Talk:False consciousness

Can I just mention how there is exactly zero difference in how Marxists and feminists/anti-racists/unionists/other varieties of leftists and progressives explain exactly why their ideas don't get unanimous support from the people they're supposed to be standing for? Hell, this wiki's page for teabaggers has 'false consciousness' written all over it. It doesn't make to sense to utilise the same method of reasoning your opponents do and then claim your straw man is their no true Scotsman.^{— Unsigned, by: 147.30.72.39 / talk / contribs}

Smells rather to the right of anything even remotely reasonable. This one comes from a Kazakh IP, so insert Borat joke here.--Arisboch ☞✍☜☞✉☜ ∈)☼(∋ 01:57, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

"Rather to the right"? All right, you lost me. If it's meant to be a dismissal, then I guess it's pointless to ask for an elaboration. (And I should really stop using proxies when those are logged in, eh.)

Reality?

"This creates the impression that in capitalism everyone can "make it", when, of course, this is not true, because the restrictions are structural, not legal."

That someone wrote this line in this article, in that section, is pretty ironic. Apparently the reality of false consciousness is that it's totally a thing.

What's your point? Pizzameister (talk) 01:08, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

Just that whoever wrote that line fully buy into false consciousness as an explanation for the relative popularity of capitalism among workers: they are mistakenly under the impression it's in their interest, when of course it's not.

If I may suggest a minor tweak that could help make this feel a little more sensible, maybe instead of saying "When, of course, this is not true" say "When this is not always true." With that sort of minor change it does leave room for elaboration of some on the factors that could impede an individual's attempts to increase their ability to improve their situation but it also allows for elaborating on when there have been (a good amount) of cases of individuals successfully "bootstrap-ing" their successes throughout history. The reason I suggest this is that framing this as it being an absolute is technically incorrect and gives the article a borderline appearance of being political proselytizing (to be painfully honest.) (Please forgive me if I have made a formatting error or have violated a particular rule or anything pertaining to this site's decorum as this is the first time I've engaged with a wiki-style page. ~Sincerely, A new stranger. 17:25, 25 June 2016.)

Instead of? -EmeraldCityWanderer (talk) 14:38, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

The alternative would be for capitalism to actually be in their interests, because social mobility is a real possibility and not an illusion. I'm not saying this is true, I'm just pointing out that the line implies false consciousness in an article otherwise critical of the concept. Which I find ironic.

Well capitalism is pretty bad. Especially if you are just a normal worker. The only real question open to any debate is: Are there better things? Pizzameister (talk) 23:33, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

You can only judge something compared to a realistic alternative, everything looks bad next to utopia. So the answer to that question also determines whether capitalism is bad: if there is a better system, than it's bad; if there is not, than it's not (which still doesn't mean it's perfect).

No. It is objectively bad in any frame of reference. Working sixty hours a week and still going hungry more often than not is objectively bad. Private ownership of the means of production is objectively bad. Exploitation of those who have nothing to sell but their hands' work is objectively bad. The only moral question is: Can those objectively bad aspects of capitalism be solved? If so, can it be done within capitalism? If there is a system that "solves" some of the objectively bad aspects of capitalism yet produces more objectively bad aspects in other areas, that system is no better than capitalism. A Marxist would say those things are capitalism and any attempt to solve them must involve the replacement of capitalism with something else. Pizzameister (talk) 20:48, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

The only thing that come close to being objectively bad is the first, which is neither inherent nor exclusive to capitalism. On the other hand the private ownership of the means of production (which I don't see how is bad) is inherent to capitalism, it's a big part of it, and the marxist would be quite right in saying that to do away with it require abandoning capitalism.

"...everything looks bad next to utopia" is kind of a meaningless statement. No shit reality looks bad compared to a personal imagined ideal of perfection. On the other side of the coin everyone's utopia is fairly subjective so my utopia might be another persons version of hell.

