according to karl marx, what is the most important factor in a persons social life?

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe Durkhiem'due south functionalist view of society
• Understand the conflict theorist view of society
• Explain Marx'south concepts of form and breach
• Place how symbolic interactionists understand lodge

Warren Buffett's ideas well-nigh taxation and spending habits of the very wealthy are controversial, specially since they raise questions nigh America's embedded organization of class construction and social power. The iii major sociological paradigms differ in their perspectives on these bug. (Photo courtesy of Medill DC/flickr)

While many sociologists have contributed to research on society and social interaction, three thinkers form the base of operations of modern-solar day perspectives. Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber developed different theoretical approaches to help usa understand the mode societies office.

Émile Durkheim and Functionalism

As a functionalist, Émile Durkheim's (1858–1917) perspective on club stressed the necessary interconnectivity of all of its elements. To Durkheim, society was greater than the sum of its parts. He asserted that private behavior was non the same every bit collective beliefs and that studying collective beliefs was quite different from studying an private'due south actions. Durkheim called the communal beliefs, morals, and attitudes of a society the collective conscience. In his quest to understand what causes individuals to act in like and anticipated ways, he wrote, "If I exercise not submit to the conventions of society, if in my dress I do not conform to the customs observed in my country and in my grade, the ridicule I provoke, the social isolation in which I am kept, produce, although in an attenuated form, the same furnishings equally penalization" (Durkheim 1895). Durkheim besides believed that social integration, or the strength of ties that people have to their social groups, was a fundamental factor in social life.

Following the ideas of Comte and Spencer, Durkheim likened club to that of a living organism, in which each organ plays a necessary role in keeping the being alive. Even the socially deviant members of order are necessary, Durkheim argued, as punishments for deviance affirm established cultural values and norms. That is, punishment of a law-breaking reaffirms our moral consciousness. "A crime is a criminal offence because nosotros condemn it," Durkheim wrote in 1893. "An act offends the common consciousness not considering it is criminal, merely it is criminal because information technology offends that consciousness" (Durkheim 1893). Durkheim called these elements of order "social facts." Past this, he meant that social forces were to be considered real and existed outside the individual.

Every bit an observer of his social world, Durkheim was not entirely satisfied with the direction of society in his day. His main concern was that the cultural glue that held society together was failing, and people were becoming more than divided. In his book The Partitioning of Labor in Society (1893), Durkheim argued that as society grew more complex, social order made the transition from mechanical to organic.

Preindustrial societies, Durkheim explained, were held together past mechanical solidarity, a type of social society maintained past the collective consciousness of a culture. Societies with mechanical solidarity act in a mechanical fashion; things are done mostly because they accept e'er been done that fashion. This type of thinking was common in preindustrial societies where strong bonds of kinship and a low segmentation of labor created shared morals and values among people, such as hunter-gatherer groups. When people tend to do the aforementioned type of work, Durkheim argued, they tend to call back and deed alike.

In industrial societies, mechanical solidarity is replaced with organic solidarity, which is social order based around an acceptance of economic and social differences. In capitalist societies, Durkheim wrote, division of labor becomes so specialized that anybody is doing different things. Instead of punishing members of a gild for failure to assimilate to common values, organic solidarity allows people with differing values to coexist. Laws exist as formalized morals and are based on restitution rather than revenge.

While the transition from mechanical to organic solidarity is, in the long run, advantageous for a society, Durkheim noted that it tin be a time of chaos and "normlessness." One of the outcomes of the transition is something he chosen social anomie. Anomie—literally, "without constabulary"—is a situation in which society no longer has the support of a firm collective consciousness. Collective norms are weakened. People, while more interdependent to accomplish complex tasks, are also alienated from each other. Anomie is experienced in times of social incertitude, such every bit state of war or a great upturn or downturn in the economic system. As societies reach an advanced stage of organic solidarity, they avoid anomie by redeveloping a prepare of shared norms. According to Durkheim, once a society achieves organic solidarity, it has finished its development.

