class consciousness

American  

noun

1. awareness of one's own social or economic rank in society.

2. a feeling of identification and solidarity with those belonging to the same social or economic class as oneself.

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class consciousness Cultural  

1. Identification with other members of one's own class and awareness of its relationship with other classes. According to Marxist theory, the proletariat (see also proletariat) will assume class consciousness when workers realize that they are being exploited by the bourgeoisie; then a proletarian revolution will be inevitable. Contrary to this theory, however, the American working class is primarily socially conservative.

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Other Word Forms

• class-conscious
  adjective

Etymology

Origin of class consciousness

First recorded in 1885–90

Example Sentences

We know nothing about the other gladiators, or how they got to the point where a boring speech was enough to suddenly awaken their class consciousness, but at least we know how Hanno got here.

From Salon • Dec. 7, 2024

Generally, Marxism relied on the proletariat, the industrial workers in the factories, gaining class consciousness.

From Textbooks • Dec. 14, 2022

The ideas about class consciousness aren’t anything that a college freshman isn’t already well-versed in.

From Seattle Times • Oct. 12, 2022

The extreme class consciousness of characters in Proust or, for that matter, in Evelyn Waugh and Louis Auchincloss also tells us a great deal about the inner lives deformed by rigidly hierarchical societies.

From New York Times • Mar. 3, 2022

Even the spirit of the class consciousness had changed.

From Socialism and Democracy in Europe by Orth, Samuel P.