Material Forces

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The material forces within the sociocultural system include environment, population, production, technology and labor and they intersect and intertwine with non-material forces with the system, such as ideas and ideologies (Elwell, 2013, p. 38). Indeed, the two impact and are impacted by one another. Material forces are important to the entire sociocultural system in that they play a fundamental role in how governments are shaped, how religion is communicated and spread, how the economy is expressed, how education transpires, and how the institution of the family is affected.

The material infrastructure shapes the evolution of sociocultural systems. For instance, the Industrial Revolution brought about material changes in labor, which impacted the economy, which impacted governmental formations both domestically and abroad (as industrialization led to globalization and to new imperialism). As Elwell (2013) points out, there are interrelationships among the material infrastructure, the social structure, and the cultural superstructure of societies (p. 93). Culture and society interact with material forces as part of patterns of everyday life, and all of the material forces are responsible for shaping the sociocultural system at some level.

Their importance cannot be understated, especially in a society that defines itself (its successes and failures) in materialistic terms. For example, in the U.S., the American Dream is intimately bound up with the idea of material possessionsa home, a career, a car, a family. At other points in history in other societies, materialism and the material forces played a substantially different role in the sense that they were undoubtedly less pronounced. With the elevation of the primacy of material forces and focus on elements like economic factors, the suppression of ideas and ideology has been seenor at least the simplification of ideas and ideologies is more apparent. Complexly formed and articulated ideas, like what existed in the Age of Reason or even in the Age of Scholasticism, are largely missing in the sociocultural system of todays materialistic societies.

As such, the most relevant material forces of the sociocultural system include the environment (which consists of economic elements such as trade, commerce, debt, coinage, and so on, as well as interactions among states, war politics, etc.) and technology (which sets the stage for the...…that social conflict does not lead to the gaining of individual rights but rather that self-deluded notions of possessing rights are what lead to social conflicts.

In the twenty-first century, where social movements flourish briefly before fizzling out and an inverted form of totalitarianism is expressed through the sociocultural structures of the modern era, the postmodernist theory may be the most suitable approach to understanding the social conflicts for individual rights if only because it ultimately focuses on the conflicts that arise through power struggles as irrational human beings engage in a variety of subjective experiences throughout their search for meaning and purpose, which is really just an exercise in obtaining power over a weaker people, group, or institution.

The twenty-first century has provided numerous examples of the concept of equality being trampled upon in favor of the might-makes-right attitude displayed in both rightest and leftist politics. Social constructionism and social movement theories could help to identify factors in the social conflict, but the postmodernist approach brings a type of devastatingly and refreshingly skeptical reminder that understanding is but a vain attempt to categorize and…