The other thing is that it's not a competition of pure ideologies where it's an either or option. Pure unregulated capitalism is horrifying, as much as any other pure ideology I can think of, which is why most countries are a mishmash of things that work from many areas of thought with the ability to replace parts that don't work without reworking the entire economy. -EmeraldCityWanderer (talk) 21:18, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

Yes, but we are not talking about pure capitalism (which may or may not be even possible), since very few people would argue for it in the first place. False consciousness is an explanation for the approval of capitalism to the extent it's actually implemented. That is to say, capitalism with some level of welfare and labor protection.

Well private ownership of the means of production means that a select few (the owners of the means of production) make money off of the work of others. This is inherently and obviously unjust. And it is the very definition of capitalism. And as Marx said in so many words, a capitalist state is nothing but an executive meeting of the class of owners of the means of production. Given the way politics works in the US today, he might have been on to something. Now there is a case to be made that no system has been observed in the wild that produced better results than capitalism. In any conceivable sense there are more people "not poor" than at any other point in history. Both in relative and in absolute numbers. The growth and development that our current social and economic system has allowed over the course of hardly more than two centuries would seem like a fairy-tale to even the richest Roman or classical Chinese. On the other hand for centuries even those that had moral qualms about slavery were convinced of its economic necessity. Maybe the alternative to capitalism now is just like the alternative to slavery was in the past. Painfully obvious only in hindsight. Or maybe the alternative to capitalism is like the alternative to eating food: A nice thought experiment but not real. There is only one way to find out: Run an extremely complicated super sentient computer-simulation for a hundred years or so. Pizzameister (talk) 12:39, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

Original notion

I'm curious, in this part:

"The question then becomes, why are all workers not communists? Since it would be too much to suggest that any one of the premises (particularly Premise 3) is a pile of bunk, it must be that workers are just deluded, having been duped by the ruling classes into thinking that they are anything else besides workers, in an attempt to "divide and conquer" the worldwide proletariat."

Why is premise 3 singled out as potentially a pile of bunk? It seems to me the least challengeable premise. In fact the only ones I can imagine being seriously challenged are 5 and especially 7. 46.249.75.8 (talk) 12:36, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

I don't want to drink

But in an encyclopedia where almost every page details the subject's or the public's failure to rationally conceive of something or another, it seems particularly bizarre to have an article extolling the rightness of a lack of objective truth, and mocking the idea that people can be systematically misled.

we have people who systematically believe the Earth is flat, that evolution isn't real, or that vaccines are more dangerous than the alternative. We have known and identifiable causes for those delusions. And yet we have this article trying to argue, in essence, that those who suggest that these believers are being systematically Hoodwinked are being "offensively patronizing"?

Give me a f****** break. Premise 7 is obviously the target of a lot of flaws (going from the obvious conclusion of "society has demonstrable flaws" to "and I alone know the correct way to fix it") but the article spends more of its time trying to argue against the idea of objective truth than it does on that provable fallacy. The whole article needs to be taken back to formula.2600:1:9146:E5E3:F0D2:975A:A35:110C (talk) 23:57, 18 June 2019 (UTC)

There's also the total horseshit of trying to claim that it's in modern times a particularly right wing borrowing of marxist thought. it's not unique to either party. Everyone does it, and it's very nearly the fundamental basis of all debate in the first place, is assuming that there is some objective truth out there, then trying to figure out whether either of the parties in the debate are closer to it, with the necessary corollary that at least one of you is very definitely not.2600:1:9146:E5E3:F0D2:975A:A35:110C (talk) 00:06, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

Comparisons

The Malthusian theory was propounded as the Agricultural Revolution (as well as industrialisation and developments in transport - canals, steam-driven vehicles etc) made some of its tenets obsolete.

Some aspects of Marxism were being rendered obsolete during the lifetimes of Marx and Engels - education, labour organisation, extension of the franchise etc.

One aspect of Christianity - the 'lower orders' should endure the actual present in the expectation of heaven hereafter.

One aspect of Marxism - the 'working classes' overthrow the present (in which they have some stake and status, even if using different measures to the middle class (and) Marxists) for some notional/ill-defined future - and they were developing 'unionism, syndicalism, and other methods of self-improvement/'bettering themselves' (including through learning).

The proponents of the theory did not seem to include themselves among those who should be de-false-consciousness-ised. Anna Livia (talk) 19:47, 3 November 2021 (UTC)