Class Struggle vs Status Struggle Politics

Typology

Joseph R. Gusfield:

"The following is an excerpt from sociologist Joseph R. Gusfield’s Symbolic Crusade, a book from 1963 about Prohibition in the United States. As Matt Karp and others have pointed out, our current juncture is not dissimilar to the Gilded Age—a confused political time that saw bitter partisan rivalry, class dealignment, and momentous culture wars, resulting in that most curious “noble experiment.” For Gusfield and others, we often confuse class politics (a social struggle between people with different material interests) and status politics (a “characterological struggle” between people with different cultural commitments). Whereas “class politics is an effort to influence material gain, to rectify discontents by directly affecting the distribution of wealth”, status politics is rooted in “affect or emotion, generating action which, in the use of the psychological concepts of ‘projection’ and ‘rationalization,’ need not affect the distribution of prestige.” While we don’t agree with everything here—Gusfield’s reading of school integration as only symbolic seems insufficient—we do find the basic distinction here useful. Gusfield is certainly not dismissive of status politics, but he does note its particularly symbolic character: “the significant meanings are not given in the intrinsic properties of the action but in what it has come to signify for the participants.” More critically, he also invokes Freud in claiming that status politics are often kinds of substitute satisfactions, which leads us to wonder how else expressive movements might be satisfied."

(https://damagemag.com/2021/10/06/class-politics-and-status-politics/)

Source: Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. University of Illinois Press, 1963.