False consciousness

Am I so out of touch!? ...No — it's the children who are wrong. False consciousness is, within Marxist theory, an attempt to explain why the majority of workers consistently fail to play their allotted part in the Marxist narrative, viz., uniting in unilateral support of a worldwide communist revolution already. (What are they, stupid!?)

In Marxist theory, the role played by "false consciousness" is basically identical to the role played by "sheeple" in conspiracy theories; there having to exist as explanation — other than the theory itself being wrong, of course — for why the very people who ought to wake up the fastest seemingly refuse to do so.

When communists are not in power, the term sees use as an ad hominem of sorts — targeted against anyone who isn't communist and indeed against those subscribing to the "wrong kind" of communism.

When communists do get into power, the concept of "false consciousness" still sees wide use. In the Soviet Union, the idea that those who dared question communism publicly were in massive denial — or just not quite right in the head — was taken to its logical conclusion, and political dissidents were systematically clapped up in booby hatches or forcibly committed to asylums, fraudulently "diagnosed" with "sluggish schizophrenia".

The superstitious stern warning that consciousness itself may turn "false" if exposed to the wrong ideas may also have the added effect of inducing avoidance behaviors in those already communist, thus providing a layer of fresh paint to the walls of their echo chamber.

Original notion
The argument goes like this.
 * Premise 1. There are different classes of people within society.
 * Premise 2. These classes have different goals that contradict each other, and one has far more members than all others combined.
 * Premise 3. To retain their position as the most prosperous class, the bourgeoisie uses its power over the means of production.
 * Premise 4. The proletariat is bombarded with ideological messages of anti-unionism, and is swayed from using its labor power.
 * Premise 5. The struggle between various social classes is the be-all-end-all of world affairs.
 * Premise 6. In this struggle, members of each social class tend to look out for their own class interests, as shown by Premise 4.
 * Premise 7. Fulfillment of the communist political program is an advance in the interests of the working class, and by extension each worker — no other movement can organize this correctly.
 * Conclusion: Therefore, all workers should be communists for their own class interests.

The question then becomes, why are all workers not communists? Since it would be too much to suggest that some of the more assumption-based premises (particularly Premise 7) are logically unsound, it must be that workers are just misled, having been duped by the ruling classes into thinking that they are anything else besides the rightful owners of their labour, in an attempt to "divide and conquer" the worldwide proletariat. The ridiculous notion that the worker is actually an individual person is heavily frowned upon, as it tends to make him think he is somehow different from some other worker halfway across the world, with different interests, thus ruining the abstraction (and also the worker's usefulness to the Party).

According to this line of thinking, "worker" should be the primary identity of all working class people, but many workers have been duped by the ruling classes into thinking they are some other identity first and foremost. Instead of workers, this segment of the working class see themselves as having some other primary identity, such as "entrepreneur" or "middle class", and hence these workers have false consciousness. Which terms the ruling classes try to push on workers to make them think of themselves as not being workers can change all the time, but all serve to remove the worker from their own identity.

Modifications
The theory of false consciousness has undergone modifications through the years.

Previously, communists had claimed that they were not in power because workers were being excluded from the political process. The lie was put to these claims when communists started losing free elections; in response, the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci came up with the notion of "cultural hegemony".

This was the idea that the ruling class uses cultural (as opposed to strictly political) means to keep the majority in a state of covert subjugation. Variants on this concept were predictably enough adopted by the far right, notably as basic narrative components of Cultural Marxism and Neoconservatism alike.

Later, with the advent of identity politics, in which various other identity groups took the place of the proletariat in the abstractions, the idea has become much more widely applied. The so-called "Uncle Toms", for example, who place their own interests above that of their perceived race, are seen as having false consciousness.

Radical feminists are also particularly fond of the idea, much to the dismay of less radical feminists. Elucidating this link between Marxist false consciousness and radical feminism, professor of social justice Sue Wise and professor of sociology Liz Stanley explain:

Feminism vs radicalism
Feminist academics seem to see a difference between themselves and other women. They seem to be saying ‘I can see and conceptualize the truth about things but those poor falsely conscious morons can’t.’ You’d think all these years of men saying that women can’t really understand what’s going on in the world would have had some kind of impact on this idea of false consciousness and on how feminists do theory and research. I can only think of a couple of things written by feminist social scientists that actually challenge that way of doing research. The feminist retort to the above described radicalism is profound. Once again, professor of social justice Sue Wise and professor of sociology Liz Stanley explain:

Right-wing spin
Some hard-right activists and libertarians of a conspiracy theorist bent have developed their own version of false consciousness, in which they claim that people only vote left-wing because they've been duped by the liberal media, public education system, and other institutions. Deep down these "left-wing" (which just means anything left of firmly right-wing) voters supposedly believe in right-wing values, they just don't know it. When taken to an even greater extreme they may say liberals are just right-wingers in denial, or are vying for attention. A more mainstream version of this was pushed by Fox News and the GOP after the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election, where they tried to say that people didn't vote for Mitt Romney because of "messaging problems" as opposed to their platform itself being too extreme or morally repugnant for the voting public.

Another right-wing version of this, called the "Democratic plantation", pops up every now and then to explain why non-white people (and in particular, black people) don't vote Republican. The "answer" is that they've been fooled by the Democratic Party, who repress them through food stamps and welfare into not taking personal responsibility, making them like slaves on a plantation. Never mind that the suggestion that people of color are too stupid to know what's good for them is an argument that will help turn off people of color from voting for you. (See States' Rights Democratic Party for details).

The libertarian version of this is to refer to people who didn't vote for Ron Paul as "sheeple" on YouTube.

The fact that both the far right and far left like the theory goes to show it may just be that it is simply used as a ideological excuse to justify criticizing anyone objecting to their theory.