A Marxist Lens On Society And Ideology

Karl Marx believes that a capitalistic society separates the rich from the poor. corporations that holds the money hold the power to dictate whether certain fucntions of society.

Karl Marx is one of the most influential and revolutionary philosopher, economist and sociologist of the 19th century. His thoughts not only shaped our understandings of the capitalistic world but also created a new system of social organization, communism. His ideology also defined the key political figures of the cold war period such as Stalin, Mao and Castro. Without Marx, the modern history would have been completely different. Despite his rather bourgeoisie family background, he was able to closely observe the struggle of proletariat and identified the injustices in the capitalist system.

Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) was a revolutionary German economic theorist and communist with many publications on sociology, economics and politics. Many of his writings can be used and applied into the media. Marx stated that in prehistoric times, people had no concept of private ownership, and everything was shared freely. There was no government to rule over everyone, but small tribes of people who each had their own leaders. This was known as primitive communism. As time went by, people became greedy and craved wealth. Private ownership of land led to the class system developing, with the upper class owning the land that the lower classes lived on and worked off. This became the feudal system, which was headed by a king. This system suited the upper class however it also meant that the lower class was always kept at the bottom, with no way of moving up from their positions. Industrialisation in the 1700’s meant that power in society fell into the hands of the wealthy, as they owned the land and had the money to build factories,

Marxism is an ideology based on the economic and political theories of Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels. Karl Marx who was born in Germany in 1818 was a revolutionary whose ideas on society were the foundation of communism. Under modern capitalism the means of production, such as factories, land, and technology are controlled by a small minority who Marx called the bourgeoisie. Production is carried out by the working class, known as the proletarians who have to sell their labour or face poverty or starvation. Taken together these two classes form the economic base of society, what Marx called the substructure. Marx saw that there was conflict between these two divisions

AQA AS/A SOCIOLOGY ESSAY: CRITICALLY EXAMINE MARXIST PERSPECTIVES ON TODAY’S SOCIETY Classical Marxism is a conflict structural theory which argues that, rather than society being based on value consensus as functionalists would contend, there is a conflict of interest between different groups (social classes) because of the unequal distribution of power and wealth. Marxists are also interested in the way in which social change can occur, particularly in sudden and revolutionary ways. However, there are differences between Marxists especially over the way which social change can come about. For example, humanistic Marxists like Gramsci give a greater role to the conscious decisions and actions of human beings than do structural Marxists

“The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.” Marx (1848, p.74)

The theory of Marxism was founded on the ideas created by Karl Marx, he stated that materialism has become part of our nature and that it has created grounds on how we live in our reality. Marxist criticism argues that literature shows a reflection on reality, specifically how the power of social institutions have affected not only the economic world but the mind and ideals of society. Through literature we can see the mental difference in characters based on their social standing. The difference in class is referred to as socioeconomic; Marxists believe that the socioeconomic divide is much stronger than that of race, gender, religion and intelligence. We see through the difference in class levels that the poorer characters tend to have issues that revolve around the word that they live in; while more wealthy characters tend to have more selfish problems. Marxist addresses the classes as follows: The Bourgeoisie, those who have and are fortunate; the proletariat, the have nots/ laborers. We will see through the stories of the characters from our literary works how the issues of the two classes differ, and how they affect the groups internally. I believe that this theory is important to literature because much of what Marxism creates a foundation on is how the literature that we study is a direct reflection of our reality, and through the study of this theory we can better understand this “reality” that we have found ourselves

The later half of the 19th century was characterized by the rise of labor unions, strikes, protests and uprisings. Starting in the 1960s, workers started to feel strongly the presence and pressure of instability in social mobility. “The truth could hardly be denied. Class, as defined in terms of dignity, was increasingly insecure” [Isenberg[8]] The gap between the rich and the poor became wider and the working class erroneously placed in-between began to question their identity and in the process seek to define and defend this new identity Capitalist America was witnessing a boom in production as industrialism became more and more prominent. The gap between the rich and the poor continued to widen and eventually would evolve to create a new class. The Marxism theory identified the rise of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; the bourgeoisie consisted of those who owned capital and supplied the means of production while the proletariat were the laborers who owned only their labor and offered it up to the bourgeoisie in return for wages. According to the Marxism theory, the definition of the working class was simply made up of people who simply offered up work. The inclusion of the Marxism theory above serves to clearly and simply define who the stakeholders were in the Industrial labor system. At the extreme ends of the labor spectrum, both the elites who owned the means of production and the laborers who owned only their labor will offer the lens from which we will view

