Marx and Durkheim on Social Feeling of Guilt

Subject: Sociology
Pages: 6
Words: 1982
Reading time:
7 min
Study level: PhD

Under the private ownership of the economic system, the society categorizes itself into two groups: the properly fewer workers and the property owners. In the display, the workers not only experience disaffection but also suffer impoverishment from the world.

This alienation happens because workers transmit the result of their work as an object hostile or even alien to themselves. The worker sets his life into the object and his labor is empowered in the object, yet since the worker does not own the benefits of his labor, which in capitalism are opposed from him, he becomes more alienated the more he produces. Whatever he makes leads to a world outside of him to which he does not fit in. he turns shrinks as compared to the world of objects that he assists to create but does not own. This first kind of estrangement is an alienation of the workers from the product of work.

The second kind of estrangement is the alienation of the worker from production activity. The work performed by the worker does not belong to the worker but it is a way of survival that forces the worker to perform the work for someone else. As such, his activity of working does not spontaneously spring from within as an act of nature of creativity but it exists outside of him thus signifying a loss of himself.

The third type of estrangement is the worker’s estrangement from species being or the human identity. According to human beings, work amounts to a life intention (Horton 1948, pg 26). The process of working on and changing inorganic matter to create things comprises the core identity of the human being. A human being is what he or she performs in changing/transforming nature into objects through realistic activity. But in the current system, of the division of labor and private ownership, the worker is isolated from this fundamental source of identity and life principle for the human species.

The final estrangement is the alienation of man-to-man. Due to the fact that the worker’s product is possessed by someone else, the workers consider this person, the capitalist, as hostile and alien. The worker feels antagonized from and alienated towards the entire system of personal property through which the capitalist opposes both the production objects for his own enhancement at the expense of the worker and the worker’s identity sense and totality as a human being. The 1844 philosophical and economic manuscripts, show and illustrate the young Marx’s transition from philosophy to political economy. Marx’s materializing interest in the economy is evident here. This is interest that differentiates him from other Hegel followers but his writings in his texts are more abstract.

In a mixture of skills from several epochs, NetFlix maneuvers express potatoes out of the video hoards and directed them to the mailbox. It has a website that offers rentals of DVDs on monthly basis transacts with around 70,000 to 6.3 million subscribers. They use the old fashion style of delivering the movies to the customers. Such includes the use of the United States postal service. The only advantage it has is that it does not have due dates or fee charges for lateness. In order to make recommendations in movies and have a prediction on individual performances, the firm’s activities utilize user ranking.

With over forty countries of distribution in main United States cities, the majority of the workers are African and Asian women. NetFlix Incorporation provides employment to associate with a payment of nine dollars per hour. Only those who could maintain the accuracy and fast speed performance were permanently employed after three months probation. The benefits from the Incorporation are NetFlix subscription and free DVD machines.

According to Karl Marx’s and Durkheim’s social theories, the Incorporation did not use the right channel of recruiting employees. Basing their style on who could maintain a fast pace could not lead to qualified workers. Instead, they should have used merit in selection. Also, the workers could have been paid wages for their work instead of being benefits of NetFlix subscriptions and DVD players freely. The NetFlix Incorporation had a clear alienation of worker production activity whereby the workers worked just for survival means.

In his first manuscript, he adopted Hegel’s alienation concept, the idea that humans can become out of sync with the world they live in, but he differently interprets this concept. He argues that estrangements arise from why human beings consider their own labor. Marx’s early manuscript reveals himself as a greater philosopher of work which he perceives as a transformation process of physical matter to objects of sustenance. This process is essential to a person’s sense and identity of place in the world according to Marx (Rex 1961, pg 124). Capitalism in the principle of private property, work as a source of location, and identity is seriously demoralized.

Those without property, who are mainly the factory workers must hand over their productive capabilities, their fundamental human beings to the factory owners, to another person the rich capitalists. This is not only unsatisfying and inherently frustrating but also changes workers against the system and capacities of private property that is the source of their disappointment. This manuscript is difficult and particularly dense because, in it, Marx is very much engaged in Hegelian philosophy which is an extremely abstract and difficult subject. Marx is seen moving away from the idealism of his major philosophical predecessor, Hegel, to the materialism that makes the bedrock of history and human nature.

According to Karl Marx in the communist manifesto, the history of all hitherto existing in the society implies the history of class struggles. Slaves and freemen, plebian and particle, lord and serf, journeyman and guild- master in a word, oppressed and oppressor stood in constant differences to one another, carried on an uninterrupted either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society, in the common destruction of the contending classes.

In the earlier era of history, there exists almost everywhere a complicated array of society into several orders, a manifold degree of social rank. In ancient Rome, there is a knight, patricians, plebeians, slaves; in the feudal lords, Middle Ages, guild-masters vassal, journeymen, serfs, apprentices; in at most all of these classes again, subordinate degrees.

