Karl Marx's Social Conflict Theory

In sociology, there are a few main sociological perspectives. These are the grand theories that sociologists generally base their studies off of and these theories shape how they understand and analyze the elements of a society. One of the most well known and developed sociological theories is the social conflict theory. This theory concentrates heavily on how society is held together by coercion, how individuals are subordinate to society, and how society is a constant competition for power between groups. It is a theory that is more critical, pointing out the negative attributes of society, focusing on the struggles and conflicts between groups in society. Many sociologists have been proponents of this theory, but the most well known, and

Karl Marx, a famous sociologist, philosopher, theorist, and political activist, was born in Germany in 1818. Before he was born, his father converted to Christianity in order to become a lawyer; his family was of Jewish background, there were many anti-Jew laws in Germany. Although Karl Marx never really identified as a Christian or a Jew, he still often felt alienated because of his Jewish background, which explained his later exploration in theories relating to alienation and estrangement. Even early on in his life he already was a critic of capitalism, as he was involved in the Communist Party, a small group of individuals who advocated the abolition of private property and planned to overthrow the class system. He was working as a journalist in Germany until he eventually moved to London, where he wrote many books, many of which he wrote with his friend Freidrich Engels, and mostly about capitalism in the western world, and how it affected

Karl Marx believed that because modern work was specialized, no worker felt gratification or felt that they were contributing to society because they were performing a job that countless other people could perform as well. He also stated that modern work is “insecure” because capitalism makes an individual expendable and easily replaceable at any moment. Another huge issue, and possibly the biggest issue, with capitalism was primitive accumulation, which is defined by capitalists making their factory workers’ wages as low as possible in order to skim off a wide profit margin. He defined exploitation as: factory owners paying their worker’s an extremely low price to make a product, but then selling it to someone else for a much greater price. The more the industries produce and sell, the richer the industry owners become, while the working class are still paid very little, which would only increase tension and widen the gap between the upper and lower class. His beliefs and views on capitalism were incredibly important, because they were the sole influence of his thoughts on the social conflict theory. To Marx, the system of capitalism essentially bridged society into two distinct groups: the upper class and lower class, and the effect of the tension between the two characterized and created