where does class consciousness come from?

I don't like to mix emotions and morals with economic analysis since I think there are much bigger battles to be had than with those who are "silly" or "evil". So this is the closest this blog will ever get to such things. Let me just say that this quote is crucial to understanding my own views on these issues.

From "Mass Mobilisation and Ideological Transformation in the Vietnamese Land Reform Campaign," by Christine White in Journal of Contemporary Asia, Volume 13, pg. 84

In the case of the village cited above where 'outsiders' and 'insiders' did not get on, it was 'recounting of suffering' which initially brought the problem of the poor treatment of 'outsiders' into the open. During a village 'recounting of suffering' session, an 'insider', Mr Bach, was telling how poor he had been. His father, who had finally died of starvation, had been a village guard and had to sit on the ground in the communal house. 'We suffered as much as "outsiders".' At this point, the meeting went very quiet, for he had let the cat out of the bag: he had revealed to the outside cadres that whereas 'insiders' sat on the raised wooden floor in the dinh, the 'outsiders' sat on the ground. Finally a poor peasant 'insider' broke the ice with the comment, 'happiness does not come from sitting on the wooden floor'.

This led to a number of insiders telling of their sufferings. An old woman recounted that her father died when she was a young child and her mother sold her to the canton chief for money to buy a coffin. She had to work for the canton chief for 12 years as a servant without wages. The old woman wept as she told of the sufferings of the little servant girl that was her former self, and so did the listeners. According to the Nhan Dan report, outsiders realised that poor insiders had a terrible life.