Bourdieusian class analysis and labor,exploitation and production: A response to Seim and McCarthy

Abstract

In a recent paper in this journal, Seim and McCarthy continued the ongoing debate between Marxists and Bourdieusians over the meaning and purpose of class analysis. Taking issue with Bourdieu’s apparent neglect of labor, exploitation and production, they suggested that whatever insights Bourdieu may have had should be encased within a Marxist framework giving priority to these three elements of class. In this response, I make the opposite case, suggesting how and why traditional Marxist concerns with labor, exploitation and production relationships can and should be embedded within a Bourdieuisan framework. This, I argue, offers the most coherent and encompassing platform for critical sociology today.

Introduction

The struggle between Marxists and Bourdieusians over the meaning and purpose of class analysis rumbles on. Having already generated antagonism and debate across journals and books (Atkinson, 2023; Burawoy, 2019; Desan, 2013; Heilborn and Steinmetz, 2018; Paolucci, 2022; Riley, 2017), its latest instalment comes in this journal by way of a focused three-pronged critique of Bourdieu’s vision of class launched by Seim and McCarthy (2023). Avowedly Marxist, they take issue with his apparent neglect of labor, exploitation and production. Rather than jettison Bourdieu’s concepts of social space, symbolic domination and cultural capital entirely, however, as others do, they suggest instead that Bourdieu’s theory be fitted within a Marxist one prioritizing productive relations and extraction of labor effort. In that much they continue the general line of argument pursued by both Burawoy (2019) and Wright (2015), the latter of whom in particular always admirably sought to critically integrate and accommodate non-Marxist analyses of stratification and domination within an overarching Marxist shell emphasizing exploitation and critique.

Seim and McCarthy’s arguments have already started to be repeated by others (e.g. Boyle and Vandebroeck, 2025; Hoctor and Murphy, 2025), so in this paper I endeavor to respond to them directly in the hope of heading off any further unchecked spread. The aim is certainly not to deny the sociological importance of labor, exploitation and production, nor to claim Seim and McCarthy are necessarily wrong or mistaken in how they characterize some of Bourdieu’s own writings. They do provide a narrow reading, confined to only a few selected texts or lecture transcripts, and inevitably I will point towards other things Bourdieu wrote or said to respond. Still, the core intention is not to claim Bourdieu did offer worked out conceptions of everything himself but to suggest how a Bourdieusian approach can accommodate labor, exploitation and production and do so within a sounder and more encompassing framework than Marxism. In other words, I want to make the – perhaps provocative – case that Marxist categories and concerns can and should be fitted within the Bourdieusian program, not the other way around. This entails going a little beyond Bourdieu himself, for sure. Marxists, including Seim and McCarthy, often claim to be criticizing ‘Bourdieusian class analysis’ but only ever target (some of) Bourdieu’s own writings, as if those inspired by him think him infallible and no one has developed, extended or corrected his ideas. This is like claiming to grapple with ‘Marxism’ but only focusing on Marx’s writings rather than, say, those of critical revisers like Gramsci, Poulantzas or Wright. In that respect, Seim and McCarthy’s intervention – like other Marxist confrontations – is a welcome stimulus to refining and progressing the Bourdieusian program and, ultimately, the critical analysis of domination.

I will proceed by recapitulating Seim and McCarthy’s account of Bourdieu’s position and the arguments they levy against it, that is, the neglect of labor, exploitation and production, and responding in turn. This will entail clarifying the Bourdieusian conception of the human condition and its difference from the classical Marxist one; elucidating a Bourdieusian view of what exploitation is, how it comes about and how it is maintained; and outlining the dialectic of field relations and productive relations. Seim and McCarthy’s first point, however, contains a complaint regarding Bourdieu’s reading of Marx as substantialist and over-focused on mobilization, which I will treat separately.

On relationalism

For Bourdieu, as Seim and McCarthy rightly point out, the class structure takes the form of a social space organized around a multidimensional distribution of capitals. The core capitals are economic capital – money, property and financial assets – and cultural capital – embodied and certified mastery of legitimated symbol systems – with the social capital of connections largely playing the role of a multiplier of other capitals (Bourdieu, 1984, 1986/1997). People are distinguished along the primary, vertical dimension of the space according to their overall volume of capital and on a secondary, horizontal dimension according to whether they are relatively richer in economic or cultural capital. Hence we get not only a polarization of capital-rich and capital-poor, with others in between, but a polarization of the cultural-capital-rich (e.g. intellectuals and teachers) and the economic-capital-rich (e.g. industrialists and small business owners). Experience of the possibilities and impossibilities delivered by the material conditions of existence associated with a certain stock of capital generate a practical sense of the possible and desirable and dispositions to think and act in specific ways, or a habitus. The space is a cartography of domination, meanwhile, because with higher capital tends to come greater symbolic power, or the capacity to have one’s visions, definitions and evaluations of the world taken for granted by others (i.e. it becomes doxa). Insofar as this involves the very acceptance of economic and cultural capital and/or their trappings as valuable and worthy of pursuit, and their possessors as successful, gifted, authoritative and so on, it tends to not only reproduce the system as a whole but justify or obscure intergenerational transmissions of capital. That said, the social space is a field open to struggle and contestation along both axes: not only is there a battle between holders of economic and cultural capital to impose their respective capitals as the dominant principle of domination, but dominated agents in the space, under certain conditions, can challenge the structure and rules of the game to lesser and greater extents. The form and degree of acceptance of domination is an empirical question (Atkinson, 2023).

