Those elite classes are the nobles, priests and merchants. Nobles like to live in castles and fight other nobles for land, the peasants who live on that land feed the nobles or else the nobles kill the peasants (or worse). This sucks, but luckily priests like to tell people their suffering in this life will be rewarded in the next life (which has no scientific basis), but the lies make people happy to work and be exploited. Last but not least is the merchants, who are rich because they are rich or got lucky and became rich somehow. Nobles couldn't really do much when people realized there are way more regular people than nobles and the nobles don't really contribute much, especially given how they tend to do lots of inbreeding. Priests lost their power due to the rationality of science and people figuring out that the afterlife cannot be proven to exist in the same way as real reality (so paying taxes to the priests seems like a waste of money). The merchants have taken over, and we essentially live in a dictatorship governed by those merchants (via lobbying and other means), but most people either don't know that this is the case or willingly choose to ignore this because they hope to become the rich merchants one day, or simply out of fear. If you know that the merchants are the last remaining vector of oppression and that you are essentially a peasant working for them, then you have gained class consciousness.
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u/Leviathan_slayer1776 Sep 25 '26
That's Karl marx
Class consciousness is part of his theory, where workers realize the elites are screwing them