More handpicked essays just for you.
Factors contributing to social inequality
Factors contributing to social inequality
Causes of social inequality
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Social inequality is characterized by the existence of unequal opportunity for various social positions or statuses within a given group or society. It is a phenomenon that has a long history as social inequalities has a wide range of varieties. From economic, gender, racial, status, and prestige, social inequality is a topic often disputed by classical theorists. Sociologists Karl Marx, Max Weber, W.I. Thomas, and Frederic M. Thrasher have formed varying thoughts on this recurring phenomenon. Marx believed that social inequality synthesized through conflicts within classes and in modern society those two classes were the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In contrast, Weber disputes Marx’s simplistic view of the conflict and theorizes that social …show more content…
Commodity fetishism has blinded people into believing that value is a relationship between objects, when in reality, it is a relationship between people. This in turn, prevents people from thinking about the social labor condition workers have to endure; they only care and value about how much objects costs. They think that the source of the value comes from the cost, but it truly comes from labor (FC). Through this objectification stems alienation and estrangement. Marx starts with the assumption that humans have an intrinsic quality. As human beings, individuals like to be create and manipulate his or her environment. Creating is a part of people; therefore, people their being into their creations. However, Marx postulates that capitalism and specialized division of labor separates that working class from their creations in four ways- through alienation from the product, the labor process, one’s species-being, and humanity itself. The working class suffers through this hostility to make create more wealth for owners of factories. They get trapped in a cycle to make products for profit, but as automation advances, machines begins to take over people’s jobs; therefore, there less employment opportunities available, which in turn allows factory owners to decrease wages and exploit and devalue the working class (EL). In the The Poverty …show more content…
The social disorganization theory directly links social deviance (criminal activity) to neighborhood ecological characteristics. Thus, an individual's residential location can shape whether he or she grows up in engaging and participating in illegal activities. In The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, W.I. Thomas defined social disorganization as a “decrease of the influence of existing social rule of behavior upon individual members of the group” (Thomas DR: 4). The likelihood of an individual on the lower end of the economic ladder living in a crime ridden neighborhood is high. Therefore, the likelihood that individual will be involved in illegal activity when he ages is substantially higher because he grew up in that environment and sees crime just a way of life. In addition, individuals poor neighborhoods might engage in social deviance as a desire for security. The individual may be motivated by fear to avoid death by finding any means necessary to procure items for survival (W
This theory suggests that individuals who commit crime is based on their surrounding community. Shaw and McKay, who are two leading contributors to social disorganization feel that community disorganization is the main source of delinquency and believe that the solution to crime is to organize communities (Cullen, Agnew, & Wilcox, pg. 107). According to the reading, the strengths of social disorganization can be categorized into three. One, it explains the high crime rate in certain areas. Two, it accounts for the transmission of deviant values from one generation to the next and three, it predicts crime rates from neighborhood characteristics. Given the circumstances, these strengths can often lead to its weaknesses. The social disorganization theory uses too much of a macro-sociological approach by focusing on broad areas instead looking at the situation through an individual approach. Also, the classification of an area of being “disorganized” may actually be organized based on different
Marx’s analysis of social class is that there will always be a divide between the haves and the have not’s. He separates them into two classes the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie signifies the capitalist class, while proletariat signifies the working class. Max Weber’s defines class as “a group of people who have a similar level of economic resources”(p.244). He identifies two main elements of class, material resources, and skill knowledge in the marketplace. In contrast to Marx’s view on class Weber believed that class was not just based solely on ownership of means of production, but could also be based off ownership of other resources and the amount knowledge one has. Pierre Bourdieu’s view on class is that it is based on the concept of cultural capital meaning, “our tastes, knowledge, attitudes, language, and ways of thinking that we exchange in interaction with others”
Much of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto discusses the relationship between how a capitalist society produces its’ goods and how this affects the social structure of the society. Throughout the manifesto, Marx used the term mode of production to refer to how a given society structures its’ economic production, it also refers to how a society produces and with what capital the society produces. Human capital plays a large part in Marx’s communist manifesto, concerning himself with the relations of production, which refers to the relationship between those who own the means of production (bourgeoisie) and those who do not own the fruit of their labor (proletariat). This is where Marx believes that one can find the causes of conflict, asserting history evolves through the mode of production. The constant evolution of the mode of production toward a realization of its’ full potential productivity capacity, creates dissensions between the classes of people, which in capitalism, are defined by the modes of production (owners and workers). Marx believes that one such dissension is that since Capitalism is a mode of production based on private ownership of the means of production, and entities within a capitalistic economy produce property to be exchanged to stay competitive, these entities are forced to drive the wage level for its’ labor as low as possible so as to stay competitive. In turn, the proletariat must create means with which they can keep the interests of the bourgeoisie in check, trying to avoid being exploited to the point of extirpation. Marx holds that this example shows the inherent conflicting nature of the social infrastructure of production, which will in turn give rise to a class struggle culminating in the overthrow ...