Karl Marx and Conflict Theory

Karl Marx (1818–1883) is certainly amid the most significant social thinkers in recent history. While there are many critics of his work, it is still widely respected and influential. For Marx, gild's constructions were predicated upon the idea of "base of operations and superstructure." This term refers to the thought that a society's economic graphic symbol forms its base, upon which rests the civilisation and social institutions, the superstructure. For Marx, it is the base (economy) that determines what a lodge will be like.

Karl Marx asserted that all elements of a society'southward structure depend on its economic structure.

Additionally, Marx saw disharmonize in society as the primary ways of change. Economically, he saw disharmonize existing between the owners of the means of production—the bourgeoisie—and the laborers, called the proletariat.

Marx maintained that these conflicts appeared consistently throughout history during times of social revolution. These revolutions or "form antagonisms" as he called them, were a upshot of one form dominating another. Most recently, with the stop of feudalism, a new revolutionary class he called the suburbia dominated the proletariat laborers. The bourgeoisie were revolutionary in the sense that they represented a radical change in the structure of society. In Marx's words, "Club every bit a whole is more than and more splitting up into two corking hostile camps, into 2 cracking classes directly facing each other—Bourgeoisie and Proletariat" (Marx and Engels 1848).

In the mid-nineteenth century, as industrialization was booming, industrial employers, the "owners of the means of product" in Marx'south terms, became more than and more than exploitative toward the working class. The big manufacturers of steel were particularly ruthless, and their facilities became popularly dubbed "satanic mills" based on a poem by William Blake. Marx'south colleague and friend, Frederick Engels, wrote The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844, which described in detail the horrid weather condition.

Such is the Old Town of Manchester, and on re-reading my description, I am forced to admit that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from black enough to convey a truthful impression of the filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and health which characterise the construction of this single district, containing at least xx to 30 thousand inhabitants. And such a commune exists in the heart of the second city of England, the first manufacturing city of the globe.

Add to that the long hours, the utilise of child labor, and exposure to extreme weather of heat, cold, and toxic chemicals, and it is no wonder that Marx and Engels referred to commercialism, which is a way of organizing an economy so that the things that are used to make and transport products (such as land, oil, factories, ships, etc.) are endemic past individual people and companies rather than by the authorities, every bit the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie."

Karl Marx (left) and Friedrich Engels (correct) analyzed differences in social power between "have" and "accept-not" groups. (Photo (a) courtesy of Wikimedia Commons; Photo (b) courtesy of George Lester/Wikimedia Eatables)

For Marx, what we practise defines who we are. In historical terms, in spite of the persistent nature of ane class dominating some other, some element of humanity existed. In that location was at least some connection between the worker and the production, augmented by the natural conditions of seasons and the rising and fall of the sun, such every bit nosotros run across in an agronomical society. But with the bourgeoisie revolution and the rise of industry and commercialism, the worker now worked for wages alone. His relationship to his efforts was no longer of a man nature, but based on artificial conditions.

Marx described modernistic society in terms of alienation. Alienation refers to the condition in which the individual is isolated and divorced from his or her society, work, or the sense of self. Marx defined four specific types of alienation.

Alienation from the production of one'due south labor. An industrial worker does not have the opportunity to relate to the product he labors on. Instead of training for years every bit a watchmaker, an unskilled worker can go a task at a picket factory pressing buttons to seal pieces together. The worker does not care if he is making watches or cars, merely that the job exists. In the same mode, a worker may non even know or intendance what product to which he is contributing. A worker on a Ford assembly line may spend all day installing windows on car doors without ever seeing the rest of the car. A cannery worker tin spend a lifetime cleaning fish without ever knowing what product they are used for.

Alienation from the procedure of 1'southward labor. A worker does non control the weather condition of her job considering she does not ain the means of production. If a person is hired to piece of work in a fast food restaurant, she is expected to make the nutrient the manner she is taught. All ingredients must be combined in a detail order and in a detail quantity; in that location is no room for creativity or change. An employee at Burger King cannot make up one's mind to change the spices used on the chips in the same way that an employee on a Ford assembly line cannot determine to identify a car's headlights in a dissimilar position. Everything is decided past the suburbia who so dictate orders to the laborers.

