Symbolic Exploitation and the Social Dialectic of Desire

Abstract

Utilizing the work of Thorstein Veblen, I argue that the interrogation of `symbolic exploitation' should be of pressing concern to sociologists who hope to end economic exploitation. Contesting economic exploitation must begin with the destruction of traditional sovereign action patterns of desire that ensnare agents. Such a work of destruction must simultaneously be a work of construction, the construction of counter-hegemonic cultures of solidarity that reject the normative systems of status distribution associated with pecuniary capitalism. With this self-recognition on the part of the laboring classes, the end of economic exploitation becomes both palpable and possible.