d. Class conflict/ pg. 10: Marx’s term for the struggle between capitalists and workers. Class conflict appears in the harvest video since there is some kind of a struggle between the lower class (migrants) who would represent the workers and the upper class (farm owners) who would represent the capitalists. The conflict would primarily be the fact that migrants do not get treated fairly. They are paid extremely poorly and make less than eighteen thousand dollars a year. That, in turn causes them to have tremendously poor living conditions. The families shown in this film live in small, run down houses that are exceptionally dirty. Some of the houses that were shown in the film didn’t even have doors; instead families hung towels or sheets …show more content…
The definition says “exploited class,” exploited means “to use (a situation or person) in an unfair or selfish way or to benefit unfairly from the work of (someone), typically by overworking or underpaying them.” The migrants are treated unfairly in many ways. They don’t receive any benefits. They get paid less than they deserve and usually by the amount harvested instead of by hour. They are not allowed to keep any of the things they harvest. They can’t afford good living conditions including housing and food. Children are taken away from the opportunity to attend school due to the lack of pay and need for more family members to work in order to support their families. Also, migrants don’t even recieve the opportunity to attend colleges since they rarely graduate high school and their families probably couldn’t afford to pay tuition either if family salaries are under eighteen thousand a year. Migrants are also over worked. The migrant families in the harvest film rarely took breaks to eat or drink because they are trying to get as much harvested as fast as they can since they get paid by how much they harvest. The migrants also are out in fields all day working twelve to fourteen hours with no shade. They are then at risk for sun poisoning, heat strokes and dehydration. The migrants are also exposed to various chemicals that the farmers often times spray while the migrants are in the field which is a huge health
Karl Marx’s was a German philosopher, economist and evolutionary socialist born in Germany on May 5th 1818. His theories mostly consisted of the capitalist economic system. Marx’s attended the University of Bonn and University of Berlin. He is widely recognized for his theory of on the class system which included the concepts of base and super-structure. Marx’s theory of the class system is well exhibited by the documentary film, Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class.
In 1938, the Chavez family lost their farm due to the Great Depression. They were forced to relocate to California and become migrant workers. Chavez was distressed by the poor treatment that migrant farmworkers endured on a daily basis. His powerful religious convictions, dedication to change, and a skill at non violent organizing cultivated the establishment of the United Farmworkers (UFW). It was also referred to as “La Causa” by supporters and eventually became a vital movement for self-determination in the lives of California's farmworkers. The astounding nationwide lettuce and grape boycotts along with public support revealed the atrocities of California agribusiness and resulted in the first union hiring halls and collective bargaining for migrant workers. The details of the childhood of Cesar Chavez and how they would later shape his actions are a vital aspect of this book and the establishment of the farm workers movement.
After the devastation left from the Civil War, many field owners looked for new ways to replace their former slaves with field hands for farming and production use. From this need for new field hands came sharecroppers, a “response to the destitution and disorganized” agricultural results of the Civil War (Wilson 29). Sharecropping is the working of a piece of land by a tenant in exchange for a portion of the crops that they bring in for their landowners. These farmhands provided their labor, while the landowners provided living accommodations for the worker and his family, along with tools, seeds, fertilizers, and a portion of the crops that they had harvested that season. A sharecropper had “no entitlement to the land that he cultivated,” and was forced “to work under any conditions” that his landowner enforced (Wilson 798). Many landowners viewed sharecropping as a way to elude the now barred possession of slaves while still maintaining field hands for labor in an inexpensive and ample manner. The landowners watched over the sharecroppers and their every move diligently, with harsh supervision, and pressed the sharecroppers to their limits, both mentally and physically. Not only were the sharecroppers just given an average of one-fourth of their harvest, they had “one of the most inadequate incomes in the United States, rarely surpassing more than a few hundred dollars” annually (Wilson 30). Under such trying conditions, it is not hard to see why the sharecroppers struggled to maintain a healthy and happy life, if that could even be achieved. Due to substandard conditions concerning sharecropper’s clothing, insufficient food supplies, and hazardous health issues, sharecroppers competed on the daily basis to stay alive on what little their landowners had to offer them.
Throughout history, social and economic affairs have separated people into the rich and poor, with those in authoritative roles struggling to defend their position. Those in power have often taken advantage of those under them. In Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, severe droughts led to massive agricultural collapse in Oklahoma. The Joads were forced to leave their home in search of employment opportunities in California. Migrants often faced prejudice and aggression from the Californians. Landowners, taking advantage of the migrants desperate need for work, often treated them poorly, paying them wages too low to live on and containing them within dirty camps. Workers suffering was not only evoked the failing land, but by human heartlessness towards one another. Large banks and businesses ignored the fact that “… a majority of the people are hungry and cold…” (Steinbeck 238) Large corporations were only concerned with their own financial prospects and not the well being of the people. In Miller’s Deat...
...ld be compared to the story of Moses and the Hebrews. The Californians and the wealthy business owners symbolize the Pharaohs while the migrants symbolize the enslaved Hebrews. However the happy ending to Moses’ story doesn’t correspond with the ending of the Joads or other families. In the end, they are still impoverished, homeless, and hungry. While Egypt suffered plagues, the Californians and business owners suffer none. There isn’t any reason for the vindictiveness of the Californians and wealthy business owners to cease. Steinbeck uses the story of one family to ultimately cry out to everyone that “food must rot, must be forced to rot” (Steinbeck 349). The ones forcing poverty upon the migrants are the same ones sitting comfortably in their chair reading The Grapes of Wrath.
Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. The Bourgeoisie was of the upper class, shopkeepers, property owners, upper class. The proletariat was the working class, earned minimum wage, labor is their only material value, lower class. Class rankings were apart of the European history as well as the future. Communist wanted to do away with rankings by the country being classless, yet owning nothing, earning just enough to live. This would make each person a paid wage labourer, no matter the title they carried. Marx theory was to live in a classless system and each person have a strong work ethic, as well as
...e. Think any of us folks’d live like that?” The migrant farmers were not even considered Americans; they were viewed as foreigners and second-class citizens. The economic inequality that developed during the 1930’s not only left thousands of Americans impoverished and it created a large division in the class structure of America.
For Marx, the society history of class was a history of class conflict. He observed the successful rise of the bourgeoisie, and the essential of revolutionary violence. He says that the heightened form of class conflict securing the bourgeoisie rights that supported the capitalist economy. Marx believed that the poverty inherent in capitalism were a pre-existing form of class conflict. He assumed those wage laborers are in need to revolt to bring about a more equitable distribution of wealth and political power.
Social inequality is characterized by the existence of unequal opportunity for various social positions or statuses within a given group or society. It is a phenomenon that has a long history as social inequalities has a wide range of varieties. From economic, gender, racial, status, and prestige, social inequality is a topic often disputed by classical theorists. Sociologists Karl Marx, Max Weber, W.I. Thomas, and Frederic M. Thrasher have formed varying thoughts on this recurring phenomenon. Marx believed that social inequality synthesized through conflicts within classes and in modern society those two classes were the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In contrast, Weber disputes Marx’s simplistic view of the conflict and theorizes that social
In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels attempt to explain the reasons for why there is class struggle and suggest how to prevent class separation. According to Marx there are two different types of social classes: the bourgeoisies and the proletarians. The bourgeoisie are capitalists who own the means of production and the proletarians are the working classes who are employed by the bourgeoisies. Due to their wealth, the bourgeoisies had the power to control pretty much of everything and the proletarians had little or no say in any political issues. According to Marx, the proletarians population would increase and they would eventually rise above the bourgeoisie and hold a revolt against them. The proletarians would base this revolt with the help of 'faith and reason.' With the help from The Communist Manifesto, the proletarians realize the conditions they are in by being overpowered by bourgeoisies. The proletarians now have the reasons to ask questions about origin, order, and their purpose of life. Also, they could raise questions about meaning, truth, and value. Through 'faith and reason' the proletarians will be able to overthrow the empowerment of the bourgeoisies.1
Marx’s analysis of social class is that there will always be a divide between the haves and the have not’s. He separates them into two classes the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie signifies the capitalist class, while proletariat signifies the working class. Max Weber’s defines class as “a group of people who have a similar level of economic resources”(p.244). He identifies two main elements of class, material resources, and skill knowledge in the marketplace. In contrast to Marx’s view on class Weber believed that class was not just based solely on ownership of means of production, but could also be based off ownership of other resources and the amount knowledge one has. Pierre Bourdieu’s view on class is that it is based on the concept of cultural capital meaning, “our tastes, knowledge, attitudes, language, and ways of thinking that we exchange in interaction with others”
In The Communist Manifesto written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the two German philosophers saw history as the struggle between the working class and the Bourgeois, or middle class (textbook 708). The Communist Manifesto was written in 1848, during the peak of the Industrial Revolution, a time when the Bourgeois made huge profits in manufacturing at the expense of the working class. According to Marx and Engels, the fruits of the Industrial Revolution created a new class of the oppressed modern working class, the Proletariat, which had never before existed because it was neither like serfdom or slave hood in that it was dependent on the Bourgeois to hire them for wage labor. This was the class the two philosophers envisioned would set off a revolution that would overthrow capitalism to end the perpetual class struggle and create a fair society known as Communism.
As people immigrated to the United States, legally and illegally, particularly Hispanic workers, they began to look for jobs to provide for their families. They took jobs that Americans did not want: they accepted the low-paying, physically-demanding, and temporal agriculture jobs. Since many did not speak English and were uneducated, some even illiterate, they were easy targets for farm owners to exploit. Immigrant workers were often not paid, had low wages, and because of such conditions, some even died. In addition, they also lived and worked in appalling conditions, some workplaces did not even have suitab...
Harvest Of Shame, an interesting and touching black and white documentary from the early 1960’s, documents and exposes the deploring lives of thousands of American migrant cultural workers narrated and dissected by one of the best and first American broadcast journalists called Edward Roscoe Murrow. The principal objective of this movie is not only to show the poor and miserable lives that all of these people live, but to let all the other Americans who are above these workers on the social and wealth scale know that the people who pick up their fruits, vegetables, and grains have no voice, no power, and no help to battle the inequities and mistreatment they receive.
Karl Marx was known in sociology history as the master builder of social science. Marx believed that history was made up of steps and controlled by a class conflict. In today’s social problems we face a wide range of conflict Marx 's might analyze very differently then how today 's humans beings would.