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.

---

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.

---

Other Word Forms

• class-conscious
  adjective

Etymology

Origin of class consciousness

First recorded in 1885–90

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

class consciousness

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

Historians used to believe that while European societies were burdened by ferocious class antagonisms, Americans had relatively little class consciousness.

From Seattle Times ● Nov. 6, 2022

I would add one more reason for the inspectors’ race-blind sense of class consciousness that belies some other research about implicit racism: They spend most of their time looking at buildings.

From Slate ● Jul. 11, 2022

Capital has been for some time developing its class consciousness.

From Crowds A Moving-Picture of Democracy by Lee, Gerald Stanley