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Marxs ideas about class division
Social class and inequality
Power in modern society essay
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Power and powerlessness go hand in hand as to have one the other must exist. As society is not egalitarian and never shall be, there will always be inequalities. These inequalities can be on both personal and structural levels. To enable us to understand power and social work we must firstly understand the theoretical explanation of the distribution of power, privilege, prestige and powerlessness within western society by looking at social divisions, class and their positions within society. Marx was interested in the theories of economic development, he believed that economy was dominated by agriculture and power was held by the aristocratic landowner, in the period when manufacture was the dominant mode of production which he called the ‘bourgeoisie age’. According to Marx the history of human society past and present, has been that of class struggles. There has always been subdivisions within society into different ranks, where social positions have come into grades. The ‘bourgeoisie age’ has been split into two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Marx defined class in the term of dominant ‘mode of production’ and the position within the social organisation of the means of production, within industrial capitalism it was the bourgeoisie who owns the means of production and as a result exploits the proletariat who sells his labour to the owners of the means of production. The industrial middle class had created an industrial proletariate and the success of the middle class would ensure other classes would slip down into the proletariat, the lower middle class would be excluded from the bourgeoisie as they did not have enough capital to compete, this combined with the immersation of the proletariat to keep co... ... middle of paper ... ...rkers are in fact in alliance with the state and are instruments of state power who may at times be, themselves tied and bound by the power given to them, as stated by Harris “Social Workers s power is expressed not just by what they do but by what they are, and they are subject to the very power they are themselves exercising” in Davis,M (2000) page 28 Social workers may very well find themselves at times in a no win situation whilst they are striving to empower the service user. Works Cited Adams, R. Dominelli, L. & Payne, M (2002) Social Work, Themes Issues and Critical Debates Palgrave Hampshire Harris, R in Davis, M(2000) Blackwell Companion Blackwell Oxford Payne, M (1996) Professional Social Work Venture Press Birmingham Power and Social Work (2003) Lecture notes University
Social Workers are very important to everyday life. They are the ones that help people in need when they have nobody else to turn too. Also, they provide resources and better understanding of predicaments that you could be experiencing. I will reflect on how the class has affected me, my own experiences and how some theories have connected to my life experiences, and lastly, if the class helped toward my major. This class is important for someone that wants to become a social worker and wants to learn about the different theories used. Also, learning about me during this process of completing this class is fun and a way to see if the social work profession is right for me. There was many theories explained throughout this class but many will not be said because it wasn’t the main points that I was trying to get across. There are two tools that are used that can help a social worker organize a client’s life: Bubble map and Briefcase exercise. There are so many different ways a social worker can help a client deal with their problems and come up with a solution. It is up to that social worker to identify the client’s problem and see what theory fits.
Karl Marx (1818 - 1883) and Max Weber (1864 - 1920) both recognised that economic categories played a large part in social class structure. Nineteenth Century history plays an important part in understanding how class influenced identities. The Industrial revolution was changing the structure of the communities, the rich or landowners having a far better standard of living with better education, health care, property ownership and power than the poor. The working class would have a daily struggle to survive. The change in Trade Unions meant that the working class had a voice, helping to push their needs forward, looking for better standards of living and working conditions. Marx's concept of class was based around the production of goods. The emerging owners of these goods, or capital, were known as the ruling class. Marxism would define only two classes, the ruling class and the working class. The influence on identity of these two class structures would be very relevant in those days. The working class would earn a wage from the production of the goods but the ruling class would sell these for a profit and exploit the workers. The two classes were on two different levels of wealth, property ownership and social standing and they would struggle to mix, they were dependent on each other but the rewards would be unevenly matched.
Social workers have to choose between the individual struggles and society rules. In choosing to help people with programs or challenging the existing state
Karl Marx, a German philosopher, saw this inequality growing between what he called "the bourgeoisie" and "the proletariat" classes. The bourgeoisie was the middle/upper class which was growing in due to the industrial revolution, and the proletariats were the working class, the poor. These two classes set themselves apart by many different factors. Marx saw five big problems that set the proletariat and the bourgeoisie aside from each other. These five problems were: The dominance of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, the ownership of private property, the set-up of the family, the level of education, and their influence in government. Marx, in The Communist Manifesto, exposes these five factors which the bourgeoisie had against the communist, and deals with each one fairly. As for the proletariat class, Marx proposes a different economic system where inequality between social classes would not exist.
