The Causes Of Alienation In Karl Marx And Max Weber

At some point in their professional jobs people will most likely experience a disconnect or alienation to their job. According to Dalton Conley, author of the book “You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction to Thinking like a Sociologist”, he notes that even though Smith and Simmel saw the benefits of the division of labor, Marx saw alienation. Dalton defines alienation as, “A condition in which workers are dominated by forces of their own creation that then confront them as alien powers” (Conley 2015), which comes with working in a capitalist society. Alienation occurs when the worker is not allowed to express individuality in the industrial jobs controlled by the bourgeoisie. This is because capitalists ensure that workers can be exploited to attain the maximum surplus value while being isolated from the products they produce.

During the industrial revolution Laissez-faire was a thing, but it was very controversial. Business owners were for Laissez-faire, because it benefited them more than it benefited the workers. Business owners made so much more money without the overhead over them. The absence of overhead is the main reason most business owners were for laissez-faire. Laissez-faire prevented the business owners from having to present workers with safe working conditions, this also led to spending less money which meant making more.

Although in the eyes of many it brought welfare and a better standard of living for lots of people, it had its own destructive effects on working class. Karl Marx, one could go so far as to say, was the prophet of his own age. However, notwithstanding with the other prophets, he was mostly concerned with material aspects of human life. He accompanied by his life-long friend Friedrich Engels analyzed capitalist society in terms of social structure, economy and culture. In Marxian theory of classes, society is torn into two, between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and it is the scene of perpetual exploitation of the working class by bourgeoisie and a permanent struggle between them.

The conflict theory can be connected on both the full scale level and the miniaturized scale levels. Conflict theory tries to inventory the courses in which people with significant influence look to stay in force. In comprehension conflict theory, rivalry between social classes has key influence. For Marx, the conflict unmistakably emerges in light of the fact that all things of significant worth to man come about because of human work (Cross, 2011). As indicated by Marx, business people misuse specialists for their work and don 't share the products of these works similarly.

Here the workers work even though their body hurts, they have pain they have to work because they are powerless “the powerful tend to believe they deserve the success they have had and that the powerless have bought their problems on themselves” (Holmes 44). Holmes here explains that the authorities believe they deserve this to control the workers and the problems these workers are facing with the labor is their own fault. Another article that deals with this topic is Economy and Exchange with article “The Original Affluent Society” by Marshall Sahlins, a quote from there relates to the workers in the book "must work much harder in order to live than tillers and breeders" (Sahlins 13). Here you can see in the book that the migrant workers have to work in order to live but they work harder than those who have citizenship and make less money. “We have to migrate to survive.

The strikers misused their power as the growers did. In John Steinbecks novel In Dubious Battle, there was enormous power struggle between the owners and the very weak workers. The owners were much more prestigious and feared, but when the workers were pushed to their limits they did indeed use the power that was available to them in the means of the strike. The pickers could not give into the demands of the owners because this would have defeated their purpose of the strike. On the other hand the Growers Association could not give into the pickers because they believed that this would have cost them to much money and made them out to be viewed as weak.

“The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an even cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates” (Marx, 2). The second is the estrangement from the activity of production itself. Third is the worker’s alienation from a sense of life purpose, human identity, or what Marx coins, “species-being.” Marx states that the process of transforming physical matter (raw materials) into something of substance is fundamental to a person’s identity. The fourth and final form is the “estrangement of man from man.” Since the worker’s product is owned by someone else, the capitalist, there is hostility towards

This sociological study will analyze the problem of commodity fetishism in American consumer culture. Karl Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism is a major problem in the United States due to the inability of consumers to see the intrinsic value of a commodity. American consumer culture tends to become trapped in the “magical qualities” of a product, which makes them unable to understand the object as it was made by a laborer. This abstraction of the commodity is part of Marx’s analysis of capitalist products that is separated from the labor and become valuable objects in and of themselves. This is an important sociological perspective on commodities, which creates an irrational consumer culture in the American marketplace.

The modern working classes, or proletariats, own only their labor. Proletariats work for the capitalists, who own the product that was produced and then sell it for a profit. In other words, the capitalists benefit most from this system. The result of this was often alienated labor, which is one of Marx and Engels’ main critiques of capitalism. Marx explains, “It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine

Firstly, Harold had a blurred vision of the overall effect, not a detailed plan which caused the effect of the that no one reorganized his vision and there was a precipitous drop in worker’s morale, understanding, and productivity. Thus, in my opinion, Harold was no effective change agent and social architect, this is because as a change agent Harold was supposed to illicit a transformation. Whereas, Harold could not be an example or be confident in his vision and dismissive with his mission. This was due to the fact that Harold could not influence his workers to follow his method. Of Couse, an ineffective leader only leads to making the employees to feel a instability.

In Schwartz’s article “Rethinking Work”, he questions the satisfaction or dissatisfaction people have with their jobs, how they feel about their wage, and their purpose as a worker. Schwartz starts off by saying that the current way the workplace runs was based on a system that was created to minimize the need for skill and close attention. The idea was that workers were only working to get paid and in layman terms were lazy. He continues to say that this approach to work is not doing what it’s supposed to do; in fact it is doing the opposite. Working in an environment where your only motive to be there is your paycheck leads to dissatisfaction and poor work performance.