Karl Marx (1818-1883) is a German philosopher and revolutionary socialist. Karl Marx born in Prussia on May 5, 1818. He began exploring sociopolitical theories at university among the Young Hegelians after that he became a journalist and his socialist writings expelled him from Germany and France. In 1848, he published The Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels and then he was exiled to London, where he wrote his first volume of Das Kapital.
Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore article “Some principles of stratification” informs us how important inequality is. People need to be in different social positions to balance out and make the society function. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels article, “The class struggle,” on the other side, begins with the two social classes; along with how unfair and corrupted the system is benefiting, and damaging the rest of the people. By inheritance and effort, people will always be in different social statuses, but changes will only happen when people unite to make the difference.
Where would you consider yourself with your ranking in America 's social classes, are you upper class, middle class or even lower class? This is actually very important when it come to you receiving opportunities and in a sense special treatment. I’m referring to of course social inequality which is still very much alive in America and still affects a lot of families mostly in a negative way. This problem in America has grabbed the attention of two authors, Paul Krugman who wrote “Confronting Inequality” and Gary S. Becker and Kevin M. Murphy who wrote “The Upside of Income Inequality”. However, they both have different views on inequality Krugman believes that social inequality is only negative while on the other hand, Becker and Murphy believe
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.
A century and a half ago, Karl Marx established a theory that today is known as the backbone to modern socialism and communism. Marx viewed the early capitalism of his own day as inherently exploitive. At the core of capitalist production is what is considered surplus value, the value left over after the producer (in Marx’s case, factory owner) had paid the fixed costs of production such as raw materials, machinery, overhead and wages. The left over amount was kept as profit, a profit that Marx saw that was earned from the sweat of the labor. Derived from his idea of surplus value was that of alienation. Marx gave an economic interpretation to alienation. People were alienated from their own labor; their work was appropriated by someone else and the work itself was compulsory, not creative; the cause was capitalism, and the cure was socialism. Marx believed that modern labor is an evolution of something that began centuries ago and encompassing everything from slave states to European feudalism right on up to today’s version of commercial capitalism; which, completed or perfected the capitalist technique of worker alienation. Marx is correct in saying that capitalism exploits the working class, and that working under capitalism is in fact “alienating”.
Therefore, the community has informal social control, or the connection between social organization and crime. Some of the helpful factors to a community can be informal surveillance, movement-governing rules, and direct intervention. They also contain unity, structure, and integration. All of these qualities are proven to improve crime rate. Socially disorganized communities lack those qualities. According to our lecture, “characteristics such as poverty, residential mobility, and racial/ethnic heterogeneity contribute to social disorganization.” A major example would be when a community has weak social ties. This can be caused from a lack of resources needed to help others, such as single-parent families or poor families. These weak social ties cause social disorganization, which then leads higher levels of crime. According to Seigel, Social disorganization theory concentrates on the circumstances in the inner city that affect crimes. These circumstances include the deterioration of the neighborhoods, the lack of social control, gangs and other groups who violate the law, and the opposing social values within these neighborhoods (Siegel,
With the current unrest occurring in our nation, it would both naïve and in many cause ignorant to believe that is not social inequality still happening each and every day. Social inequality itself can be described as the presence of unequal distribution of benefits and opportunities due to “the significance of a group’s hierarchies and statuses” in a society that drastically hinder one’s life by “setting limits and circumscribing one’s possibilities” (Henslin, 2012). Unfortunately, there are still a large number of instances of social inequality that are still occurring in today’s society with little change being conducted to change them.
