[tristram_shandy]

I think you might be having a completely valid emotional response to your consciousness being called false.

False Consciousness, like Dictatorship of the Proletariat, are specific terms within Marxist thought that are popularly misinterpreted, and often used by more cynical capitalists to misdirect.

False consciousness has to be understood as false as it relates to 'class consciousness', the true consciousness of the Proletariat as the Proletariat relates to its position within the dialectical materialism applied by Marx to the historical process. This has nothing to do with psychological consciousness.

The Proletariat has class consciousness when it collectively realizes that capitalism is simply a phase in history, and not an eternal state of nature.

It's awfully pompous. Marx wasn't infallible. False consciousness developed a lot after Marx, and you truly can't see it when you're in it. Krein, for example, is in false consciousness. He can't properly conceptualize that capitalism will be replaced, and has developed his own asinine class analysis not on the bedrock of Hegel, but on dividing the working class by race, gender, and ethnicity. It blinds him from seeing the real class antagonisms in society between the Proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

He doesn't seem to know he's a prole like the rest of us, for instance.

[AnimalMuppet]

The definitions may be as you say. But you seem to be assuming that the Marxist definitions are correct; that is, that they correspond to reality.

Here's what I mean: By your definition, I'm a prole. I should have "class consciousness" that I'm a prole, and since I don't, I have "false consciousness". But try and expand your mind to the point where you can consider the alternative: People like me might actually see our condition reasonably clearly. When Marxist theory puts us in the same bucket as a ditch-digger, that could be because Marxist theory doesn't correspond to reality, and it's not reality's fault. And telling us that our understanding is false could betray the weakness of your analytic framework rather than the weakness of our understanding of our own position in society. If this alternate position is correct, then we really don't need to care very much about what bucket Marxist theory puts us in, or about what it says we ought to think.

You've got your position, which you think is correct. But at least consider the possibility that it could be mistaken.