Class struggle is the key link in the struggle for substantial justice

The idea that class struggle is central to any substantial let alone revolutionary social change is not a new one. Of course some politicians seem to understand this. Senator Edwards has persistently focused on the class differences in the United States and takes the side of the workers. At least this is his stated intent, and it is a remarkably isolated performance in a nation where there seems to be one point of view, the point of view of the sometimes visible, sometimes hidden ruling elites.
Objectively speaking I think he should have done better in the Democratic horse race. He didn't do better because working class consciousness in the United States is dominated by capitalist notions and ideas. Mental slavery is the condition of the oppressed group who thinks and acts only in the interests of the oppressor group. It is largely the condition of the American proletariat today.

Proletarian ideas conceive of a world and society where workers benefit and flourish without exploitation. A mature class for-itself will naturally conceive of replacing the rule of any oppressor class with its own rule.

Of course many may see working class consciousness as including an acceptance of bourgeois rule and exploitation. That view will not be promoted here.

Proletarian or working class consciousness is relatively low in the United States today. It is an ironic situation, those most oppressed by capitalism, especially isolated workers, are often unable to conceive of any alternative. Working class notions of a better society are few and far between. Working class ideas have not been televised, taught in school or church. Still, a proletarian world view can be conceived of and built by those who build everything anyway.

People learn all the time. In this case people have learned that subservience to capitalism is the best and perhaps only option in their lives. Few institutions or advocates for working class rule exist in the
United States today.

Steve Biko and other South African liberation fighters founded the Black Consciousness Movement during the reign of de jure apartheid. There was a need to develop and popularize ideas that represented the interests of the black African caste in apartheid South Africa.

At that time, the capitalist rulers of South Africa also imposed a system which condemned people of color to very limited options at the bottom of the economic and social system. Black South Africans were created as a special sector of the working class available for superexploitation both in and outside the formal marketplace. So the black consciousness movement helped educate thousands and millions of black South Africans. Equal economic and politcal rights with the whites was a fundamental liberating demand and desire that became personally embraced by millions who may have previously had neither hope nor notions of a liberated condition or a liberation struggle to
achieve those political goals suitable to black South Africans being viciously exploited and enslaved by the whites, that is what apartheid was all about.