Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
False consciousness
Summary
In Marxist theory, false consciousness is a term describing the ways in which material, ideological, and institutional processes are said to mislead members of the proletariat and other class actors within capitalist societies, concealing the exploitation and inequality intrinsic to the social relations between classes. According to Marxists, false consciousness legitimizes the existence of different social classes.
False consciousness is consciousness which is incorrect and misaligned from reality. In a Marxist worldview, false consciousness is a serious impediment to human progress. Thus, correcting false consciousness is a major focus of dialectical materialism.
Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) used the term "false consciousness" in an 1893 letter to Franz Mehring to address the scenario where a subordinate class willfully embodies the ideology of the ruling class. Engels dubs this consciousness "false" because the class is asserting itself towards goals that do not benefit it. In the letter, Engels uses the term false consciousness interchangeably with the term ideology.
"Consciousness", in this context, reflects a class's ability to politically identify and assert its will. The subordinate class is conscious if it plays a major role in society and can assert its will due to being sufficiently unified in ideas and action.
Although the term false consciousness was not coined until after Marx's death, the concept appears throughout the earlier writing of Marx and Engels. For example, in The Holy Family, Marx describes how communist workers are able to break out of the false consciousness prevalent under capitalism:
They (the communist workers) are most painfully aware of the difference between being and thinking, between consciousness and life. They know that property, capital, money, wage-labor and the like are no ideal figments of the brain but very practical, very objective products of their self-estrangement.
Marshall I. Pomer has argued that members of the proletariat disregard the true nature of class relations because of their belief in the probability or possibility of upward mobility.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.