1. "Roulette, which holds out the opportunity of winning a lot of money in a short space of time, and therefore of changing one's social status quasi-instantaneously, and in which the winning of the previous spin of the wheel can be staked and lost at every new spin, gives a fairly accurate image of this imaginary universe of perfect competition or perfect equality of opportunity, a world without inertia, without accumulation, without heredity or acquired properties, in which every moment is perfectly independent of the previous one, every soldier has a marshal's baton in his knapsack and every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything" (first page of "excerpted from Pierre Bourdieu
The Forms of Capital, 1983)
This rather lengthy sentence is simply pointing out the great myth of class mobility. We like to think that today in America everyone is given an equal opportunity to succeed. All we need is luck and elbow grease. The great myth is that at any given moment, everyone has equal capacity to become anything they wanted to be in an instant. In regards to Bourdieu's theory, this is his "anti-thesis," the thing that he sets out to dismantle while explaining why this "imaginary universe" does not exist. It is important to understand that this idea of equal opportunity is a
myth if we are to proceed to asking what gives structure to the actual social world--Capital.
