Analysis Of Marxian And Durkheim's Theory Of Poverty

There are many issues within our society that can be analyzed through a Marxian and Durkheim’s perspective. Both are necessary with most issues and in the case of poverty, it definitely is. Within the United States, there is a high concentrated of poverty that is caused by a lot of factors. Poverty is just one of the issues that we don’t think we really play a direct role with, but I think everyone plays an indirect role in influencing and contributing to poverty. The high concentration of poverty can be both analyzed through the Marxian’s framework of the economic system and through the Durkheim’s framework of the collective representations and social norms. Marx’s economic system explains the existence of poverty through the mode and relation

This false consciousness causes people to solely think about themselves and how to make themselves look better than the others to get a better paying job. Their relationship to the production is at the same level as proletariats, Marx would say. Poverty is an outcome of how production is produced and by who and therefore is part of the economic base. When social factors contribute to how institutions are run, the institutions created by the economic base are, in a sense, reinforcing and adding to the poverty concentration. One weakness of Marx’s theory to modern society is that there is not a clear explanation of race and ethnicity division that contributes to poverty. We have a lot of immigrants in the United States who comes with the desire to one day achieve the American dream. Although the aspirations and dreams are there, there is a lot of obstacles that immigrants have to overcome, such as language barrier, lack of money, and more. Immigrants come to the United State with the desire to improve their lifestyle, but that does not mean that they have the means to have a stable living the minute they get here. This can be considered along with Durkheim’s concept of people following social expectations because immigrants often have the mindset that America is a land of equal opportunities and that it is one of the wealthiest country and so, they invest into it. However, they add to the number of people in poverty in America because they don’t have much themselves. Therefore, the concentration of poverty in America is composed of poor white Americans, black Americans, other racial Americans, and immigrants. Often we associate white Americans with being the wealthiest in comparison to blacks and other races due to the historical knowledge that we have. We know about slavery and who was the landowner, and