I came across this while reading Mao’s On Practice today: he talks about how at the beginning of the capitalist period the proletariat was a “class of itself” but in the later period of organised resistance against capitalism it became a “class for itself”. This rang a vague bell for me, I think I’ve heard people talk about things of themselves while discussing Hegel before but what precisely does it mean? I have not really studied Hegel beyond the very very surface level so I feel there’s some context I am missing here.