Breach from others. Workers compete, rather than cooperate. Employees vie for time slots, bonuses, and job security. Even when a worker clocks out at night and goes home, the competition does not stop. Every bit Marx commented in The Communist Manifesto (1848), "No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer, so far at an terminate, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is prepare upon by the other portion of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker."

Alienation from one'southward cocky. A final upshot of industrialization is a loss of connectivity between a worker and her occupation. Because there is goose egg that ties a worker to her labor, there is no longer a sense of cocky. Instead of being able to take pride in an identity such as being a watchmaker, automobile builder, or chef, a person is simply a cog in the auto.

Taken every bit a whole, then, alienation in modern gild means that an individual has no control over his life. Even in feudal societies, a person controlled the way of his labor as to when and how it was carried out. Just why, then, does the modern working class not rise up and rebel? (Indeed, Marx predicted that this would be the ultimate effect and collapse of capitalism.)

Another idea that Marx developed is the concept of false consciousness. False consciousness is a condition in which the beliefs, ideals, or ideology of a person are not in the person's own best involvement. In fact, it is the ideology of the dominant class (here, the suburbia capitalists) that is imposed upon the proletariat. Ideas such every bit the emphasis of competition over cooperation, or of hard work being its ain advantage, clearly do good the owners of industry. Therefore, workers are less likely to question their place in order and assume individual responsibility for existing conditions.

An associates line worker installs machine parts with the aid of complex mechanism. Has technology made this type of labor more than or less alienating? (Photo courtesy of Carol Highsmith/Wikimedia Commons)

In order for social club to overcome imitation consciousness, Marx proposed that it be replaced with class consciousness, the sensation of 1's rank in society. Instead of existing as a "class in itself," the proletariat must become a "course for itself" in lodge to produce social modify (Marx and Engels 1848), meaning that instead of only being an inert strata of guild, the grade could become an advocate for social improvements. Only once social club entered this state of political consciousness would it exist ready for a social revolution.

Max Weber and Symbolic Interactionism

While Karl Marx may exist one of the all-time-known thinkers of the nineteenth century, Max Weber is certainly one of the greatest influences in the field of sociology. Similar the other social thinkers discussed here, he was concerned with the important changes taking place in Western society with the advent of industrialization. And, like Marx and Durkheim, he feared that industrialization would have negative effects on individuals.

Weber'southward primary focus on the structure of lodge lay in the elements of grade, status, and power. Like to Marx, Weber saw class as economically determined. Order, he believed, was divide between owners and laborers. Status, on the other hand, was based on noneconomic factors such as pedagogy, kinship, and religion. Both status and course determined an individual's ability, or influence over ideas. Unlike Marx, Weber believed that these ideas formed the base of social club.

Weber's analysis of modern society centered on the concept of rationalization. A rational order is ane congenital around logic and efficiency rather than morality or tradition. To Weber, capitalism is entirely rational. Although this leads to efficiency and merit-based success, information technology can accept negative furnishings when taken to the extreme. In some mod societies, this is seen when rigid routines and strict design lead to a mechanized work surround and a focus on producing identical products in every location.

Another example of the extreme conditions of rationality tin exist found in Charlie Chaplin'south classic motion-picture show Modern Times (1936). Chaplin'due south graphic symbol performs a routine job to the indicate where he cannot stop his motions even while away from the job. Indeed, today we fifty-fifty take a recognized medical status that results from such tasks, known every bit "repetitive stress syndrome."

Weber was also unlike his predecessors in that he was more than interested in how individuals experienced societal divisions than in the divisions themselves. The symbolic interactionism theory, the third of the three most recognized theories of folklore, is based on Weber'southward early ideas that emphasize the viewpoint of the individual and how that individual relates to society. For Weber, the culmination of industrialization, rationalization, and the like results in what he referred to as the atomic number 26 muzzle, in which the individual is trapped past institutions and bureaucracy. This leads to a sense of "disenchantment of the world," a phrase Weber used to describe the terminal status of humanity. Indeed a dark prediction, but one that has, at to the lowest degree to some caste, been borne out (Gerth and Mills 1918). In a rationalized, modern guild, we have supermarkets instead of family unit-endemic stores. Nosotros have concatenation restaurants instead of local eateries. Superstores that offer a multitude of merchandise have replaced contained businesses that focused on one production line, such as hardware, groceries, automotive repair, or article of clothing. Shopping malls offer retail stores, restaurants, fitness centers, fifty-fifty condominiums. This modify may exist rational, but is it universally desirable?

