What is Bourdieu saying here? The historical success of Marxism is to have constituted the idea of class out of a bundle of attributes shared by an arbitrary assemblage of people, what he calls ‘class on paper’. Aided by parties, trade unions, the media and propaganda – an ‘immense historical labor of theoretical and practical invention, starting with Marx himself’ (Bourdieu, 1991 [1984]: 251) – Marxism effectively called forth the working class as a real actor in history, an actor that otherwise would have had only potential existence. However, Marxism did not see itself as constituting the working class, but as discovering and then reflecting the prior existence of an objective class that was destined to make history in its own image. Marxism did not have the tools to understand its own effect – ‘theory effect’ – without which there would be no ‘working class’. In short, Marxism did not comprehend its own power – the power of its symbols – and thus missed out on the importance of symbolic domination.

But why does Marxism constitute such a ‘powerful obstacle to the progress of the adequate theory of the social world’ (Bourdieu, 1991 [1984]: 251) now, if before it had been so successful? Here I conjecture the answer to be as follows. In failing to recognise the symbolic world, Marxism fails to anticipate the emergence of fields of symbolic production – fields of art, literature, science, journalism – that engender their own domination effects, overriding and countering Marxism's symbolic power. Marxism cannot understand that a classification or representational struggle has to precede class struggle, i.e. classes have to be constituted symbolically before they can engage in struggle.