The rich get rich and the poor get poorer. Essentially this is the view that Marx and Engels had on social economic status. There is a polarization of classes, in that there is a division of groups, the rich and the poor. However not much has changed today. The rich help the rich, and the poor in a sense also help the rich, but no one seems to care to help the poor. Even in times of natural catastrophes the poor undoubtedly suffer the most with little help from anyone. The state only helps the ruling class and protects big corporations.
Even with decades of warning of the possible flooding that could happen from the after math of Hurricane Harvey, corporations chose to ignore all warnings and took no action to prepare if a natural disaster were to happen. Marx and Engels would see that their theories are still relevant today. There is still a social and economic inequality between classes. The poor and marginalized suffer the most. Marx and Engels propose that the class in control of the material production also controls the mental production "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time I ts ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it" (Marx, 172). Those in the top class are in charge and ruling everyone else. They're the ones who have a say and the power over others.
The corporations not only ignored the warnings for the flood they also fought against having to take any precautions in case the natural disaster did happen. The flood itself could not have been prevented, but the amount of damage and the people harmed could have been kept at a minimal. Marx stresses that the economic production, the base, is what shapes the prevailing ideas, the superstructure, and this economic structure is what drives society.
The rich take everything they can from the poor and are nowhere in sight when they are in need of help. They state the reason people are poor is because of their own
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were also discussed. Together, these philosophers outlined the Marxist theory, a theory that involves collectivism as the mechanism to run the economy of a society. Although their efforts were recognized, it did not, however, help bring hegemony to an end, especially due to constant change in technology. The chapter continues with saying that along with the advancement in technology, social domination has become much more complex, ultimately concluding that the difference in
He further explains that organization is usually disrupted by the competition between the laborers, but it always comes back stronger. (Marx & Engels 1948, 31) He then describes capitalists and argues the loss of individuality that the bourgeoisie fear from the threat of Communism and lays out the foundations for the Communist revolution. He states that "political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another." (Marx & Engels 1948, 37)
According to Henslin (2015), “Weber illustrates, a large group of people who rank close to one another in property, power, and prestige; according to Marx, one of two groups: capitalists who own the means of production or workers who sell their labor” This is a dynamic that should be working currently in American society. However, in the past three decades there has been a gap between the poor and the not very rich. This gap has not happened by itself. According to Reich (2015), in the movie Inequality For All, “…the all
The Communist Manifesto left a tremendous impact on a society that was rapidly becoming industrialized, and its effects can even be seen on the dominating economic system of the twenty-first century. In the later nineteenth century, however, industrial capitalism was on the brink of ruin. “On many occasions during the past century, Marxists have thought that capitalism was down for the count . . . Yet it has always come back with renewed strength.” Industrial capitalism succeeded in the face of communism, despite numerous economic disasters. As the capitalist economists hopefully noted at the time, these economic earthquakes, temporary in character, soon cured themselves and left capitalism unscathed. Karl Marx sought to create
Classism is an issue so large that it has become a global pandemic. In the United States alone, the allocation of ~90% wealth in a 10% population serves as a clear indication that there is a wide gap in the quality of lives of many individuals. The wealthy use many strategies to maintain their power against the poor. In order to control the economy, they dictate the price of the dollar, causing it to inflate when necessary to oppress the working class. The problem classism has on us today is that it separates the country into two parts, rich and poor. Although the majority of the U.S. population belongs to the working class, and keeps the nation running, the smaller upper class feel
In the article Rich and Poor, Peter Singer sees extreme poverty as “not having enough income to meet the most basic human needs for adequate food, water, shelter, clothing, sanitation, health care or education” (pg. 234). Singer does not fail to compare those in extreme poverty to people who are living in absolute affluence. He suggests that it is the responsibility of those living in affluence to help those who are in need of obtaining even the basic human needs. He also argues that the affluent not helping is the moral equivalency of murder. Singer realizes that even though the rich can give to the poor these resources that they need, the rich do not feel enough of a moral mandate to do so. I disagree a bit with Singer because he seems to suggest that everyone who has the basic necessities is morally obligated to give but, I believe that this idea of a moral mandate to give should only apply to the extremely wealthy. Like Singer’s first premises says “If we can prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it.” (243) If the absolute affluent have large amounts of money, they can help to at least make people live comfortably without losing anything of great significance. The increasing poverty rates, not just in America but, globally cannot be solved if the extremely wealthy continue to do wasteful spending and choose to not put their money more towards programs and charities that better the lives of the people in their
As long as it has been in existence, society has always been fractured into social classes, the very rich and the very poor. I see within our society the chasm growing by the year. The proletariat, boxed into cramped houses, while the bourgeoisie reside in mansions that jut up towards the sky touching the clouds. The rich, who control mostly everything in todays age, capitalize on those less fortunate than themselves and bask in the ignorance of the lower class. It is painful for myself to see the common worker, the average person, being taken advantage of and not even knowing his rights against such things.
