Teligent committee to submit a report outlining its findings and recommendations with a final recommendation on impeachment left to their judiciary committee Republicans would be allowed to request subpoenas but such requests would ultimately be subject to a vote by the full committee which Democrats control as the House majority the number 2 official at the State Department faced off with Senators demanding to be told why he didn't know more about the Trump administration's back channel diplomacy with Ukraine and they just missile of the former us Ambassador to the country issues now at the heart of the impeachment inquiry Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan is president trumps nominee to be ambassador to Russia under questioning by Democratic Senator Bob Menendez Sullivan said he knew that Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani had spearheaded a campaign to oust ambassador Maria Vonnegut's from riposte by didn't know why or why President Trump ultimately decided to recall the career diplomat in your view was there any basis to recall ambassador given of a Charlie yes there was the president had lost confidence in her the President had lost confidence in her and you were told that by the secretary of state I was you were aware that there are individuals and forces outside of the State Department seeking to smear Ambassador you of all of which is that correct I was going to remove her as I rise and did you know Mr Giuliani was one of those people I believe he was yes I asked why he didn't oppose Evanovich his ouster or speak out publicly on her behalf at the time Sullivan said ambassadors serve at the pleasure of the president and can be removed with or without cause the inmates at Alameda County Santa Rita jail have announced they've begun a hunger strike and worked stoppage to protest their conditions of incarceration in a statement inmates say that cell sanitation is at a crisis point they cite insufficient supplies in. Times to clean their cells sinks showers toilets and floors inmates say they're contracting lice bed bugs and flesh eating staph infections they say they're only given one set of clothes for the week and one shower Tel and mates also cite continuous lock downs due to insufficient resources and staffing they say their gala by commissary prices and excessive phone call cost and they say they need more fresh fruits and vegetables conservation groups have sued the trumpet ministration over its decision earlier this month to allow fracking and drilling on more than 725000 acres of public lands and mineral estate across California Central Coast in the Bay Area the lawsuit says the administration violated federal law by failing to consider the potential harms. Eileen elfin dairy news headlines or turn it for join us at 6 for the Pacifica evening news. From the studios of k p f a in Berkeley California this is against the grain on Pacifica Radio My name is c.b.s. Song and what happens when a Marxist scholar engages with the ideas and theories of peer board your board to the French sociologist and public intellectual was no Marxist but his ideas influenced and still influenced scholars and activists interested in how power operates and whether those who are dominated and marginalized can turn the tables on those who dominate and I'll press Michael Board for your u.c. Berkeley based sociologist and self described Marxist decided to put board you're in conversation with Marx and with a number of prominent my. Thinkers the result is a fascinating book called symbolic violence conversations with Board year when Michael Bor avoid joining a recently in studio he began with some biographical information about here for deer. That actually born in 1930 and died in 2002 he's the most influential sociologist of our era and remains though. One of my colleagues refers to him as the Mike Tyson of sociology and in some ways it's quite an apt analogy since he does have a sometimes a pugilist approach to other sociologists So he says he's become incredibly influential and should be known to our listeners that he wrote about an enormous range of things. He wrote about journalism he wrote about sports he wrote about literature they are region of the what he called a literary field in 19 century relative about impressionist painting he wrote a lot about education. And he wrote a lot about politics and he's often the Says he says the Elegy of culture was nothing virtually nothing was beyond his intellectual grasp and so what is interesting he does have an overall overarching theoretical framework through which he actually examines these very different fields. And what is the project of this book what are you trying to do with air and possibly for board your thought but I think any self respecting sociologist today has to grapple with peer Boije. And I grappled with him in a particular way says the ologies had a long sort of antagonistic and interdependent relationship with Marxism and. Himself was influenced by Marxism in the 960 s. When he was in France and with colleagues many of them who were Marxists so he grappled with Marxism in his early years and he also I must add spent a lot of time in Algeria he was there from the 19552960 where he also engaged with Marxism of the national liberation struggle and he became more and more critical of Marxism like so many over the years and he didn't take Marxism seriously he had a critique of Marx but he didn't actually acknowledge that Marxist themselves have made the same criticisms and Marx and there's a whole Marxist tradition that he I think deliberately ignored right these very very what might be called the the cultural marxists the the thinkers who tried to introduce an analysis of culture that Marx had left out exactly right so figures that people may know about people like Antonio Graham she were the ones I deal with in the book Antonio Graham she Paolo fresh air a and idea was Simone de Beauvoir who was a Marxist feminist idea with friends find on who was a black Marxist from Africa well here that's where he wrote many of his works he was originally from the West Indies so these days a source of figures that I think really doesn't. Grapple with the they often say things that are quite similar to him and says provides that they says for a very very interesting conversation you know let's talk about the conversation you put the board you're into with Marx and vice versa in one chapter of your new book symbolic violence and it's called the poverty of philosophy Marx meets board here. You begin this chapter and it's reflected in the title this chapter by comparing how Marx inboard