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Karl marx economic thought
Economic and political philosophy of Karl Marx
Theory of social change by Karl Marx
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Short Story Essay Greed comes from money and the greediness can make you forget your status in society. After viewing "A Pair of Silk Stockings" through Marxist lens, the author tries to explore the ideas of those who wish to live in the rich upper class of the society. The Marxist theory is a system of economic, social, and political philosophy which is based on the ideas that show social change in terms of economic factors. (1) In other words the Marxist theory is a class struggle between groups. In this story, Marxist theory applies to Mrs. Sommers reaction when she gets $15. She wants to become a part of the upper class. The story shows that Mrs. Sommers is a woman from the lower class, with possession of little money. However she becomes greedy and spends it all on herself. From Marxist’s theory Mrs. Sommers strive to be part of the upper class and she wants to remain there, when she purchases the silk stockings, ignores her family, and does not want to go back to her previous lifestyle. To begin with, Mrs. Sommers purchases the silk stocking for herself. This evident proves the point “A dollar and ninety-eight cents, …… Well I’ll take this pair. She ……. of her shabby old shopping – bag” (Chopin 88). This quote shows that Mrs. Sommers buy an expensive silk stocking for herself. It shows that she try to convert in upper class. This is when she thought like a lower class person, caring more for her family then herself. Silk stocking has symbolic representation because it use to convert in upper class and when she buy a silk stocking she feel good and she decide to spend more money on herself. Symbol is use in this quote because shabby old shopping-bag represent her present life and she get feel embarrass towards her pres... ... middle of paper ... ...ever wants to return her real life style. Thus, leaving her with the great lesson that a person should not forget his/her real value. Poor people wants to be a part of upper class and people do not want to go in suffering times. after I read the story "A Pair of Silk Stockings", through Marxist lens, the author tries to explore the ideas of those that wish to live in the rich upper class from the lower class. In the story "A Pair of Silk Stockings", I realized how Mrs. Sommers went from caring for her family, to becoming selfish and then wishing for this time to never end. This story also shows how Mrs. Sommers, a woman from the lower class, found $15 and became very happy. Now she felt like she was living in the upper class. In the end she wished that this time never ends, thus showing how people from the lower class wish to live forever in the upper rich class.
The upper class lives far above the poor, causing the lower class to feel shame which then stimulates the desire to achieve equality and happiness which the American dream promises. The narrator, Esperanza, admits that when looking at the homes on the hill, "I am ashamed--all of us staring out the window like the hungry. I am tired of looking at what we can`t have." She feels self-conscious not only for her lack of money and house, but also because her family looks at these houses with such longing that their expressions are comparable to "the hungry." Since she feels that her family's income and means exists beyond the starving class, she does not want to look at the houses with an appearance of hunger. She feels ashamed for belonging to the lower class who can only look and admire the houses but cannot own them. Ezperanza no longer feels content with looking at the houses because she wants her own yet knows that at the moment, she cannot have it. In addition, Esperanza notes that "People who live on hills sleep so close to the stars they forget those of us who live too much on earth." The upper class lives on a metaphorical hill, near the stars and heavens because society raises up those with money. Because society places the wealthy on a pedestal or "hill" they become unaware of anyone other than those who live leisurely lives. They do not see the poor who struggle and work through the everyday hardships life throws at them. According to Esperanza, the poor live "too much on earth" signifying that they have experienced too many trials and tribulations yet have not spent anytime amongst the stars.
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.
Marxism is a method of analysis based around the concepts developed by the two German philosophers Karl Marx and Fredrich Engel, centered around the complexities of social-relations and a class-based society. Together, they collaborated their theories to produce such works as The German Ideology (1846) and The Communist Manifesto (1848), and developed the terms ‘’proletariat’ and ’bourgeois’ to describe the working-class and the wealthy, segmenting the difference between their respective social classes. As a result of the apparent differences, Marxism states that proletariats and bourgeoisie are in constant class struggle, working against each other to amount in a gain for themselves.
One of her argument is that people like to wear jeans and sweatshirt no matter the social class. But it does not mean the social class is disappeared. The price of a simple pair of jean can be low as few dollar from the thrift store up to thousands in boutique shop. Good and services are two good measurements for social station. The richest people is spending their money on personal services or exclusive experiences and isolating themselves from the masses. According to the poll by The New York Times, about 81 percent of Americans said they had felt social pressure to but high priced goods (Steinhauer). Professor Juliet B. Schor at Boston College suggests that “ the actual social competition used to played out largely at the neighbors level, among people in roughly the same class” (Steinhauer), but people have become increasingly isolated from their neighbors in the past 30 years. Magazines and televisions filled with advertisements and celebrities has become the new level of desire across all classes. Similar to the case from the film, Lillian is affected by her boss’s wife/friend Helen. The film represents marital and familial institutions. Lillian looks up to Helen’s high standard of life, which made her suffer in the
The Great Gatsby set in the glistening and glittering world of wealth and glamour of 1920s Jazz Age in America. However, the story of the poor boy who tried to fulfill the American Dream of living a richer and fuller life ends in Gatsby’s demise. One of the reasons for the tragedy is the corrupting influence of greed on Gatsby. As soon as Gatsby starts to see money as means of transforming his fantasy of winning Daisy’s love into reality, his dream turns into illusion. However, other characters of the novel are also affected by greed. On closer inspection it turns out that almost every individual in the novel is covetous of something other people have. In this view, the meaning of greed in the novel may be varied The greed is universally seen as desire for material things. However, in recent studies the definition of “greed” has come to include sexual greed and greed as idolatry, understood as fascination with a deity or a certain image (Rosner 2007, p. 7). The extended definition of greed provides valuable framework for research on The Great Gatsby because the objects of characters’ desires can be material, such as money and possessions, or less tangible, such as love or relationship.
