- Let's draw some factories
and next to them, let's draw some farms.
So what I'm drawing here is something
called the means of production.
These are facilities and resources
by which we can produce goods.
Now when we think about factories and farms, who owns them?
Typically, it's pretty wealthy, wealthy individuals.
On the flip side, those individuals
typically hire a large amount of workers
and what the workers offer is their labor.
The workers don't own any of the means of production.
They don't tend to get any of the profits or major benefits.
They tend to get some kind of salary, generally.
So, when we look at the owners and we look at the workers,
we should start to realize that there's a class divide
and when we think about class in society,
we often think about the hierarchy of the upper class
and middle class and lower class
and we often say the lower class are the working class
and that upper and middle class,
they may very well be the owners.
Now we come onto a theory
and this was a theory that was partly discussed by
someone called Karl Marx and further put forward by
people who were advocates of his theory called Marxists.
And what this theory says is that these workers,
who are part of this working class,
they don't realize that they're being exploited
and oppressed by this capitalistic model of working
where the owners control the means of production
and they get all of the benefits and all the rewards.
But what can happen, is that these workers can develop
something called class consciousness
and what that means is that they realize that as a
class of society, that they have solidarity with one another
against the owners, against the people
who own the means of production
and that they must struggle to overcome
this oppression and exploitation.
And part of that may involve seizing
and obtaining the means of production
and redistributing the means of
production amongst the workers.
So in class consciousness, the workers seek to obtain the
factories and the farms and take over the ownership.
However, there's another part to this theory
and that part conflicts with class consciousness
and this is called false consciousness.
And unlike class consciousness, when the workers start
to see that their struggle is that they
have solidarity with one another,
and that they're in a class struggle against the owners.
In false consciousness, they're unable to see their
alleged exploitation and oppression.
And remember, the story of society,
the information that floats around societies
are often controlled by the people in power,
the owners, the people who control the means of production.
So through a lot of processes,
they can install this false consciousness,
promote it among the workers.
So when we think about false consciousness,
we see that the owners may be feeding a lot of information
and controlling processes in society to the workers
and maybe giving them hope that one or two of them
may potentially become owners in the future,
whether that's true or not
and really promoting this false consciousness,
making it much more difficult for the workers to unite
and see their true levels of exploitation and oppression.
So one of the things we need to also focus on is this
false consciousness and class consciousness is part of
this Marxist theory and there's many people who would
obviously disagree with this.
And some of the ways we're thinking about owners
and workers in these models, they really refer to much more
historic models of how society worked in regards to
society's way of farms and factories are dominant,
which isn't necessarily the case in some of
the more developed countries in the world today.