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Course: MCAT > Unit 13
Lesson 1: Social structures- Understanding social structures questions
- Macrosociology vs microsociology
- Social institutions
- Social institutions - education, family, and religion
- Social institutions - government, economy, health and medicine
- Functionalism
- Conflict theory
- Social constructionism
- Symbolic interactionism
- Rational choice-exchange theory
- Social theories overview (part 1)
- Social theories overview (part 2)
- Relating social theories to medicine
- What are social groups and social networks?
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Conflict theory
Conflict theory, rooted in Karl Marx's ideas, studies societal inequalities. It suggests societies evolve through stages like feudalism, capitalism, and socialism. In capitalism, economic inequality between factory owners (bourgeoisie) and workers (proletariat) leads to societal change. This theory models drastic societal changes but doesn't account for societal stability.
Created by Sydney Brown.
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- At2:03I still don't understand what Thesis and Antithesis mean. Can somebody explain it to me? Thanks!(14 votes)
- A thesis is an unproved statement that is put forward as a premise in certain arguments.
An antithesis is the very opposite of someone, or something, else. Being alive is the very antithesis of being dead, or not alive.(19 votes)
- Assuming that everyone started out equally at the beginning of society, how did the minority bourgeoise become so powerful and come to own the means of production0:40, whereas the majority proletariat became subordinate/powerless?(5 votes)
- The division of labour created the social classes. It is taught that long ago, the society divided itself into 3. The first was the economical class who did the work, the second was the intellectual-spiritual class who did the thinking, and the third was the military class who did the fighting. The Vaishya, the Brahmins and the Kshatrya in the indian castre system can be seen as a rigid representation of such division of labour. Such division of labour created also a division of power.
Starting at that time, everyone were not equal any more
During feudalism, the military class, the nobility, controlled the society. But with economical development of cities created a place not as feudalistic as the countryside for they use a money based economy when the serf only had the food they made and the nobility the food the serf payed them in taxes.
As cities developed, the nobility started to losing influence, feudal kingdom started to becoming more centralized because of the taxes paid in money by the cities to the kings, letting the king to have a more powerful army that didn't needed the nobility.
The industrial revolution let people in the cities who had more money the invest in capital and take control of new means of production like factories, becoming by that the bourgeoisie. People worked for the bourgeoisie, mostly serf who emigrated in the cities, became the proletariat.
The bourgeoisie also gained a lot of power during political revolutions like the American Independence War or the French Revolution. They used such revolution to destroy the nobility. For example, in France, the revolutionary government took over all the land that was owned by the nobility and the church and sell it to raise money for the war effort against the rest of Europe (almost all of Europe was at war with France at that time). For only the bourgeoisie had the money needed to buy huge chunk of land, they took control of almost every piece of land in France during this time and the serf, not having any land, had to work for the bourgeoisie.(13 votes)
- Can conflict theory be tested?(5 votes)
- You can witness in various incidence of History. Nelson Mandela. Martin luther king, Mahatma gandhi were few of the people who demonstrated antithesis in history. This theory looks to be an observation and certainly can be tested. You can test in group of people over a period of time by creating difference. Its more of an behavioural trait.(3 votes)
- Can you explain how Ludwig Gumplowicz and Max Weber contributed to this theory?(6 votes)
- Didn't Karl Marx write the "Communist Manifesto"?(3 votes)
- Yes, he did. He also wrote 'Das Kapital', another book focusing on economic laws.(0 votes)
- Du Bois is actually pronounced without a French accent.
Yahoo! Best Answer: Nope.
There is a written record of Dubois in fact explaining how to pronounce his name ('duboyz'). I'll try to find it for you.
Add: Here it is: In a letter to the Chicago Sunday Evening Club dated Jan. 20, 1939 (cited in David Levering Lewis W.E.B. DuBois, Biography of a Race, p. 11), Du Bois wrote that "The pronunciation of my name is Due Boyss, with the accent on the last syllable."(3 votes) - Was Karl Marx the first person to propose capitalism ----> socialism ----> Communism?(1 vote)
- He proposed that capitalism ought to be replaced by communism (although there are other interpretations that stress a more deterministic view of history, stressing that socialism is inevitable, but Marx himself knew that wasn't exactly the case), which would have a lower and higher phase of development, the lower phase still somewhat resembling the social order it was leaving behind for various reasons (an example being that communism wouldn't magically change us into radically different people that lose all of our old prejudices; ideological change lags behind economic change and there's a good chance that we would still be operating as we already often do out of social habit). This lower stage has often been referred to as simply "socialism" since Lenin, but that did not come from Marx himself and, of course, whether or not Lenin's socialism really coincides with Marx's view of a lower stage (or if a lower stage/transitional period is even necessary in the first place) has been debated for a century now.(4 votes)
- Did Karl Marx foresee an evolving state, as described in the video, or did he envision violent overthrows of the uneven societies through revolution of the proletariat?(2 votes)
- I've heard this thesis, anti-thesis thing before, really as more an explanation of Hegel than Marx, but I believe it's actually a weird (though common) simplification and misunderstanding of what they're talking about. So it's a bit of a flag to have this represented like this here..
