No Local by Sharzer Greg

Author:Sharzer, Greg
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780993324
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing

Habitus

There’s no single ideology for the different layers of the petite bourgeoisie. However, localism is a petite bourgeoisie ideology because it projects its particular class interests, the desire to remain small and avoid conflict, onto the capitalist economy as a whole. This assumes cultural, not just economic forms.

Habitus was a concept Bourdieu invented to describe how ideology works. The simplest definition is the taste of class: what members of a particular class do to define themselves. This means everything from going to university, to their favorite music, to what kind of beer or scotch they drink. But habitus also separates classes from each other. For a world divided into social classes, habitus helps “organizes the perception of the social world.” Lifestyles come from habitus, and while they appear as a free choice for individuals, in fact they’re products of a complex set of meanings that produce ideology. These meanings come from the power and privileges of their makers. Property ownership gets transformed into a series of symbols that grant cultural power to the owner. This is a description of power structures, not a way to blame people for holding certain ideas, and certainly not the “petite bourgeois ideology” so loathed by the New Left. It’s simply that individuals who move up, apparently by their own efforts, come to believe that those who behave and consume appropriately can do the same.

Those who control capital don’t have to rise because they’re already at the top, while those without capital are stuck selling their labor power to survive. Bourdieu ascribes multiple, shifting ideas to the petit bourgeois precisely because they’re constantly moving between the two poles, rising up or falling down the social hierarchy and using habitus to mark their progress. Habitus is about the consumption of goods and images, and this departs from Marxism’s focus on who controls production. But for a class that distributes capital, rather than making or owning it, this is appropriate: for the petite bourgeoisie, control over consumption substitutes for real social power.

Stuck between capital and labor, the petite bourgeoisie’s class power is limited by the power of other classes. This forces its members to personalize all decisions about how to advance. There are no family networks to inherit capital through or collective communities to depend on. They face daily “ethical, aesthetic or political dilemmas” that determine their well–being and future prospects, making everyday life into a series of strategic decisions. Members of the petite bourgeoisie assume that the sum of their voluntary choices creates social change. Put together, these choices equal a lifestyle, which both legitimizes those who practice it and models that behavior for others. Its ‘lifestylism’ makes the petite bourgeoisie unique: it is the only class to demonstrate these values not through propaganda and overt control (which it will never have) or collective resistance; instead it seeks “its occupational and personal salvation in the imposition of new doctrines of ethical salvation.” Thus, Bourdieu writes, “the new petite bourgeoisie is predisposed to play a vanguard role

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