Abstract
In this chapter, I explain the nature of “class consciousness” in America in light of both the standard sociological definitions in stratification theory and the Marxist sense of the term. I argue that the Marxist concept provides us with a useful tool missing from other definitions: the key concept of agency. After outlining a class-based explanation of our political system—Stanley Aronowitz’s notion of an elite political directorate composed of competing factions—I provide a relatively detailed history of the post-war decline of working-class consciousness and the concomitant rise of what I call a fully developed form of ruling-class consciousness. I chart how these forms of consciousness influenced and were influenced by politics.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
See Divine and Savage (2005, 10–12) for a history of theories of class consciousness, and Divine (2005, 142–46) for a history of the study of the nature of class consciousness. For an argument that Americans are more class conscious than has been generally recognized, see Vanneman and Cannon (1987).
- 2.
- 3.
One subset of working-class literature is proletarian literature, which is devoted, Bill Mullen says, to “a class-conscious or Marxist approach to themes that have shaped American literature from 19th-century realism and naturalism forward to contemporary multiculturalism: the individual versus the collective, the impact of race, gender, and sexuality on identity, labor, and work conditions, and the problem of upward mobility.” See especially Foley (1993) for a defense of proletarian literature as a sophisticated genre in regards to aesthetics and politics.
- 4.
Schocket (2006, 14) resists the trend toward treating class as a matter of personal identity and instead defines class as a process of ongoing, historically contingent exploitation, which is understood in part by the way this exploitation is “constructed” in fiction.
- 5.
To Ollman’s basic categories, Michael Mann (1973, 13) adds the concept of “totality” as a bridge between opposing another class and conceiving of an alternative society. To Mann, in order to make the leap toward conceiving an alternative society, workers need to realize that their own class status is a synecdoche for all of society, that their oppression is inherent in society as a whole.
- 6.
For a brief history of the elite formation of the American governmental structure, see Higley and Burton (2006, 109–14).
- 7.
Rather confusingly, Aronowitz (2003, 11) calls these social formations “class formations,” or as he puts it, “class occurs when insurgent social formations(s) make demands that cleave society and engender new social and cultural relations.” This usage, however, ignores the traditional distinctions among classes in the standard taxonomies of economic and social status, and so I will refer to what Aronowitz calls “class formations” as social movements that often cross class lines.
- 8.
See Fink (1983) for a history of the Knights of Labor.
- 9.
For a summary of these surveys, see Lipsitz (1994, 230–33).
- 10.
See also Lipset, Trow, and Coleman (1956) on the International Typesetter’s Union as an example of a union that kept local control as long as it could—until the early twentieth century.
- 11.
For a full history of the right-wing attempt to dominate the federal judicial system, see McGlaughlin and Avery (2013).
References
Aronowitz, Stanley. 1973. False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness. Rev. ed. Durham: Duke University Press.
———. 2003. How Class Works: Power and Social Movement. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Brody, David. 1980. Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth-Century Struggle. New York: Oxford University Press.
Calabresi, Steven G. 2007. Introduction. In Originalism: A Quarter-Century of Debate, ed. Steven G. Calabresi, 1–40. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing.
Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report. 1978. Carter Dealt Major Defeat on Consumer Bills. February 11.
Cowie, Jefferson. 2010. Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. New York: New Press.
Davis, Mike. 1986. The Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U. S. Working Class. London: Verso.
Divine, Fiona. 2005. Middle Class Identities in the United States. In Devine et al. (2005), 140–62.
Divine, Fiona, and Mike Savage. 2005. The Cultural Turn, Sociology and Class Analysis. In Devine et al. (2005), 1–23.
Divine, Fiona, et al., eds. 2005. Rethinking Class, Culture, Identities, and Lifestyles. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dow, William. 2009. Narrating Class in American Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Eaton, Walter H. 1952. Hypotheses Relating to Worker Frustration. Journal of Social Psychology 35 (1): 69–58.
Fantasia, Rick. 1989. Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary Workers. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Fink, Leon. 1983. Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knight of Labor and American Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Foley, Barbara. 1993. Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941. Durham: Duke University Press.