Marx’s theory rests on critiquing alienation as the most obtrusive consequence of capitalism. Essentially, all sectors of bourgeois political economy are adopted from the concept of alienation. While capitalism benefits from having a predominantly democratic system, it only functions when the ruling minority make the bulk of decisions, which leave the masses disenfranchised and subjugated to oligarchy. Marx classifies alienation as the estrangement of the worker from the product of labour (“Manuscripts” 30), subsequently, he describes the alienation of the worker from the activity of their own work it is instead an activity of “self estrangement”(“Manuscripts” 31), the third form of alienation is the workers alienation from their “species-being”(“Manuscripts” 31) and the final “estrangement from man to man” where the relationship between the worker and the capitalist is one of hostility (“Manuscripts” 31). Essentially “the worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces”(“Manuscripts” 28) and grows inherently dependent on this alienating system of exploitation because a worker cannot survive without the capitalist. Today, we are living in the apex of monopoly capitalism, and while wealth is increasing, it is controlled heavily by fewer elite. While economic impoverishment is steadily increasing and Third-World countries are being exploited for their
“Communism deprives no man of the ability to appropriate the fruits of his labor. The only thing it deprives him of is the ability to enslave others…” (Marx 238). In today’s Western society, such a statement would be smacked down as a statement of radicalism or of anarchy. In the years surrounding the Industrial Revolution in Europe, however, the deprivation of man by his labor was a greater threat for the working class population. The working class, described by Marx as the proletariat, was in a continuous struggle for survival during this time, and it was to this class of society that Marx appealed. Karl Marx offered the workers of the world the solution of revolution in response to the struggles they faced. To convince them of this and
Karl Marx is a renowned scholar whose philosophy gave a firm foundation to a good number of twentieth-century communist states. Marx's school of thought is embedded in the notion that society rises and falls depends largely on human capacity and power to produce. Marx asserts that communism will replace long-term capitalism. In defending this observation, Marx identified the class struggle as the main ignition of this radical change. Karl Marx's radical analysis of the economics of capitalism is broadly aligned with a personal version of the value theory of labor (Amable 96). In addition, Marx's criticisms include the dissection of the profits of capitalism, here the scholar tries to relate the profits to a surplus value resulting from the exploitation of the workers. This economic analysis of the capitalist system leads Marx to the conclusion that the rupture and subsequent replacement of capitalism are inevitable. This essay seeks to critically evaluate the Marxist thoughts that relate the exploitation of workers under capitalism.
The division of labor consists of the means of production and the relations of production (Marx, 1932. P. 87). Marx states that individuals are defined by their labor in their sense of self and their place in society. He described means of production, such as working on an assembly line, as being unskilled and repetitive (Marx, 1932. P. 87). During Marx’s time, he claimed the rise of machinery caused workers to become mere extensions of the machines and this type of labor created a sense of alienation from the individual and their position in society. Importance in the production of goods switched from the laborer to the machine, because the machine became the main creators of products instead of the individual. At this point, the person became irrelevant and disposable in the production of goods(Marx, 1932. P. 92). This change in the means production altered the division of labor creating social change in every aspect of the super structure. According to Marx, capitalism is set up so that the fewer amount of benefits given to an employee results in the business owner increasing their surplus value (Marx, 1932. P. 88). This results in poor working conditions for the working class and the exploitation of the workers’ rights (Marx, 1932. P. 86). This commodification of labor becomes problematic to the working class who end up becoming dehumanized and their well-being is
A term Marx used to describe “the ways in which commodities have a phantom objectivity” . It is in other words the manner of penning commodities with social qualities. In the marketplace, consumers and producers view one another by means of the goods and money that they exchange. Marx argues that what led to commodity fetishism was ultimately, capitalism . What happens then is that the social relations that are interlaced in the production of said commodities are made to disappear. In that way, the social relations that together links us to other people across space and time as well as the social relations involved in making commodities significant are replaced by how we come to see ourselves relative to commodities. We act then primarily as consumers of commodities. These commodities then become a form of fetishes, which are available for and become participants in projects of the self. An example of this is when we have markers on food, for instance: exotic food; this highlights difference and identity in consumption practices. Knowing about food marks, or buying certain marks makes the consumer current, fashionable and hip. This also applies for people that partake in alternative ways of consumption by choosing, for example, organic food and/or fair trade products. These marks, these meanings become then participants in the project of the self, linking individual’s bodies with global networks of power through