In an article entitled "To have and have not: Notes on the progress of the American class war," Michael Lind argues that the key to the success of the American oligarchy is that it "spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist" (1995, p. 35). But, he adds, its success also depends on the "equally strenuous efforts of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight" (p. 35). In avoiding questions related to the stratification of American society the ruling class and the rest of the citizenry collaborate on distractions such as phony ideological issues (should there be a Constitutional amendment banning "flag-burning"?) and the perpetuation of divisive categories (white against black, straight against gay, men against women, religion against religion) that keep the great majority of Americans from concentrating on what they have in common, that is, their near-permanent relegation to near powerlessness while a minority retains (and increases) its hold on wealth and power. As is clear from Lind's subtitle, his approach derives from Marxist conflict theory of stratification which "asserts that capitalist societies are divided into two opposing classes, wage workers and capitalists, and that conflict between these two classes will eventually lead to revolutions that will establish classless socialist societies" (Kornblum, 2000, p. 348). This, however, is a very limited statement that ignores the impact of Marxist analysis and goes on as if to demonstrate that conflict theory had somehow been disproved by the failure of so-called communist societies in the USSR and China.
Kornblum (2000) also asserts that "no persuasive evidence shows that class conflict is heightening the division between workers and owners of capital in capitalist societies" and, although there is some conflict, "the industrial working class is shrinking and the new occupational grou...