Marxism vs Functionalism

In this assignment I was asked to look at my society and how I view it, analyse it, understand it and evaluate it. With theories and theorist on society available I will focus on two of the theories which are Marxism by Karl Marx & Functionalism by Skinner. Karl Marx, the man was a genius. The man was not blind, most people are blind, we look but we cannot see and when we do see, we change how we see to make ourselves feel better or we change and explain things so we can have some sort of illusion of control over the situation. That is what we do as humans we try and control every aspect of our lives, we have a curse and that is the curse of choice so being told that we are not the controllers of our destinies is something that we cannot comprehend and that is what Karl Marx said. According to Marx we live in an illusion of false consciousness, we like to believe that it’s all fair ground so play ball. We tell our children that if they work hard then they can be the prime minister or whatever they want to be and that unfortunately is not the case.
In today’s society we are split, we live in a society where 1% rules over the 99%, we are the 99%, the teachers, the policeman, the petty bourgeoisie and the students. We know this yet we accept it. The workers work and the bosses get rich and the bosses look at the workers as replaceable commodities that are there to be an asset and to be done away with as soon as they start negatively affecting the profit margin. These are the views of Karl Marx and they are endorsed in his theory of Marxism, one of the two theories that I will be comparing.
We are all working together towards reaching a goal. As a society we are part of the same body that is working to maintain its self and better yourself, this is the viewpoint of functionalism, it states that “society is depicted as a more or less harmonious and integrated ‘whole’ with every social constitution serving a particular function” taylor,p,1995.sociology in