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Perspectives In Sociology

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Themes and Perspectives in Sociology I
What are the links between Class and Alienation According to Marx?

Marx outlined four types of alienation (worker from the product, worker from the work, from 'species-being' and from other humans), which he regarded as the result of a class structured society. This led Marx to believe communism was the solution to preventing alienation and the negative effects it caused. A communist society could potentially resolve structural economic-related alienation between humans by removing class conflict. However, it would not account for alienation as a result of other stratification such as gender and ethnicity, or existential alienation as the result of human agency or the unpredictability of human nature. …show more content…

Marx saw alienation as the negative outcome of a class ordered society, which is why he proposed communism as the solution. Restructuring society could remove the socio-economic causes of alienation, but such a deterministic view does not remove existential alienation. The correlation between class and alienation might not prove causation, nor indeed is class the only cause of alienation. Also, Marx does not define what he meant by fulfilment, and every person has different needs: existential alienation to other humans and of 'species being' is highly subjective and variable. To eradicate a class society could potentially deny some people fulfilment: those who enjoy hard work, profit and material goods, although these are questionable markers of success if they bring suffering to others. Marx also overlooks other structural causes of alienation like gender and ethnicity; as a white European male perhaps Marx was not able to apply enough objectivity to his observations. Schweickart included issues of gender and ethnicity in his “critique of modern political, economic and social life that he identifies as The Counterproject” ( Padgett 207: 123), in which he outlines a theory which he believes could be a successor to capitalism - economic democracy. Marx is unable to see solutions to alienation within a capitalist society by finding fulfilment within work. Padgett argues that “economic democracy places greater control in the hands of the workers and significantly reduces alienation” (2007: 129), so changes to the distribution of power in the workplace would be beneficial by creating a sense of ownership over job roles, rather than changing the whole way society is

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In sociology, there are three theoretical perspectives; symbolic interactionism, functional analysis and conflict theory. The major point of symbolic interactionism is to use symbols to help understand how we as a society view the world, and how we communicate with one another. In functional analysis, the major point is to look at society as a whole, constructed of various parts, or groups, that all have their own function. Lastly, conflict theory is the opposite of functional analysis. In this perspective, society is viewed as different groups, each competing for power, or dominance.

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In his capitalist system “the worker receives means of subsistence in exchange for [their] labor power,” which serves no purpose but “immediate consumption,” whereas the capitalist receives “a greater value” than they had previously (Marx 209). The worker, despite creating additional earnings for the capitalist, only receives their “means of sustenance,” or their bare minimum for survival. Because the worker has been alienated from their work and the system however, they normalize this exchange, and are content with receiving a mere fraction of what they produce, unaware of their exploitation. Alienation provides the framework for both Douglass’ and Marx’s economic systems to function, as it allows the ruling class to establish a norm of

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Fermelita Borre AB1213 Rochelle Igot Philosophical Research Paper What is Alienation? In this paper, we will evaluate alienation and its premises as presented in “Estranged Labor” by Karl Marx. Although the entirety of the arguments he presented in his manuscript were substantial, there was a flaw in one of the arguments he presented in the types of of alienation, the estrangement of the worker from the activity of production.

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Marx, equally, believes that the outcome of industrial capitalism is alienation of the proletariat, the working class, from their society.

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The main concept of alienated labor was developed by Karl Marx in his early work Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts from 1844 - First Manuscript [Estranged Labor]. As defined, the concept of alienation is profoundly embedded in religions and social and political theories, the possibility that some time in the past individuals feeling like foreigners in the world, however, sooner or later this distance would be overcome and humankind would again harmony with itself and Nature (Encyclopedia of Marxism). Formed from Private Property, the political economy that is Capitalism divided society into two classes¬ - Property owners and Property-Less workers. By exploitation and estrangement, these classes become further designated as masters

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Because Marx believes the worker would “put his [or her] life into the [alien] object” (William, 132) he/she is producing, they are ultimately alienated, unconnected to

