Karl Marx Major Contributions to The Field of Sociology
Karl Marx a man of intellectual repute had contributed to sociological thinking in no small way as a man of many parts. Karl Marx was a socialist theoretician and organizer. He became a major figure in the history of economic and philosophical thought and a great social prophet.
However, the following are the major contribution of Karl Marx to the development of sociology:
CLASS THEORY
Karl Marx class theory rest on the premise that the history of past existing societies is the history of class struggle. He was of the view that society emerged from its primitive and relatively indferentiated state. It has remained fundamentally divided between classes. Marx opined that these classes clash in the pursuit of what Marx called class interest. If we take the world of capitalism as our point of reference, it then mean that the antagonism is between the exploiters and the exploited. That’s it is between the buyers and the sellers of labour power.
He continually based his analysis on how the relationship between them are shaped by their relative positions in regard to the means of production. Stratification therefore happens in the society due to the relation of aggregate of means of production.
In the modern society, Karl Marx claimed that these are major modern classes. These are owners who merely have labour power, owners of capital and land owners. These classes Marx believed, have their own respective sources of income which he called wages, profit and ground rent.
From this, Karl Marx defined classes as aggregate of persons who carryout the same functions in the organization of production. Karl Marx sees individual self-interest among capitalist as destructive to their class interest in general. According to him, will lead to the ultimate self destruction of capitalism.
Karl Marx
ALIENATION
For Karl Marx, the history of mankind had double aspect. He observed that the history of mankind was a history of increasing control of man over nature at the same time as it was of the increasing alienation of man. By Karl Marx conception, he regarded alienation as a condition in which confront them as alien power. To Marx therefore, all major institutional spheres in capitalist society such as religion, the state and political economy were marked by a condition of alienation. These various aspects of alienation are interdependent.
RELIGION
Karl Marx saw religion as a form of false conciousness and as a tool of the powerful in the struggles between competing social classes. He believed that belief in religion was a profound form of human alienation. This Karl Marx described as a situation in which people lose control over the social world they have operated. Hence, men find themselves alien in a hostile environment. The situation here is that people create system of government, law, marriage, feudalism, industrialism or slavery. They then lose sense of their authorship of these products, take them for granted as though they were part of an unchanging natural order.
Also, Karl Marx claimed that the dominant religion in any society is always the religion of its economically and politically dominant class. Such religion always provide a justification for existing inequality and injustice. Marx in his philosophy on religion concluded that in every simple, pre-industrial societies that have no class divisions, religion is simply a matter of superstition. In all other societies, he insisted that the status quo diverts the attention of the oppressed from their real problems.
IN CONCLUSION according to Karl Marx, society comprises of balance of antithetical forces that generate social change by tension of struggle that they create. He believed that struggle rather than peaceful growth was regarded as the engine of progress. The interpretation of this is that Marx considered strife to be the father of all while he saw social conflict as the core of historical progress. Karl Marx doctrine was in contrast with most of the philosophical thinking of his predecessors.