Bourdieu (1998) presents this reading of the class structure as ‘relational’ in a specific sense: the meaning and value of each element – each token, symbol and bearer of capital – is defined only by its place – its opposition to and proximity/distance vis-à-vis other elements – within the system as a whole. This is the version of relationalism taken from structuralism and embellished with help from Ernst Cassirer and Gaston Bachelard on developments in the natural sciences. It resonates with Hegel and shares some affinities with the language of structural Marxism as well as Gramsci’s (1971) allusions to various ‘fields’ in The Prison Notebooks. Its opposite is substantialism, which ascribes to each element a specific essence defining its properties universally. The sociological meaning of golf, political participation or job titles would be assumed to be essentially the same everywhere and everywhere, for example, rather than defined by their place and trajectory in specific systems of relations in which they are inserted (Bourdieu, 1998: 3–4).

Bourdieu points out, on this basis, that there are no definitive boundaries within the social space; no substantial criteria for demarcating universal borders between ‘classes’. Categories used by the sociologist are only ever more or less effective means of approximating differences in the space for analytical purposes. Thus he distinguished various ‘classes’ and ‘class fractions’ in Distinction in order to draw out statistical differences but saw them not as sharply demarcated ‘groups’ in the space so much as clusters with greater or lesser overlap and blurring of capital stocks, conditions of existence and habitus (Bourdieu, 1984, 1987). Distances and proximities in the space do, however, translate into people’s sense of affinity or dissimilarity and generate classificatory or ‘groupist’ languages – including the very language of ‘classes’ – for making sense of it. These can then become principles of mobilization when championed by specific motivated agents – political activists or trade union leaders, for example – with enough symbolic power. In the process, people can come to believe there really are such groups or classes, with clear boundaries and specific criteria of membership, and take social and political action on that basis.

This argument is the source of Seim and McCarthy’s first grievance. They take issue with Bourdieu’s characterization of the Marxist definition of class as both ‘substantialist’ and premised purely on ‘mobilization’, or ‘classes-for-themselves’. It is not clear that Bourdieu did accuse Marxism of substantialism in the texts they cited, however – there are no direct allegations. His target was, instead, ‘commonsense’ understandings of class. Indeed, Marx, operating in Hegel’s wake, can be assimilated to the relational tradition broadly construed (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 16; Wacquant, 2001), not just because of his focus on the capital-labor relation but because of his unswerving insistence on the interrelations and reciprocal conditioning of all elements – production, distribution, exchange, consumption, etc. – in the social totality. On the other hand, Bourdieu (1998) may have been flippant in his characterization of classes in ‘Marx’s sense’ or ‘Marxist theory’ (p. 11) as being mobilized entities to make a specific point, but he did not always portray Marxism this way (see e.g. Bourdieu, 2018: 64ff). Nor does it undermine his general take on Marx and Marxism, which is that Marx offered a particularly prominent example of someone advocating a specific principle of vision and division – the bourgeoisie/proletariat opposition – as a means of making sense of differences in conditions of existence and interest given by the social space and, alongside others, cultivating widespread belief in the existence of the two groups with profound consequences for subsequent social and political organization. Marx’s mistake, according to Bourdieu, was twofold. First, he claimed the groups could or would move from being structural entities to classes-for-themselves without – or at least while underemphasizing – the kind of intellectual articulation and political activity he took part in (a point Seim and McCarthy concede). Second, he took as ‘real’ groups with objective interests – classes-in-themselves – what were in fact symbolic constructs for articulating social difference and antagonism in the social space. In other words, Marx’s positing of classes as structural entities was simply a specific way of carving up, in perception and language, differences given by the social space and the first step toward a process of ‘class making’ (Bourdieu, 1987, 1998; see also Wacquant, 1989, 1991). It might also be noted that Bourdieu believed the profound influence of Marx’s classification – its ability to ‘catch on’ and mobilize people – lay in the fact that ‘it followed, however crudely, the dotted lines that were out there in reality: it was not bad at all compared to what had come before it’ (Bourdieu, 2022: 108). There is an epistemological point here: not all practical or intellectual classifications of difference are equally ‘wrong’. Some, like Marx’s, approximate the divisions and oppositions of the social world better than others, giving them stronger relative ‘truth value’. The social space model is an even better approximation of reality, however, because it reveals the major oppositions and fine-grained differences in conditions of existence and interest and explains the varying symbolic classifications of difference they give rise to – including the bourgeoisie/proletariat couplet.

