<BR> Imagine a life where as an employee you have no security in a job, if your employer believes he or she can be more profitable without you then without you is how they continue. Or if you are injured your income disappears also. This is how many workers lived their life in America at one time with continuously cut wages. Desperately trying to hold onto their position because no one else will care if they are replaced. While workers fought for fair treatment and job security, the employers wanted the freedom to become more efficient and profitable.
This leads them to the working life where you work under capitalists and accept orders from superior employers. Therefore they prepare for your working life which benefits the capitalists, however Functionalists view is that the family teaches us the shared norms and values of the society, but not just the norms and values of the ruling class. Although Marxists further argue the family does this through punishments and rewards and being role models. Also Feminists believe that Marxists do not give more attention to the exploitation of women within the family for example, the family produces labour at low cost to the capitalist system as
Weber believed it was linked to the type of job people could get, Weber thought differently to Marx about this, as marx believed it was due to owning factories or other resources, and weber thought it was due to skills and qualifications. Weber’s idea of class influenced the ideas of other sociologists, such as goldthorpe (1980). Goldthorpe derived a stratification scale which includes the Weberian concept of market position. This was felt by sociologists to be a more accurate technique of studying stratification, as a pose to just studying peoples jobs. Weber was skeptical about the possibility of the working class bonding together for revolutionary purposes, for example becoming class-conscious because of differences in status would always undermine any common cause.
However, in a capitalistic society, man is forced to sell his labor to those who own the means of production. Therefore during the hours of work the laborer is not spending his time doing something enjoyable and freely chosen; he is doing something which is forced upon him by external forces. This causes an externalization of the worker from his actions because he does not freely give anything of himself to his labor, not his physical energy nor his imagination. In fact, while the worker is laboring, his actions belong entirely to another causing complete alienation from his actions. This alienation changes the balance of power between work and worker because the more time the worker spends working, the more he
For example in paragraph 2 he explains in detail the labor condition he is arguing against; long hours, discrimination, unhealthy facilities etc. Another example where he appeals to logic is where he states how easy and little effort it would take to solve the issues regarding sweatshops. He states “Many consumers in the West refuse to pay a little bit more even if it would improve the lives of sweatshop workers”. Ravisankar also mentions the selfishness of corporations who are more interested in making
They would not care about what job it is. In the article Living to Work, Dorothy Sayers states that, “work is something hateful, only to be endured because it makes money and money is desirable because it represents a way of escape from work.” It does not matter how strenuous the work is, an individual will work it until the end as long as they are getting paid. “Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers
However it doesn’t guarantee a jump in the upper social class. The capitalists class does not exist in isolation, the working class is needed which explains class relation. This is just the structure of the game. Even though in 1945 post boom , the standard of living went up for everyone it didn’t result in the working class moving up in social classes. In comparison to the Utchille book the myth of retraining and better education is revisited in this chapter.
1. Ayn Rand’s quote is one that comes from life and not from theory or hopes. Rand clearly stresses that men work mainly for their own gain. It is true, that a man’s surplus can motivate him to create progress. However, it very rarely comes with the society in mind.
The worker has no role in deciding what to do or how to do it. The capitalist who owns these means also purchases the labour of the worker that isengaged. Apart from working under the supervision of the capitalist, the worker also does not have a say in what becomes of the finished product after production. This latter point forms the second feature of alienation, the workers' estrangement from the product of their work (Ollman, 1976).Thirdly, the worker is estranged from other fellow workers. Rivalry and class antagonism within the workplace declares most forms of
Marx first mentions alienation in the following statement, “The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life the greater is the store of you estranged being" (mcLellan, 2000) Here I think the most important part is the word "express", because in terms of life each person wishes to express themselves to their maximum limit. I think that no one wants to have a "store" of isolated being, because it would mean that one is holding something back. A man's life-activity is his work. In a capitalist society, the worker is alienated from his labour - 'he plays no part in deciding what to do or how to do it. The division of labour ensures that each worker only does one job, and the labour market decides which job any particular worker will do.