SOC 105 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Unfree Labour, Erik Olin Wright, Labour Power

• School: Stony Brook University
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOC 105
• Professor: Nicholas Wilson

Document Summary

Much of the intersection of self and society is structured by your social position. These social positions are distributed and provide a structure to social settings and social interaction. In any society, society positions are stratified unequally because resources are limited so we live in structured inequalities. Caste: lifelong social status tied to religious rituals and social duties. Ethnicity: a group with shared common cultural identity, in distinction from other ethnicities within a society. Marx; social class is determined by people"s relationship to the means of production- people are either the owners or workers. The theory says that overtime the gap between the rich and the poor will widen and conditions for workers will become increasingly miserable. Surplus value is the return on investment from making people work harder. Weber; class locations are structured by economic position, but it is more complicated than that; different economic positions have different sets of skills therefore giving them more privileges and rewards.