Marxist criticism leaves society thinking that dominant classes overpower social order. However, its goal is to present ideas of changing social realities, so future generations will know all people are important and equal. During the Victorian period, a Governess was faced with contradictory burdens leaving them uneasy with status imbalance. The governess is uncomfortable with the fact that she could be similar to the servants/ghosts, because she still feels that she is above them socially. Her desire to break out of the class structure, yet her inability to do so, shows her dependence on the structure. From her first moments at Bly or the “castle of romance”, she instantly feels the conflict between her emotional...
In the novel wealth plays vital impact on the lives of the characters, money defines social stature, in my perspective middle class was practically nonexistent, established wealthy individuals
In the beginning of the play, Walter is foolish and quarrelsome, with his heart set on becoming affluent. As he grasps how hard work his father worked and how hard his family works, he reasons that living by his standards is more important than gaining wealth, and he stops feeling resentful towards them. This play highlights how many members of society focus more on making money than living by their ethical
The working class--the proletariat--must work to survive. Conversely, the bourgeois own the means of production and exploit the proletariat for their labor as well as the goods produced as a result (Ollman). The characters of Fuenteovejuna fit easily within this dichotomy. The townspeople exemplify Marx’s proletariat class, working tirelessly only to have the fruits of their labor--the crops they have harvested--taken by the Commander and the other nobles. Then, the Commander and his fellow nobles exemplify the bourgeois
Poverty on social conditions affects everyone in every part of the world, no matter if they are rich or poor. First of all, everyone is divided into some sort of social class. The most known classes are the economic classes- the lower class, the middle class, and the higher class. The lower class goes through arduous labor all day and night to earn decent amounts of money to provide for themselves and their families. Most likely, they are the only source of income for the entire family. The higher class works hard to keep up or raise their high social status. They also work hard so they don’t loss their social rank, which permits them to hold a higher power over the middle and lower classes. Similarities of decisions made by characters in these two literary works will analyzed to understand the meaning behind the actions and influences of the social classes on each other.
The Marxist theory “is the belief that the struggle between social classes is a major force in history and that there should eventually be a society in which there are no classes” – Karl Marx In the book “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood there are significant examples of the Marxist theory because of the way social classes are represented, how religion is manipulated in the society, and what values the text reinforces in the reader.
The relationship between spending habit and social position are inextricable. Just as Gatsby has been striving to become a member of the traditional upper-social class like Tom and Daisy. His conspicuous consumption is to proof that he deserves Daisy. But is consumption able to reshape class fractions? Yet he is rejected again by Daisy in the summer of 1923. There lies an insurmountable gap between Gatsby and the Old Money—a gap that cannot be filled up by money—that is the taste.
The marxist lens reflects the gap between the rich and the poor during the 1920’s through the glass ceiling effect and female economic status. The glass ceiling is an unseen and unbreakable barrier that keeps one from rising to the upper class regardless of their qualifications or achievements. The different settings in the novel represent this effect: East Egg, the Valley of Ashes, and
... their positions and their stand in society. Material privileges and money distinguish the upper class people from the harder working lower class, and with this we can see how morals play an important role in their life. Arrogance and vanity control the lives of those with all the money, and modesty and inner happiness is what lower class people strive for. In Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier is able to glorify a phenomenon that takes the main character life from the bottom of the sea to a cruise ship sailing the seven seas. The narrator goes through the different social classes but keeps her own mind and morals; she is not over taken by all the riches and material privileges that come with such a life, but on the contrary, she remains true to her self and makes sure that the only thing that matters is the she and Maxim De Winter share and carry on with their lives.
Sommers had to forgo the lifestyle she was accustomed to when she got married and had children. In paragraph four, the author states “the neighbors sometimes talked of certain ‘better days’ that little Mrs. Sommers had known before she had ever thought of being Mrs. Sommers”; before getting married, Mrs. Sommers had lived much more comfortably. Now that she is a mother and has a seemingly absent husband, her desperation to return to her former life and feel like her old self has greatly increased. The money gives her a “feeling of importance such as she had not enjoyed for years”, and the feeling of having wealth again gives her a sense of freedom that she has not experienced for a long time. When she buys the stockings, she sees them as “lost in the depths of her shabby old shopping-bag”; to her, the stockings symbolize a small object of wealth and her old life lost in the responsibilities and poverty of her new life. Mrs. Sommers does not attempt to justify her actions; as stated in the story, “she seemed for the time to be taking a rest from that laborious and fatiguing function…and freed her of responsibility.” At the end of the story, the author states that Mrs. Sommers had a “powerful longing that the cable car would never stop anywhere, but go on and on with her forever.” The cable car is transporting her back to her responsibilities, and she knows that once she returns home, her former lifestyle will fade once again and she will be left to deal with her present