Material conditions beyond voluntary control determine how people come to consciousness.

Evidence

It is because men are, so to speak, decentered by the determinate conditions under which they live and produce, and depend on circumstances and conditions which are not of their making and which they enter involuntarily, that they cannot, in any full and uncontradictory sense, be the collective authors of their actions. Their practice cannot “un-mediatedly” realize their goals and intentions. Hence the terms through which men “make sense” of their world, experience their objective situation as a subjective experience, and “come to consciousness” of who and what they are, are not in their own keeping and will not, consequently, transparently reflect their situation. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 886

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Hall’s account of how class structures shape subjectivity, relevant to understanding how economic conditions produce political consciousness. — connects to: The world’s instrumental organization depends partly on constituting consciousness; Critical consciousness without a material base cannot change society — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 877; Unconsciousness is the precondition for consciousness to emerge.