On labor

From their misplaced objection to Bourdieu’s reading of Marx, Seim and McCarthy make the leap of questioning why ‘capitals are objectively realer than classes’ for Bourdieu and even claiming capitals are ‘arguably less relational, and thus more substantialist, than Marx’s classes’ (p. 4). This is because Bourdieu overlooks ‘the most important relationality of Marx’s version of capital: its relation to labor’. Of course, the equivocating ‘arguably’ and the ‘Marx’s version’ qualifier here are crucial, the former depending on the latter. There is no sense given of how Bourdieu’s capitals might actually be considered ‘substantialist’ except by false opposition to this specific take on Marx’s relationalism. The real point is this: there is only a problem with Bourdieu’s definition of class if one assumes labor is paramount and assumes Marx’s definition of capital, that is to say, takes Marx’s classification of differences in the social space as not only given but the defining feature of ‘classes’. But why should we? It cannot be, as we will see, because not to do so makes it impossible to analyze work, exploitation and productive relations. Nor can it be because it yields a more complete picture of conditions of existence, domination and habitus, since even Seim and McCarthy acknowledge the usefulness of the concept of social space for drawing out granular differences and power relations. Perhaps there is a political or moral commitment to the starting point, but even that needs some kind of grounding. There has to be, as Marx himself firmly believed, a logical – philosophical and/or naturalistic – foundation (Geras, 2016).

Seim and McCarthy proffer no such foundation, but perhaps we can assume they subscribe to Marx’s original materialist starting point. Humans, then, are first and foremost laboring beings, meeting their material needs by engaging with and transforming nature in line with a conscious projection of how things could be otherwise – the architect’s imagination discussed in Capital (Marx, 1887/1954: 174) – and a sense of producing with and for others – our ‘species-being’, as discussed in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (Marx, 1844/1959) – with all ideas being ‘expressions’, ‘reflexes’ or ‘sublimates’ of this ‘life process’ (Marx and Engels, 1845/1998: 42). This is an inversion of the Hegelian starting point, dethroning consciousness as the conditio sine qua non of humanity in favor of the production of means of subsistence. The problem for many since – feminists, critical race scholars, Weberians and more – is that it is too reductive, unable to explain or inadequately explaining away other forms of domination and division. Seim and McCarthy’s (2023: 5) effort to reduce workplace sexual harassment to class domination, for example, may explain specific forms of harassment but fails to explain why some harass others sexually in the first place. Many a neo-Marxist has thus grappled with the question of autonomy, but these endeavors ran into an impasse, either retaining a residual form of economism in the ‘last instance’ (Althusser and Gramsci), ineluctably passing into post-Marxism (e.g. Michelle Barrett, Jane Flax, Ernesto Laclau, Paul Gilroy) or dutifully acknowledging autonomy or even stressing intersection without grounding that concession or emphasis philosophically or naturalistically (e.g. Erik Olin Wright, Patricia Hill Collins).

The logical contradiction of Marx’s strict materialism, however, is that, from Marx’s own presumptions, humanity’s distinctive level of consciousness or evolved cognitive faculties – projection, abstract thought and intersubjectivity – can be said to underpin our specific manner of engaging with nature and that our life process is therefore an expression or reflection of our ideational capacities. This need not return us to a lofty idealism in which specific ideas are divorced from and always precede life activity, but it does recognize our generic ability to handle symbols is transformative rather than epiphenomenal. Later Marxists seizing on offhand remarks would move further in this direction by emphasizing the unity, or dialectic, of consciousness and activity in ‘praxis’, a term found in Aristotle and Hegel among others but developed by the likes of Lukacs, Gramsci and the Praxis School to characterize labor and revolutionary action (see Wainwright, 2022). Similarly, Bourdieu’s theory of practice and practical mastery was explicitly conceived as a mode of overcoming the opposition of materialism and idealism (or ‘spiritualism’) by embedding conscious activity in ‘preoccupied, active presence in the world’ with ‘its things to be done and said’ (Bourdieu, 1990a: 52, also 17) and insisting on a double dialectic: of mental structures and objective structures, and of conditionings (experiences) and transformations (strategies). Unlike the Marxist tradition, however, labor and revolutionary action narrowly defined – producing and transforming means of subsistence – are not privileged or paradigmatic forms of practical activity for Bourdieu. To see why, we need to acknowledge another consequence of our distinctive cognitive capacities as human beings: our unique need for meaning or purpose, which we find in part through the construction of symbolic systems for explaining and expressing human existence (‘culture’) and in part through recognition from others. Here I am synthesizing scattered remarks from Bourdieu (1990b, 1991, 2000; Bourdieu et al., 2011) on the human condition, which he overtly presented as Pascalian but which contain distinctive echoes of a thinker Bourdieu was exposed to by one of his favorite teachers, Éric Weil: Hegel. This means there are some affinities with Honneth’s (1996) critical theory, though with greater concern for empirical evidence than fidelity to the musings of an 18th Century master, and I would agree with the general thrust, if not the details, of Paludo’s (2026) recent argument that Hegel offers a grounding for Bourdieu’s critical sociology. It is, however, a Hegel brought thoroughly down to earth via the medium of situated practical activity.