Cubicles are used to maximize individual workspace in an office. Such structures may be rational, but they are also isolating. (Photo courtesy of Tim Patterson/flickr)

The Protestant Work Ethic

In a serial of essays in 1904, Max Weber presented the thought of the Protestant work ethic, a new mental attitude toward work based on the Calvinist principle of predestination. In the sixteenth century, Europe was shaken past the Protestant Revolution. Religious leaders such as Martin Luther and John Calvin argued against the Cosmic Church's conventionalities in salvation through obedience. While Catholic leaders emphasized the importance of religious dogma and performing good deeds as a gateway to Heaven, Protestants believed that inner grace, or faith in God, was plenty to achieve salvation.

John Calvin in detail popularized the Christian concept of predestination, the thought that all events—including salvation—have already been decided past God. Because followers were never sure whether they had been chosen to enter Heaven or Hell, they looked for signs in their everyday lives. If a person was difficult-working and successful, he was probable to exist i of the chosen. If a person was lazy or simply indifferent, he was likely to exist one of the damned.

Weber argued that this mentality encouraged people to work hard for personal gain; after all, why should i help the unfortunate if they were already damned? Over time, the Protestant work ethic spread and became the foundation for capitalism.

Summary

Émile Durkheim believed that as societies advance, they brand the transition from mechanical to organic solidarity. For Karl Marx, society exists in terms of class conflict. With the rising of commercialism, workers become alienated from themselves and others in club. Sociologist Max Weber noted that the rationalization of society can be taken to unhealthy extremes.

Short Answer

1. Choose two of the 3 sociologists discussed here (Durkheim, Marx, Weber), and use their arguments to explicate a current social upshot such as the Occupy motility. Do their theories hold upward under modern scrutiny?
2. Think of the means workers are alienated from the production and procedure of their jobs. How tin can these concepts exist applied to students and their educations?

Glossary

alienation

an individual's isolation from his lodge, his work, and his sense of self

anomie

a state of affairs in which social club no longer has the back up of a firm collective consciousness

suburbia

the owners of the means of product in a society

capitalism

a manner of organizing an economy so that the things that are used to brand and send products (such equally land, oil, factories, ships, etc.) are owned past private people and companies rather than by the government

class consciousness

the sensation of one's rank in society

commonage conscience

the communal beliefs, morals, and attitudes of a gild

imitation consciousness

a person's beliefs and ideology that are in conflict with her best interests

fe cage

a situation in which an individual is trapped by social institutions

mechanical solidarity

a type of social guild maintained past the collective consciousness of a culture

organic solidarity

a blazon of social order based around an acceptance of economic and social differences

proletariat

the laborers in a guild

rationalization

a conventionalities that mod society should exist built around logic and efficiency rather than morality or tradition

social integration

how strongly a person is connected to his or her social group

Further Research

I of the almost influential pieces of writing in mod history was Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' The Communist Manifesto. Visit this site to read the original document that spurred revolutions effectually the world: http://openstaxcollege.org/l/Communist-Political party

References

Durkheim, Émile. 1960 [1893]. The Partitioning of Labor in Society. Translated past George Simpson. New York: Free Press.

Durkheim, Émile. 1982 [1895]. The Rules of the Sociological Method . Translated by Due west. D. Halls. New York: Free Press.

Engels, Friedrich. 1892. The Condition of the Working-Form in England in 1844 . London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co.

Geographia. 1998. "The Bedouin Manner." Geograpia.com. Retrieved January 4, 2012 (http://world wide web.geographia.com/egypt/sinai/bedouin02.htm).

Gerth, H. H., and C. Wright Mills. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Printing.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1998 [1848]. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Penguin Group.

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