Tag: False consciousness

UK: A Working Class Experience of Alien Abduction! (18.11.2025)

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)2 Comments

The capitalist will say (and do) anything that justifies the endless accumulation of profit. To this end, the emphasis of individualism is vital – as it is through this loss of collective identity that humanity learns to routinely brutalise its own existence and being. Inflicting pain and harvesting gain is the only permitted exchange which locks out all other modes of possible interaction. Love becomes a limited commodity which can be bought for a short time period before the clock runs out and its flow dries up.

UK: A Working Class Experience of Alien Abduction! (18.11.2025)

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A Socialist, Feminist, and Transgender Analysis of “Sex Work” (2020)

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

The question of women’s liberation is central to any revolutionary project, and thus so is the question of “sex work.” Esperanza Fonseca’s contribution, although coming from a Maoist political orientation with which we often have differences, [1] makes the stakes of this debate crystal clear, as she combines personal experience, public policy research, and historical materialism to argue that Marxists cannot uphold what she calls “sex-trade-expansionary feminism.”

Content Warning: Descriptions of rape.

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The right of the subordinated classes of men to buy access to women’s bodies has been used historically to break class solidarity in order to maintain the dominant social relations of the time. This was true in feudal Europe and remains true today: when proletarian and petit bourgeois men get to buy women too, they develop a false consciousness and build solidarity with bourgeois men of their own gender rather than aligning with women of their own class. And because the overthrow of capitalism is only possible by the overthrowing of the bourgeoisie, prostitution serves two great purposes: (1) allows bourgeois men access to a reserve army of women for their pleasure, and (2) prevent class consciousness and thus helps stop the proletariat from organizing as a class.

A Socialist, Feminist, and Transgender Analysis of “Sex Work” (2020)

Marx-Engels Correspondence 1893: Engels to Franz Mehring

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Marx-Engels Correspondence 1893: Engels to Franz Mehring

Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. Because it is a process of thought he derives both its form and its content from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors. He works with mere thought material which he accepts without examination as the product of thought, he does not investigate further for a more remote process independent of thought; indeed its origin seems obvious to him, because as all action is produced through the medium of thought it also appears to him to be ultimately based upon thought. The ideologist who deals with history (history is here simply meant to comprise all the spheres – political, juridical, philosophical, theological – belonging to society and not only to nature), the ideologist dealing with history then, possesses in every sphere of science material which has formed itself independently out of the thought of previous generations and has gone through an independent series of developments in the brains of these successive generations. True, external facts belonging to its own or other spheres may have exercised a co-determining influence on this development, but the tacit pre-supposition is that these facts themselves are also only the fruits of a process of thought, and so we still remain within that realm of pure thought which has successfully digested the hardest facts.

Related:

Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh: Marx/Engels Letters (PDF)