Class Conflict: Boourgeoisie And The Proletariat

1228 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Importance of class to social stratification

A. Class conflict/ pg. 10: Class conflict is where two social classes collide. These two social classes are bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie are the capitalists who own the means to production such as money, land, factories, and machines; the proletariat are the exploited workers who do not own the means of the production. In the video, the owners of the farmers and/or companies will be called the bourgeoisies or capitalists and the workers, the teenagers and their families, will be called the proletariat or exploits. An example from the video that demonstrated this is when the 16 year old boy’s family went to the grocery store to purchase groceries, his mother noticed all the crops that they picked are overpriced and compared …show more content…

Basically the farmers and companies are getting the profit from this while the workers aren’t getting paid enough for the hard work that has to be put in to work on the fields. In the text, the workers were eventually free of this exploitation and the workers were able to work to their abilities receiving goods and services to their needs; not from someone telling them what to do in an aggressive way. In the video, exploitation for the workers was still demonstrated; such as not having a break to eat (sometimes), very low pay, long hours, early mornings, aches and pains, filthy clothing, exhaustion, dehydration, and sweaty bodies. The teenagers and their families are looking to be free from this bondage and live like normal people. The parents just wanted to see their kids out of this because they had to deal with it since birth, but their children thought very differently. …show more content…

Subjective meaning/ pg. 13: Subjective meanings is how people interpret their situation in life by viewing what they are doing and what is happening to them. In a view sections of the video it shows how the teenagers realize what is actually happening in their lives. The 12 year old girl is rebelling, getting smart with other adults around her, frustrated, and the adults are feeling the same way about her. This shows the audience that she is tired of picking crops and wants to be in school with her friends, having fun, and enjoying her life like the others. The 14 year old girl realizes she has to care for her sickly parents and she can’t fulfil the dreams she wants because she sees the struggle they are going through. As for the 16 year old boy, he sees that he needs the help his father since he is like the man of the household as well and doesn’t want his sisters to have to do what he does; he just wants them to get their education and have a happy life. The 12 year old had dreams, the 14 year old had dreams and goals, and the 16 year didn’t have any goals or dreams. The 12 and 14 year mentioned that they have no dreams or goals anymore because what they are doing now is more beneficial to them than any goal or dream. The 16 year old remained with no dreams because he said even if he had all the money in the world it wouldn’t solve anything so he rather continue work on the fields, but if the opportunity comes then he will tell his story of how he worked on the fields.

Show More
Related

  • Tanaka Brothers Farm: Chapter Summary: The Tanaka Brothers Farm

    1147 Words  | 3 Pages

    Chapter four talked a lot about The Tanaka brothers Farm and how the workers had picked berries once a week or twice a week and experienced several forms of pain days afterward. Workers often felt sick the night before picking due to stress about picking the minimum weight. This chapter also focuses ethnographic attention on how the poor suffer. The poorest of the poor on the farm were the Triqui Strawberry pickers. The Triqui migrant laborers can be understood as an embodiment of violence continuum. Triqui people experienced notable health problems affecting their ability to function in their work or their families. This chapter also talked about how crossing the border from Mexico to the United States involves incredible financial, physical, and emotional suffering for Triqui

    Read More

  • Cesar Chavez Impact On Society

    2138 Words  | 5 Pages

    One of many reasons that Cesar Chavez fought for equality was “Because farm workers were often unseen or ignored, he would make them visible—to place them in the public’s attention and keep them there” . He already knew how life was when he was a farm worker, so he knew he had to do anything to get the publics attention. When he had that he would again do his best to keep them there. This was one fight that he didn’t want to lose, since he understood how hard it is being a farm worker.