We cannot deny that human beings have material needs they must meet to live (food, hydration, etc.), nor that they have evolved needs for sex and affection – all of which we also find in other animals. Yet our need for meaning and purpose and our construction of symbol systems is what sets us apart and gives our material, sexual and affective life its specific humanity. Producing with and for others, forming sexual and conjugal partnerships, raising children and caring for others and developing shared symbol systems all depend on recognition of others as beings like ourselves, with the same needs, capacities and interests, and provide justification for our existence, or a means to ‘carry on’. Any one mode of recognition, however, may trump others: some needs, including material needs, may be negated in pursuit of, or otherwise in accordance with the logic of, others. One may, for instance, sacrifice material goods or sustenance for, or even die for, someone/thing (a person, a belief, a cause). None is a priori primary. Moreover, the need for purpose and recognition carries the seed of domination and symbolic power because, disposed by our cognitive architecture to think relationally (high/low, up/down, more/less), recognition becomes relative: some people can be seen as worthier than others, a desire to be worthy thus becomes a desire to be worthier than others in some way, struggles emerge over what defines worth, processes of dispossession and alienation emerge and some definitions come to be widely accepted and taken for granted by others. The possessions and properties that come to be taken for granted, or misrecognized, as symbols of worth, legitimacy and authority are the capitals at the heart of Bourdieu’s theory. Their primordial form is the symbolic capital of ‘good name’, ‘honor’ or ‘repute’, but capitals, according to Bourdieu (1993, 2004, 2005, 2014) and others working in his wake (e.g. Emirbayer and Desmond, 2015; Illouz, 2012; Wacquant, 2024), can take several fundamental forms – physical, sexual, affective, ethno-racial, etc. – and split off into relatively autonomous subspecies – literary, academic, financial, technical, etc. Economic capital and cultural capital define ‘class’ today because they are most directly, intricately and comprehensively related to material conditions of existence via a dual relation of conversion and opposition. Cultural capital is an institutionalized ticket to economic capital (and vice versa) but also inherently defined against economic capital (and vice versa): it is the spiritual versus the temporal, the ‘higher-order’ versus the this-worldly, the ascetic versus the hedonistic, the anti-materialistic versus the materialistic and so on. These oppositions have a long history and wide geographic scope (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1993), and they may just express the ultimate experiential oppositions between mind and body, the abstract and the concrete, the transcendent and the present given by our physiological and neurological capacities.

Are all capitals, though, accumulated ‘labor’ or ‘energy’, as Bourdieu (1986/1997: 46) seemed to suggest in passing in one place? Only in a broader sense than Seim and McCarthy’s. It is not about congealed productive labor time but a condensed history of practices in pursuit of recognition. Every token of capital possessed, its form and value, is the outcome of myriad struggles and strategies – ‘labor’ in a much wider sense – across time, space and fields undertaken by oneself and others, dead and alive, in pursuit of capitals (cf. Bourdieu, 1980). Is Bourdieu’s definition of capital ‘less real’ than, or an unwarranted ‘extension’ of, Marx’s (cf. Desan, 2013)? No, Marx’s definition is simply a specific species of Bourdieu’s definition of capital. It is but one form of value that some people pursue. It is worth remembering that the etymological origin of ‘capital’ is the head (caput), associated with notions of ‘top’, ‘high’, ‘best’ and so on, which only took its narrow economistic definition via heads of cattle. In its original meaning, in other words, it is a broad relational term for denoting evaluation of difference. If Bourdieu’s model of class, as Seim and McCarthy suggest, therefore gives us a space of ‘capitalists’ – people seeking to accumulate or maintain capital – this can only be understood in our broader sense: the social space is a system of people struggling (laboring) for worth in pursuit of purpose, which, as we will see, entails all the practices classified as ‘work’.

On exploitation

Seim and McCarthy’s next complaint gives the appearance of following from the last. Not only does Bourdieu downgrade labor, they claim, he also ignores exploitation. This, they say, is ‘arguably a core relational feature of class’ (p. 5), but Bourdieu only focuses on domination, or ‘excluding others from advantages’, including via nonconscious submission (i.e. misrecognition), which is derivative (p. 6). The ‘arguably’ here takes us back to Seim and McCarthy’s absent starting point: they believe in, but are not willing to confidently assert, the priority of exploitation in defining class. This time, though, they tie the point to a claim that, without exploitation, Bourdieu is unable to explain the genesis of the social space and the distribution of capitals, that is, ‘why class differentiation emerges’, ‘what explains the underlying allocation of capital’ or ‘why domination happens’. I would argue the reverse is true: Bourdieu can explain the reproduction and genesis of exploitation within his broader framework better than Marxism. The leap in Marxism from Homo Sapiens as laboring being, producing with and for others, to exploitation always struck me as tenuous. Why, exactly, do some exploit the labor of others? What drives or motivates them to do so? Why do some people desire to ‘live off’ others and, in capitalist society, chase profits? Marx himself often assumed that greed or avarice were basic motivating forces – that ‘the will of the capitalist is certainly to take as much as possible’ (Marx, 1865/1968: 187) – but claimed this motive was explained, because necessitated, by the existence of private property, alienated labor and capitalist competition (cf. Marx, 1887/1954: 226–232; 1844/1959: 64ff). Deterministic and tautological as it may seem, this argument fails to explain what it presupposes: that capitalists want to stay in business. Utilitarian readings of Marx (e.g. Elster, 1985; Wright, 2015) offer similarly false answers because they do not elucidate where perceptions of utility and preferences come from (Bourdieu, 1990a), and reliance on ‘ideology’ in one form or another to explain the reproduction of belief or consent (e.g. Althusser, 1971; Cohen, 1968; Gramsci, 1971) devolves to a circular functionalism. They do not satisfactorily answer why this particular ideology is promoted – why capitalists want to reproduce or improve their material position rather than give it all away – and why it is accepted, or contested, by others.

