Since my name was invoked in the ongoing debate on Eran’s latest post (“Could there be an intellectual history about ideas”)—as someone who might know something about “false consciousness”—I hereby dedicate a short post to thinking through this term and concept. It seems to me there are at least two ways in which “false consciousness” has been used in the Marxist tradition since Engels first used it in a private letter to Franz Mering: False consciousness is how the proletariat (or oppressed classes more generally) internalizes its oppression. It believes that the system is working in its favor, when in Read more