class consciousness

Examples of class consciousness in the following topics:

• Politics

  • The higher one's social class, the higher their levels of political participation and political influence.
  • Educational attainment, an indicator of social class, can predict political participation.
  • Social class impacts one's level of political participation and political influence.
  • Those who vote as members of a social class can be said to be participating in identity politics.
  • Some groups have combined identity politics and Marxist social class analysis and class consciousness.

• The Conflict Perspective

  • There is a class conflict and within access to healthcare.
  • Marx ushered in radical change, advocating proletarian revolution and freedom from the ruling classes.
  • Marx rejected this type of thinking and termed it false consciousness, which involves explanations of social problems as the shortcomings of individuals rather than the flaws of society.
  • Marx wanted to replace this kind of thinking with something Engels termed class consciousness, which is when workers recognize themselves as a class unified in opposition to capitalists and ultimately to the capitalist system itself.
  • Karl Marx wanted to replace false consciousness with class consciousness, in which the working class would rise up against the capitalist system.

• Class

  • Subjectively, the members will necessarily have some perception of their similarity and common interests, called class consciousness.
  • Class consciousness is not simply an awareness of one's own class interest but is also a set of shared views regarding how society should be organized legally, culturally, socially and politically.
  • The upper class is the social class composed of those who are wealthy, well-born, or both.
  • Class mobility refers to movement from one class status to another--either upward or downward.
  • Compare and contrast Marx's understanding of 'class' with Weber's class model

• Marxism-Leninism

  • The goal of Marxism–Leninism is the development of a state into a socialist republic through the leadership of a revolutionary vanguard, the part of the working class who come to class consciousness as a result of the dialectic of class struggle.
  • His main contribution to Marxist thought is the concept of the vanguard party of the working class.
  • The party was open only to a small amount of the workers, the reason being that the workers in Russia still had not developed class consciousness and therefore needed to be educated to reach such a state.
  • Lenin believed that the vanguard party could initiate policies in the name of the working class even if the working class did not support them, since the vanguard party would know what was best for the workers, since the party functionaries had attained consciousness.
  • In contrast to Karl Marx, who believed that the socialist revolution would be composed of and led by the working class alone, Lenin argued that a socialist revolution did not necessarily need to be led by or composed of the working class alone, instead contending that a revolution needed to be led by the oppressed classes of society, which in the case of Russia was the peasant class.

• Class Conflict and Marx

  • For Marx, society was characterized by class conflict.
  • Marx argued that establishing class solidarity was difficult because most people were blind to their true class position.
  • Instead, they embraced a false consciousness composed of ideology disseminated by the ruling class.
  • In each stage, an ownership class controls the means of production while a lower class provides labor for production.
  • Once the proletariat developed a class consciousness, Marx believed, they would rise up and seize the means of production, overthrowing the capitalist mode of production, and bringing about a socialist society.

• Marx's View of Class Differentiation

  • In a capitalist society, the ruling class, or the bourgeoisie, owns the means of production, such as machines or tools that can be used to produce valuable objects.
  • The working class, or the proletariat, only possess their own labor power, which they sell to the ruling class in the form of wage labor to survive.
  • In a capitalist society, the ruling class promotes its own ideologies and values as the norm for the entire society, and these ideas and values are accepted by the working class.
  • A temporary status quo could be achieved by employing various methods of social control—consciously or unconsciously—by the bourgeoisie in various aspects of social life.
  • Eventually, however, Marx believed the capitalist economic order would erode, through its own internal conflict; this would lead to revolutionary consciousness and the development of egalitarian communist society.

• The Social Reproduction of Inequality

  • Working class students may begin to understand that they are in a double-bind: either they must strive to succeed, and in doing so abandon their own culture in order to absorb the school's middle class values, or they will fail to climb the social ladder.
  • The premise that education fosters equal opportunity is regarded as a myth, perpetuated to serve the interests of the dominant classes.
  • Anti-school values displayed by these children are often derived from their consciousness of their real interests.
  • For example, working class students may begin to understand that they are in a double-bind: either they must strive to succeed, and in doing so abandon their own culture in order to absorb the school's middle class values, or they will fail.
  • Children from lower-class backgrounds face a much tougher time in school, where they must learn the standard curriculum as well as the hidden curriculum of middle class values.

• Describing Consciousness

  • Consciousness is an individual's state of awareness of their environment, thoughts, feelings, or sensations; in order to experience consciousness, one must be both awake and aware.
  • Issues of concern in the philosophy of consciousness include the following: whether consciousness can ever be explained mechanistically; whether non-human consciousness exists, and if so, how it can be recognized; how consciousness relates to language; whether consciousness can be understood in a way that does not require a dualistic distinction between mental and physical states or properties; and whether it may ever be possible for computers or robots to be conscious.
  • He pointed out that there is no reason to assume that consciousness is tied to any particular body or mind, or that consciousness cannot be transferred from one body or mind to another.
  • Today, the primary focus of consciousness research is on understanding what consciousness means both biologically and psychologically.
  • It questions what it means for information to be present in consciousness, and seeks to determine the neural and psychological correlates of consciousness.

• A History of Theories of Consciousness

  • Consciousness can be defined as human awareness to both internal and external stimuli.
  • In fact, Locke held that consciousness could be transferred from one soul to another.
  • René Descartes also addressed the idea of consciousness in the 17th century.
  • They posit that consciousness changes over time, in quality and in degree: an infant's consciousness is qualitatively different than a toddler's, a teenager's, or an adult's.
  • Abnormal development also affects consciousness, as do mental illnesses.

• The Conflict Perspective

  • For Karl Marx, class conflict was most prominent; other theorists saw racial and ethnic conflict as more significant.
  • The classical conflict perspective pioneered by Karl Marx saw all forms of inequality subsumed under class conflict.
  • For Marx, issues related to race and ethnicity are secondary to class struggle.
  • Du Bois theorized that the intersectional paradigms of race, class, and nation might explain certain aspects of Black political economy.
  • Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins writes "Du Bois saw race, class, and nation not primarily as personal identity categories but as social hierarchies that shaped African American access to status, poverty, and power" (2000 Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, 42).