Development Theory

Frederic-Alexandre                                                      

Judith Adelson

DSSG 200 B

15 SEPTEMBER 2017

Synthesis Paper

        The social inequality is a difference in access to scarce and valued social resources, resources being understood in the broadest sense, including all possibilities of human actions: political, economic, cultural, social, sexual , etc. Social inequalities are therefore the result of an unequal distribution of resources within a society

.Inequalities are at the root of the stratification of human societies. Indeed, unequal access to socially valued resources distributes individuals to different social groups.

For Marx, exploitation is present because of capitalist profit because it imposes profit, to explain the market, argued that each commodity had 2 final values. The first was the use value which corresponds to the value in use of the product, that is to say, the use that is made of this good. The second is the exchange value that corresponds to the monetary value of the asset. Marx applied this comparison to work because, according to him, labor is an element of the growth of capitalism. The use value of the worker is the ability to produce goods, and his exchange value is the wage he receives in exchange for this work. But this value of the use of the worker is added to the equipment of the enterprise to produce goods which then cost more than the monetary value of labor. From this imbalance a surplus is created which Marx calls exploitation and which the employer keeps as a profit. The accumulation of profit makes it possible to strengthen capitalism. Even before inventing economic Marxism, Karl Marx denounced and analyzed the origins of capitalism. His early works are dedicated to the origins of capitalism, to the aberration of the concentration of wealth in a few hands. Marx evoked that this rapid rise of capitalism could push contradictions in the market and thus lead to a takeover of the means of production by the workers who can then set up a communist economy. Communism comes from the idea of ​​the class struggle advanced first by Karl Marx. The class struggle emphasizes that society is not homogeneous, it is subdivided into classes, and its individuals have divergent aspirations. Karl Marx has thus shown that the class struggle is at the root of the history of our world and is present since the sedentarization of men. From this ideology, Karl Marx revealed a new social class: the proletariat, the social class, whose only wealth was its labor power. Karl Marx then considers that this class has interests fundamentally in opposition to those of the bourgeoisie and that being the most numerous class it is capable of transforming the society to make it more egalitarian for all. If Marxism defends the working class so fiercely, it is to fight against alienation in labor. This notion developed by Karl Marx is the fact that in a capitalist system labor is no longer merely a commodity. Labor being at the cost of the workers' lifetime, the proletariat becomes a commodity that kills his time of life for the benefit of capitalism. On this subject Karl Marx says the following words “Time is the root of human development. A man who has no free time to dispose of, whose whole lifetime, apart from the mere physical interruptions by sleep, meals, and so forth, is absorbed by his labor for the capitalist, is less than a beast of burden. He is a mere machine for producing Foreign Wealth, broken in body and brutalized in mind. Yet the whole history of modern industry shows that capital, if not checked, will recklessly and ruthlessly work to cast down the whole working class to this utmost state of degradation.” ( Marx 1968; 129)

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