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This made the product "hostile' and "alien" because the worker had no real connection to it. Maybe a female worker sewed the seam of a pocket for a coat several hundred times a day. But she didn't make the coat. Maybe a man tightened a bolt on the bumper of a car hundreds of times each day, or connected two wires, but he didn't make the car. The product was "hostile" because when the worker looked at it, he or she was only reminded of the hours spent in drudgery doing a seemingly meaningless task. Receiving a paycheck didn't make up for the loss of meaning and the pride of accomplishment, and it led to consumerism, that is, people working in order to buy things that are supposed to make them happy.
I think Marx was correct in what...
I worked in a factory once on a machine that stuffed advertising into envelopes. The work was incredibly boring and I only lasted one week. The "product" wasn't even a thing -- it was an envelope full of junk mail. What was to feel proud of or connected to? Nothing. It certainly had none of the satisfaction of, say, making a gift for someone in the family. I think now that gradually, assembly lines with human workers are disappearing. Robots and computers are running the machines that mass produce all the junk. If you've ever watched those programs on HGTV about "purging" and "organizing" all the clutter in your home, you can see that people are not that attached. The problem for them is that they have too much of it.
Karl Marx is one of the most interesting philosophers of the 19th century, and his teaching have contributed immensely to the discussion of political organization for the past 150 years. The social conditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were of the utmost significance to the development of sociology. The chaos and social disorder that resulted from the series of political revolutions ushered in by the French Revolution in
Cambridge; Cambridge, MA: Polity Press Devine, F. (ed.) (2004). Rethinking class: culture, identities and lifestyles. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Joyce, P. (ed.) (1995). Class. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press Reid, I. (1989). Social class differences in Britain: life-chances and life-styles. London: Fontana [Franklin-Wilkins HN400.S6 REI] Rose, D and K. O'Reilly (eds.) (1997). Constructing classes: towards a new social classification in the UK. Swindon: ESRC/ONS Wright, E. (1997) Classes. London: Verso Zbigniew, a. (1972). Karl
Corporate cultures no longer sustain an autocratic, hierarchical design that distances workers from the spirit of their creation. Quite the contrary, many modern corporations are run with programs such as profit sharing. Feedback from employees is encouraged, as companies are becoming more mindful of the ways job satisfaction positively impacts productivity. What Marx and Engels could not and did not envision was the next revolution to follow the Industrial Revolution:
Marx and Durkheim on Religion Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim, two of the most important social critics of the modern world, agree on very little about the functions and goals of religion and its place in modern societies. The one clear overlap in their assessments of religion is that it is immensely important and that no important critique of society can be complete without an examination of religion. This paper explores
But to say that Marx had a conservative agenda on hand would also be wrong. What Marx was propagating for a more socially equal and respectful environment for women where they could work out of their own free will and did not have to resort to prostitution and other evils to support themselves. But I must agree that Marx's sarcastic way of advancing his argument in the manifesto is
Karl Marx begins as an interpreter of the prior philosophy of Hegel, extremely popular in Marx's youth. Hegel espoused a philosophy known as "absolute idealism," which entails a complicated re-interpretation of Kant in order to arrive at a process which Hegel refers to as dialectic. The Hegelian dialectic proposes an original idea, thought or condition which Hegel calls the "thesis," this conjures its own opposite "antithesis," and the struggle between