More elementary:
G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America Now. Current edition. D is the premier (technically nonMarxist) empirical analyst of the ruling class. His stuff is understandable by a high school graduate.
William Ryan, Blaiming the Victim, also Equality. Both older, but very clear and accessible.
Philip Green, Equality and and Democracy.
Intermediate:
Ralph Miliband, Divided Societies. An excellent, accessible Marxist approach, very nicely written
Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream. A Reagan-era history of the US working class, its divisions, and its dependency on the Democratic Party, written in Davis' usual glittering style. Davis' City of of Quartz, about LA, is a great case study.
Sophisticated:
Erik Wright, Classes, The Debate on Class, Class Counts. Wright is the most serious empirically minded Marxist sociologist doing work on class today. He operates from an analytical Marxist perspective. His views are summarized in the essays in Interrofating Inequality.
J.F. Sitton's Crrent Marxian Theory has a good discussion of Wright along with other contemporary Marxist classd theory.
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. Long, gorgeously written history of class in England in 1790-1830, the locus classicus of the "suibjective" processes theory of class; EPT argues that classes make themselves. It takes some effort to transpose the thought to modern America; would go with with Davis' Prisoners.
--jks
>
>I spend a certain amount of time talking to non-leftists and I've gotten
>rather tired of telling them about class. I want to shift the drear burden
>to book and article writers who, unlike me, acquire name, status and
>fortune by doing it. Many of my interlocutors think that class doesn't
>exist, or that class war/struggle is a fiction. So, besides _The_Hidden_
>_Injuries_of_Class_ I'm wondering if there's anything y'all would like to
>recommend, recalling that the targets may not be drawing much more water
>than Mises, Hayek & Co. at this time. Besides books, currently available
>web pages and magazine articles would be nice. And comic books -- yes,
>Class War Comic Books would be just the ticket.
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com