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January
25, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
You
Call This Terrorism?
CounterPunch
Wire
Cal
Energy Crisis Hoax:
It Wasn't A Shortage,
It Was a Shakedown
Tariq
Ali
Kashmir,
Klinghoffer,
the Kurds and Chomsky
Nadine
Strossen
Protecting
MLK Jr.'s Legacy:
Justice and Liberty After 9/11
January
24, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Turkey
Targets Chomsky
Dean Baker
Lying
on Top:
Ken Lay One of Many
David
Vest
Idiot
Wind
January
23, 2002
Terry
Waite
Guantanamo
Prisoners:
Justice or Revenge?
Molly
Secours
The
Case of Abu-Ali:
Racism and the Death Penalty
Robert
Jensen
Speak
Out, Get Slimed
January
22, 2002
Brendan
Cooney
Moby-Dick
and the Hunt
for Osama bin Laden
Rick Giombetti
Progressive
Pols for Enron?
Judith
Resnik
Invading
the Courts?
Kevin
Alexander Gray
The
Crisis in Black Leadership
January
21, 2002
Marjorie
Cohn
Will
Walker's Words
Be Used Against Him?
Ahmad
Faruqui
MLK
Jr. and the Palestinians
January
19. 2002
Jordan
Green
Enron
Stole Our Future
January
18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
The
Enron Model
Walt Brasch
Enron
at the White House
CounterPunch
Wire
Human
Rights Groups Says Guantanamo Prisoners Must
Be Treated as POWs
January
17, 2002
Gideon
Levy
Bulldozing
Rafah
Uri Avnery
That
Weapons Shipment
January
16, 2002
John Chuckman
The
Angel and the Pretzel
Lawrence
McGuire
Subverting
the
Geneva Convention
Kathy
Kelly
An
Open Letter to
Richard Perle on Iraq
January
15, 2002
George
Monbiot
Greenpeace,
Lord Melchett
and the Business of Betrayal
Jack McCarthy
Follow
the Pretzel
William
Blum
Atta
and the Times:
Follow the Changing Story
Edward
Said
Emerging
Alternatives
in Palestine
January
14, 2002
David
Vest
Open
Bag. Eat Pretzels.
Patrick
Cockburn
Collapse
of Georgia
Ignored by the World
Mokhiber/Weissman
Enron's
Accountants:
When In Doubt, Shred It
January
13, 2002
C.G. Estabrook
Why
We Kill People
January
12, 2002
Cockburn/St.
Clair
Forbidden
Truths
January
11, 2002
Lee Balllinger/Dave
Marsh
Neil
Young's Duet with Ashcroft
January
10, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Bush,
Enron, UNOCAL
and the Taliban
St. Clair/Cockburn
Greenpeace
to Greenwash?
Hans von
Sponek
Iraq:
Is There an Alternative
to Military Action?
Jim Lobe
Israeli
Human Rights Group Assails Army
Marina Mayakova
Russia's
Top Military Astrologer Predicts More Attacks from OBL
January
9, 2002
David
Vest
The
Super-Burqa
and the Big Tent
ND Jayaprakash
Winnable
Nuclear War?
Rafiq
Kathwari
Kashmir
Will Make Ground Zero Look Like a Bonfire
January
8, 2002
Prudence
Crowther
Sting
Like a B-52
Nelson
Valdés
Al-Qaeda
at Guantanamo Bay
John Chuckman
Dark
Tales from the
Ministry of Truth
Richard
Corn-Revere
Do
We Fear Freedom?
Joan Hoff
The
Nixon You Haven't Heard
January
7, 2002
Lawrence
McGuire
Confusing
Economic Tales About Argentina
Wael Masri
They
Are Taking
Our Rights Away
Philip
Farruggio
Better
Medicine
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
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January
25, 2002
Pierre Bourdieu's "ATTAC'
Passing the Left
on the Left
By Norman Madarasz
Distinguished French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu,
succumbed to illness on Wednesday January 23. He was 71. Bourdieu
held the chair of sociology at the Collège de France,
the highest instance of independent French research, where he
had been teaching since 1982. Author of some 25 books, he also
founded the leading sociological journal, "Actes de la recherche
scientifique" in 1975.