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As dark clouds of smoke suspended above the crematoriums in many of the concentration camps during World War II, Jewish people alongside other minorities facing Nazi oppression questioned their fate in this time of devastating horror; however, those who were not immediately killed oftentimes witnessed an even worse fate under the power of the Nazi physician Dr. Josef Mengele. During the Holocaust, Mengele was one of the most well known doctors in the concentration camps for his brutal, immoral experiments and research trials in which he abused thousands of Holocaust victims. While minority groups such as Jews and Roma Gypsies were cruelly oppressed in numerous ways during the Holocaust, some of the most heinous acts of cruelty were committed

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In Karl Marx’s “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”, Marx writes, “The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object… The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him…” (148). This passage from Marx’s work explains his view of the condition of alienation, where as a result of the capitalistic system, the worker has become detached from their labor, the labor process, themselves, and other people (“Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” 147-150).

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In our everyday life, we come across people or institutions that try to exercise power over us, making us to what they want. Lukes (1974) explains that compliance can be secured by the use of force or by people choosing to surrender to others. When people choose to accept the will of others as legitimate or right, we can describe the relationship as one of authority (Lukes, 1974). Assumptions and beliefs that are embedded in the culture teach us learned responses to various problems of survival in any given society (Schein, 1992). In this regard, in 2006, Cuff and Francis discuss Karl Marx’s concept of alienation in which he suggests that those who are in power design cultures in a way that will only benefit them, leaving the others in a state

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Marx’s concept of alienation is then introduced and related back to formal rationality in their similarity of

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Additionally, Marx and Weber touched base on capitalists and the labour movement. In any event, Karl Marx had the most convincing perspectives and was who I believe to be, the most effectual theorist in relation to understanding the sociology of work. Social Fragmentation and Exploitation Two key concepts that greatly contrast one another includes Marx’s conflictual, yet realistic

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Marx’s theory on exploitation is related to his earlier writings on the theory of alienation. They are both similar in that they are both highly critical of the capitalist system. Grint,(2005) emphasises that before Karl Marx nobody had ever confronted the idea of exploitive wage labour, many great thinkers of Marx’s time like Locke and Ricardo thought that the value of the wage labour was exactly equivalent to the labour expended while producing a product. Watson,T.J (2008) states that “ capitalist employment is exploitive in attempting to take from working people the value which they create through their labour and which is properly their own. ”P.62.

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How can who we are in society(race, social status, gender) have an effect on our future? Society can affect our future by shaping our lives and the person we chose to fall In love. When The author of the chapter The Sociological Perspective is explaining, Seeing the General in the Particular, He explains how society shapes people into various categories such as women by stating,“... Lillian Rubin (1976) found that higher-income women typically expect the men they married to be sensitive to others, to talk readily,and to share feelings and experiences. Lower-income women, she found, had very different expectations and we're looking for men who did not drink too much, were not violent, and held steady jobs.”

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Karl Marx and Max Weber both agreed that capitalism generates alienation in modern societies, but the cause for it were both different. For Marx it is due to economic inequality in where the capitalist thinks that the workers worth nothing more than a source of labour, that can be employed and dismissed at will. This causes the workers to be dehumanised by their jobs (in the past, routine factory work and in the present-day, managing demands on a computer), which leads to the workers finding slight satisfaction and feeling incapable of improving their situation. It was noted by Marx four methods on how capitalism alienates workers. The first, is alienation from the function of working.

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Melvin Seeman’s five prominent features of alienation Melvin Seeman, the American sociologist, considers alienation as the summation of the individual's emotions, divides it into five different modalities: powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, and finally self-estrangement. 1. Powerlessness According to Seeman, powerlessness theoretically means when the individual believes his activity will fail to yield the results he seeks. He also opines that the notion of alienation is rooted in the Marxian view of the worker’s condition in capitalist society, where the worker is alienated to the extent that the prerogative and means of decision are expropriated by the ruling entrepreneurs.

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