The current bourgeois society that has emerged from the destruction of feudal society has not eliminated the class antagonism. As a whole, society is more and more dividing up into great unfriendly camps, into major classes facing each other directly which are proletarian and bourgeoisie. The chartered burghers of the earliest town sprang from the serf of the middle age. Out of the burgesses, the first elements of the bourgeoisie developed (Blend 1960, 213).

The bourgeoisie cannot survive without revolutionizing the instruments of production and thereby the production relations, and then the whole society relations. Protection of the old modes of production in uncharged form was on the converse, the first condition of existence of all ancient industrial classes. Constant production revolution ration, everlasting uncertainly, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions and agitation differentiate the burger is the epoch from the earlier ones. All fast-frozen relations fixed with their teachings of ancient and venerable prejudices, and opinions are cleared away and all newly formed ones become archaic before they can ossify. All that is solid melts to air. Man is eventually compelled to face with abstemious senses his real-life conditions and his relations with his kind.

According to Emile Durkheim with the rules of sociological methods, he suggests that guilt is to be understood in relation to the abuse of a fixed ideal or norm or to the failure to live up to it. It presupposed some power that leads us to account such as reason, God-human law or nature, Rights, human and civil. In content, it is very difficult to differentiate between criminal, moral, political, metaphysical, and religious guilt.

Currently, guilt is felt in ecological, social, geo-economic, and technological matters. In the philosophical aspects, in the ancient Roman and Greek world, guilt came up from lawbreaking that was the last of the state to enforce. According to the scholastic view, Thomas Aquinas, guilt results from disobeying the conscience as the voice of God, and it implied to lead to repentance, treat council of. Kantianism describes that guilt arises out of a deficiency sense of responsibility before the voice of the inner judge in the enlightenment and the modern period, however many questions have arisen to the concept of guilt.

We cannot clearly say what guilt is because of the existence of conflict between authorities to obedience, and how we perceive our human dignity. Radically, casual thinking probes the origin of guilt behavior (Barnes 1924, pg 98).

Evolutionary thought and determinism of sociology argue that the concept is a social product. Theorems that claim to uncover guilt bring the issue of morality without guilt. Social philosophy, behavioral research, and sociology note that the close connection the concept of guilt exists in both the social influences and inborn impulses. Various psychology schools of behaviorist, structuralists, developmental and psychoanalysis suggest a close relationship which exists between guilt feelings and the emergence of the superego, Freud suggests that the social feeling of guilt, associated with the conscience is followed by the feeling of guilt resulting from the inner conflict between superego and impulses opposed to it.

Emile Durkheim uses Anomic Suicide aspects to describe the social theory. He explained how the collective tendencies exist between individuals, which are forces as real as cosmic force, although of another kind, the same affect the individual from without. He proposed the term suicide is applied to all cases of death that result indirectly or directly from a positive or negative act of the individual himself, which he or she knows will lead to the result.

This definition was used to separate accidental death from true suicides. He further collected suicide rate statistics from several European nations which were relatively constant among those countries and among the smaller demographics with those nations thus a collective tendency towards suicide discovery. In his methodology, he drew a theoretical conclusion on the social basis of suicide. To Durkheim, anomie implied how the societies failed in the regulation of the goals or ends of people’s aspirations. He outlined methodological strategies and distinctive theoretical tribulations of sociological analysis. He further had an argument that it was only through the sociological way that social facts can be explained through reference to supplementary social facts.

He addressed four types of suicide based on the scale of imbalance of two social forces: moral regulation and social integration. The first one which he termed Egoistic suicide was a result of too little scale incorporation. The individuals who were not adequately bond to social groups were left with minimal social support or guidance, whereby they later committed suicide on an increased basis (Brinks 2001, pg 121).

Durkheim came up with an example of unmarried people, especially males who with less to connect and bind to the steady social goals and norms, committed suicide more than unmarried people. Altruistic suicide was another form that resulted from too much integration. It happened at the contrary end of the incorporation scale of egoistic suicide. With it, self-sacrifice was the defining trait where the individuals were very much incorporated into social groups that they lost picture of their individuality thus becoming willing to forgo themselves to group’s interests, even if they sacrificed their own life. The members of the military were prone to altruistic suicide.

Emile Durkheim with elementary forms of religious life sets him the task of determining the enduring source of human social distinctiveness. He investigates what he termed to be the simplest type of documented religious totemism between the Aborigines of Australia. To Durkheim, studying Aboriginal belief was a way of yielding an understanding of man’s religious nature by showing the permanent and essential humanity aspects (Brinks 2001, pg 213).

Bibliography

Barnes H, (1924).Sociology and political theory: A Consideration of the Sociological Basis of Politics. New York.

Blend C, (1960). Emile Durham: A Collection of Essays, with Translations and a Bibliography. Columbus.

Brinks J, (2001). Paradigms of political change–Luther, Frederick II, and Bismarck on Its Way. Milwaukee.

Horton B, (1948). Dictionary of Modern Economics. Washington.

Rex J, (1961). Key Problems of Sociological Theory. London.