Class Consciousness Essay ⋆ Essays on Controversial Topics ⋆ EssayEmpire

Class consciousness is an awareness of one’s position in the class structure that can be shared by members of the same class. It enables individuals to come together in opposition to the interests of other classes and, therefore, can be important for people challenging inequality and exploitation. Although members of any class can have class consciousness, it is particularly important for those in the working class because they are at the bottom of the class hierarchy and have the most to gain from being unified.

The concept of class consciousness originates in the work of Karl Marx, who emphasized that it is important for the working class (proletariat) to see itself as a group with shared interests in order for workers to come together and overthrow the dominant capitalist class (bourgeoisie) and to take control of the means of production in a revolution. Although Marx never actually used the term class consciousness, he distinguished between “class in itself,” where workers merely have a common relation to the means of production, and “class for itself,” where they organize to pursue common class interests.

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Friedrich Engels encouraged workers to unite by informing them of their exploitation by 19th-century capitalists who forced them to endure bad working conditions, long working hours, and wages so low that many families had to send their children to work to supplement the family income. Marx and Engels wrote that proletarians faced alienation—estrangement from both their work and the world in general. The Communist Manifesto states that because the dominant classes control major social institutions like education and religion, they can shape cultural norms and values so that members of the proletariat will blame themselves for their misfortunes. An individual who blames him-or herself will fail to recognize that others have the same problems and will fail to see a collective solution for them. Thus, Marx and Engels thought that an awareness of the increasingly exploitative nature of capitalism would make class consciousness inevitable and that it would help workers around the world to overthrow the bourgeoisie.

Marxists express concern about the lack of class consciousness among workers, particularly in the most developed nations, where Marx predicted that communist revolution would occur first. Engels introduced the concept of false consciousness to explain how workers can develop a mistaken or distorted sense of identity and their place in the social hierarchy. Because people with false consciousness identify with the bourgeoisie rather than with other workers in the same class, they do not develop a true class consciousness that would disrupt the social order. For example, waiters employed in a five-star hotel may associate and identify with their wealthy customers and fail to recognize that their interests are more aligned with the interests of the hotel’s kitchen workers, security and maintenance staff, housekeepers, or other people who make a similarly low wage. This would make waiters less likely to see themselves as working class, to recognize that their wealthy customers and the owners of the hotel mistreat them, to participate in efforts to organize for better pay or working conditions in the hotel, and to support social policies that challenge inequality in society. In contrast, waiters with a class consciousness, who recognize other hotel workers as fellow members of the working class and have interests opposed to those of wealthy customers and owners, would be more likely to work together to demand change.

Michael Mann’s work further developed the idea of working-class consciousness by specifying varying levels of class consciousness. He identified four different elements of working-class consciousness: class identity, one’s self-definition as part of a working class; class opposition, the perception that the capitalist class is an enemy; class totality, the acceptance of identity and opposition as the defining characteristics of one’s social world; and having a vision of an alternative society without class. These elements help us to contrast class consciousness in different settings. For instance, Mann compared the working class in Western economies and said that workers in Britain were likely to see themselves as members of the working class, but they were not likely to envision a classless society or work toward worker revolution. In contrast, Italian and French workers were more likely to participate in unions that directly oppose capitalism in favor of socialist or communist platforms. Mann’s arguments can help explain why class organizing has been more prominent in some countries than in others, and why socialist or communist parties have been supported only in some societies.

Despite these conceptual advances, class consciousness is considered difficult to study: It is hard to measure using common survey methods, and it is always changing because classes themselves are always in flux as people interact with one another. Class consciousness may change as people learn about their positions in society, about the status of others, and about social stratification in general. What it means to be working class can vary across time and space, making it hard for workers to have a common awareness of class. Recently, some sociologists argued that class consciousness is an overly rigid concept. Instead, they proposed class formation; that is, the dynamic process of interclass relations and how class is practiced, represented, and constructed in daily life. To study class formation, scholars might examine how class is part of the organization of workplaces, family traditions, and neighborhoods, paying attention to how class images and identities affect other perceptions of society and how evolving class formation can increase or decrease the potential for resistance and social change.

Bibliography:

Fantasia, Rick. 1995. “From Class Consciousness to Culture, Action, and Social Organization.” Annual Review of Sociology 21:269-87.
Mann, Michael. 1973. Consciousness and Action among the Western Working Class. London: Macmillan.
Marx, Karl and Fnednch Engels. [1848] 1998. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Signet Classic.

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