Class Conflict as a Familiar Phenomenon - Essay Example

Introduction Social theories are analytical frameworks that are used in social sciences so as to examine social phenomena. It revolves around societies looking at how they change and develop, the methods of explaining social behavior, issues concerning power, politics and social structure, gender, racial issues and ethnicity, modernity, civilization, revolutions and utopia. Some social theories are purely scientific, descriptive and objective while conflict theories critique the ideologies of most societies which basically oppress the majority workers at the expense of the minority capitalists. Social dynamics attempts to study individual interactions as well as group behavior. Talcott parsons came up with the grand theory that explains social behavior. Values are core to all human behaviors because they give meaning to what people do, direct people’s lives and bind people together. Any lasting social system strives for stability and equilibrium with a strong sense of social order and interdependence. Discussion Chapter 3 is about the marriage between one Dan Croteu and Cate Woolner. Dan is from a poor family while Cate is from the middle class. They met six years ago while he was selling cars at Keene, New Hampshire. They started off well and she later sent him a note that if he was not involved with someone, preferably not a republican and not an alien, maybe they could meet for coffee. Their main difference was that he came from the working class, poor family while she came from a rich family. Dan’s father was a factory worker who schooled until eighth grade and his mother was a factory worker too. Dan had a difficult childhood and he quit school at sixteen, joined the navy and went through a series of jobs without getting a permanent one. He married his pregnant nineteen year old girlfriend and they had the two daughters by the time he was twenty four. Cate is the daughter of a doctor and a dancer. She grew up in a comfortable home in Hartsdale,New York with summer camps, vacations and college education. She married a psychotherapist in her mid thirties and that’s when her son’s were born. In Dan’s world, they had close relations with the extended family members while in Cate’s case they did not value wider family relations as much. People marrying across class boundaries will most likely end in divorce especially when the woman has more power over the man. It’s accepted in their household that Cate’s status in the household has given her an upper hand in the marriage. Cate’s son’s schooled in good schools while Dan’s daughters schooled in Keene public schools. Cate and Dan remain conscious of the class differences between them. For the son’s, Dan’s arrival did not make much difference as they are mostly oblivious of the extended Croteu family. In this chapter we can well see the class struggle that Dan and Cate are facing in their marriage. The point is that with his entire manly ego, Dan will never be accorded the respect he deserves in the family just because he is from a poor class than his wife Cate. As Karl max theorized, tensions occurs in societies due to the classes that people are labeled with. Chapter 4 is about Della Justice who is struggling to cope with two worlds, the poor one where she was raised and the middle class where she is now. Justice is a product of the Appalachian coal mining country. She was from a poor family, living for several years in a house without indoor plumbing. Her father was an absentee parent and his half brother had to hunt squirrels for the family to eat. After high school, she left Pike County and made her way through college and law school. She spent time in France, Scotland and Ire land before starting a high powered legal career. She moved the ladder from rural poverty to the high achieving circles of the middle class. She thinks that class is everything pointing that when you are poor and from a poor socio economic group, you actually don’t have a lot of choices. Justice is very sensitive to the cultural significance of the cars people drive, the food they eat and where they go on vacations. She remembers vividly when she was sent to foster care at age fifteen when her mother and father disagreed. She did not like the experience at all and it has affected the person she is now. George Habert Mead proposed that the self is a social concept which is not present at birth but arises as a product of socialization. The concept of self is developed through language, play and generalized other. We can progressively see that Della had a negative self image of herself even in her adulthood years. Having grown up in the poor Pikeville County, she actually feels intimidated even by her colleagues. She feels like she knows nothing while they seem to know everything. She is also not well socialized and thus couldn’t get friends even in the church. Charles Horton came up with the concept of the looking glass self which states that a person’s self grows out of the daily social interactions we have with other people. The self grows from other people’s impressions and how they perceive us. Our self image grows from the responses and evaluations of other people in the environment. Della was shy and naïve when Joe and Virginiah Justice adopted her. This is because she had to socialize and get along with people from the middle class while she felt she belonged to the poor class. That’s why she ends up adopting her half brother, children Will and Anna Ratliff as she fears that growing in a poor society will have a great negative effect on them as it did to her. Working class parents tend to play a passive role on their children lives like managing their own free time while middle class parents are actively involved in their kids’ lives like encouraging them to speak up and shaping their children’s activities. Chapter 5 is about the church and how the culture has changed overtime from not only desiring heavenly