your view philosophy philosophy as it was being done at the time that they wrote that they respectively wrote Why do you start this way well if 2 people going to have a conversation they need to start out at least with some sort of common ground and what is interesting about monks in Bolivia is that they were both indeed very critical of philosophers as somehow removed and detached from the world but not only that they believe that ideas drove history and both. Are critical of this perspective they think that material factors action they are as important and for Marx much more important than ideas for months it was the German idealists in the middle of the 19th century who thought that they were sort of making history by having arguments with one another and he makes fun of and he makes fun of them in the German ideology in the same way but makes fun of his fellow philosophers in Paris who think they're also making history but they just playing with words and not really impacting history at all so that's that common point of departure Mark somebody you know marks pheromone to higgle and Hegel Would you agree is a kind of an idealist what didn't Marx like about what Hegel was trying to say with kind of the you know the evolution of an idea right well hey go have. The idea that ideas all the unfolding of human consciousness the development of human spirit whatever that is is really the essence of history and Hagel had developed a school of philosophers that were critical of him saying that basically it's human spirit there's a theory of spirit there's no there that you have to bring Hagel down to earth and there's the most famous of these people is a fellow called back but before that too was an idealist he you know he just had different he had different ideas he had the idea of species being that human beings have this rich potentiality develop their rich and varied abilities and can you talk a little bit about the the materialist focusing on poseurs of Marx what instead of ideas was he saying drove history and would drive history Well this is all subject to debate but my view there are sort of there are basically 4 elements and this particular engagement with board reduced marks to 4 elements won a theory of history which was a succession of modes of production now i mode of production is nothing other than the way we produce things mocks viewed. The way we produce things evolve to set the relations one set of relations is our relationship to nature that we are transforming into some sort of labor process and the other is the relationships of ownership so it's not just who does what but actually who gets what those I saw 2 dimensions of a mode of production and then he said that you know you have your Start with us or of sometimes called primitive communism tribal mode then you move to the feudal then you move to the capitalist and then Bob's your uncle you move into coming as I'm 7 evolution that people sort of are very skeptical of and rightly so I agree but anyway that was his view of history as a succession of modes of production. He also had a theory of the internal dynamics of each mode of production he didn't have a theory of anything any motor production except for the capital is one and he argued in the case of capitalism that as capitalism developed as capitalist competed with one another they generated on the one hand crises of overproduction and on the other hand they deepen class struggle and he argued that there is a coincidence of the deepening of the crises of overproduction which we see all around us today coincidence of that with the intensification of class struggle that will lead to working class seizing state power and introducing communism overproduction being capitalist over producing things right and they come about because what is really happened what is happening in the capital there competing one another and in the process of competing with one another they drive down wages the same time they're producing more and more things other a few and fewer people so actually consumed the greater amount being produced and we see this capitalism goes through these cycles all along but only that but the point I want to want to make is that Marx had a theory of the dynamics of the capital is not about action and why it was so the seeds of his own destruction Ok so you give us 2 elements of Marx's materialism 1st history as a succession of modes of production like feudalism and capitalism 2nd each mode of production has an internal dynamics one of the other 2 not the other 2 well monks also said that this is very important for the discussion with Badia he had a a notion of super structures it was not just the economy but there was super structures that involve the production of ideology education philosophy cultural forms and politics too and super structures that actually for the most part kept the mode of production going. So ideology for example in this country the ideology that every few work hard enough you make it a process that has an ideology that actually many people believe even if they don't know it's not true they will still believe it and it has the effect of atomizing the working class making it more difficult to organize as a class but anyway the point is ideology is very impis important even though it's critical of it amongst the German idealists he never then brings it back to understand how Actually capitalism manages to maintain itself reproduce itself that's the 1st and the 4th is that history is also the history of class struggle. And that he believes as I said earlier in the intensification of class struggle and this is what's so is so interesting because there's a tension between on the one hand the project of the state of ideology of culture. Of politics 2 men tain capitalism to undermine the working class and on the other hand there's a tendency for the class struggle to intensify and which of these 2 wins out will determine of course the fate of capitalism and he was just optimistic too optimistic that class struggle would actually dissolve the distortions that ideology brings the what actually counteract the intervention of the state to actually promote an increasingly militant and capacious working class and may now know it was wrong Michael Bora-Bora joins me in studio He's a sociology professor at the University of California Berkeley I'm C.R.'s song and this is against the grain on Pacifica Radio did Marx see class struggle leading to workers revolution leading to the overthrow of capitalism as inevitable yes I suppose he he did but he gave us the intellectual ammunition to understand why he be wrong. Because