The power resources of the lower classes, and wage earners in particular, depended primarily on their willingness and capacity to act collectively in the market and in politics, that is, to create and sustain corporate and political organizations for collective action. This problem can be framed in terms of a collective-action calculation. Assuming the existence of a common group interest determined by a common social position, the historical sequences, the institutional setting, and the resulting political opportunities should be regarded as the conditions that shape the individual's cost–benefit analysis and therefore set the incentives for collective action outcomes. In this case, class consciousness is conceived as the capacity to overcome the free-rider problem in collective action.

The value of this perspective rests entirely on its basic assumption: the possibility of defining some basic or minimal common “interest” for the members of a given social group. This is especially hard when dealing with the long-term processes of formation and transformation of social groups. The fact is that interests, and therefore costs and benefits, cannot be defined unless identity is fixed beforehand, since the former are shaped by the latter. What is regarded as an unbearable cost with one given individual identity may well be seen as an inexpensive benefit with another. In Belgium, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the costs and benefits of any given collective-action choice of a Catholic Flemish worker depended on which of these three possible identities he regarded as predominant. In France, the same worker would not have been embarrassed by a possible subnational ethnolinguistic identity, but could still regard himself primarily as a Catholic or as a member of the working class.