Tucked away toward the end of Bourdieu's masterpiece, Pascalian Meditations, are four startling pages under the heading ‘The twofold truth of labour’ (Bourdieu, 2000 [1997]: 202–5). They are startling, firstly, because they deal with the labour process, a topic Bourdieu rarely broached, and, secondly, because his interpretive framework follows Marxist orthodoxy, a framework he generally dismissed as anachronistic and misguided.

His argument is presented in typically intricate form in the quotation above. Let me translate. In constituting the object of knowledge – i.e. the notion of wage labour – Marx breaks with the subjective (lived) experience of workers that they are paid for a full day's work, for eight hours in an eight-hour day. In reality, workers are exploited and only receive wages that are equivalent to a portion of the working day, say five hours, leaving three hours as surplus labour, which is the basis of profit. So far, this is straightforward Marx. But, says Bourdieu, it is not enough to make this first break – first reversal – with lived experience to produce the objective truth of exploitation, it is further necessary for theory to make a second break, a second reversal, this time against the ‘objective truth’ in order to reincorporate the ‘subjective truth’ – the lived experience of workers.