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

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

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

From Seattle Times ● Oct. 12, 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

But meantime, the industrial process continues; the modern factory system brings the workers together in larger and larger groups, and teaches them the lesson of class consciousness.

From The Book of Life by Sinclair, Upton