Consciousness and class struggle in Marxism

Abstract

The concept of class struggle is, in Marxist philosophy, the principle on which an entire conception of history is built upon (history understood as past, present, and future). Different schools of thought have attempted to disparage the existence of an antagonism, which is determined by the relations of production and is, as well, inherent to the development of any social system. The aim of this work is to expose—based on three fundamental ideas for Marxism (work and alienation, reification and class consciousness, and the historical mission of the proletariat)—the political significance that the transition of the proletariat from class-in-itself to class-for-itself, in capitalism, represents. A second objective, derived from the aforementioned, is to explain the formation of class consciousness as a prelude to an effective transformation of the current economic system of production.