“Consciousness-raising” derives from the Marxist concept of “false consciousness,” a phrase that Friedrich Engels coined in an 1893 letter to the Communist historian Franz Mehring. Gramsci, Marcuse, and countless other Marxists intellectuals in and out of the Frankfurt School have relied on the concept to explain why the oppressed masses seem so much better adjusted than the theorists who write about them. The radicals think they understand the little guy better than he understands himself, and they intend to convince him of his own misery.
Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, by Michael Knowles, p 75