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Karl Marx: The Ideology Of Bourgeois Society

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For Karl Marx the enlightenment represents the ideology of bourgeois society.“The thoughts of the dominant class are in every epoch the dominant ideas, i.e. the class which is the dominant material power of society is also the dominant spiritual power. The dominant thoughts are not anything other than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, material relations are the dominant form of ideas before, so the reports that are words from one class the ruling class, ie what are the ideas of its dominance.” ~ Karl Marx*(1)

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, associated with The Frankfurt school*(2) of philosophers that emerged from the Nazi State in the mid twentieth century followed some of Marxist theory but perceived omissions …show more content…

Horkhiemer and Adorno were led to the consideration of the enlightenment as myth, how it started with the aim of getting rid of myth, then became a myth."Technology is the essence of this knowledge. It aims to produce neither concepts nor images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labour of others ...What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts." ~ Horkheimer and …show more content…

The thoughtful person is subsumed with rational procedures. He claimed that Marx's immiseration of workers is wrong as he didn't allow for improvement in their conditions. "Marx did not see justice and freedom are dialectical concepts ... the more freedom, the less justice, and the more justice, the less freedom. The critical theory which I concieved later is based on the idea that one cannot determine what is good, what a good, a free society would look like from within the society we now live in. We lack the means. But in our work we can bring up the negative aspects of this society which we want to change." ~ Adorno

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Karl Marx was a German philosopher and economist in the 18th century. He is known for his book the Communist Manifesto that was published in 1848. Marx believed that a revolution of the working classes would over throw the capitalist order and creates a classless society. The Industrial Revolutions led to the proletarianization; his partner Friedrich Engels explained why the changes created by the proletarianization of the worker would develop into a huge problem for industrial societies. I do believe that Karl Marx’s vision of communism in the Communist Manifesto could re-emerge as a popular and workable philosophy of social, economic, and political organization.

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Socioeconomic status is frequently considered to be a potential confounder or a risk factor for overweight and obesity in health studies. Although there is general agreement that SES is a multidimensional construct, scholars tend to include only one socioeconomic status component in their predictive models and few researches have provided an explicit theoretical and methodological rationale for the choice of indicators (Ball et al., 2002). Socioeconomic status is a measure of an individual’s position within society that is determined by the access to collectively desired resources (Oakes and Rossi, 2003). The SES concept has emerged from the class approach to social structure analysis, primarily developed by Karl Marx and Max Weber, and, consequently, is widely used as a synonym to “social position”, “socioeconomic position” or “social class” (Liberato et al., 1988). From Marx’s perspective, social class is identified as a group of people sharing common relations to the means of production that support their wellbeing (Marx, 1981).

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Karl Marx (1818-1883) considered himself not to be a sociologist but a political activist. However, many would disagree and in the view of Hughes (1986), he was ‘both – and a philosopher, historian, economist, and a political scientist as well.’ Much of the work of Marx was political and economic but his main focus was on class conflict and how this led to the rise of capitalism. While nowadays, when people hear the word “communism”, they think of the dictatorial rule of Stalin and the horrific stories of life in a communist state such as the Soviet Union, it is important not to accuse Marx of the deeds carried out in his name.

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In the Communist manifesto, a well known quote of Marx, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” This is introductory to the first part of the pamphlet and a conclusion to Marx’s theory about class struggle. Marx’s highly structured on how the class struggle emerges and affects the development of a society. The development of a society from the old and from the new is the result of the conflict of classes in the society.

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