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Marx's Theory of Class

In the perspective of Karl Marx, the bourgeois society in which he lived and which persists to this day in the developed West was a system of class conflict and the domination of the bourgeois class over the proletarian class. Marx described the nature of this society not as an aberration but as a stage in social evolution, succeeding the feudal period and preceding the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat. His view was based on the idea that these stages were inevitable and that the only way for the proletariat to gain a better position in life was through revolution, through the violent overthrow of bourgeois society. Yet, as we have seen in subsequent history, this is not the case, and while we have not produced a classless society, the classes are not in conflict to the degree Marx saw as inevitable and inescapable.

For Karl Marx, the force that determines social relations is economic and is identified by the relationship of the human being to labor. Marx has a conception of human history based on dialectical materialism, a perspective which includes the idea that the determining factors in the development, relations, and institutions of mankind are not mystical or ideological but economic. Human motivations are rooted in the labor activities of human beings. Human beings have to secure a livelihood, and to accomplish this they organize their productive forces in a way that is based on the level of development of society and thus the type of economic system that has been produced. For Marx, everything in life rests on these economic foundations. Society is made up of social classes, with one class dominant at a given time based on the control of the means of production. Human nature is expressed in the way individuals relate to class and the way they are controlled by that relationship. The workers sell their labor and are alienated from the product of their labor because of it. They do not own the means of pr...

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Marx's Theory of Class. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 01:14, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1691893.html