It might be objected that the answer is historical, and that we therefore need to plumb Marxist writings on the very emergence of exploitation as a social relation. Marx’s (1887/1954) mature thoughts on primitive accumulation, however, only address the appearance of specifically capitalist exploitation of free wage labor via expropriation of the peasanty from the land, presupposing interest in accumulating economic capital by new means among feudal lords and tenant farmers and taking extant feudal exploitation as its starting point. If we want to trace further back, we need to look to The German Ideology, where the first form of exploitation – slavery – was said to develop out of the ‘latent slavery’ in the ‘natural division of labor in the family’ through population growth, war/trade and the ‘growth of new wants’ (Marx and Engels, 1845/1998: 38–39; cf. 47–54). What those ‘new wants’ were and what spurred them remained mysterious, and casting familial patriarchy as ‘natural’ rather than socially constituted is highly problematic (Lerner, 1986), but Engels, of course, would explode this brief passage into a whole book. Slavery emerged in agrarian societies, he claimed, because it was possible with new-found productive surpluses and desirable because it reduced the labor of the agriculturalists and facilitated the emergence of handicrafts (Engels, 1884/1986: 198ff). However, he then springs from this situation, which does not ipso facto necessitate desire for more, to further accumulation of property, slaves and wealth, the entrenchment of economic divisions and the systemic oppression of others through the state by means of just one explanatory principle: greed. Thus he blames ‘the greed of peoples who already see in the acquisition of wealth one of the main aims of life’, the ‘greed for riches’ and ‘sheer greed’ for ‘wealth and wealth again’ understood as ‘the lowest instincts and passions of man’ (pp. 201–202, 215). Yet greed is not an explanans but an explanandum, unless one falls back, as Engels seemed to, on a base Darwinism long since discredited.

Ultimately, then, we need a better means of explaining the origin and reproduction of belief in the importance of economic capital, including by exploiting others, and/or the importance of other things for which economic capital and exploitation are means or outcomes – what Bourdieu termed illusio. The starting point outlined in the last section furnishes this: the pursuit of economic capital offers a reason to be, or a form of (mis)recognition from others, either directly (being seen as ‘rich’ and ‘successful’) or indirectly (as a tool for securing other forms of ‘honor’). Pursuing it through exploitation also entails another form of misrecognition: seeing fellow human beings and their activities as exploitable resources or commodities (this is a point made by Honneth in Fraser and Honneth, 2003), which we can describe as a mode of alienation.

Illusio for economic capital and alienation are today reproduced within the family and the education system and by exposure to the doxic categories of thought disseminated by media, taking different forms according to the specificities of the family, the school and so on. Some will come to desire business success per se as a road to social worth, some will earnestly believe in the importance of providing a specific good or service, and employing others and making money to that end, and yet others accept the apparent necessity of working for pay in pursuit of other forms of capital they value, whether they be specific to a profession (art, science, etc.), an organization (esteem and titles in the workplace) or intimate relations (Bourdieu, 2000, 2005). Pursuit and possession of those other forms of capital even generate active subordination or negation of, or efforts to critique, devalue and redistribute, economic capital. The ascetic and the anti-capitalist have their reasons to be, their commitments, their purpose derived from belief in the importance of something else and their effort to convey that to others, whether ‘art for art’s sake’, ‘truth’, ‘justice’ or whatever. Hence, in place of a singular ideology promulgated by a unified ruling class, we get a mosaic of orthodox, heterodox and heretical ideas emerging from within a fractious ‘field of power’ polarizing (inter alia) intellectuals, activists and business leaders (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1993) and concordant with people’s habitus to greater and lesser degrees. These ideas raise elements of doxa to the level of open articulation, advocacy and challenge (Bourdieu, 1977), but even thoroughly doxic modes of thought – that some work for pay and others pay for workers, for example – persist because they underwrite feelings of worth and purpose among the dominant.