glory but also material possessions. Evangelical Protestants are pulling closer to their main line counterparts in class and education. In 1965 a white protestant was two and a half times as likely to have a college degree as a white evangelical. To many of the evangelicals, the reason for their increasing worldly success and cultural influence is God’s will at work and the founder of the ministry, Carl Henry who urged his believers to look beyond their churches and fight for a place in the American mainstream. One good example is the assembly’s preachers who began speaking not only of the heavenly rewards but also of material blessings God might provide in the world. This made the assemblies faith more compatible with the upwardly mobile middle class. As they flourished, evangelical entrepreneurs and strivers built a distinct evangelical business culture of prayer meetings, self help books and business associations. The rise of evangelists has also coincided with the gradual shift of most of them from the Democratic Party to the Republican and growing political activism. Their growing wealth and education helps explain the new influence of evangelicals in American culture and politics. Evangelicals are now most likely to be college graduates and in the top income graduates. Tim havens is one of the well educated born again Christians. He hopes to make money with his medicine degree and put his children through college without scholarships and part time jobs. Like other evangelicals he plans to take his faith with him as he makes his way in the world. The church is thus portrayed as capitalist society which is accumulating a lot of material possessions from its members. The Assemblies in particular is thriving among the middleclass neighborhoods. The churches are also being involved in the political arena. In chapter 7, we read of the plight of Jeff Martineli and McClellan who are finding it hard to cope with life after the aluminum Company they were working for closed down. This is because they do not have college degrees like other people in this generation. Jeff has been doing a factory job over the course of his adult life and has used it to raise a son who is now married and with a son. The job he held at the factory earned him a straight ticket to the middle class. However when the job disappeared, he found himself between a rock and a hard place because he could not find\d anything close to the security of his former life. His son Caleb already knows what it is like to lack a college degree because since high school he has had six jobs and none has been very promising. At twenty eight now, he knows he may never reach anywhere near the middle class. Mark McClellan worked his way up from the Kaiser furnaces to the management by taking extra shifts and learning everything he could about the aluminum business. However, when the company closed in 2001 he discovered that the job market did not value his company skills much as it did to people who had college degrees. Martineli now works in pest control, killing ants and spiders at people’s homes. He now barely makes half the money he made at Kaiser. Martineli and other former factory workers fear that the fall out of the middle class could be permanent. McClellan’s was the doctor’s son just out of high school when he decided he did not want to go much further than Kaiser. The decision to skip college at that time was not unusual and his father gave him his blessing. By twenty two he was group foreman, by twenty eight the supervisor and by thirty two he was in the management. After Kaiser closed, McClellan has not yet found any job and he is living off his dwindling savings and investments. He does not want his son to do the same mistake he did and David knows that he wants to go to college and study medicine. Durkheim’s Structural functionalism theory is based on the premise that the society is a complex system whose different parts work together to promote stability and solidarity. He presents the society as a body and the different parts as its organs (family, religious and education institutions) which work towards the functioning of the body as a whole. In Durkheim’s division of labor, he suggested that the primitive societies were characterized with mechanical solidarity where people acted and thought alike with a collective conscience. Social ties were homogenous and relatively weak and the law was repressive and penal. However, in advanced more complex capitalist societies, division of labor was allocated in terms of merit and thus social inequality is a common phenomenon. Law was thus more restitutive than penal and it sought to restore rather than punish individuals (Barnes,159). In Auguste Compte’s positivism, he points out that there is need to keep the society unified. According to him, the society has gone through three stages of development; in the theological stage, people expressed societal functions as God’s will. In the metaphysical stage, people started seeing the society as a natural phenomena rather than a supernatural entity. In the scientific stage, people could explain the society through the application of scientific approach. Durkheim’s and Compte’s views can be explained in the light of the time that Kaiser Alluminium Company was thriving. Even people with no college degrees could work themselves up to the middleclass. However the situation is different nowadays as a college degree is mandatory so as to earn middle class lifestyle. In chapter 12, David Johnson talks about the rich and how they are being left behind by the richest Americans. The people at the top of America’s money pyramid have so much prospered in recent years that they have pulled far ahead of the rest of the population. A report by New York Times shows that they have even left behind people making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. The average income for the top ten 0.1 percent was $3 million in 2002. Economic mobility, the concept of