The dominant classes in society accumulate wealth off of expropriating the labor of society. One German economist Karl Marx has said, “The ideas of the ruling class are, the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its 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. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.” Karl Marx shows that when you are considered a higher class, which means you produce the resources need by society, you control what happens to society.
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The Marx approach focuses on economic factors as the sole reason for conflict in society. He saw society divided into the Bourgeoisie, or the owners of the means of production, and the proletariat, or the workers. Tensions and conflicts occur when the resources, power, and status are unevenly distributed between these two groups, and the conflict can lead to social change. He believed the exploited people would bane together and attempt to bring about changes. The workers would develop a class consciousness and revolt demanding more changes in society, while those with the wealth, power and prestige will continue to try and promote their own interest usually at the expense of the weaker
To begin, the scholars Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Pierre Bourdieu all had different views of social inequality. One of these views best explains the current level of social inequality in today’s society. First, Karl Marx believed that social relations depended on who controlled the primary mode of production. He also believed that there were two classes, the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat. He also wanted a classless society because he believed that liberalism was a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (the capitalist class) because this class exploited the proletariat (the working class).
Social class is in his definition mainly based on economical assets, where strata goes beyond economic wealth: it can be possession the religious insight, intellectuality or political engagement (Weber 1958). Political dedication is one of his main themes; Weber distinguishes between people living for politics or off politics. A person who is passionate about politics, lives for politics as a vocation, in Weber’s (1958, 5) terms: ‘Either he enjoys the naked possession of the power he exerts, or he nourishes his inner balance and self-feeling by the consciousness that his life has meaning in the service of a 'cause '’. The opposite of living for politics is living off politics. By this, Weber means a person, a person who seeks economical wealth of political engagement.
Marx views the Bourgeoisie and the Proletarians as fundamentally different people at the level of consciousness. Moreover, these two classes are fundamentally divided. Weber, though, would disagree by arguing that both businessmen and laborers are Protestants, which means that they have the same cultural origin and are essentially the same group of people. In fact, God will be pleased by both groups of people if they worked hard despite the fact that businessmen earn much more than laborers do (Hayek 121). This divide between Marx and Weber leads to two distinct yet both insightful origin stories of capitalism.
He termed this case as contradictory class locations. According to him, there were four classes including those who owned large enterprises who were the capitalists, those who owned small businesses named as petty bourgeoisie, those employees who have power or authority over rest of the workers named as managers and those who worked as laborers classified as the workers. Dennis Gilbert and Joseph Kahl who were the sociologists developed a model based on the framework of Weber to define the structure of class in the United States and other few capitalist countries. Just 1% of the population is the capitalist class which comprises of heirs, investors etc. it is divided into two categories that are ‘old’ money and ‘new’ money.
For Marx, he considered class in relation to the means to production. He saw a shift from a feudal society on agriculture, where the land owning classes are classified from the peasant class. Scribes, information dealers, intelligencia and civil servants, who did not contribute to the production in the economy, are considered of no use and ar classless. On the other hand, Weber saw class on several layers (Bartle, 2007). Such differences can be understood in a sociological perspective.
“In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations” (Manifesto, 1848). In the Communist manifesto, Marx discusses the class type of his time, bourgeois and proletariat. The bourgeois were the higher class who exploited the proletariats. They constantly strived to expand their power and wealth in society.
Marx believed that the current capitalist society is separated into two classes, the Proletariat society, and Bourgeois society. The Proletarians, as perceived by Marx, are part of the working class that only possess one significant material value, that is the ability to work, or labour power. The Bourgeoise, on the other hand, is the societal class that owns the means of production and hence rule over the Proletarians. As I quote from Marx’s book, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” (Marx and Engels, 1988, p. 473)
According to Edwards et al. (2006) Marx thought that within capitalism there would be an increased divide between the bourgeoisie class and the proletariat class in the future. The proletariats are lower of the two classes, the people who have to work for wages in order to survive. The bourgeoisie are the people in society who controlled and owned the means of production in a capitalist system.
As a result of doing this, Marx developed later theorists to further investigate how capitalism affects the creation and the responses of laws. According to Karl Marx, every member of the society is divided into two separate classes, the bourgeoisie (ruling class) and the proletariat (working class) (Somashekar, 2007).
Bourgeoisie, which gains the power, defines superstructure “including all social and legal institution, all political and educational systems, all religions and all art” (Bressler, 162), and articulate the ideology which is based on profits of bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie ideology leads to alienation of individuals, especially proletariats. This bourgeoisie ideology creates the clash between the two classes. Marx supported the working class and their victory over dominant class. Marxism believes in providing equal opportunity to the working class as that are available to the
In his work, Marx focused on two antagonistic classes of capitalists and workers to demonstrate uneven distribution of material resources and exploitation power, also rooted in economic relations, within society. Hence, in the Marxian framework, social position could be treated as a unidimensional construct. Weber extended Marx’s analytical scheme by introducing additional components of social position, “status” and “party”. Status, or prestige,
Although they actually share some similarities, Weber’s analysis of class, change, capitalism and history differ radically from the views by Marx. Marx believed in capitalism and class conflict whereas Weber believed in rationalisation and bureaucracy. Both Marx and Weber agreed that there was many problems within modern society. Marx had an optimistic view about the future of society and he was confident that his theory would improve the lives of those in society. Weber however took more of a pessimistic view arguing that society is characterised by the process of rationalisation.
