False Consciousness

At its simplest, the concept of false consciousness denotes a misperception of reality, particularly a [Page 241]cognitive inability to comprehend accurately those social relations that are exploitative. It is commonly associated with the work of Karl Marx (1818–1883), where it forms part of an analysis of the conflict between social classes. In Marxist theory, false consciousness refers to a failure of the members of the subordinate classes, the non-owners of the means of production, to comprehend the true nature of their oppression. It explains how they are duped and inadvertently come to accept and support the interests of the class that owns productive resources, which in Marxian terms necessarily constitutes the ruling class. This is sustained through a methodical misrepresentation of material and productive social relations in the consciousness of wage-laborers, which for Marx betrays the real relations between classes. Such a deception, he held, perpetuates the power of the capitalist class. Marx distinguished between a class-in-itself—a shared objective position in productive relations, and a class-for-itself—a subjective knowledge of this position. He realized that during the period in which he lived the proletariat lacked the latter, a unified class consciousness—hence, the familiar term “false class consciousness”; a collective realization is a prerequisite for working-class empowerment, so the workers would, he hoped, in due course develop a true consciousness.

Although Marx himself did not use the actual words false and consciousness together (his coauthor and collaborator Fredrick Engels coined the phrase), the concept is nevertheless developed in his writings, and he frequently critiqued the related concept of ideology. Ideological distortion upholds the privileged position of the dominant class. In The German Ideology (1845), Marx and Engels claim that ideology and consciousness have a material premise. It is, as The 1859 Preface famously states, social being that determines consciousness, and not, as had previously been held, the other way round. It follows that if consciousness is mediated via the existing mode of production, it can be transcended only through a radical transformation of its economic premise.

Despite its theoretical subtlety, the concept has a number of immediate problems. It is a difficult concept to investigate empirically. Can one really obtain true knowledge of a collective consciousness that is said to be false? And if so, is it then legitimate to enforce, perhaps involuntary, the supposedly accurate understanding onto the falsely conscious? Further, with their dislike of metanarratives, postmodernists have typically objected to universal categories of “the truth” that include claims to a correct and authentic consciousness. On a practical level, differences in the status and earning potential of nonskilled, semiskilled, and skilled labor, and competition for consumer items has created the kind of internal divisions within the working class that tend to frustrate the possibility of generating a shared consciousness.

Despite these difficulties, the concept has influenced the thinking of Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, and Louis Althusser, who have, in their own ways, developed Marx's ideas of consciousness and ideology. In a contemporary setting, these ideas have also received critical interest from a feminist perspective. The manipulated self-perception in which social contradictions are concealed is now said to obscure the realities of gender domination and serve the interests of patriarchy. On the premise that illusionary thinking propagates servitude, and given that both Marxists and feminists point to the social mechanisms that deliberately frustrate consciousness-raising (to generate subjective awareness in subservient classes of their oppressive conditions), the move from class to gender is analytically consistent. In sum, it seems likely that as long as societies are divided distinctively by large class and gender inequalities, and as long as subject classes remain passive, the concept of false consciousness will continue to attract interest.

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