    Read More

  • Food Class Warfare By Tracie Mcmillan's Context

    710 Words  | 2 Pages

    Near the end of her essay, McMillan implies that the “lines of an absolute...are typically drawn, somewhat laboriously, around the elephant in the room: economic class” (217). I expect more information after being pulled in like that, but she immediately transitions into her solution proposals instead of exploring the issue behind class. She lightly touches on the different food spending of the rich and poor, but I am still curious. She also seems to jump right back into the “two sides” (217) after changing my train of thought. Her brief mention of class issues is distracting, especially since it is so short-lived and placed right in the middle of what could have been a continuous stream of thought. Also, the title suggests that her essay is about class warfare, but she fails to properly illustrate that aspect of the food debate. Perhaps her slight hints throughout the essay are supposed to be enough, but I remain unsure of her

    Read More

  • FIGHT IN THE FIELDS: CESAR CHAVEZ

    672 Words  | 2 Pages

    Even though, this is a fictional book, it tells a true story about the struggle of the farm worker to obtain a better life for themselves and their families. There are two main themes in this book, non-violence, and the fight for dignity. Cesar Chavez was a non-violent man who would do anything to not get in a fight while they where boycotting the growers. One, incident in the story was when a grower pulled out a gun, and he pointed it at the strikers, Chavez said, “He has a harder decision to make, we are just standing here in peace…” The picketer were beaten and put in jail before they would fight back and that is what why all farm workers look up to Cesar Chavez , along with his good friend Martin Luther King Jr. Non-Violence is the only way to solve anything. The growers in that time did not care about their workers, if people were striking, the growers would go to Mexico and bring in Braceros, mean that they would not have to sign the union contract and not take union workers, who were willing to work if the grower would sign the contract.

    Read More

  • John Steinbeck And Cesar Chaver's Impact On Farm Workers

    1202 Words  | 3 Pages

    He states thousands of farm workers are forced to live in horrendous conditions in garbage and underneath trees. In order for workers to purchase food at inflated prices, they have to walk miles and their only source of free water is from irrigation pumps. Children in the family are put to work even though child labor is illegal in the United States. Children make up 30 percent of northern California garlic harvesters. The working conditions farmers were put through in the 1930 's and 60 's were not as pleasant as Crevecoeur described them to be. Crevecoeur ensured workers that if they were hard working and good citizens they would live an easy happy life. Instead, they were paid poorly and treated as if they weren 't important human

    Read More

  • Gentrification of Class Warfare in East Harlem

    812 Words  | 2 Pages

    Class warfare is the struggle between classes in a society, often based on capitalist principles.

    Read More

  • Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society

    840 Words  | 2 Pages

    The best part to learn from in my opinion is the Epilogue where the Chavez speaks to the lives of undocumented immigrants inside the political and social environment that has recently "shadowed" to be stricter on illegal aliens. Chavez brought a clear unbiased look at the simple and often risky life of undocumented migrants, mainly in Southern California area. I also learned more about the term "migrant worker" I knew some things but as I was reading I got more out of the term like it has multiple meanings and interpretations in different places of the world. The general meaning is any person working outside of their home country (which is what I thought it to be.) Some countries have millions of illegal immigrants , most of them being workers. The word can also be used to label someone who drifts within their country just to follow work as well as seasonal work "Farmworkers in northern San Diego are generally employed as seasonal workers" (Chavez pg. 86) which is the common definition in the United States.

    Read More

  • Child Labor

    1721 Words  | 4 Pages

    Throughout time children have worked myriad hours in hazardous workplaces in order to make a few cents to a few dollars. This is known as child labor, where children are risking their lives daily for money. Today child labor continues to exist all over the world and even in the United States where children pick fruits and vegetables in difficult conditions. According to the article, “What is Child Labor”; it states that roughly 215 million children around the world are working between the ages of 5 and 17 in harmful workplaces. Child labor continues to exist because many families live in poverty and with more working hands there is an increase in income. Other families take their children to work in the fields because they have no access to childcare and extra money is beneficial to buy basic needs. Although there are laws and regulations that protect children from child labor, stronger enforcement is required because child labor not only exploits children but also has detrimental effects on a child’s health, education, and the people of the nation.

