Conflict Theory And Sociological View Of Poverty

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As discussed in last paper, poverty refers to the scarcity or lack of certain amount of material possessions or money. It includes social, economic and political elements. There are a lot of different sociological perspective on poverty, this paper is more about conflict theory perspective.
As Karl Marx claims “society is in a state of perpetual conflict due to competition for limited resources. It holds that social order is maintained by domination and power, rather than consensus and conformity” (Dalton Conley. You May Ask Yourself). This is the definition of conflict theory which is propounded by famous sociologist Karl Marx.
Poor people who live in poverty are most likely to stay poor for most of there lifetime. It is really challenging for poor people to get a better lifestyle or to move up the socioeconomic ladder. The people who live productive lives, enjoy being healthy, basically the rich people of the society who are on the top of the socioeconomic ladders will do everything they can to stay on the top, even if they have to oppress the ones in the bottom (poor people), they will do that. That’s the reason why the poor people has to suffer in their life and live in poverty always. …show more content…

Though it can be reduced, provided the government and people of richer society decides to do so. But the chances are that they won’t do it. The reason why rich people will hesitate to do so is because, it will take away their status of being rich and the reason why government doesn’t do much about it is because they know the economy of the country can tremendously fall by it. Basically, nothing much can be done to avoid poverty. Marx in his theory also argued that conflicts are unavoidable in society. Therefore, the conflict between rich and poor is seen as inevitable, specially by the rich

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