Social Stratification

What is Social Stratification : Social stratification refers to a system by which a society ranks categories of people in a hierarchy. It is perfectly clear that some groups have greater status, power, and wealth than other groups. These differences are what lead to social stratification

In the Marxist perspective, social stratification is created by unequal property relations, or unequal access to the means of production.

Key points:

* In capitalist societies, the bourgeoisie class owns the means of production while the proletariat class sells their labor to the bourgeoisie.

* The bourgeoisie have power and status, which they use to maintain the society's superstructure—it's values, ideologies, and norms.

* In an ideal Marxist communist society, everyone would share access to the means of production and social stratification would be nonexistent.

Karl Marx based his conflict theory on the idea that modern society has two main classes of people: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie are the owners of the means of production: the factories, businesses, and equipment needed to produce wealth. The proletariat are the workers.

In addition to the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, Marx discussed a number of other classes. First, Marx mentions landowners or landlords as a class in Britain. While these were historically important, and many still retain their wealth even today (e.g. the Royal Family), they were considered by Marx to be a marginal class, once powerful and dominant but having lost their central role in production and the organization of society. In order to retain their wealth, some of these landowners were able to transform their wealth in land into landed capital. While this constituted a somewhat different form than industrial capital, this meant that the land was also used as capital, to accumulate. Labour may not be directly employed by landowners, but the land is used as a means by which capital can be expanded.

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