My understanding, after getting rid of all the old terms that can be very confusing, is that Marx is encouraging us to think in terms of a sort of mindmap of oppositional relationships between entities which is constantly in flux.
So rather than thinking in the binary (thesis vs. anti-thesis), trying to think in a more systemic and holistic way.
Of course curious of the sources that could contradict my persepective here.(2 votes) - how might cultural war be beneficial to society?(1 vote)
Video transcript
Conflict theory is a
way of studying society that focuses on the
inequalities of different groups in a society. It is based on the
ideas of Karl Marx from the 19th century, who
believed a society evolved through several stages,
the most important of which were feudalism, capitalism,
and finally socialism. 19th century Europe was
a capitalist society where the rich upper class
called the bourgeoisie were a minority of the population. And the poor lower class,
called the proletariat, were the majority. Now you might think
that the majority would have more sway over the society. But it was actually the
bourgeoisie that had the power. They owned the
factories that produced everything people needed. And they sold what they
produced to earn a living. The proletariat only had their
labor to sell to make a living, and they were dependent on the
factory owners to get paid. But this wasn't just a
one-sided dependence. The factory owners were also
dependent on the workers to work in the factories,
though they would never admit it because they would lose
some of their power. There was a significant
economic inequality between the factory
owners and the workers. It was this economic
inequality that Marx believed would fuel
a change in society. As the working class realized
they were being exploited, they would unite to create
a class consciousness. This class consciousness is
kind of like getting everyone on the same wavelength so they
can be stronger and overthrow the capitalist status quo. Marx created a
model which proposed that a society where
one group exploited another group economically
would actually contain the seeds of
its own destruction. The existing generally accepted
state, or thesis, of a society would cause the formation
of a reaction or antithesis that opposed the accepted state. In a capitalist society,
the accepted thesis was that the bourgeoisie
ran the factories while the working class
provided the labor. The desire of the working class
to change the way things were was the antithesis. The thesis and antithesis can't
exist together peacefully. One side is quite happy
with the status quo and wants to leave
things the way they are. The other side is looking for
change because they really aren't so happy with the
current state of things. The struggle between
the two sides would eventually lead to a
compromise or a synthesis of the two, resolving
the tension between them by creating a new state. Perhaps the synthesis
here is that members of the working class begin to
take on managerial positions. The few workers
who become managers might create a new
middle class that has even more power than the
factory owners themselves. This synthesis of
thesis and antithesis would eventually become a
new thesis in its own right and begin the process of
creating its opposite once again. Perhaps the new middle
class has become so powerful that the factory owners
begin to feel threatened. The middle class is quite happy
with their newfound status, but the bourgeoisie
doesn't want to share. The strong influence of the
middle class over everyone else has become the new thesis. And the bourgeoisie
wants that to change, creating an antithesis. But maybe the bourgeoisie
doesn't feel threatened, and instead, the
workers are resentful of their former friends
and their new power. Now, the workers want
the status quo to change. The antithesis can arrive
from any source of unrest to oppose the thesis. Even after this
struggle is settled, there would eventually
be unrest again, and an antithesis would
spring from that new source of unrest and tension. The idea of two opposing
sides has come up many times through history. WEB Du Bois was very
influential in the struggle of African-Americans
for equal rights. And the women's
suffrage movement created tension and
eventually changed society. Each of these conflicts
between the status quo and its opposition
resolved into a new thesis, which just waited for the
next source of tension to come along. Conflict theory
does a wonderful job of modeling the often
drastic changes that occur in a society. But it doesn't take into
account the stability that a society can experience. And it doesn't explain how
a society is held together. And it really doesn't
like the status quo. There is much to be said for
the application of conflict theory and much that
it leaves unanswered. All in all, it's
another tool in our belt to understand the complexities
of the society we live in.