The United States has become the classic case of a socially-stratified capitalist society of the type that Marx's analysis of the problems of income inequality, wealth distribution, and the hardening of class differences predicted would be subject to socialist revolution. While revolution seems unlikely, the rest of his critique was predictive and there is no reason the present state of affairs might not lead, at least, to widespread social unrest. As income distribution continues to reach new heights of inequity, however, the dominant class has at its disposal forms of mass communication that go far beyond what Marx saw in nineteenth century Britain. The construction of false consciousness among the American people, especially in such an ethnically and racially diversified nation of immigrants (new and old), has been so effective as to make the real problems of the society nearly disappear in a cloud of distractions. When combined, the prevailing American myth of equal opportunity and freedom, the power of elite-owned mass communications, and the inherent corruption of the political system have caused the enormous growth of the country's underclass and the increasing desperation of working- and middle-class citizens to become a non-topic in America.
Yet income inequity in the United States has grown so rapidly since 1970 that "it threatens, as it did in the Great Depression, the social stability of the country" and, for the first time since the 1930s, has begun to "undermine our sense of ourselves as a nation of equals" (Galbraith 24). It may seem contradictory to argue that the problems of social stratification are repressed by most Americans yet say that they may cause social unrest. But Marx's concept of false consciousness is the key here. False consciousness occurs when "the working class accepts the dominant ideology as true although this ideology contradicts its own class interests" (Shepard 195). Marx predicted tha...