Dangerous Ease of Claiming Class-Consciousness

To "possess" class consciousness means that individuals must understand certain group characteristics.  At the same time, having class consciousness means an individual can be aware of a group's collective feelings.  So, either a person is "class conscious" or they are not.  If they're judged unconscious by someone who claims to know the difference, then they're immoral beings.  Who'd wanna be class unconscious?  Please don't let it be me, moral deciders!

This topic reeks of context.  This is group determination of “truth” about individuals.  So, economic data along the lines of income, a number, or a person’s  plight as they sort through garbage for food are experiences that are part of reality, not descriptive pieces that depict the whole that one can absorb without experiencing.   

While facts about a person may cause humans to empathize and assist each other, it is impossible to “think” like a class.  I base this declaration on two assumptions and they might be a tad philosophical.  First, as far as I know I’m the only person inhabiting this body and thus, I’m the only person who can have imperfect knowledge of my mind (me), my experience, and thus my reality as I move through time.  “I know me best," which is a modified version of the Cartesian idea of “I think therefore I am.”  Second, I can’t mindtravel, which means  I can’t enter your brain and comprehend how you view life or even this note.  You could type your response, but I might misinterpret it or you could alter or even deceive others about what I’m trying to argue.

So, it stands to reason that if two person-interaction is flawed, because two imperfect, self-validated individuals can't understand each other "perfectly," then assumptions based on testimonials or data also do not present a “truth” free of doubt of individual reality.  Likewise, the amount of doubt increases as the number of persons involved increases, say to the size of an economic class.  

Even less so, trying to think “socially” does not mean a solution presented for the purposes of altering everyone else’s reality is the right decision.  There is no way to verify social consciousness the way you can validate your sole presence in your mind or your individual ignorance of another being controlling it.  Did God use me as his instrument to write this?  Are martians controlling me?  I can live my life believing so, thus believing in my lack of control, but unless proof appears that I'm NOT it in here, I can only validate "me" as making the decisions.  Nor does declaring that you must act "socially conscious to help the poor" suggest that a problem of whatever scope or complexity has been accurately diagnosed and the remedy valid.

So the question remains:  what's the value of economic data classed by certain criteria?

Under traditional Marxist theory, communists assume they possess the ability of working class consciousness and with that ideological foresight, they are instructed to seize the "means of production" as a "moral imperative (mission)" and then assume a dictatorship of the workers.  Aside from the flawed assumptions on the communist’s part, which subsumes worker differences for “collective truth,” scarce resources etc., the prescriptions to further “class consciousness” are even more horrifying.  So, Stalin’s programs to bring about socialism by fostering it at home in Russia led to purges.  Those millions of lives and families destroyed were bad influences, cancers to be eliminated because they did not fit his conception of class consciousness.  Connecting people by an abstraction led to violence for those that didn’t fit the ideal.

Now, I’m not writing that being aware of poverty is a bad thing or that purges must result.  Rather, I’m arguing that the debate over what to do about the problem of “poverty” should be approached as a rational weighing of different complex solutions.  A debate within the confines of our imperfect “law and order society” should prevent easy abstractions like class consciousness from directing people, based on their subjective view of what the objective should be.   Advocating for solutions because they believe they know what “it’s like to be poor” and therefore their program must be best is not good enough for me. 

The difficulty is that humans need to reduce complex problems to abstractions like class consciousness, because as proponents argue, it helps you to “understand the difficulties they are going through.”  Instead, the concerned public should ask the abstracters who claim social awareness how they know what they claim to know.  A healthy dose of skepticism is important.  I am under no illusions that abstracters will always choose “rational” arguments to defend their viewpoints, because why argue with someone who doesn’t believe in what you believe to be the truth?  

It's easier to call them an idiot or if you're a hardline North Korean Stalinist, label them immoral and shoot them. I am also not confident that by arguing with people who believe that they follow the ideal to its perfect form, they will ever feel obligated to present evidence to support their viewpoint.  It’s just that when challenging an imperfect system with at best a bright idealism or at worst a harmful, ephemeral feelings, humans need to be extremely critical about the prescriptions so that life isn't remade into a bloody gulag from humanity's past.