<nettime> Bourdieu's question

[Brian Holmes <106271.223@compuserve.com>]

"His works made their author the leader of a school of thought dedicated to
the incisive critique of capitalist society," said Lionel Jospin in memory
of Pierre Bourdieu. Proof that anybody can say anything about anybody.
Rather than building a monument to Bourdieu, we could find the answer to
his most important political question, which you find stated throughout his
work from the past five years, here in an interview with Günter Grass:

"The strength of neoliberalism is to be put into application, in Europe at
least, by people who call themselves socialists. Whether Shröder, Blair, or
Jospin, these are people who invoke socialism to carry out
neoliberalism.... For that reason it has become extremely hard to bring
into existence a critical position on the left of these social-democratic
governments. In France there was the movement of great strikes in 1995 that
widely mobilised a population of workers, employees, etc., as well as
intellectuals. Then there was an entire series of movements: the unemployed
people's movement, the European Marches of the Unemployed, the Sans-Papiers
movement, and so on. There was a kind of continuous agitation that forced
the social-democrats in power at least to pretend to maintain a socialist
discourse. But in practice, this critical movement remains very weak,
largely because it is enclosed within a national scale; and one of the
major questions of politics, it seems to me, is how to bring a position on
the left of the social-democratic governments into existence on an
international level, a position that is really capable of influencing those
governments."

www.lemonde.fr/article/0,5987,3246--259830-,00.html

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