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Karl marx social class theory
Discuss Marx and alienation
Karl marx theory on social class
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However, he also believed that religion in fact alienates society from reality and it is used to mask life to make it seem more endurable. Marx theorised that class orientated society workers are those who have been denied access to the results of their hard work which is then taken from them and given to someone else, resulting to them becoming alienated, Marx calls this the first type of alienation. The second is alienation from productive activity, this is workers only working to survive, the third type is alienation from the human species, where the workers perform less and less like humans, this is because they are forced to work like animals. The final type of alienation, is being alienation from fellow humans and the community. According Because of this, Marx thought to believe that society and its individuals would not live to their full potential, as a result of this they aren’t truly happy, as they are being tricked by religious teachings to believe that they should be happy and grateful for their lives. Marx theorised that the solution to alienation would be society and individuals cutting themselves off from God which would then allow them to see what reality is really Durkheim thought that society had a social structure, where this structure existed above the level of the individual. As the values and norms already existed in society before individuals were born into it. Durkheim believed that individuals behaviours was shaped by this system, as he suggests that religion creates this social structure and the norms and values. This results to religion providing social cohesion to help maintain social solidarity through the shared beliefs and behaviours that individuals are born into, and that social control would help enforce religious moral and norms to help keep social conformity. However, Durkheim thought that people were naturally selfish and looked out for themselves as they were biologically determined to be this way, resulting to society having to control these natural
According to Marx, capitalist system has another damage rather than class differentiation and low source of income. This damage is basically alienation of labor. Labors are being fundamentally alienated from production, production process, man’s species being and also from other men. Those are the alienation steps of workers in capitalist world. According to communist theory Marx believes that in such system society divides into two different classes; on one hand there are property owners so called bourgeoisie and on the other hand property less workers so called proletariats. For Marx the class stratification that driven from private ownership causes to alienate workers from the existence world. It begins that property less workers become alienated from the product that they produce. Worker relates to...
With the emergence of an industrial working class that arrived from the farms and countryside new theories and ideologies about the political economy began to appear. Karl Marx, a political philosopher during this time, introduced the idea of "alienation of labor". His theory proposed that labor has the ability to create a loss of reality in the laborer because the laborer himself becomes a commodity or object due to the nature of work. In terms of the roles of women it can be argued that the effect is even greater due to the limited choices of work available. This theme is expressed in literature through the writings of Gilman and Alcott.
Durkheim Emile Durkheim (1858 - 1917), believed individuals are determined by the society they live in because they share a moral reality that we have been socialised to internalise through social facts. Social facts according to Drukhiem are the “manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him [or her].” Social facts are external to the individual, they bind societies together because they have an emotional and moral hold on people, and are why we feel shame or guilt when we break societal convention. Durkheim was concerned with maintaining the cohesion of social structures. He was a functionalist, he believed each aspect of society contributes to society's stability and functioning as a whole.
Karl Marx is living in a world he is not happy with, and seems to think that he has the perfect solution. I am a strong believer in his ideas. We are living in a time period with a huge class struggle. The Bourgroise exploits and the proletariat are being exploited. Marx did not like the way this society was and searched for a solution. Marx looked for “universal laws of human behavior that would explain and predict the future course of events" (36). He saw an unavoidable growth and change in society, coming not from the difference in opinions, but in the huge difference of opposing classes. He speaks of his ideal society and how he is going to bring about this utopia in his book The Communist Manifesto. I am going to share with you more on his ideas of this “world-wide revolution” (36) that would put an end to social classes and allow people to live with equal sharing which would result in a harmonious and much peaceful world.
Why The Ideas Of Karl Marx Were So Radical To Society? The Communist Manifesto, written in 1848, provided the views of Karl Marx on humans and nature. For the time in which the document was written, the ideas of Marx were very radical to society. The ongoing struggle between the Proletarians( the working class) and the Bourgeois( the owners) prompted Marx to develop a solution to this social problem.
