[AnimalMuppet]

"Class consciousness" is a framework for thinking about society. It is used by those who think they know how the world should be structured to make others see things their way - by "others", I mean those who don't think that way, based on their own lived experience. "Identify with these people that you don't feel any identity with, and join them in attacking these other people that you wouldn't otherwise want to attack."

Which, when you look at it, is just another set of people trying to manipulate you into behaving the way they think you should. They say it's for your own good? So does everyone else trying to manipulate you.

Now, back in the day, the difference between working and managing was twofold: managers got paid more, and they were allowed (and expected) to think as part of their job. The workers were just robots made of flesh, but the managers were supposed to be able to think. Well, for all we (most of us) still have to work, we're more in the managing class, in that we get paid well and have to think. So trying to tell us that we should have "working class consciousness"... yeah, there's a reason why it doesn't feel to us like it fits.

[claudiawerner]

I disagree on your characterisation of 'class consciousness', which from the point of view of a proponent of the theory reflects the general lack of knowledge of a class about its objective position in society. As Lukacs wrote, "It is the objective result of the economic set-up, and is neither arbitrary, subjective nor psychological". It is, from this standpoint, no different from ignorance of technology or other objective factors that shape society and control distribution and production.

>we're more in the managing class, in that we get paid well and have to think

The distinction which proponents of "class consciousness" talk about was never between thinking and doing, but between those who (loosely speaking) have nothing to sell but their labour power, and those who posses capital. The reluctance to view highly paid wage labour as a form of wage labour rests on misconstrued notions of what "working class" means in political theory (i.e blue collar workers, people who work with machines, etc.), notions drawn from romantic Soviet depictions of the worker (the strong, brave man with a hammer and sickle) and the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire".

There's been a lot of work since the 60s into trying to figure out why this notion is so prevalent. Perhaps it can be best summed up by Marcuse:

"If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population."