Alienation, alienated labor and symbolic capital: A possible dialogue?

Alienated labor may be understood in two different senses, both present in the Marxian thought: one (present in the manuscripts of 1844) refers to the extent into which labor is estranged from its essence when his product becomes private property of someone other than the producer. The other (mainly present in Capital) refers to the way into which an amount of unpaid labor is appropriated by the non-producer (the capitalist) as if it was paid in the purchase of the merchandise labor force: since labor force is sold in the form of working-days, what happens is an exchange between nonequivalents. The first sense departs from the postulate of an essence of labor (that derives from the postulate of a human essence), understood as the very “human vital activity”, conceptualized through an abstraction process that seeks to isolate the essential determinations from the accidental ones. Bourdieu reproaches this way of conceptualization as the “substantialist way of thinking”, fated to produce ethnocentric idiosyncrasies. Although this sense is still present in the late Marxian formulation (particularly in his concept of labor), Bourdieu is sympathetic to the unveiling of the exploration in the process of sale of the labor force: he speaks of the way into which the “subjective truth” of labor conceals the “objective truth” of exploration. But for Bourdieu this is the way into which symbolic violence operates in the maintenance and reproduction of the distribution of symbolic capitals, and is not immediately present in its production: symbolic capital (cultural, social, etc.) is a concept he develops to understand the distribution of objective positions within symbolic fields and the social space as a whole. The paper will analyze the Bourdieusian formulation in order to understand to what extent the proposed dialogue is possible.