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

• The Conflict Perspective on Deviance

  • Conflict theories draw attention to power differentials, such as class conflict, and generally contrast historically dominant ideologies.
  • The legal rights of poor folks might be ignored, while the middle class side with the elites rather than the poor.
  • Alienation is the systemic result of living in a socially stratified society, because being a mechanistic part of a social class alienates a person from his or her humanity.
  • However, Marx used the term lumpenproletariat to describe that layer of the working class, unlikely to ever achieve class consciousness, lost to socially useful production, and, therefore, of no use in revolutionary struggle or an actual impediment to the realization of a classless society

• 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.

• 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).

• Social Control

  • Conflict theory assumes that the ideas held by a society are the ideas of the ruling class.
  • The ruling class uses schools, along with the media and other means of communication, to disseminate ideas that will support its continued rule.
  • Individuals are socialized consciously or subconsciously.

• Student Subcultures

  • Marxist theories account for some diversity, as they focus on classes and class-fractions rather than youth as a whole.
  • Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson described youth subcultures as symbolic or ritualistic attempts to resist the power of bourgeois hegemony by consciously adopting behavior that appears threatening to the establishment.