for example when I was talking about before well the state that's so talk about the state he had in my view an undeveloped theory of the state so what does the state do that he didn't anticipate Well the state basically has an interest in keeping capitalism going and has an interest in actually doing what monks in the end really didn't think it could do namely and force concessions to the working class so what do we get after monks dies we get so minimum wage legislation we get some sort of control of the conditions of the workplace we get the development of some sort of men minimalist in this country welfare state in other countries much more developed welfare state all of which are material concessions for the working class so the working class recognizes that it actually can make gains within capitalism doesn't have to go beyond capitalism so yes so so much didn't appreciate that there was a new form of capitalism after competitive capitalism that would be a state organized in principle state organized capitalism that would actually lead the working class to struggle within capitalism Rosin beyond capitalism. So you said earlier that both poor dear and Marx Karl Marx saw flaws a few years disposed to dismiss practical worldly activity and you write in your book symbolic violence conversations with poor dear that Karl Marx and border they turned in different directions after they said this I mean that they basically agreed on the point about philosophy ignoring material conditions so you're right that Marx turn to all logic of practice and I think we can since we're going to try and focus more on board year we can say that you know he turned to labor right he turned to labor and the working class and this idea of the class struggle. So that was his his turn to practice now you can elaborate on that if you'd like but what I'm most interested in is what board you're what his turn to practice was and how how that was different than Mark's is very good that's that's so what I was just earlier saying was basically Marxist theory of the transformation of capitalism the transition to socialism that rested upon the development of class struggle now boys yes things no no. That yes we can go to the idea of practice but that practice does not lead to the intensification of class struggle quite the opposite and he argues when he examines the dominated classes the working class as an ally classes he argues that they develop a Happy to us that is in him a call to the development of class struggle he argues that they cannot see the conditions of their own subjugation and Marx assumes that ultimately the working class can say through it all and say that there that their real interests are beyond Come pick lism he was the optimist as I said Bush Jr is the very much the opposite pessimist and basically argues that the words he uses that the working class recognises the conditions of their subjugation understand that they are a dominated exploited class and so this is the fascination to my mind of bogus work it shreds throughout this idea of symbolic violence or symbolic domination that is a form of domination that is not understood as such and so he argues that the working class does not understand that the essence of that subjugation just as what men and. Women don't understand masculine domination just as the education process mystifies or mis recognizes the character of class so much of his work is about that so he argues that so deep is this have be to us of Miss recognition that surely there is no hope for a alternative future in the developments of class struggle it's not going to happen now happened to us one of the famous concepts that board year has forwarded what is it like how do we explain what it is so much of that it makes people not able to recognise the conditions of their oppression. That's the most controversial of his concept is the concept of habitus he has the idea that social structures are in a sense internalized and as such they are taken for granted and not recognized at all and that non-recognition not taken for granted in the us is embedded and embodied in the hobby to us and the habitants is more than just a mental thing it is also and bodily matter that we in the very way in which we carry ourselves bodily sort of half the world rather than critique the world he said he has an idea that there is a primary socialization then there is secondary socialization. Of people's habits as which can be seen like a person's character is there a lens in the character and this rary difficult to dislodge it and so if they individual is brought up in a particular class that individual will have a particular class happy to use and it will be very difficult to change and they will accept the conditions of their subjugation as a result of that and he argues that basically you know where monks would recognize that the working class may suffer from mystification may not understand things correctly through struggle every think all the mistakes that they make will be dissolved for blood you know you can't struggle is not going to dissolve this working class habitus that accepts the world as it is and that actually often doesn't recognize class and in this country you know it's interesting how difficult it is to have a tool to explain things in terms of class race yeah class more difficult. And interrelated concept of board your field the notion of feels as important to her. Thought what are fields yeah yeah they're that there are 3 concepts habitus field and capital of the troika. A field where field is like a field you know like a football field in which there are players Oh engage with one another according to rules that are collectively accepted it has some sort of boundary and the idea in the most general formulation in a field is that individuals will try and accumulate as much of the feel specific capital as they can in order to dominate the field so characterize the field are relations of domination so in an economic field the idea is to accumulate as much capital as you can economy capital and in the academic field and this is very important because he he is a very interesting figure in that he he come Pelz us to think about our own lives as academics we're not just studying of this so he talks about the academic field where we're trying to accumulate academic capital and indeed you know we do that and compete with one another and we have all sorts of measures of academic capital so what medals you get from up where you publish your articles there is a field of competition and he's sort of. Sociologist who like to miss recognise the world or social