From Class Politics to Classed Politics

Abstract

Questions of political conflict have always been central to class analysis; changing political fault lines were a key argument in the debates about the ‘death of class’. The ensuing ‘cultural turn’ in class analysis has shown how class continues to shape lives and experience, though often in new ways. In this article, we bring this mode of analysis to the political domain by unpacking how a multidimensional concept of class – based on the ideas of Bourdieu – can help make sense of contemporary political divisions. We demonstrate that there is a homological relation between the social space and the political space: pronounced political divisions between ‘old’ politics related to economic issues and ‘new’ politics related to ‘post-material values’ follow the volume and composition of capital. Importantly, the left/right divide seems more clearly related to the divide between cultural and economic capital than to the class hierarchy itself.