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Mark 344). This is the famous sentence with which Karl Marx begins the first chapter of Manifesto of the Communist Party, by using the word class this would imply ordering people into societal groups. Karl Marx was referring to economic class, however, society can be grouped into many different classes, such as, economic standing, gender, or race. Each provides an interesting view on how different values have shaped history as is currently viewed. If viewed through the struggles of economic oppression, similar to how Karl Marx did, the major conflict is centralized within the relationship of each class to the means of production. However, Kate Millett and Charles Mills would argue that economic class is meaningless in political society, as Mills would argue that race is the most important, while Millett would say that gender is important. Regardless of the viewpoint that history is taken through Marx, Mills, and Millett would concur that the various classes need to be broken down in order to create a peaceful society. While divisions amongst the various societal classes creates oppression, it is in this oppression that society through the introduction of laws or the evolution of a society’s values, and these changes can be witnessed from where society was when Marx wrote in the mid-nineteenth century, and Mills and Millett’s writings towards the end of the twentieth century.

In The Ruling Class and the Ruling Ideas by Mark and Engels discuss that the ideas of a particular historical time are designed to serve the ruling class. This reading proves the presence of ideology within society to explain how it serves the ruling class. “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production…” (Marx and Engels, 1970, p. 39). Within The Beauty and the Beast, the prince used the working class in order to improve his way of life. This signifies that within this period of time, there was a limited amount of independence that separated the ruling and working class because of the control of the means of material production that the ruling class had over the working class.

I intend critically to examine, from the standpoint of Marxist theory, the arguments for race, gender and class studies offered by some of their main proponents, assessing their strengths and limitations and demonstrating, in the process, that Marxism is theoretically and politically necessary if the study of class, gender and race is to achieve more than the endless documentation of variations in their relative salience and combined effects in very specific contexts and experiences.

According to Marxism, there is a struggle or conflict between individual rights and social rights. In many regards, Marxism places more emphasis on societal rights than it does on individual rights. In fact, some critics even state that Marxism ignores the rights of the individual altogether. As can be observed when Marxism is implemented under the umbrella of communism. However, Marxism takes into account the inequality and unfairness that exists in society. The inevitable truth is that contrasting groups in society will always conflict with one another and will be unable to agree on the way in which resources should be distributed. Furthermore, there is also a difference between genders, specifically in terms of the equity of how the roles

Karl Marx, also a philosopher was popularly known for his theories that best explained society, its social structure, as well as the social relationships. Karl Marx placed so much emphasis on the economic structure and how it influenced the rest of the social structure from a materialistic point of view. Human societies progress through a dialectic of class struggle, this means that the three aspects that make up the dialectic come into play, which are the thesis, antithesis and the synthesis (Avineri, 1980: 66-69). As a result of these, Marx suggests that in order for change to come about, a class struggle has to first take place. That is, the struggle between the proletariat and the capitalist class, the class that controls

Karl Marx is often called the father of communism, but his life entailed so much more. He was a political economist, philosopher, and idea revolutionist. He was a scholar that believed that capitalism was going to undercut itself as he stated in the Communist Manifesto. While he was relatively ambiguous in his lifetime, his works had tremendous influence after his death. Some of the world’s most powerful and most populace countries follow his ideas to this day. Many of history’s most eventful times were persuaded by his thoughts. Karl Marx was one of the most influential persons in the history of the world, and a brief history of his life will show how he was able to attain many of his attitudes.

Marxism is a set of theories, or a system of thought and analysis, developed by Karl Marx in the nineteenth century in response to the Western industrial revolution and the rise of industrial capitalism as the predominant