Impact On The Ideas Of Karl Marx's Work

Karl Marx’s work has had a large impact on the ideas of sociology. He was one of the first social scientists, and his ideas were believed to be so radical that he was an inspiration to revolutionists and a threat to government leaders. He studied the conditions and unhappiness of working class people. His views opened doors to the study of how social class had a direct impact on life experiences. According to Karl Marx, there was one social element that determined how people fit in the social hierarchy, and that was who controls the means of production. He felt that capitalism was responsible for putting so many people in poverty while the world had an abundance of wealth.
With the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Marx expected a social …show more content…
It allows us to live, be creative and flourish. He felt that work was destroying workers, because to factory owners, a worker was only an idea, and nothing more. Workers had no choice but to work for long hours for low wages, and became alienated. According to Karl Marx, alienation is the process in which the worker is made to feel foreign to the products of their own labor. Capitalism alienated workers to their labor by making things that they couldn’t afford to buy. Instead, those things were sent to shops to make money for people who paid workers little to nothing for their labor. For example, workers produced products that they could never buy, built houses in which they would never live, and built cars in which they would never drive. The production lines split jobs into meaningless tasks that made long hours at work boring, which turned workers into machines; workers also had no control over the process of production, and the hours they spent working. They lived for the time they spent at home to eat, sleep and relax; at work, they weren’t really fully alive, and this also alienated them from each other. Also contributing to alienating people from each other was the class structure of society; workers were alienated from those who controlled production and exploited labor. Capitalism also alienated workers from their “species being.” Marx believed that work was forced, and that those who create the wealth are …show more content…
Although the worker has played a part of producing the car, he is alienated because the car company will sell the car and make the profit, giving him none. This worker is instructed how to properly install the steering wheel on each car, and has no input or choice on which job he performs or how he does it. Attaching steering wheels to cars all day is a boring job, and the worker gets no happiness from his job task. The priority of the car company that this worker is employed by to install steering wheels, is to sell cars and make profits, not to care for the well being of the workers or how they interact and get along with each other.
Karl Marx believed that inequality and social division were the main aspects of society. His ideas, including those regarding social class, exploitation, and alienation, have shaped the world we live in today. The current political landscape in our country reflects the divisions that he described long ago. Through the years, his ideas have been criticized as inaccurate and ridiculous, but to many people, his message of a classless society brings both inspiration and