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“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto (with the exception of the history of the primitive community, Engels added subsequently). “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes…. The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.” (Campbell)

Relative to the knowledge I have gained about stratification thus far, the theory that best explains the existence of the Upper Class and the Corporate Class in the United States is the functionalist perspective. In functionalism groups are viewed like living organisms. These groups and group processes are studied as parts of a functioning whole. Also in this perspective aspects and behaviors of society may have obvious functions or hidden functions with in society.

The structural functionalist perspective gives us important insight into how societies ensure that all positions in the division of labor are filled. Every society, no matter how simple or complex, differentiates people in terms of prestige and esteem and possess a certain amount of institutional inequality. Critics argue divisive, and a source of social disorder (pg.387-393,Tumin).

In structural- functionalism there are a select and limited few that can perform any given talent. The most talented people are to perform the most important jobs. And to reinforce this notion is to ideally pay those people more money for their talent. Yet in our society people who have the talent to become a corporate lawyer, or a top surgeon fundamentally lack the essential tools such as: family name, wealth, and networking opportunities. These tools are utilized to gain access to the training necessary to achieve in a meritocracy like the United States. As the Upper Class and the Corporate Class wonder why those on the bottom are not able to pull themselves up by their boot straps and find solutions to their social, political, and economic predicament. The people on the bottom are screaming the solutions yet the Upper Class and Corporate Class are turning a deaf ear.

Bibliography

1.) Abercrombie, Nicholas; Hill, Stephen; and Turner, Bryan S. The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology. Penguin Books.London: 1984

2.) Aron, Raymond, Main Currents In Sociological Thought. Anchor Books: 1968.

3.) Campbell, Ken. Http://cst.colorado.edu/psn/Marx/bio/Marx-karl/Granat/z.Html March 1,1999.

4.) Kerbo, Harold R., Social Stratification and Inequality: Class Conflict in Historical and Comparative Perspective. McGraw-Hill Companies,Inc. New York: 1996.

5.) McLellan, David., Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Oxford University Press: 1979.

6.) Tumin, M., Some principles of stratification: A critical analysis. American Sociological Review, New York:1954

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