Theory
The concept flows from the theory of commodity fetishism — that people experience social relationships as value relations between things, e.g., between the cash in their wage packet and the shirts they want. The cash and the shirt appear to conduct social relations independently of the humans involved, determining who gets what by their inherent values. This leaves the person who earned the cash and the people who made the shirt ignorant of and alienated from their social relationship with each other. So the individual "resolves" the experiences of alienation and oppression through a false conception based on a "natural law" argument that there is a fundamental need to compete with others for commodities.
In Marxist terms, not only is there no such objective need separate from the formulation of the general problem of production and distribution for a given society, moreover, Marx said each against all competition is antithetical to the very concept of society, and therefore sets up a contradiction or historical dynamic which over time is resolved in favor of the class with the greatest ability to act in its own rational self-interest. Ruling elites, traditional or otherwise, suffer from false consciousness to the extent that they see the social orders they command as predetermined or inevitable.
Read more about this topic: False Consciousness
Famous quotes containing the word theory:
“Don’t confuse hypothesis and theory. The former is a possible explanation; the latter, the correct one. The establishment of theory is the very purpose of science.”
—Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)
“The theory seems to be that so long as a man is a failure he is one of God’s chillun, but that as soon as he has any luck he owes it to the Devil.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.”
—Thomas Nagel (b. 1938)