Salt of the Earth and Ain't No Making It

In both the film Salt of the Earth (Herbert Biberman, 1954) and the book Ain't No Makin' It by Jay MacLeod, class conflict produces an untenable situation for the lower class in the equation and contributes to conflicts which lead to violence and direct confrontation. Conflict theory explains the nature of these confrontations and of the social problems that emerge. In the case of the strike depicted in Salt of the Earth, the strikers are able to organize and win the strike by getting the company to negotiate. In the book, groups such as the Hallway Hangers and the Brothers who seem unable to "make it" are no better or worse off than the workers except that the workers gain some semblance of control through their actions, while the members of the gangs seek control outside of society in an underground life that only acknowledges that they have already lost.

The film tells the story of a real miners' strike by MexicanAmerican mineworkers in the American Southwest, and the film has a semi-documentary style reflecting the fact that the story is based on real events and makes use of non-actors who were actual participants in the strike. The film was challenged when it was released by critics claiming it was only a piece of Communist propaganda, and both the labor message and the strong feminism apparent in the way the women worked alongside the man and took control of their own lives were ignored by these critics. The film has since acquired a much higher status both as

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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. Marx ascribed the social inequalities of society to class differences based on material inequalities separating the working class from the mode of production and from the product of their work in a form of social alienation (Wallace and Wolf 78-79). 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

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