Class Divisions and Status Rankings: The Social Psychology of American Stratification

None of the studies we have reviewed can justify the conclusion that American workers lack class consciousness. On the contrary, past studies have consistently overlooked available evidence that Americans are indeed class conscious but that this consciousness is not translated into successful protest because of the opposition of a healthy and vigilant capitalist class. Past explanations of working-class protest failed not because they included social psychological explanations but because they did so without any independent evidence of the workers’ actual psychology. The lack of class consciousness was inferred from the behavior; class consciousness itself was never studied. Since we cannot