On the Theoretical Value of Conceiving Capitalism as a Relation of Power

Capitalism belongs among those general entities that struggle to take heuristic shape in the study of practice. Inherited from a tradition more Marxist than Marxian, it remains relatively static, designating a typical and modern mode of production that appears as the backdrop to everyday life. In this sense, it imposes itself as a ground upon which practices unfold without it — gender, race, class, age, and so forth rarely needing to be anchored to capitalism in order to account sociologically for what individuals do. Yet the work of Pierre Bourdieu shows that the economic is not reducible to the economy, for there exist ordinary logics of accumulation and appropriation at the very heart of social life which strongly contribute to logics of domination. Thus, we suggest that capitalism is better apprehended as a relation of power through which the economic comes into the lived world. This, indeed, allows us on the one hand to avoid falling into an objectivism and reductionism that risk reifying economic power as an exogenous determinism imposed upon the individual, and on the other hand to apprehend the economic dynamically, by bringing to light how Capital — understood as concept and not merely as stock — works upon the individual within lived experience. From this perspective, existentialism becomes complementary to the sociological enterprise, grounding a phenomenological approach to freedom that enables us to grasp the ambiguity of the effects of a power which itself valorises freedom, and thereby to move beyond the opposition determinism/freedom.