Pierre Bourdieu Social Class

Marx wrote extensively on class and he took a more linear approach to his class analysis claiming that:
‘the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles...The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms.it has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. (Marx,K.1848. as quoted in McLellan,D.2000.pg.246)

Bourdieu argues that ‘Through habitus we learn…our rightful place in the social world, where we will do best given our dispositions, and resources and also where we will struggle’ (Bourdieu,P.1990.as quoted in.Maton,K.2012.57). Thus leading to social actors becoming likely to ‘gravitate towards those social fields (and positions within these social fields) that best match their dispositions and try to avoid those fields which involve a field-habitus clash’ (Maton,K.2012.58) or in other words avoiding those situations that they recognize they will be likely to be unsuccessful. Bourdieu therefore shows that social divisions are created through individual experiences which lead to a loss of ambition, for example a school pupil from a poor neighborhood may be less inclined to become a doctor, for example, simply because it is for the ‘rich kids’. However an important part of this habitus is the 4 different forms of capital, these

It helps to convince us that if someone is poor it is through the choices they have made as individuals, and should be viewed upon with disgust due to their irresponsible nature. Evident of this is black dee in benefits street of whom the viewer was given the impression of her having irresponsible spending habits. Nonetheless it is important to consider how we all come from different positions in the social hierarchy and how class divisions can also be caused atleast in part by higher status occupations and opportunities creating what Bourdieu refers to as a ‘field-habitus clash’(Maton,K.2012.58) for people of lower class origin. Nor should class be taken for granted as something that everyone feels as class becomes less corporate, less collective and less communal in character’(Scott,2002 as quoted in Wetherall,M.