What about the historical origins of this illusio and the very existence of economic capital as a standardized, institutionally backed, doxic source of recognition and misrecognition across social orders? Bourdieu (2014) did give hints on this. Building on Polanyi and others, and briefly put, he saw the commodification of land, labor and money, and the birth of market societies and capitalism, as driven in good part by struggles among the European nobility, especially the dynastic state, for symbolic capital. ‘Commodification’ here refers to the wide diffusion of doxic schema of perception in which entities and activities are assumed to have a cash value and be buyable and sellable. There is a substantial body of historiography – Marxist and non-Marxist – concerned with documenting the various strategies and adaptations of landholders, merchants and peasants in this changing environment, and without pretending to be able to arbitrate between the various theses we can at least underscore that Bourdieu provides a motivating force missing from most Marxist accounts: the evolved human need for purpose, worth and recognition, whether through dispossession and accumulation of forms of economic capital – via taxes, rents or profits – or selling one’s labor to support a family or serve God (see further Atkinson, 2020). The same principle can be extended to precapitalist societies, where ‘primitive’ economic relations and capitals – land ownership, labor provision, debts – were in many ways outgrowths of, means to, and often subordinate to, the specifically symbolic capital of individual or family honor (name, lineage and reputation) and the more or less localized system of exchanges through which it was maintained, improved or lost (Bourdieu, 1990a: 112ff). A comprehensive Bourdieusian history of ancient orders is yet to be written, for sure, but is entirely possible and desirable, and how far back in time we can trace private property and exploitation is an open question. Archaeology and anthropology tell us economic capital was not and is not always a particular source of recognition and striving among humans, but at some point, in some places, it became so, with profound historical consequences.

For this account of the genesis and maintenance of exploitation to be coherent, however, we need to clarify exactly what ‘exploitation’ means. Traditionally, it refers to extraction of surplus value, which depends on the labor theory of value. Seim and McCarthy conveniently want to sidestep debates over ‘value’ (p. 5), no doubt because the labor theory of value is so problematic, and instead follow Wright’s (1997: 9ff; 2015: 84ff) looser rendering of exploitation in terms of some people ‘living off’ others by appropriating the ‘fruits of their efforts’. Wright tied this definition to three specific conditions: the inverse welfare principle (the material welfare of one group depends on material deprivation of another); exclusion of the exploited from productive resources (i.e. means of production); and mutual dependence – the exploiter and exploited need each other, which is to say they are engaged in an (unfair) exchange relationship.

At this level of generality, exploitation can be accommodated and explained in Bourdieusian terms without too much trouble. Some people are legally recognized as possessing species of economic capital – means of production/provision – and certain accompanying rights allowing them to derive not just subsistence but other species of economic capital – tradeable productive surpluses or money – from certain practices of others – whether contribution to the production of specific goods or provision of specific services – who use but do not legally possess those means of production/provision. In social orders where labor is commodified and money the doxic measure of economic value, that is, capitalism, the degree of exploitation can be gauged by the mismatch between the amount of economic capital gained by the exploiter by virtue of this relationship and the economic capital paid to the exploited. Wages, prices and profits, furthermore, are determined not by their relationship to objective labor time and surplus value but through struggles and strategies within the economic and political fields (Atkinson, 2023). Insofar as owners of means of production seek to raise their own economic capital and thus improve their material conditions of existence – increasing relative distance from necessity and expanding the field of possible actions – by, among other things, lowering worker wages or economic benefits, thus worsening the material conditions of others – heightening proximity to necessity and closing down possibilities – we capture the inverse welfare principle. Since absolute and relative conditions of existence also engender profound differences in physical and mental wellbeing, it follows that pursuing economic capital through the exploitation of others is an unnecessary, socially generated source of suffering that critical social science should expose and challenge.

Let me underscore three provisos, however. First, as Wright (1997: 10) acknowledged, property rights and exchange relationships are ultimately dependent on juridical recognition backed by threat of force (cf. Graeber and Wengrow, 2021), meaning the state is the ultimate guarantor of exploitation. Put another way, exploitation depends on misrecognition of not only an employer’s symbolic power but, lying behind that, state symbolic power, itself premised on multiple forms of capital (Bourdieu, 2014). There is, in fact, a contradiction in Seim and McCarthy’s argument on this: they want to argue that exploitation precedes and explains symbolic domination, understood as doxic acceptance of exclusion from advantages, but, in Wright’s definition of exploitation, living off others is only possible because of exclusion of others from means of production, and that exclusion presupposes symbolic domination. The latter, in other words, precedes and explains exploitation by constituting its conditions of possibility (cf. Wacquant, 2024).

Second, it bears repeating that the process depends on the human desire for recognition and the misrecognition it yields, and that this desire can generate multiple forms of value and power irreducible to, and sometimes at odds with, economic capital. Exploitation and unequal material conditions are not exhaustive or explicative of all unnecessary domination, physical and mental suffering or even alienation: insult, discrimination, objectification, dehumanization and violence occur along lines of culture, religion, gender, race, sexuality and more. These can be bound up with struggles for and around economic capital, or they may counteract them, override them or crosscut them. Some who are seemingly economically advantaged – even those possessing means of production – can still be subjected to symbolic violence on account of their culture (e.g. as ‘stupid’, ‘crass’, etc.), gender, race, religion, ‘ugliness’ or sexuality and so on, and even, in some cases, dispossessed of economic capital on that basis (seizures, segregation, legal restrictions, etc.).

