Critically evaluate Marx’s analysis of social class.

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Critically evaluate Marx's analysis of social class.

Social class, it is a very simple phrase, but it is so hard to define this simple phrase. Various attempts have been made to try to define social class by sociologists. None is completely satisfactory but most make an honest attempt at classification. Basically, most of the sociologists facing this case have their own opinions which are different between each other. Such as Durkheim, Weber and Marx. In this essay I shall take the Marx's analysis of social class as a mail topic and evaluate his view on this topic.

How did Marx define class? It is rather ironic that Marx, a man whose name is synonymous with class, and who wrote extensively about class, should never have defined class in a definitive manner. Marx quite often used the term class to refer to quite different groupings of people. Like most terms Marx used class in quite a liberal and perhaps loose manner. however, possible to extract a definition of the concept of class from the writings of Marx. According to Marx a class is determined by its relationship to the means of production. By this what is meant is that a class is determined by its ownership or non-ownership of the means of production, that is, of raw materials, factories and land.

Classes consist of individuals, people, who share a common relationship to the means of production and thereby share common interests. Those that own the means of production Marx called the Bourgeoisie (a French Term) while those who owned no productive private property, and who sold their labor-power, Marx called the Proletariat. These two great classes did not, by virtue of their very existence, share common interests. Put simply, the bourgeoisie sought to lower, or keep constant, wages and thereby increase profits while the proletariat would seek to improve their living conditions by seeking higher wages. The two interests of these two classes were opposed and could not be solved within the confines of capitalism. This was one of the many contradictions that eventually lead to the replacement of capitalism by socialism.

For Marx these irreconcilable interests were expressed in class struggle. Class struggle or class conflict (the two terms have a similar meaning) is conceived as the driving force behind history. Marx famously writes in the Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes"
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Marx recognized that the world was not black and white, between the capitalist and the worker were a number of what he called "intermediate strata". These are people who are neither the owners of substantial property or the means of production and thus employ a significant number of the proletariat nor sellers of labour to the bourgeoisie in return for a wage. One of his examples was the small shopkeeper, a man who rent or owns his property from which he conducts his business and uses members of his family to help run the small business. Marx suggested ...

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