Gandal, Keith. 2007. Class Representations in Modern Fiction and Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gibson-Graham, J.K., Stephen A. Resnick, and Richard D. Wolff. 2000. Introduction: Class in a Poststructuralist Frame. In Class and Its Others, ed. J.K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen A. Resnick, and Richard D. Wolff, 1–22. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Giddens, Anthony. 1980. The Class Structure of Advanced Societies. London: Hutchinson.
Hacker, Jacob S., and Paul Pierson. 2010. Winner-Take-All Politics. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Hapke, Laura. 2001. Labor’s Text: The Worker in American Fiction. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Higley, John, and Michel Burton. 2006. Elite Foundations of Liberal Democracy. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.
Hochschild, Jennifer L. 1981. What’s Fair: American Beliefs About Distributive Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hodgson, Godfrey. 1976. America in Our Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Jackman, Mary R., and Robert W. Jackman. 1983. Class Awareness in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Janowitz, Anne. 1994. Class and Literature: The Case for Romantic Chartism. In Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations, ed. Wai Chee Dimcock and Michael T. Gilmore, 239–266. New York: Columbia University Press.
Jones, Gareth Stedman. 1984. Languages of Class: Studies in Working Class History, 1832–1882. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Judis, John. 2001. The Paradox of American Democracy. New York: Routledge.
Kahl, Joseph A., and Kingsly Davis. 1957. The American Class Structure. New York: Rinehart.
Kessler-Harris, Alice. 1987. Trade Unions Mirror Society in Conflict Between Collectivism and Individualism. Monthly Labor Review 110 (8): 32–36.
Kruse, Michael. 2018. The Weekend at Yale That Changed American Politics. Politico Magazine, September/October.
Lipset, Seymour Martin, Martin Trow, and James S. Coleman. 1956. Union Democracy. New York: Free Press.
Lipsitz, George. 1994. Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Mann, Michael. 1973. Consciousness and Action Among the Western Working Class. London: Macmillan.
Mayer, Jane. 2016. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. New York: Doubleday.
McGlaughlin, Danielle, and Michael Avery. 2013. The Federalist Society: How Conservatives Took the Law Back from Liberals. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Meese, Edwin, III. 2005. The Case for ‘Originalism.’ Heritage Foundation, June 6. https://www.heritage.org/commentary/the-case-originalism
Michels, Robert. 1958. Political Parties. Glencoe: Free Press.
Moody, Kim. 1999. The Dynamics of Change. In The Transformations of U. S. Unions: Voices, Visions, and Strategies from the Grass Roots, edited by Ray M. Tillman and Michael S. Cummings, 97–115. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Mullen, Bill. Proletarian Literature. Oxford Bibliographies On-line. http://www.oxfordbibliograhies.com/view/obo-9780199827251/obo-9780199827251-0130.xml
Ollman, Bertell. 1993. Dialectical Investigations. New York: Routledge. https://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/di_ch01.php
Page, Benjamin I., and Lawrence R. Jacobs. 2009. Class War? What Americans Really Think About Economic Inequality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Phelps-Fein, Kim. 2009. Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan. New York: Norton.
Rothman, Robert A. 1978. Inequality and Stratification in the United States. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Schocket, Eric. 2006. Vanishing Moments: Class and American Literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Smith, Mark A. 2007. The Right Talk: How Conservatives Transformed the Great Society into the Economic Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Stagner, Ross. 1950. Psychological Aspects of Industrial Conflict II: Motivation. Personnel Psychology 3 (1): 1–15.
Teachout, Zepher. 2014. Corruption in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Thompson, E.P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Pantheon.
Vanneman, Reeve, and Lynn Weber Cannon. 1987. The American Perception of Class. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Vogel, David. 1989. Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America. New York: Basic Books.
Wilentz, Sean. 1986. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850. New York: Oxford University Press.
Winkler, Adam. 2018. We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights. New York: Liveright.
Woodward, Bob. 1994. The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Zinn, Howard, and Anthony Arnove. 2009. Voices of a People’s History of the United States. 2nd ed. New York: Seven Stories.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Smit, D. (2019). Class Consciousness in Late-Twentieth-Century America. In: Power and Class in Political Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26769-8_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26769-8_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-26768-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-26769-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)