Part of the generation of thinkers called
poststructuralist in Anglo-American countries, Bourdieu revolutionized
sociology by creating an alternate set of categories whose task
was to bring object status to symbolic systems. He sought to
accomplish  such a move without, for all that, reducing the
contents of symbols to merely functional tags in a vastly deterministic
system. In Bourdieu's perspective, society and power are not
only crossed by class struggle or through imposition of the ruling
class' hegemonic will to representation. Instead, the struggle
for power in the context of social regeneration seeps into the
complete symbolic systems that marshal integration into institutions,
media and interpersonal relations.
Nor did his work on symbolic systems
ever decline on naming names. His analyses spread over distinguished
institutions of French culture such as the Ecole National de
l'Administration (a rough equivalent to Harvard Business School
in the US), as it does to French farming culture, as well as
the media. 1995's "On Television" represents one of
the pivotal works in transforming analysis based on symbolic
systems. Away from the open-ended semiotics of Roland Barthes,
or the 'terrorist' aesthetics of the situationists, "On
Television" is undaunted in its portrayal of gagged journalists,
pundits and other functionaries as a trickle-down effect from
the concentration of media resources in a handful of major conglomerates.
Bourdieu's early work dealt with a type
of ethnological research that explicitly restored dialogue and
category sharing with French structuralist philosophy, thereby
countering the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss' scientific
ethnology. Despite the category sharing, Bourdieu, a devoted
rationalist, joins numerous French philosophers to reject the
poststructuralist, not to mention postmodernist, appellation
imposed on his work as if to shrink its timber and scope.
Above all, Bourdieu's work has always
been committed to a radical study of society-in Marx's sense
of taking it 'by the root'. In 1993, he published "La Misère
du Monde" (translated in 1999 as "The Weight of the
World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Societies"), a collective
work in which theoretical analysis from researchers shares time
and space with their subjects' self-analyses. Masterfully edited,
the book is one of the few to have shown the particles playing
off each other in the void otherwise separating academia from
the poorest reaches of society. Turning sociology toward its
own foundations and interests as an academic institution is the
stimuli peeling it open to a scientific study of its reflexive
parti pris and compromises. The theme of his last seminar was
Pierre Bourdieu himself: a reflexive analysis of the institutional
beams bolstering his discourse and allowing it to stand. But
the ambiguity-and vulnerability-of the intellectual in France
ended up passing on its flame to him in 1995. The most important
general strike affecting the public sector since the seventies
had ground France to a halt for a week and a half. Bourdieu took
the podium at the Gare de Lyon, honoring the workers of the French
national train service, the SNCF, who stood up against the plan
to privatize the rails. A risky proposal for any intellectual,
Bourdieu was applauded throughout by those who sparked the flame
leading to the resignation of prime-minister Alain Juppé,
a leading French advocate of the neo-liberal shift that swept
the wealthy G7 countries and beyond in the 1990s .
Bourdieu went on to rally a political
stream he called the "gauche de la gauche", the left
of the left. This was a French precursor to the anti-globalization
movement. From its inception, his idea was derided by intellectuals
close to France's RPR, the right-of-center party of Juppé
and current president Chirac. But Bourdieu's ideas were far more
threatening to France's traditional and institutional PS, socialist
party. His legacy on the political platform will, doubtless,
be felt most strongly in the movement he has helped to create
from among PS renegades and other radicals: ATTAC.