moving from one economic group to another over a life time has stopped rising in the United States. The share of the nation’s income earned by those in the uppermost category has more than doubled since 1980 to 7.4 percent in 2002. The share of the income earned by the rest of the top 10percent rose far less and the share earned by the bottom 90 percent fell. The treasury department says that the very wealthiest find both legal and illegal ways to shelter a lot of their income from taxes. Karl Marx propositions actually laid the basis for the understanding of labor and its relation to capital. He theorized how human societies progress through class struggle, a conflict between the owners who control the means of production and the workers class who have nothing else to offer other than their labor. He believed that the state was run to the interests of the ruling class which represented the interests of all. The American society is a capitalist society characterized by the richest that actually control all the forms of production, economics and politics. The gap between the richest and the poor is so large. Utopian sociology argued that growth in industrialization and scientific discovery would lead to changes in the society. Fredrick Engels continued his friend Karl Max legacy about class conflict in societies when Karl died. In 1846 they formed the communist league which linked together all the socialist leaders living in different parts of Europe. The aim of the organization was to overthrow the bourgeoisie and put the proletariats to dominate and establish a new society without classes and private property. Adam smith argued that individuals have a capacity to make reasonable judgment but it is usually under estimated. This should not allow politicians to impose unreasonable government regulations on them. He advocated for free markets which allowed natural laws of demand and supply to function optimally. David Ricardo shared the same thought with Smith that economies actually function best when they were left alone by the government. His theory of comparative advantage stated that states should focus on industries where they could trade internally and where they would only trade with other countries so as to gain products that are not available nationally. The split labor market theory explains the racial tensions and labor market segmentation in terms of social structure and political power rather than individual level prejudice. Bonacich argues that the ethnic differences arises from a split labor market there two or more differing racial or ethnic groups of workers fight for the same jobs and where the cost of hiring workers from one of the groups is lower than the cost of hiring workers from the other group. The capitalists prefer hiring cheaper workers as compared to higher priced workers. Du Bois target was racism and discrimination in areas of education and employment. He was interested in people of color everywhere and their struggles against colonialism and imperialism. In particular he was among the first proponents of Pan-Africanism. Chapter 13 is a fiction story about the long history of fixation on the social gap written by Charles McGrath. On television, movies and in novels, people tend to dwell on a classless, homogenized American community. However the bitter truth is that this does not happen at all. The American community is characterized by a sharp divide between the poor and the middle class society. What persists now is the longing, of wanting something more, the wish not to rise in class so much but to become classy. This is a repression as it means that pop culture has succeeded in burying something that used to be right in the open. Freud and Breur explained how the past events give significance to the present life in normal mental functioning. Past events even those of childhood are not actually lost but rather are rearticulated through symbolism in later life. This shows that as it has been in the American society since time immemorial, the society will never be homogenized. Dreisser captures the darker version of this aspect in ‘An American Tragedy’ where class envy, a wish to live like his tycoon uncle causes Clyde Griffiths to drown his hopeless proletarian sweetheart and where the impossibility of transcending his lot leads him to the electric chair. The story takes place in the town of Lycurgus in New York and Dreisser reminds us that the line of demarcation and stratification between the rich and the poor was as sharp as though cut by a knife or divided by a high wall. Some novels also portray class anxiety to evoke a dream of the great American nightmare, the dread of waking up one day and finding yourself at the bottom. They suggested that the worst thing that could happen to an American is to move down the class ladder. Novel reading is a middle class pastime and it might be the reason novels mostly focus on the middle and upper classes. The Hollywood movies also portray the upper class person as being extremely humanized by the poor ones but in every case the exchange is seen as fair and equitable with the lower class person giving as much as he receives. Conclusion As in the American society, class conflict is a familiar phenomenon in most of the societies in the world. People are discriminated in line with how rich or poor they are their race and also ethnicity. This cuts out in many aspects of life including relationships and marriages, religious affiliations, political and economic arena. The mass media such as news papers, television programs and the Radio all seem to highlight the plight of the poor people while upholding the state of the rich. Their point is that they are humanizing the rich people too much at the expense of the helpless poor. Capitalism which started long ago is showing no signs of ending any time soon. Works Cited Barnes, JA. Durkheim’s Division of Labor in Society. The Australian National University.1.2 (1966):158-175. Read More