Third, rather than assume a clear qualitative break between owners and nonowners of means of production, the social space model allows us to empirically document degrees of separation or overlap in volumes of economic capital, distance from necessity, perceptions of the possible and desirable – habitus and interests – and strategies pursued on that basis (as is done, for example, with multiple correspondence analysis, e.g. Atkinson, 2022; Flemmen, 2012; Hjellbrekke et al, 2007; Melldahl, 2018). The difference in the form of economic capital is not irrelevant, but nonetheless part of a relational whole alongside other forms of economic capital – and other capitals. All this is to encase the capital-labor relation, and exploitation, within a broader framework. Their genesis, reproduction, structural form and meaning and bearing on conditions and interests are given by the more general struggle for recognition and the symbolic domination it gives rise to.

On productive relations (and forces)

The clarification of how exploitation fits within the Bourdieusian framework points us toward Seim and McCarthy’s (2023) final criticism of Bourdieu: that he ignores productive relations, or, more specifically, ignores the fact his map of social positions is rooted in productive relations and fails to explain the genesis of specific productive relations, by which they mean patterns of ownership and control of means of production and labor (p. 9). This has an affinity with the interactionist critique of Bourdieu’s conception of fields that they obfuscate the structuring and negotiation of differences in resources and interest through concrete networks of interaction (Becker, 2008), and the ‘new materialist’ critique that they ignore the efficacy of material assemblages (DeLanda, 2006) – both claiming to offer alternative species of relationalism. The response to Seim and McCarthy is the same as the response to these critiques: Bourdieu may well have generally underemphasized these in pursuit of his own research objectives, but he did give clues on how to accommodate them conceptually, and it is not hard to use the logic of his theory to explain the genesis and maintenance of specific productive relations. The key, in true relational fashion, is to think dialectically, that is to say, to think about how productive relations and field structures and struggles mutually condition and change one another, though with one important caveat: the capitals defining field struggles are the motor of human striving and therefore assume a certain explanatory primacy. This is the road to a truly unified relationalism.

First we need to look for those conceptual clues. Key here are Bourdieu’s (1996a, 2000, 2014) occasional allusions to what he termed circuits or ‘chains of legitimation’ underpinning the recognition of institutionalized capitals and the differentiation of fields within a social order. One example is the chain of legitimation leading out from state actors to those recognized as having power to confer educational qualifications, i.e. representatives of a university. Through a circuit of delegated intermediaries invested with certain powers, a piece of paper is conferred value and designated a property of a person by ‘the state’, rendering it a widely recognized token of cultural capital within a territorial social order. Likewise, employers and employees are granted certain rights and legal powers, but also subject to obligations and constraints, by the state, including the autonomy, within certain limits, to make decisions on employee pay, contracts, working conditions, worker participation, work tasks, automation and so on as well as suppliers, distribution, inter-business relations, mergers and such like. Insofar as the state regulates the market in such a way that businesses operate within a relatively autonomous and competitive economic field, these decisions become integral to strategies within that field: pushing down pay, laying off the workforce, standardizing the labor process, removing worker benefits or voice and so on become means to the end of perceived success within the economic field (Atkinson, 2025a; Bourdieu, 2005). Insofar as an employer has the legal capacity to partition and delegate their own symbolic power to others – executives, managers, supervisors, etc. – and employees also have certain state-enforced legal rights – for example, to collectivize and take industrial action – firms and corporations themselves can operate as fields of struggle and striving, adding another layer to the process by which productive relations are negotiated and specified (Bourdieu, 2005; Emirbayer and Johnson, 2008). Workers can resist, and, when successfully mobilized by trade union leaders and activists participating in the political field, turn firm-specific strategies into a wider strategy of resistance or even subversion within the social space. Employers can and do also forge alliances, of course, and lobby the state, but the latter retains its relative autonomy.

Now comes the dialectical moment: possibilities within the social space, the economic field and an organizational field are all themselves conditioned by the state of productive relations – the distribution of symbolic powers and capitals – generated by previous struggles and strategies within those fields. As the saying goes, people make history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing. People pursue strategies for capital, or activities giving them purpose and worth, but within the confines of a web of interdependencies laced with misrecognition and symbolic power that have been generated by past struggles for recognition. I would also extend this point beyond Seim and McCarthy’s focus on relations of production to include the genesis and adoption of forces of production too, that is, the technologies, infrastructure and ideas – assemblages of matter and symbolism – put to use or navigated in the productive process, though here we must invoke, inter alia, struggles and strategies within and between the state (aka the bureaucratic field) and the fields of scientific and intellectual production as well as the economic field. These too set the limits and prospects for strategies to accumulate capital, or to resist the strategies of others attempting to do so, and, with that, the practical sense of the possible and desirable.

