Marx and marxism
...r long hours in a repetitive system just to earn the minimum necessary to survive. In a capitalist society, as individuals, we are the product of economic forces beyond our control. As an individual, we don’t decide what our needs are, it is imposed by the society. In society today we believe we need a dvd player, a Tv, clean clothes, forms of entertainment, but we don’t need any of those to survive. That’s what Marx calls economic determinism. He believes that with the increase of economic development the amount of exploitation increases as well, and the more exploitation the more alienated we become. This idea can be compared to Burke’s that we are a product of society. However, Marx is not trying to end capitalism, but to improve the conditions of work for the proletariat. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on a an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contend classes” (1998, p1). Marx is saying that social change is only accomplished through conflict between the ruling class and the working class, revolutionary violence, that reformation is not effective. The bourgeoisie, “one of the wealth classes into which a capitalist society is typically divided, according to certain western schools of economic thought, specially Marxism” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie), exploits the working class by forcing workers to extremely hard for a small amount of money and selling the goods for huge profits, resulting on the dominance of one class over the other. “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relation. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash-payment’. It has drown the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervours, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation” (1998, p5). The management of the society creates the condition for social revolution. As the exploitation of ...