Class consciousness

Class consciousness is one's understanding of their social class in society. Class consciousness is based on the belief that society is separated into social groups. Class consciousness requires people to understand that class structures exist and where in the structure they are. Class consciousness is often related to Marxist theories, as Karl Marx used the phrase. To Marx, class consciousness happened when working people fully realized their place in society, which he believed would lead to their revolting against the upper class.

Background

People living in the same general areas have different amounts of wealth and different lifestyles. Some people are very wealthy and own land and companies. Some people are workers who own their own homes but are not overly wealthy. Still others have little material wealth, work for little money, and own few possessions. Humans often group people by the amount of money and material goods they have. Social class is the idea that people can be grouped together based on the amount of wealth and resources they have. Other factors, such as education level, can also influence a person's social class.

In the United States, people often use annual income to separate citizens into different social classes, such as upper class, middle class, and working class. Members of the upper class have the most money and often own the means for production in society. Members of the middle class are often workers who have better-paying jobs and own their homes. Members of the working class often make the lowest wages for their work and often own fewer possessions.

Overview

Class consciousness is a common idea in sociology, which is the study of the structure and function of human society. In its general terms, class consciousness is a person's understanding of social class structure in a society and their place in that structure. Class consciousness is important in studying sociology because class affects the way societies and individuals operate. Sociologists study class consciousness among groups. Some sociologists study class consciousness by asking people questions about how they feel and think about specific political and social issues. They analyze this information to ascertain which members of society have the most class consciousness. Other sociologists study class consciousness by studying data about a group's actions. The data can give clues about how certain people think and feel about class. According to sociological studies, people in the middle and upper classes often form negative opinions about people in the lower classes. Those people who are in higher social classes often mistakenly believe that those in lower social classes are not in the higher social classes because of personal failings and weaknesses. Because of this, class structures are often more injurious to those in lower classes and more beneficial for those in higher classes.

Class consciousness also has a different meaning in Marxism and Marxist sociology. Marxism is made up of the political and economic thoughts of Karl Marx, who was a radical nineteenth-century philosopher and historian. Marx observed social classes in nineteenth-century England. He believed that social classes existed and people belonged to different social classes depending on their material wealth. He believed the people of higher classes controlled outcomes for people in lower classes. He noted that people of the highest social class controlled all the mechanisms for creating wealth. For example, the land used for farming and the factories used for producing goods were all owned by the upper social class. People who worked in the factories and farmed the land received very few benefits for their work compared to the people who owned the land and factories. Marx believed that two main social classes existed—the capitalists (or those who owned the mechanisms for generating wealth) and the workers.

Marx believed that people from different social classes did not have the same level of class consciousness. He believed the wealthiest people in society already understood class and their place in society. To him, class consciousness was when the workers, or the people in the lower social classes, realized that they were part of the lowest social class. Marx believed that the working class, once they had true class consciousness, would have a revolution against the upper class. He believed the lower class and upper class would then be equals, with everyone having ownership of the land, factories, and other resources necessary for building wealth. Since Marx wanted this revolution to happen, he believed that class consciousness was important for all people to develop. His beliefs famously spurred the socialist and communist movements of the twentieth century.

At the time Marx was developing his socialist theorizes, England's social classes were clearly distinct from one another. The upper class, which owned all the mechanisms for creating wealth, believed that keeping the social classes separate was important so that society would run as it always had and chaos would not result. The wealthy often thought of their class as benevolent and caring for those they deemed worthy in the lower class. They saw "beggars" and many other members of the lower classes as lazy people who deserved their lots in life. Marx and other revolutionary socialists believed that revolution was imminent once more of the working class became class conscious. Although class consciousness was an important theory of Marx's, sociologists who study Marxism in modern times debate whether class consciousness even exists.

Marx described the concepts of false consciousness and class consciousness in his book Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I: The Process of Production of Capital (1867) and in collaboration with Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848). Hungarian social theorist and philosopher Georg Lukács expanded Marx and Engels's ideas in History and Class Consciousness (1929). Class consciousness theory was further expanded with Italian scholar Antonio Gramsci's ideals of false consciousness. Marxist thinkers developed the idea of false class consciousness from Marx's theory of class consciousness. False class consciousness is the idea that people in lower classes can misunderstand social structures because of purposeful misrepresentations of those structures. This theory believes that the upper classes help construct ideas about social structure, and the lower classes often accept this information. Their understanding of class is flawed because the information being fed to them by other parts of society is itself flawed. A person who has false class consciousness would have to uncover the truth about social class and then accept it to have real class consciousness.

Bibliography

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