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False consciousness is the Engelsist hypothesis that material and institutional processes in capitalist society mislead the proletariat — and perhaps the other classes — over the nature of capitalism. The concept flows from the theory of commodity fetishism — that people experience social relationships as value relations between things, e.g. between the cash in their wage packet and the shirt they want. The cash and the shirt appear to conduct social relations independently of the humans involved, determining who gets what by their in-built values. This leaves the person who earned the cash and the people who made the shirt ignorant of and alienated from their social relationship with each other. Friedrich Engels wrote in 1893 that:
- " Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker. Consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or seeming motive forces."
There is no evidence that Marx himself ever actually used the phrase "false consciousness". It appears to have been used — at least, in print — only by Engels. (See Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), p. 89.)
False consciousness is theoretically linked with the concept of the dominant ideology. The doctrine of false consciousness has also been used by Marxist feminists in regard to other women.
The notion of false consciousness has been a focus for some of the strongest critiques of Marxism, since in this instance high Marxist theory can appear to be implicated in the worst excesses of the Soviet experiment. Within the USSR, the state deployed the concept of false consciousness to justify authoritarian measures against the working class. Marxist critics of Stalinism, such as Trotsky and his followersTrotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. The term is sometimes used more loosely to denote various political currents claiming a tradition of Marxist opposition to both Stalinism and capitalism. An adherent of Trotskyism is called, provide an account by which the theory is excused, on the basis that a corrupt regime is capable of perverting any theory.
Marxist theoryMarxist theory is an academic specialization in Western academias. Apart from the theories of Karl Marx it describes the theories of a number of thinkers like Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, etc. Difference between Marxi
