitly designated, in accordance with fairly codified rules, and are assigned functions which are differentiated according to their rank (there is a ‘first neighbor,’ a ‘second neighbor,’ and so on), particularly for the major social ceremonies (funerals, marriages, etc.). But even in this case, the relationships actually used by no means always coincide with the relationships socially instituted.

13. Manners (bearing, pronunciation, etc.) may be included in social capital insofar as, through the mode of acquisition they point to, they indicate initial membership of a more or less prestigious group.

14. National liberation movements or nationalist ideologies cannot be accounted for solely by reference to strictly economic profits, i.e., anticipation of the profits which may be derived from redistribution of a proportion of wealth to the advantage of the nationals (nationalization) and the recovery of highly paid jobs (see Breton 1964). To these specifically economic anticipated profits, which would only explain the nationalism of the privileged classes, must be added the very real and very immediate profits derived from membership (social capital) which are proportionately greater for those who are lower down the social hierarchy (‘poor whites’) or, more precisely, more threatened by economic and social decline.

15. There is every reason to suppose that socializing, or, more generally, relational, dispositions are very unequally distributed among the social classes and, within a given class, among fractions of different origin.

16. A ‘full power to act and speak’ (translator).

17. It goes without saying that social capital is so totally governed by the logic of knowledge and acknowledgment that it always functions as symbolic capital.

18. It should be made clear, to dispel a likely misunderstanding, that the investment in question here is not necessarily conceived as a calculated pursuit of gain, but that it has every likelihood of being experienced in terms of the logic of emotional investment, i.e., as an involvement which is both necessary and disinterested. This has not always been appreciated by historians, who (even when they are as alert to symbolic effects as E. P. Thompson) tend to conceive symbolic practices – powdered wigs and the whole paraphernalia of office – as explicit strategies of domination, intended to be seen (from below), and to interpret generous or charitable conduct as ‘calculated acts of class appeasement.’ This naively Machiavellian view forgets that the most sincerely disinterested acts may be those best corresponding to objective interest. A number of fields, particularly those which most tend to deny interest and every sort of calculation, like the fields of cultural production, grant full recognition, and with it the consecration which guarantees success, only to those who distinguish themselves by the immediate conformity of their investments, a token of sincerity and attachment to the essential principles of the field. It would be thoroughly erroneous to describe the choices of the habitus which lead an artist, writer, or researcher toward his natural place (a subject, style, manner, etc.) in terms of rational strategy and cynical calculation. This is despite the fact that, for example, shifts from one genre, school, or speciality to another, quasi-religious conversions that are performed ‘in all sincerity,’ can be understood as capital conversions, the direction and moment of which (on which their success often depends) are determined by a ‘sense of investment’ which is the less likely to be seen as such the more skillful it is. Innocence is the privilege of those who move in their field of activity like fish in water.

19. To understand the attractiveness of this pair of antagonistic positions which serve as each other’s alibi, one would need to analyze the unconscious profits and the profits of unconsciousness which they procure for intellectuals. While some find in economism a means of exempting themselves by excluding the cultural capital and all the specific profits which place them on the side of the dominant, others can abandon the detestable terrain of the economic, where everything reminds them that they can be evaluated, in the last analysis, in economic terms, for that of the symbolic. (The latter merely reproduce, in the realm of the symbolic, the strategy whereby intellectuals and artists endeavor to impose the recognition of their values, i.e., their value, by inverting the law of the market in which what one has or what one earns completely defines what one is worth and what one is – as is shown by the practice of banks which, with techniques such as the personalization of credit, tend to subordinate the granting of loans and the fixing of interest rates to an exhaustive inquiry into the borrower’s present and future resources.)

20. Among the advantages procured by capital in all its types, the most precious is the increased volume of useful time that is made possible through the various methods of appropriating other people’s time (in the form of services). It may take the form either of increased spare time, secured by reducing the time consumed in activities directly channeled toward producing the means of reproducing the existence of the domestic group, or of more intense use of the time so consumed, by recourse to other people’s labor or to devices and methods which are available only to those who have spent time learning how to use them and which (like better transport or living close to the place of work) make it possible to save time. (This is in contrast to the cash savings of the poor, which are paid for in time – do-it-yourself, bargain hunting, etc.) None of this is true of mere economic capital; it is possession of cultural capital that makes it possible to derive greater profit not only from labor-time, by securing a higher yield from the same time, but also from spare time, and so to increase both economic and cultural capital.

21. It goes without saying that the dominant fractions, who tend to place ever greater emphasis on educational investment, within an overall strategy of asset diversification and of investments aimed at combining security with high yield, have all sorts of ways of evading scholastic verdicts. The direct transmission of economic capital remains one of the principal means of reproduction, and the effect of social capital (‘a helping hand,’ ‘string-pulling,’ the ‘old boy network’) tends to correct the effect of academic sanctions. Educational qualifications never function perfectly as currency. They are never entirely separable from their holders: their value rises in proportion to the value of their bearer, especially in the least rigid areas of the social structure.

References

Becker, Gary S. A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1964a.

Becker, Gary S. Human Capital. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964b.

Bourdieu, Pierre “Les rites d’institution.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 43 (1982): 58-63.

Breton, A. “The Economics of Nationalism.” Journal of Political Economy 72 (1962): 376-86.

Grassby, Richard “English Merchant Capitalism in the Late Seventeenth Century: The Composition of Business Fortunes.” Past and Present 46 (1970): 87-107.