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Essay on Karl Marx & Class Conflict
Karl Marx believed that social change is what was needed for a better society, and to get social change there must be class conflict. Marx's major concern of social change was economic change. Marx's most well known work dealt with class conflict, the opposition between the capitalists and the working class. The capitalists are also known as the bourgeoisie. They are the ones that are responsible for controlling the land, factories, etc. The working class, which is also known as the proletariat, is the workers that are being exploited by the bourgeoisie.
In Marxist terms a class is a group of people with a specific relationship to the means of production. Marxists explain history in terms of a war of classes between those who control production and those who actually produce the goods or services in society "and also developments in technology and the like" (Martin, 2002). In the Marxist view of capitalism this is a conflict between capitalists (bourgeoisie) and wageworkers (proletariat). For Marxists classes are antagonistically opposed to one another. This antagonism is rooted in the situation that control over social production is necessarily control over the class, which produces goods and the exploitation of workers by the bourgeoisie.
Marx saw class categories as defined by continuing historical processes. Classes, in Marxism, are not static entities, but are regenerated daily through the productive process. As such Marxism views classes as human social relationships, which change over time, with historical commonality created through, shared productive processes. A 17th-century farm laborer who worked for day wages shares a similar relationship to production as an average office worker of the 21st century. In this example it is the shared structure of wage labor that makes both of these individuals working class......
