Compare / Contrast Social Issue found in Arthur Miller and Karl Marx / Ferdinand Tonnies - Essay Example

The theme is haunted by wartime profiteering at the cost of soldiers’ lives and the sheer contrast is shown by the brothers Chris and Larry, one abhors ill-begotten wealth and another kills himself for his father’s crime. Class issues have never been appreciated in America a country that loves to live as a capitalist. Larry’s death is a hovering presence of morality and regret in the play. It represents universality, living for one another, and dying for distant people. Chris says: “Once and for all you can know that there is a universe of people outside and you are responsible to it, and unless you know that, you threw away your son because that is what he died,” The concept of capitalism in the play is totally opposite to the philosophy of Marx, even though it somehow connects to it here and there.

It is a play of conflict and agreement where at one point, the capitalist is the gainer while labour does not gain, but need not shoulder the responsibility, because he lives in the world of work alienation. “For Marx the modern wage worker’s labour was alienated in the sense that his work was repetitive, routine, fragmented and dull, and the worker was merely ‘an appendage to the machine’” Blumburg (1969, p.299). Yet, the benefit in the play is that though the faulty cylinders were made by the labour, along with the profit, capitalist shoulders the responsibility of the fault too.

It is because the labour gets paid (perhaps underpaid) for his work and gets ticked off and he need not shoulder the eventual responsibility of the faulty pieces that will later kill a group of pilots. “In fact, therefore, the worker has exchanged his commodity, labour power, for other commodities of all kinds and that in a definite ratio. By giving him two marks, the capitalist has given him so much meat, so much clothing, so much fuel, light, etc., in exchange for his days labour. says Marx”