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The third reason that I chose Marx is the apparently cyclical nature of change and restriction. The last century has seen some tremendous social changes. The 1960s Civil Rights Movement and the Sexual Revolution changed the face of modern America. However, there seems to have been a pendulum swing back to more restrictive behavior. It is now considered more appropriate to be openly sexist and racist than it was in the 1980s. In fact, propaganda has promoted the idea of the white, middle-class, Christian male as being the target of discrimination, even though this group still maintains almost all of the status-related privilege that it had prior to either of those movements, still getting more opportunities and greater benefits, as a group, than racial minorities, women, or religious minorities. One example of this is a chain e-mail I received that said something along the lines of "Dear God, why is there violence in schools?" God's reply was, "Don't ask me, I'm not allowed in schools." Emails like this perpetuate the myth that there has been an attack on religious freedom, despite the fact that there has never been any federal judgment outlawing any type of individual prayer in schools; on the contrary, judgments have prohibited group prayer that would infringe upon religious freedom. The attitude seems to be that any behavior that inhibits the right of the majority group to set standards and mores for the entire society is somehow discrimination. This pendulum swing seems to occur after ever civil rights advance. Moreover, I think there is an important distinction between social conflict theory and communism, which many people ignore because Marx openly linked social conflict to capitalism. "Capitalism's dirty secret is that it is not a realm of harmony and mutual benefit but a system in which one class systematically extracts profit from another. How could this fail to be unjust? Yet it is notable that Marx never concludes this, and in Capital he goes as far as to say that such exchange is 'by no means an injustice'" (Wolff, 2010). This is a very interesting perspective because Marx the scholar has oftentimes been confused with Marx with political activist. "Many of his expectations about the future course of the revolutionary movement have, so far, failed to materialize. However, his stress on the economic factor in society and his analysis of the class structure in class conflict has had an enormous influence on history, sociology, and study of human culture" (Kreis, 2008).
References
Kreis, S. (2008). Karl Marx, 1818-1883. Retrieved March 2, 2012 from the History Guide
website: http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/marx.html
Vissing, Y. (2011). An introduction to sociology: Ashford University discovery series. San Diego: Bridgepoint Education, Inc.
Wolff, J. (2010). Karl Marx. Retrieved March 2, 2012 from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy website: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
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