This week we talked about social class and structure, and this article talks about it as well. This article discusses the Marxist viewpoint of social class. Marx believed that there were only two classes of people, the people who produced the means of production, and those who owned it. This is still somewhat true today, but we have more classes in between. If one person owns GM, and another person is working for GM, the owner is no question held in a higher manner. The owner is also making much more than the worker. Marx was not totally off base, but his idea of a socialistic society just cannot take place today. It is human nature to want more, and after ass isn’t that what we are told from when we are born? Bigger is better, and more is better as well. Those who make $50,000 what to make $100,000 and those who make $100,000 want to make $200,000. After all, there is nothing wrong with wanting more. This way of thinking, however, does hurt our society in a harsh way. The article states “Why is it that the west has accumulated more resources than human history has ever witnessed, yet it appears powerless to overcome poverty, starvation, exploitation, and inequality?” We have enough for everyone to live a full and good life, yet our system of giving out the resources is still flawed. As we saw in the cookie demonstration, five people got five cookies each while ten people got a crumb to share. Similarly, we have people making billions and people living on the street. According to a report by aneki.com, the U.S. continues to get richer by the year, yet our poverty rate is increasing as well. Aren’t those two stats supposed to be inversely related? How could we be getting richer yet the poverty rate keeps increasing? The reason for this is that the rich keep getting richer, and the poor keep getting poorer. The top one percent owns something like a quarter of the wealth in the country.
The article also talks about Marx not being opposed to capitalism, but realizing that it would not work out well for many people involved in such a system. It states “This is not to suggest for a moment that Marx considered capitalism as simply a bad thing, like admiring Sarah Palin or blowing tobacco smoke in your children’s faces.” I liked the quote due to the obvious Palin reference, but I also like the fact that it shows us that Marx did not despise Capitalism, but knew that privately owned means of production would leave some very wealthy, and some dirt poor. The sad truth is that 100% equality can never be reached. It is an idea that has no way to succeed with our people. Marx notes that prestige and salary are related, but as we did the activity about prestige for certain jobs, I realized that is not always the case. We usually give prestige to jobs involving a formal education with the ability to think and have the intellect few posses. We think of a prestigious job as one that requires sitting in a room and listening to a professor talking about the proper business strategy or how a prosecution works. When we were working on the “most powerful people sheet”, most of my people were not politicians, business executives, or lawyers, but actors and pro athletes. Do Will Ferrell and Derrick Rose not contain a tremendous amount of respect and prestige for their respective professions? I would rather have lunch with those two guys compared to anyone, including Obama or Bill Gates. While they do make a lot of money, they did not have very formal education, or need to think outside the box in tough situations (In fact Rose probably had a GPA close to one and didn’t even take the ACT). What I came up with is that prestige has more to do with how difficult a task is, and one’s ability to overcome it. Both actors and athletes go through intense training and work very hard physically and mentally. We tend to think of poor people as laborers, but that Idea is wrong. Just because someone is working physically for their paycheck instead of mentally, do they not deserve to get paid? Aren’t they also working?
The article makes a good point of “The richest civilizations on earth sweated every bit as hard as their Neolithic ancestors”. Even the richest people work for their money, and we are taught to work hard in our lives. Our sole motivation for working hard is to be able to make a lot of money. Why would we work hard if we were told that everyone is going to make the same amount no matter how hard they worked? This is the problem with some other systems of economy. Students now day’s stay up for hours to study for tests, and work for a good GPA. If a 4.0 didn’t make a difference compared to a 1.0 in potential salary, then we wouldn’t do anything. I wouldn’t be working on this blog, and instead might write only a couple of sentences if I knew that my grade has no impact on my future. Humans must be motivated to work hard.
We also talked about the caste system in India. While we do not have such restrictions placed on improving our social class, I do believe restrains exist. Consider a family making $30,000 annually compared to one making $200,000. The first family might come from a poorly educated family. They might not push their children to succeed in school. A “C” might be a good grade, where the second family might push their children to try hard, and emphasize an “A”. I know that if my parents were to congratulate me for a “B”, I might not work as hard for the “A”. Secondly, the first child also wouldn’t have money for a tutor. If he was failing a class for example, the rich family might be able to afford a tutor for class, and standardized tests, while the poor child would have to improve his grades and scores by himself. Another thing might be that the poor child might have to work after school, while the rich child might get to study for a test or work on a project. The poor child might not be able to afford to go to college, and might have to work at a low paying job to support his family, while the rich child could go to college and get a nice job. The point I am trying to make is that the family we are born into might also limit us in terms of having a better life that our parents if they are not financially stable. Even thought we have room for advancement, if one is born into a “poor” family, it is very difficult to climb out of the hole and raise your status. For this reason, I know that I am blessed to be in my situation where I don’t need to worry about money or paying for college and can focus solely on my grades.
People with higher financial status are expected to achieve to a higher degree for this reason, and they are also not expected to steal a couple of $20 shirts if they make 450k annually. I read online that Mike Leake of the Reds baseball team was arrested for stealing $50 worth of t-shirts from a Macy’s. There was a huge uproar, and everyone was shocked. The reason they were shocked was because this pro ballplayer make a million times that amount. If someone working at McDonalds making $25,000 were to steal the shirts, then it would be no big deal but the fact that someone making half a million dollars a year were to steal the shirts is amazing. One final note on the Marx article is that it states “The moral ostriches of the world are those who deny that there can be radical change”, and “Competition would no longer take the form of some bankers complaining that their bonuses have been reduced to a miserly 5 million while others struggle to survive on less than $2 a day.” This is already taking place, and soon we will have those making $20 million, and those who are dead because they have no food to eat. “If things don’t change, there will only be one class; the upper class.
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