Marx’s perspective was not based on the conflict of ideas, but rather on the conflict of classes. This conflict is the results of a new mode of production. According to Marx, history would consist of epochs of modes of production. He states that these modes of production are: primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, capitalism, and then socialism and communism.
In Marx’s opinion, the cause of poverty has always been due to the struggle between social classes, with one class keeping its power by suppressing the other classes. He claims the opposing forces of the Industrial Age are the bourgeois and the proletarians. Marx describes the bourgeois as a middle class drunk on power. The bourgeois are the controllers of industrialization, the owners of the factories that abuse their workers and strip all human dignity away from them for pennies. Industry, Marx says, has made the proletariat working class only a tool for increasing the wealth of the bourgeoisie. Because the aim of the bourgeoisie is to increase their trade and wealth, it is necessary to exploit the worker to maximize profit. This, according to Marx, is why the labor of the proletariat continued to steadily increase while the wages of the proletariat continued to steadily decrease.
Consequently, social work intervention depends on knowledge developed from the particular context where the practice is performed. Thus, before re-defining the standardization of social work, the priority is social justice and social change, and how policies and practices sustain oppression and inequalities. Thus, the real challenge is to enhance the ability to unravel the complexities of social dynamics and to develop effective tools that generate a positive change within
According to Marx class is determined by property associations not by revenue or status. It is determined by allocation and utilization, which represent the production and power relations of class. Marx’s differentiate one class from another rooted on two criteria: possession of the means of production and control of the labor power of others. The major class groups are the capitalist also known as bourgeoisie and the workers or proletariat. The capitalist own the means of production and purchase the labor power of others. Proletariat is the laboring lower class. They are the ones who sell their own labor power. Class conflict to possess power over the means of production is the powerful force behind social growth.
In the Communist Manifesto it is very clear that Marx is concerned with the organization of society. He sees that the majority individuals in society, the proletariat, live in sub-standard living conditions while the minority of society, the bourgeoisie, have all that life has to offer. However, his most acute observation was that the bourgeoisie control the means of production that separate the two classes (Marx #11 p. 250). Marx notes that this is not just a recent development rather a historical process between the two classes and the individuals that compose it. “It [the bourgeois] has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, and new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie ...
Marx begins by showing that throughout all of history humans have divided themselves into certain ranks or classes. For example, in the Middle Ages social divisions were “feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, [and] serfs.”[vi] As long as social stratification has existed, one group or groups have been the oppressor while another group or groups have been the oppressed. The fight that exists between the oppressed and the oppressor is destine to end reconstruction of society triggered by revoluti...
Social work practice is a profession where it works alongside the ‘code of ethics’, these consist of formal statements which represent values of the professional community. The national associations such as Britain state the core values within this field are human dignity and worth, social justice, service to humanity (human rights), integrity and competence. The professional field is regulated by the ‘British Association of Social Work’ (BASW). The core values within social work are huma...
When they are in need we must do everything in our power to make a change. Sometimes this involve advocating for them to see a change in social problems. The definition of a social worker states that they are trained person that carries out work with the aim of alleviating conditions of those in need (12). This often calls the need for social justice. After learning about social workers throughout history, I realize there’s multiple ways to help those in need (11). They’ve been able to implement social welfare for the public.
Social workers challenge social injustice. Social workers pursue social change, particularly with and on behalf of vulnerable and oppressed individuals and groups of people. The meaning of this value is to ensure that individuals going into the social work profession pursue change, most importantly with, on behalf of vulnerable and oppressed individuals, and with groups of people. Additionally, this social work value forces social workers to constantly affect social change primarily focused upon issues of poverty, discrimination, and other forms of social injustice by creating activities that seek to promote sensitivity to and knowledge about oppression and cultural and ethnic
The social work profession is defined as “a practice-based profession and an academic discipline that promotes social change and development, social cohesion, and the empowerment and liberation of people (ISFW, ‘Global Definition of Social Work’, 2016).” The definition may be true about the profession but it is more in depth than just that. To me, the profession’s primary focus is to help others through life as much as we can while letting them make their own choices and guiding them. In society, social workers are utilized in many different nonprofit and government roles. They serve the community in many different ways from monitoring parent visits to helping people through mental illnesses. Human beings are so complex and things that happen
A) Social workers “promote social change...the empowerment and liberation of people” (International federation Of Social Workers 2014, para 1);