    Read More

  • Karl Marx's Theory Of Alienation: An Interpretation And Critical Evaluation

    1843 Words  | 4 Pages

    Under capitalism, the proletariat relates to their labor as a strange object and lack any sort of identification with it. They invest their lives into objects and no longer own their own labor. The worker becomes more alienated the more he or she produces. The worker shrinks in comparison to this world of objects that he or she helps create but can not possess and habitually loses the power to determine life and destiny. They can not think of themselves as the directors of their own actions, are under control of the bourgeoisie, and treated as a

    Read More

  • Wealth and Poverty: Karl Marx

    1702 Words  | 4 Pages

    Karl Marx, a German philosopher, saw this inequality growing between what he called "the bourgeoisie" and "the proletariat" classes. The bourgeoisie was the middle/upper class which was growing in due to the industrial revolution, and the proletariats were the working class, the poor. These two classes set themselves apart by many different factors. Marx saw five big problems that set the proletariat and the bourgeoisie aside from each other. These five problems were: The dominance of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, the ownership of private property, the set-up of the family, the level of education, and their influence in government. Marx, in The Communist Manifesto, exposes these five factors which the bourgeoisie had against the communist, and deals with each one fairly. As for the proletariat class, Marx proposes a different economic system where inequality between social classes would not exist.

    Read More

  • Kuyper Against Marx

    1801 Words  | 4 Pages

    In Marx’s opinion, the cause of poverty has always been due to the struggle between social classes, with one class keeping its power by suppressing the other classes. He claims the opposing forces of the Industrial Age are the bourgeois and the proletarians. Marx describes the bourgeois as a middle class drunk on power. The bourgeois are the controllers of industrialization, the owners of the factories that abuse their workers and strip all human dignity away from them for pennies. Industry, Marx says, has made the proletariat working class only a tool for increasing the wealth of the bourgeoisie. Because the aim of the bourgeoisie is to increase their trade and wealth, it is necessary to exploit the worker to maximize profit. This, according to Marx, is why the labor of the proletariat continued to steadily increase while the wages of the proletariat continued to steadily decrease.

    Read More

  • Marx 's Theory Of Class Conflict

    1079 Words  | 3 Pages

    According to Marx class is determined by property associations not by revenue or status. It is determined by allocation and utilization, which represent the production and power relations of class. Marx’s differentiate one class from another rooted on two criteria: possession of the means of production and control of the labor power of others. The major class groups are the capitalist also known as bourgeoisie and the workers or proletariat. The capitalist own the means of production and purchase the labor power of others. Proletariat is the laboring lower class. They are the ones who sell their own labor power. Class conflict to possess power over the means of production is the powerful force behind social growth.

    Read More

  • Harvest Of Shame

    839 Words  | 2 Pages

    The movie opens up with rural images of thousands of migrant workers being transported in trucks with a short introduction by Edward Murrow and some occasional interventions of parts of an interview made to the secretary of labor after he saw the impacting images, and to the different people who have seen the lives the workers lead. Most of the secretary’s commentaries depict the exclusion that these people have since they are basically people who are silently crying out for assistance to stop harvesting the fields of their shame, or at least to hope for potential raises and better work conditions. From Florida to New Jersey, and from Mexico to Oregon, these people including women and children travel around the states following the sun and the demand from the seasonal goods while working around a hundred and thirty-six days earning and average of nine hundred dollars a year.

    Read More

  • Marxist Theory and Oedipus the King

    1332 Words  | 3 Pages

    "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" (Marx and Engels 2). This excerpt, taken from Karl Marx's and Friedrich Engels' The Communist Manifesto, explains the two primary classes found throughout most of Europe during the era of the Industrial Revolution. These classes were the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The former were known as the "exploiters" and the latter as the "exploited".

    Read More

  • Social Integration Essay

    1050 Words  | 3 Pages

    According to France (2010) this can have an impact on the welfare of individuals, groups and community and of the whole nation. Curran and Renzetti (1996) further asserted that conflict is not necessarily bad for society since it is a vital source for social change, but inequality itself has serious consequences on the lives of individuals. Majority of people in a society suffer from the effects of inequality, while the few reap tremendous benefits from it. Karl Marx found out that the bourgeoisie can accumulate massive resources, and can control livelihoods of the proletariat. These allow them to dominate the society by political corruption hence exposing the non-owners to unemployment and poverty (Macionis and Plumber, 2005). Those people at the top of the social class hierarchy can also use their greater economic and political resources to preserve their advantageous position. According to Gilchrist et al (2007), in conflict theory there are few basic conflicts which are class, race and ethnicity and gender. There are low and high ranks that give certain groups more power and prestige over others which cause conflicts in

    Read More

More about Class Conflict: Boourgeoisie And The Proletariat

Open Document