Karl Marx and social inequality

Karl Marx’s critique of economic inequality and appeals for social justice have inspired left wing political parties, labor movements, and insurgencies across the world. His ideas often have been fused with local political cultures and employed in diverse ways. For much of the twentieth century, western sociologists viewed him as an ideologue, on the margin of their discipline. During the later 1960s and early 1970s, however, sociological interest in Marx increased, spurred by anti colonialist uprisings, student activism, and the New Left. In North American sociology, which previously had ignored or dismissed him, a new generation of theorists portrayed him as a founder of ‘‘conflict theory’’ or ‘‘ critical sociology ’’ and accorded him elevated status, along with Durkheim and Weber, as part of classical social theory’s and sociology’s founding troika. Later critics held that this canon was too narrow and Eurocentric and that the postmodern cultural shift and collapse of communism rendered Marx irrelevant. Others countered that globalization, deregulated capitalism, and increased economic inequality made him more relevant than ever.

Marx wrote his masterwork, Capital, after many years of research in the British Museum, studying intensely social and economic theory, history and data. He foreshadowed a generation of late nineteenth and early twentieth century social theorists who addressed social processes, structures, and rupture s, entwined with capitalist development. This generation expressed the era’s scientific aspirations, they called for creation of social science and helped bring it forth.

Like many other modern social theorists, Marx held that people are born into ready made, hierarchical social worlds, which shape their ideas and actions in innumerable ways. However, he saw class to be the most pervasive source of systematic social constraint. It is an aggregate of people who share a common location in a mode of production and thus face similar material limits and possibilities. Marx and Engels stated that class has an ‘‘independent existence as against individuals’’ that fixes conditions under which people make themselves, regardless of their identity, will, or effort. Ex: feudal peasants were tied by law to their plots and endless toil, while the lord ruled by military means and appropriated their ‘‘surplus product,’’ leaving them only the ‘‘necessary product’’ required for subsistence. Twenty first century peoples still live in the wake of the world historical transformation that Marx analyzed; the capitalist mode of production is still ongoing. Thus, his materialism still provides heuristic (enabling a person to discover or learn) tools, which pose penetrating sociological questions about social inequality, wealth, growth, ideology, and overall social development.

Finally, his social theory’s ethical thrust, stressing just distribution of the sociomaterial means of participation, challenges us to rethink socio economic justice after twentieth century communism and social democracy and to entertain fresh alternatives to unrestricted economic liberalism and its characteristic inequalities. Marx’s specter hangs over sociology still.

Careers in Sociology

For those interested in the social world, sociology provides career preparation for a variety of career opportunities,. Those with an overall interest and training in the basics of sociological study have backgrounds that prepare them for careers including:

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