"Revolutionary Consciousness": In Marxist thinking, the stage of awareness which follows class consciousness and is stimulated by perception of the cultural forces that construct class relations, and their vulnerability to consciously directed overthrow to bring about social change.  Early Marxists tended to believe that historical forces alone, inevitably and without the need for intervention, eventually would bring about the social changes Marxist theory predicted (e.g., the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat).  Later thinkers held that this process could be stimulated and sped up by the education of workers to bring them first to class consciousness, and then to revolutionary consciousness.  Neo-Marxists tend to discount the likelihood that revolutionary change is possible, but they sometimes use "revolutionary consciousness" to distinguish the heightened state of awareness they claim to derive when reading fully alert to the hidden cultural codes and processes which hide in the text.