Within these societies people would fight for ownership of land. Eventually the feudalistic society will give way to what Karl Marx called capitalism, where a society is driven by money. Karl Marx was a famous sociologist and well known for his studies on social class. His name is where we get the term Marxism from. He looked to overthrow the capitalist system in favour of the structuralist approach (Perry, 2009).
He frames this separation of the classes as a struggle and a constantly losing battle for one group or the other (mostly for the poor). He explicitly states, “society as a whole is more and more splitting in to two great hostile camps, [….] Bourgeoisie and Proletariat” (Marx 338). Right away, Marx hopes to use this to build an argument that the current relations between the two classes is an illusion and that the proletariat are playing the zero-sum game, with the Bourgeoisie, that is capitalism. In direct contrasts to this, Carnegie believes that, in the capitalist system, the relations between the two classes is more symbiotic in nature.
Surplus value, in its most basic definition, is the amount of money earned by the capitalist after paying for overhead. In order to better understand this concept, we must explain what constitutes overhead. Overhead is the total amount of money that a company needs to pay in order to cover the raw materials used for the production of the commodity and the wages that are paid to cover the workers who have made the commodity. However, when the wage laborer makes more of a certain commodity than needed to cover overhead, surplus value is created. According to Marx, “the specific use-value, which this commodity possesses of being a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself”.
Before capitalism, humans produced their own product with their own instrument of production, however, after capitalism come into being, not only the means of production but also the products themselves are taken away from the producers. The producers become labors of the capitalists, doing repetitive works and receiving wages in return for their work. The means of the production, the creativity of production process as well as the final product are all taken away from the producer. In this way, “man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him stead of being controlled by him.”(Marx, P.160) In the modern case being discussed in the New York Times article, the blue-collar workers are precisely the passive wage takers from the capitalists who own the production instruments. As the market and the means of production being more and more controlled by the capitalist, the workers have less and less power to negotiate with the capitalist and therefore falling deeper into passive wage takers.
Some examples of such would be, illegally lobbying or bribing government leaders to gain passage of certain laws, or tax codes. Another form of class conflict may include, a lock out aimed at destroying a labor union, and this is called “open conflict”, or “hidden conflict”, which could be a slowdown in production protesting the wages being paid. According to Karl Marx however, class conflict and struggle are inevitable dissentions that occur because of the economic organization of most societies (Johnson, 2000). Marx also believed that class is defined by the ownership of property and such ownership vests a person with the power to exclude others from the property and to use it for personal purposes. In relation to property, there are three classes of society, they include, the bourgeoisie or the people who own the means of production such as factory and machinery buildings, and whose income is profit, landowners whose income is rent, and the proletariat who own their labor and sell it for a wage.
It is concerned with who does the work, and the way in which it is divided and shared. Theorists have different views on this division and claim that the tasks and people involved are differentiated depending on criteria such as gender, age, skill set, experience, class and ethnicity. I will endeavour to explain the social and gendered divisions of labour theories and provide examples to discuss the comparisons and contrasts between them. Karl Marx’s theory - ‘social division of labour’ developed in 1867, was based on social class divisions controlled by a capitalist social class of wealthy people such as factory and land owners who were only concerned in a ‘boundless greed for riches’(Banks et al, 2013). The concept claims that wealth generated from this division does not filter down to the workers, as the businesses are only concerned in profit making.
Marx believes that we now live in a capitalist society, which is based on divisions in society. He labels the two classes, the capitalist class the bourgeoisie and the class of the labourers the proletariat. Marx believes that this type of society is unequal, as the proletariat do not receive the goods that they have produced; only the cost of subsistence is received. Marx also believes that competition drives the ownership of the means of production into fewer hands, this drives smaller independent producers to become a part of the proletariat. Competition also creates companies to drive down wages, as they will wish to make their products at the lowest cost they can, this alienating the working class and causing them to become impoverished.
Karl Marx believed that the means, relations, and mode of production all relate to the inequality in a capitalist society. What he is talking about when he says means of production in society are physical non-human inputs used to produce goods. A means of production could be a natural resource or it could also be technology. Whoever controls the means of production is going to have the most power. The capitalist owned the means of production in capitalism and therefore basically were able to control the economy.
Compare and contrast capitalism and socialism and discuss a shortcoming of each system that is criticized by the opponents of the system. Then describe the overlap in capitalism and socialism and the economic theory associated with it. The theories of Capitalism and socialism adherently are opposing schools of thought. The principal arguments in the socialism verses capitalism debate are about economic equality and the role of government. Exponents of the capitalism are of the opinion that the government interference will lead to inefficiencies in the utilization of economic resources.
This is because being a mechanistic part of a social class estranges a person from their humanity. The basis of alienation in terms of a capitalist society is that the worker invariably loses the ability to determine their life and destiny when deprived of the right to think for themselves as the director of their actions. Although the worker is a self-realised human being, their lives are ultimately dictated by their employers and those who own the means of production as they try and extract a profit from the worker's laborious efforts. Thus the workers' alienation stems from the issue that they can only express themselves in terms of labor, which in itself devalues their humanity to the level of a mere instrument in a privately owned system of industrial production. Karl Marx identified 4 types of alienation that the worker endures under a capitalist regime: 1) Alienation of the worker from the product of his labour In capitalist society, there is a division of social classes which often results in the poor having to work for higher social classes.