Spring Cleaning Your Class Consciousness
The Junk Drawer in Your Head (And Who Put It There)
Theory for the Streets is an ongoing series that takes the ideas scholars write about in journals and seminar rooms and puts them where they belong: in your hands. Each installment breaks down a concept from political economy, cultural theory, or critical thought, and shows how it explains something you already live with every day. These aren’t abstract frameworks. They’re power tools. And they’re yours now.
I. The Junk Drawer of Your Mind
Ah, the joys of March - a well-deserved spring break for students (and teachers like myself), and spring cleaning for the rest of us. The windows open. You finally deal with that one closet, corner of the garage, or that particular shelf somewhere, or that one drawer in the kitchen always stuffed with batteries, takeout menus and a phone charger for a phone or shaver or some other gadget you haven’t owned since 2019, but which you still save nonetheless “just in case.”
You know the drawer. Maybe it’s in your office or bedroom instead of your kitchen. Either way, everybody has one. It fills up slowly, without anyone deciding to fill it. Things end up there because they were handed down, or seemed useful once, or because throwing them out felt like more trouble than keeping them. One day you open it looking for a pen and realize: half of this stuff was never mine. I don’t even know where it came from.
Now think about your head.
Not your knowledge. Not the things you’ve studied or chosen to believe. I mean the other stuff. The assumptions you carry around without ever deciding to carry them. “Hard work always pays off.” “The economy is too complicated for regular people to understand.” “There is no alternative.” These aren’t conclusions you arrived at. They’re furniture someone else put in your house before you moved in.
This week, we’re finally opening that drawer. And an Italian political theorist who wrote from a fascist prison cell in the 1930s is going to help us sort through it.
II. Gramsci’s Best Idea
His name was Antonio Gramsci. He was a Sardinian Marxist, a journalist, a labor organizer, and arguably one of the sharpest political thinkers of the twentieth century. Mussolini’s fascist government locked him up in 1926. The prosecutor reportedly said they needed to “stop this brain from functioning for twenty years.” It didn’t work. Gramsci filled 33 notebooks from his cell, and one of his central obsessions was a question that should haunt anyone paying attention in 2026: why do people so often believe things that work against their own interests?
His answer: common sense.
Not common sense the way we use it in English (meaning practical wisdom, good judgment or street smarts). In Italian, senso comune means something closer to the opposite: the pile of unexamined assumptions a society absorbs from its culture, media, schools, workplaces and political leaders without ever choosing to absorb them. Scholar Kate Crehan describes it as “the comfortable, predictable certainties that provide all of us with much of our basic mental furniture.”
That’s the junk drawer. Common sense is ideology that doesn’t feel like ideology. It feels like reality.
But Gramsci noticed something else, too. Buried inside all that inherited clutter, people also carry what he called good sense: a stubborn, experience-born awareness that the official story doesn’t add up.
You’ve felt it.
III. The Spring Clean
So let’s do this. Here are a few items from the drawer. For each one, ask yourself two questions: does this match my actual experience? And who benefits from me believing it?
“If you work hard, you’ll get ahead.” You know people who work two jobs and can’t cover rent. You know people who inherited a portfolio and never worked a day. Does your experience confirm this, or does it just keep you blaming yourself when the math doesn’t work?
“The government should budget like a household.” Households can’t levy taxes, print currency or build highways. This analogy sounds responsible. It’s actually the logic that cuts your kid’s school funding every time a state runs short.
“There is no alternative to the way things are.” This one is the masterpiece. It doesn’t even argue for the current system. It just tells you resistance is pointless. As decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo put it, neoliberalism isn’t merely an economic program; it’s “a new civilising design.” The assumption that nothing else is possible is the design.
“The economy is too complicated for regular people to understand.” Who benefits from you believing that? Certainly not you.
Notice what just happened. None of these are facts. All of them serve someone’s interests. And every single one (in one form of another) was probably in your drawer, doing quiet work, before you ever even opened it.
Gramsci had a phrase for this process. He said the point wasn’t to introduce some new way of thinking from scratch, but to renovate and make “critical” an already existing activity. You were already skeptical. We’re just giving the skepticism a sharper edge.
IV. Who Furnished Your House?
Here’s an important thing to consider: common sense doesn’t magically appear from nowhere. It’s produced. Media, education systems, advertising, workplace culture, political rhetoric: these are all the factories of common sense, running continuous shifts.
Gramsci called the process hegemony: how the ruling class’s worldview becomes the default setting for an entire culture. You don’t have to agree with the people in power. You just have to absorb their assumptions as the baseline of “normal.” And the genius of it is that common sense survives even when reality contradicts it. The 2008 financial crisis proved that deregulated markets could destroy the global economy. The response? Bank bailouts. Austerity. Cuts to public services. The people who crashed the system convinced the rest of us to pay for the cleanup. The common sense didn’t break…it actually deepened!
If you’ve been reading Means and Meaning, you’ve already watched this machinery operate in similar fashion, in pieces examining the architecture of not knowing that designs what’s thinkable. “Adapt or die” sold as inevitability rather than ideology. #Vanlife repackaging a housing crisis as a lifestyle choice. A billion dollars a day for bombs while teachers price used box trucks to live in.
Each of those pieces described common sense in action. Now you have the name for it. And here’s what Gramsci understood that matters most: the furniture can be replaced. But first you have to notice it’s not yours.
V. Where It All Points
Here’s the thing Gramsci understood from inside that prison cell, headaches so brutal he sometimes banged his head against the walls just to override the pain: good sense isn’t something you have to build from scratch. It’s already in you. It’s the part that knows something is off even when you can’t quite name it. The part that watches the news and feels the gap between what you’re being told and what you can see with your own eyes. The part that’s been whispering “this doesn’t add” up for years.
Carlos Alberto Torres, who directs the Paulo Freire Institute at UCLA, argues that neoliberalism has so thoroughly colonized our common sense that entire generations have grown up inside it without ever encountering an alternative. The furniture was already in the house when they arrived. They didn’t choose it. They were born into it.
But common sense also has an expiration date. Yesterday’s unquestionable truth is today’s obvious nonsense. People once “knew” that the economy needed child labor to function. They “knew” that women couldn’t manage money. They “knew” that colonies were civilizing missions. Every generation eventually opens the drawer and throws something out. That’s not destruction, that’s growth.
Gramsci believed that ordinary people developing critical consciousness (what he called becoming organic intellectuals) is the precondition for real political change. Not experts. Not academics. Regular people who start asking who furnished the house and why.
That’s what you just did.
What Means and Meaning tries to do every Tuesday is help your good sense find its voice: to give the skepticism you already carry the language, history and frameworks to stand on its own two feet. Spring cleaning your class consciousness isn’t a metaphor. It’s practice. And you’ve already started, because you’re here.
References
Crehan, K. (2016). Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11318dq
Patterson, T. (2016). Too much common sense, not enough critical thinking! Dialectical Anthropology, 40(3), 251–258. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-016-9434-5
Robinson, A. (2005). Towards an Intellectual Reformation: The Critique of Common Sense and the Forgotten Revolutionary Project of Gramscian Theory. Critical Review of International Social & Political Philosophy, 8(4), 469–481. https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230500205045
Torres, C. A. (2013). Neoliberalism as a new historical bloc: a Gramscian analysis of neoliberalism’s common sense in education. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 23(2), 80–106. https://doi.org/10.1080/09620214.2013.790658
Wells, R. (2019). Teaching austerity to working-class students: Toward a new “common sense.” Capital & Class, 43(2), 315–337 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309816818780654
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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.
Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.
~ Chris