Abstract

My thesis is concerned with exploitations' relation to class consciousness. Traditional economic literature on exploitation focuses on structural measures such as wages and productivity, but provides less attention to how perceived forms of inequality affect workers’ attitudes and collective awareness. From Marx and other theorists, I provide an account of class consciousness’ development. I argue class consciousness is not automatic, but contingent on material conditions and social relations. Using data from the General Social Survey Quality of Work life module, I produce an index of perceived workplace discrimination and analyze its effects on indicators of class consciousness. I estimate OLS, ordered logit, and binary logit models with sociodemographic controls to assess these correlations. Results indicate that higher levels of perceived workplace discrimination are correlated with lower levels of class consciousness across several measures. This indicates certain forms of inequality may hinder collective class identification, and challenges the assumption exploitation necessarily leads to an increase in class consciousness.

Advisor

McBride, Lee

Second Advisor

Moledina, Amyaz

Department

Business Economics; Philosophy

Keywords

Class Consciousness, Exploitation, Karl Marx

Publication Date

2026

Degree Granted

Bachelor of Arts

Document Type

Senior Independent Study Thesis

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© Copyright 2026 Brooke L. Bradley