Philosophy of Karl Marx, Max Weber & C Wright Mill in Sociology | Conflict perspective thinkers

Conflict theory looks at society as a competition for limited resources. This perspective is a macro-level approach most identified with the writings of German philosopher and sociologist Karl Marx (1818-1883), who saw society as being made up of two classes, the bourgeoisie (capitalist) and the proletariat (workers), who must compete for social, material, and political resources such as food and housing, employment, education, and leisure time.
Marx focused on the “mode of production” (e.g., the industrial factory) and “relations of production” (e.g., unequal power between workers and factory owners).
The bourgeoisie owns and controls the means of production, which leads to exploitation due to the profit motive.
In this arrangement, proletarians have only their labor to sell, and do not own or control capital.
Religion makes a virtue out of suffering - making it appear as if the poor are more ‘Godly’ than the rich. One of the best illustrations of this is the line in the bible: ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of heaven.
Religion can offer hope of supernatural intervention to solve problems on earth: this makes it pointless for humans to try to do anything significant to help improve their current conditions.
Religion can justify the social order and people’s position within that order, as in the line in the Victorian hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’
False consciousness is Marx’s term for the proletarian’s inability to see her real position within the class system, a mis-recognition that is complicated by the control that the bourgeoisie often exerts over the media outlets that disseminate and normalize information.
These are just some of the structural constrains that prevent workers from joining together in what Marx called class consciousness, or a common group identity as exploited proletarians and potential revolutionaries.
German sociologist Max Weber agreed with some of Marx’s main ideas, but also believed that in addition to economic inequalities, there were inequalities of political power and social structure that caused conflict.
Weber noted that different groups were affected differently based on education, race, and gender, and that people’s reactions to inequality were moderated by class differences and rates of social mobility, as well as by perceptions about the legitimacy of those in power.
C. Wright Mills, who coined the term sociological imagination, also used conflict theory to examine systems of power and the ways in which government, military, and corporations formed a power elite (1956) in the United States in the 1950s.
Bernie Sanders raised these issues in the 2016 U.S. presidential election by pointing out that both Republican and Democrat candidates were accepting campaign contributions from banks and investment firms on Wall Street, which he argued would make them subject to corporate influence.
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