1A. The author expresses the statement that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
143). The political economy approach draws its inspiration from the nineteenth-century writing of the Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels. Marx believes the human-nature nexus is inevitable. Because nature is the primary source of human’s means of subsistence. For Marx (2012, p. 148), “The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensual external world. It is the material on which his labor is realized, in which it is active, from which and by means of which it produces.” So, it can be said that the more the worker, by his labor, extracts the means of subsistence from nature, the more he loses his means of life from the nature in two ways: 1. The nature ceases to be an object belonging to worker’s labor; 2. The nature ceases to be means for the physical subsistence of the worker. In this way, the worker just becomes a servant of the nature: as a worker, and as a physical subject. So, the deprivation of workers is inherently built in the nature of their labor that always favors the owners of the means of production. According to Marx (2012, p. 149), “It is true that labor produces wonderful things for the rich-but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces-but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty-but for the worker, deformity. It replaces labor by machines, but
Those who control means of production have power over the rest of the society (Morrison, 2006). Marx saw two very different social classes.
Thus, the economic system controls all aspects of human life, and these lives are left to revolve around the means of production. Marx believed the system contained the seeds of it’s own destruction in that capitalists are constantly competing to produce goods more efficiently and cheaper. When wages are cut so low that the laboring class is unable to purchase the goods produced there will be an economic crisis. Then when conditions are bad enough the oppressed will rise up against the owners and capitalism will have destroyed itself.
There is deep substance and many common themes that arose throughout Marx’s career as a philosopher and political thinker. A common expressed notion throughout his and Fredrick Engels work consists of contempt for the industrial capitalist society that was growing around him during the industrial revolution. Capitalism according to Marx is a “social system with inherent exploitation and injustice”. (Pappenheim, p. 81) It is a social system, which intrinsically hinders all of its participants and specifically debilitates the working class. Though some within the capitalist system may benefit with greater monetary gain and general acquisition of wealth, the structure of the system is bound to alienate all its
The specialised critique of capitalism found in the Communist Manifesto (written by Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels), provides a basis for the analysis and critique of the capitalist system. Marx and Engels wrote about economical in relation to the means or mode of production, ideology, alienation and most fundamentally, class relations (particularly between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat). Collectively, these two men created the theory of Marxism. There are multiple critiques of Marxism that attack the fundamental tenants of their argument. Several historical events have fueled such criticisms, such as the fall of the Soviet Union, where Marxism was significantly invalidated and condemned. On the flip side, Marxism has been widely supported in times of capitalist hardships. What viewpoint a person will hold towards Marxism is largely dependable on the economical environment in which they live. Further, it is also important to remember that Marx and Engels lived in a very different era than today’s society, and the concept of capitalism may have arguably changed quite a lot over time. Therefore, the principles found in the Manifesto may often have to be refurnished and reapplied to fit different economic environments.
Though Marx views the communist revolution as an unavoidable outcome of capitalism, his theory stipulates that the proletariat must first develop class consciousness, or an understanding of its place within the economic superstructure. If this universal character of the proletariat does not take shape, then the revolution cannot be accomplished (1846: 192). This necessary condition does not pose a problem within Marx’s theoretical framework, as the formation of class consciousness is inevitable in Marx’s model of society. His writings focus on the idea that economic production determines the social and political structure (1846, 1859). For Marx, social class represents a person’s relation to the means of production, a relation that he believes is independent of
It can be seen that there are a multitude of reasons that the poor tend to remain poor. Reasons ranging from the spending patterns of the poor to the health and nutrition of the poor all attribute to the creation of a poverty cycle that seemingly condemns the poor to being poor. Obviously this isn’t a rule of thumb but rather an accurate observation, it is not to say that the poor can’t become affluent but rather the conditions and environment that surrounds those who are poor severely impedes their ability to earn an income and move over the poverty