White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

It is frequently asserted, in theories of the white-collar people, that there are no classes in the United States because ‘psychology is of the essence of classes' or, as Alfred Bingham has put it, that ‘class groupings are always nebulous, and in the last analysis only the vague thing called class-consciousness counts. ' It is said that people in the United States are not aware of themselves as members of classes, do not identify themselves with their appropriate economic level, do not often organize in terms of these brackets or vote along the lines they provide. America, in this reasoning, is a sandheap of ‘middle-class individuals.'

But this is to confuse psychological feelings with other kinds of social and economic reality. Because men are not ‘class conscious' at all times and in all places does not mean that ‘there are no classes' or that ‘in America everybody is middle class. ' The economic and social facts are one thing; psychological feelings may or may not be associated with them in expected ways. Both are important, and if psychological feelings and political outlooks do not correspond to economic class, we must try to find out why, rather than throw out the economic baby with the psychological bath, and so fail to understand how either fits into the national tub. No matter what people believe, class structure as an economic arrangement influences their life chances according to their positions in it. If they do not grasp the causes of their conduct this does not mean that the social analyst must ignore or deny them.