The central line of Bourdieu's political
and economic analyses treats the revolts of the late 1960s as
demands being waged by the middle-class toward increased democratic
power. Spearheaded by the student movement, it was most often
driven into violence by the State-a situation not unlike what
has befallen the anti-globalization movement since Seattle. Still,
in Bourdieu's view the pressure on the 1960s social structure,
matched with the unseen prosperity in France of the "Glorious
thirty years", aimed at extending middle-class values less
into commercial dominance than into political change. Bourdieu's
numerous analyses of the deciding bodies of the G7 economies
trace a deliberately applied policy of conservative social and
economic channeling at the highest level. These policies were
to become the much-vaunted 'pragmatic' turn of reaganomics. The
illusory growth from the over-inflating stock market, and chanting
the triumph of growth in corporate productivity, largely at the
expense of massive downsizing, were to have a calculated effect
in the shorter than long run. They aimed at spreading fear and
insecurity among the over-confident middle-class over wage and
labor loss in an economy perceived as chaotic-pitting employee
against employee. The trade-off was to be the media promoted
illusion of the power of the middle-class buck, reason enough
for intellectuals to tow the line by declaring that class struggle
was dead, gone-or unfashionable.
This background also provides the underpinnings
to Bourdieu's rejection of the postmodernist label. His attachment
to a representation of society as a struggle of symbolic forces
largely relies on the conviction that truth is a factor of interpretation
and structural recasting. The upshot can be that truth lies at
the mercy of the key facts withheld from circulation, undermining
the theoretical consistency of analysis that seeks to base truth
as the outcome of rightfully connecting the facts like so many
dots. Sociological inquiry in the Bourdieu vein, though, rarely
shows facts as being withheld per se. They circulate in symbolic
networks of partnership and corporations in which the individual
wills to speak them are shaped through the collective values
they are compelled to repeat.
Bourdieu's commitment struck a common
cord among many intellectuals active in economic and political
research, those who have gone on to join ATTAC. Propelled by
the independent radical and very serious monthly, 'Le Monde diplomatique',
ATTAC is represented by the journal's editors, Ignacio Ramonet
and Bernard Cassin, as well as by distinguished author and activist,
Susan George. In preparation for the second meeting of the anti-globalization
movement in the southern Brazilian town of Porto Allegre, a democratic
and peaceful haven in Brazil's young democracy still battling
with oligarchic concentration of power and wealth, ATTAC held
a general assembly in Paris on January 19. To its organizers'
surprise, attendance toped 6 000 at a venue otherwise used for
pop music concerts.
As the French presidential campaign swings
into full steam, ATTAC confronts a situation similar to other
critical economic movements. Their lobbying power seems to be
greater to what they can achieve as part of a left-alliance.
Yet the lobby group configuration does not disappear under headings
of a Civil Society Organization. ATTAC, like its counterparts,
the Congress of Canadians and Ralph Nader's Greens, must work
to grow before seeking accreditation as a party, at the risk
of never hoping to overcome destiny as an alliance member. The
ineffective performance of the French environmentalist party,
Les Verts, in alliance with the Socialists and Communists, not
to mention the drastic deception of Germany's Green party faced
with Chancellor Schroeder's full-hearted acceptance of the American
invasion of Afghanistan, proves the vulnerability of small radical
parties to the election route. The prestige of holding office
is never reason enough for ideals to be forsaken to the so-called
realities of the harsh world.
In the meantime ATTAC continues issuing
its low-priced publications at "Mille et une nuits".
In support of a Tobin Tax, it is also lobbying hard to break
the client secrecy that has made Lichtenstein, among other countries,
a haven for shell-companies, secret bank accounts and money fleeing
from public taxation. It is has long been clear that tax haven
accounts holding wealth from legal sources have grown indistinct
from those holding funds from criminal activities. Contrary to
what the media sheepishly like to report, President W. Bush has
shown that governments are more than able to influence the operations
of tax havens-when there's a will. This should stand as no surprise:
its executive members are most likely their most cherished clients.
Which is one of the prime lessons of Pierre Bourdieu's legacy.
In the power struggle waged within symbolic structures, through
which the middle-class's aspiration for increased power has seen
itself crushed under the menace of massive poverty, theory has
to aim for nourishing the will on its hard path to diminishing
and neutralizing interest and gain.
Norman Madarasz
is a philosopher based in Montreal and Rio de Janeiro. He has
edited and translated Alain Badiou's Manifesto
for Philosophy, published at State University of New
York Press in 1999.
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