false consciousness
false consciousnessA Marxist concept, referring to thinking that confirms human servitude, rather than emancipating the species essence. It refers to the purpose served by thought in the collective life of humanity. False consciousness hinders the universal class of the proletariat in its liberating and developmental role and it leads the bourgeoisie to misleadingly cast its sectional outlook as a universally valid view.
In The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Karl Marx writes of ‘the phrases and fantasies of the parties and their real organization and real interests, between their conception of themselves and what they really are’, which appears to suggest the commonsense (and mistaken) interpretation of false consciousness, as a wrong self-perception of interests and identity. However, these...
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