He believed that the state would disappear if classes in society were erased because a state’s job is to take advantage of inequality. Marx speculated that he would see a good portion of the poor advance financially and socially. However, this did not occur. Aristocracy was taken over by the capitalism, they were the people who’s main objective was to acquire money and the working class were taken over by the proletariat which were those working in labor to acquire income. Marx states “workers end up alienated not only from the goods that they produce and the process itself, but from fellow humans, from themselves, from nature (Marx, 6).
Karl Marx once said, “The production of too many useful things results into too many useless people”. In his passage “Alienated Labor” he discusses the different kinds of struggles or alienation one would go through due to the industrial revolution; during the industrial revolution production changed from craftsmanship to an assembly line so instead of having a master of a trade they gave out simple jobs which would save on the overhead cost of employment. This was gold for the owners of the companies because they built a factory with zero health concerns and made people work hours on hours doing something as simple as putting a ribbon on something and they would do that for eighteen-hour shifts everyday which would mass produce the product
Religion is the number one thing that distracts us from the daily social and economic struggle; it promises that after this hard and painful life we are promised an eternal and glorious one where nothing goes wrong. Marx says that Religion tells the poor that this life is ok because true happiness will be found in the next life. Going back to the quote Marx said, he continues on to say that Religion is the heart of a heartless world. Marx essentially gives religion some credit by saying that Religion tries to become the heart of a heartless world, even though Marx is very critical of Religion he acknowledges “Religion doesn’t matter so much it is not the real problem. Religion is a set of ideas, and ideas are expressions of material realities. Religion is a symptom of a disease, not the disease itself.” Marx then goes on to critique religion again by relating Religion to an opiate drug, like the opiate drug Religion only helps you forget the suffering and gets people to look forward to an imaginary future afterlife (hence opiate of the
Marx takes his idea of alienation from Feuerbach, who shows the alienation of man from God. Briefly, Feuerbach's argument is that God is created by man as the 'projection of man's species-essence, the totality of his powers and attributes raised to the level of infinity' (1). Religion alienates man by reversing the relationship between the subject and predicate - the Deity is supreme over man, even though it is created by man. Leszek Kolakowski suggests that the clearest material example of religious alienation is blood sacrifice. In general, therefore, alienation of man is the process that separates man from part of himself. In Feuerbach, the separation is between man and the god created in man's image. In Marx, as shall be seen, alienation is the separation between man and his life-activity, his product, society and the species. Each of these four relations can be seen as one aspect of man being separated from himself.
Marx’s theory of alienation describes the separation of things that naturally belong together. For Marx, alienation is experienced in four forms. These include alienation from ones self, alienation from the work process, alienation from the product and alienation from other people. Workers are alienated from themselves because they are forced to sell their labor for a wage. Workers are alienated from the process because they don’t own the means of production. Workers are alienated from the product because the product of labor belongs to the capitalists. Workers do not own what they produce. Workers are alienated from other people because in a capitalist economy workers see each other as competition for jobs. Thus for Marx, labor is simply a means to an end.
Marx explains the condition. of estranged labour as the result of man participating in an institution alien to his nature. It is my interpretation that man is alienated from his labour because he is not the reaper. of what he sows. Because he is never the recipient of his efforts, the labourer lacks identity with what he creates.
THE TERM "alienation" in normal usage refers to a feeling of separateness, of being alone and apart from others. For Marx, alienation was not a feeling or a mental condition, but an economic and social condition of class society--in particular, capitalist society.
The first type of alienation is from “product of labor”. This is where the worker is separated from their work. This is basically saying that the work that the worker is creating does not necessarily show their creativity. Marx wrote:
Durkheim is a key figure in understanding religion from a functionalist perspective. He believes that social order and stability can only exist if people are integrated into society by value consensus. Religion is seen as an important institution for achieving these functions as it sets a moral code for
With the idea of equality of all people no matter what race or previous financial situation, the concept of a god was in complete opposition of the Marxist philosophy. ?Marx?s idea of God as a projection of alienated human beings whereby God becomes in rich proportion as humanity becomes poor.?[2] Marx is criticizing society and their overall views of how religion should be treated. The society is letting God become the main focus of their lives, and since they are giving almost all their attention to God, they are becoming oblivious of the other members of the society and the relationships between each other.