I have often pondered on what I have, or more to the point haven’t, contributed to the socialist movement. My record of activism is certainly parsimonious compared with others I know. I once blogged on what I see as an elective affinity between sociology, education and socialism, at the back of my mind a sense that five decades or more of sociology teaching and writing – oriented to education – in some part compensate for a paucity of activist engagement elsewhere. I do believe that citizens superficially stereotyped and damned as stupid are in fact often under-educated; and surely sociology has a role here, otherwise why would the wealthy and powerful and their allies and co-optees across our institutions be so keen to undermine, side-line and rubbish it.
And now I come across these few sentences from Bourdieu’s Acts of Resistance:
‘There is a need to invent new forms of communication between researchers and activists, which means a new division of labour between them. One of the missions which sociologists can fulfil perhaps getter than anyone is the fight against saturation by the media. We all hear ready-made phrases all day long. You can’t turn on the radio without hearing about the ‘global village’, ‘globalization, and so on. These are innocent-sounding words, but through them come a whole philosophy and a whole worldview which engender fatalism and submission. We can block this forced feeding by criticizing the words, by helping non-professionals to equip themselves with specific weapons of resistance, so as to combat the effects of authority and the grip of television, which plays an absolutely crucial role. It is no longer possible nowadays to conduct social struggles without having a specific programme for fighting with and against television … In that battle, the fight against the media intellectuals is important. Personally, those people do not cause me sleepless nights, and I never think about them when I write, but they have an extremely important role from a political standpoint, and it would be desirable for a proportion of the researchers to agree to devote some of their time and energy, in their activist mode, to countering their effects.’
Bourdieu wrote this in Paris in 1996, and times have changed a little. To the perils of television must now be added those of the Internet in general and social media in particular. But his point surely stands.
It is in this ‘field’ that I can perhaps – through lectures, discussions, writings and blogs – best fuel the cause of socialism.