In recent times, there is a growing concern of wealth inequality in America. This has really drawn criticism and challenge to capitalism as the model of socio-economic structure. Debates surrounding this issue are often traditionally addressed through two models: communism and capitalism. Karl Marx, in his work, “The Communist Manifesto,” criticizes capitalism for it’s preaching of individualism and competition, which leads to the exploitation of the working class thus resulting in further antagonization between socio-economic classes. Marx ends his criticism by offering up the complete abandonment of capitalist system in favor of a communistic system in which socio-economic autonomy is in the hands of the state.
Second, the author clearly emphasizes on the division of social classes and the concentration of the wealth on business bearing individuals and particularly on banks and industries including a particularly ominous view at the ever reaching effects of the Great Depression. He’s views of social classes in that time where that the monsters were the wealthy people, the poor people were the oppressed and all the concentration of wealth was in total control of the big corporations. Lastly, he subtly talks about the causes of the economic evils, and the effect on the people. He viewed that the principal cause of the economic evils were the society and its individuals along with their actions and creations. The author of the Grapes of Wrath viewed that property was taken away from farmers because of the struggle between the individuals and the big corporations.
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.
The Marxism interpretation on “Our Economic Pickle” and its critics PART I The article “Our Economic Pickle” published on New York Times analyzes the issue of stagnant wage of blue-collar workers and presentes several solutions. In a Marxism interpretation, the issue is precisely the outcome of capitalism, and the only solution to the problem is communism. The article reflects the flaw of capitalism: the estranged relationship between production and producer. Marx said, “What they [men] are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce.”(Marx, P.150) In other words, production becomes human’s material life. 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.
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).
It is normlessness, Durkheim felt that led to deviant behaviour. In 1897, Durkheim used the term again in his study on Suicide, referring to a morally deregulated condition. Durkheim was preoccupied with the effects of social change. He best illustrated his concept of anomie not in a discussion of crime but of suicide. In The Division of Labour in Society, Durkheim proposed two concepts.
Factory workers suffer for the first half of the century as well as the agricultural workers who have to endure the consequences of this evolution. Political protests get more and more common and the government suffers from the pressure of the working class. Changes take place during the second half, and a greater equality is achieved at the end of the reign of Queen Victoria. How did the political protests change rights in the 19th century? Oscar Wilde, writes in The Soul Of Man Under Socialism, that for progress to be made, people have to be disobedient to the rules they are subjected to: « Agitators are absolutely necessary.
Karl Marx was the main thinker behind Marxism and he believed that society was spilt up between two groups the bourgeoisie who are the rich and the powerful who control society and the polartariant who are the poor and working class. There is a conflict between them two groups thus causing Marxism to be a conflict theory.
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.
Each class, bar the king and queen, served the class above them. However, in the Manifesto, these class antagonisms have been whetted down to two rival societies - the Proletariat and the Bourgeoisie. Marx argues that though times have changed, the exploiter in the feudal system has now simply been replaced with the equivalent of a capitalist exploiter. The two classes’ struggle, in Marx’s view, means that there must be a revolution to the new ways of socialism. The bourgeoisie view that the feudal system of ruling was one of massive