We can make a useful distinction to articulate interrelations and conditionings like this (see Atkinson, 2025b). Bourdieu often talked about ‘field effects’ – the effects that agents within a field exert upon one another via their perception of what is going on in the field – as well as the translation or restructuring of ‘external’ events into the logic of a field (e.g. Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: passim). Let us call internal field effects those calls to act or promptings deriving from a sense of the field’s structures and dynamism (distributions of capital and ongoing strategies), and external field effects all those elements of conditions of existence, and lifeworlds generally, deriving from fields that agents do not participate in themselves but which set objective and subjective possibilities and impossibilities for the fields they do participate in, including the legal status of exchange relationships and property rights and the material assemblages and infrastructures defining forces of production. The maintenance and patterned distribution of these relations and forces over time and space can be mapped out, forming what might be called circuits of symbolic power, a synthesis and generalization of Bourdieu’s legitimation chains and (global) commodity/supply chains, to convey that they are underwritten by facilities for action – the capacity to have a law enforced or commodity shipped from A to B – associated with symbolic capital.

The structure and reproduction of the social space and the relationships within and between fields, then, are indeed embedded in specific productive relations and forces, just as they are embedded in specific networks of interaction. Possibilities for accumulating, converting and maintaining economic and cultural capital are conditioned by legal relationships and markets regulated by the state and influenced by struggles within the political field between representatives of employers, workers and others, including intellectuals and jurists. Possibilities for producing art, and types of art, are likewise embedded in these relationships and forces. This was, in fact, important to Bourdieu’s argument about artistic production, which Seim and McCarthy seemed to miss in their rendition: the intensification of competition within the artistic field, the genesis of certain types of art and the polarization of autonomous and heteronomous principles of worth were born of growing autonomy from the state and patronage with the development of a consumer market and dealership system, as well as the invention and adoption of specific artistic supplies (Bourdieu, 1993, 1996b, 2017). However, the point is that artists, like dealers, employers and workers of all kinds, are struggling for forms of capital – including those irreducible to economic capital – on the basis of their sense of the game(s) they are playing within the confines of relationships and circuits of people, symbols and things generated and maintained or modified by struggles for capital undertaken by others present and past. ‘We suffer not only from the living, but the dead’, as Marx (1887/1954: 20) put it. When explaining any activity or strategy, then, productive relations and forces are certainly part of the puzzle, but where they came from and what use people make of them are explained by the structured struggle for purpose and recognition.

Conclusion

My overall aim has been to reverse Seim and McCarthy’s argument – and by extension Wright’s (2015) – and claim that Marxist concerns with labor, exploitation and productive relations can and should be fitted within a Bourdieusian framework rather than the other way around. This is because the Bourdieusian conception of the human condition, domination and practice can encompass those concerns and even explain them better than Marxism while recognising the autonomy of other forms of domination and situating them coherently within a whole. For this reason I would make the claim that Bourdieu’s vision of class and symbolic domination offers a more logically and empirically fruitful vehicle for a critical sociology tasked with uncovering, explaining and challenging unnecessary suffering today. Pace Wright (2010: 192), one can be a Bourdieusian not just for the analysis of lifestyles but the critique of capitalism too.

True enough, I have had to elaborate and extend on Bourdieu’s own writings, sparsely cited by Seim and McCarthy, to embed material needs and labor within what Bourdieu would think of as a Pascalian – but which could perhaps be described as neo-Hegelian – emphasis on justification and recognition, to define and explain exploitation and to sketch the dialectic between the social space/fields and productive relations/forces. Perhaps these are the ‘analytical gymnastics’ Seim and McCarthy (2023: 7) were sceptical of, but, as Marx (1887/1954: 30) famously informed Maurice Lachâtre, ‘there is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits’. As the history of Marxism from Lenin and Gramsci to Burawoy and Wright surely tells us, moreover, ‘elevation of marginal points’ and ‘stretching ideas’ are common base camps for solving problems or accommodating observations within a body of thought. The point is whether doing so is progressive or not. Given Marxism’s struggles with the question of autonomy in the past, and its general tendency to skirt over them today, it may be struggling to stay progressive. Bourdieu’s framework, on the other hand, is progressive insofar as coherent elaboration within the overall logical architecture of the system allows us to assimilate more of what we see in the world.

Since they prompted this elaboration, Seim and McCarthy’s critique was very welcome, as, of course, is any further reasoned questioning of the Bourdieusian perspective. Better models of the social world, as Bourdieu (2004) had it, develop through not only empirical application but clashes and confrontations with alternatives and opposites. ‘Better’ here means, following Bachelard, a closer approximation of how things are, judged by the clearing away of omissions or errors revealed by observation and logical argument (cf. Bourdieu et al, 1991). Labor, exploitation and production are indeed important yet underspecified in Bourdieu’s writings. Seim and McCarthy usefully pointed this out, and I have tried to sketch starting points, at least, for thinking about how we might go about conceptualising and studying them in an intelligible and inclusive way. I would hope that if Marxists want to continue to oppose the Bourdieusian approach and defend their baseline, they do so in the same spirit, showing how they can integrate and explain the Bourdieusian observations coherently while mobilising sound logic to justify their prima principia. I would also hope that we do not lose sight of the fact that we are engaged in a common enterprise of demystification and critique, and that any debate or dispute should be undertaken with the goal of collectively and constructively building a unified, synthesized, consistent account of social suffering and how to challenge it, that is, a better critical sociology.