Comparing the way that Karl Marx and Max Weber perceive social classes Term Paper

Comparing the way that Karl Marx and Max Weber perceive social classes - Term Paper Example Marx famously reduced historical development to a function of economics, depicted as a struggle between the proletariat or working classes and the bourgeoisie as owners of the means of production. In contrasting modern capitalist societies with feudal systems, Marx taught a historical dynamic of evolution of culture through the political economics of inequality he viewed as a repeating cycle in cultures. Marx tended to view artistic, cultural, and religious sentiment as expressed by societies and individuals as also strictly determinant terms and reflective of the political economy. That this critique was influential in Weber’s time is shown through workers’ organizations, labor movements and student radicalism as experienced across all of Germany and most of Europe following the publication of Marx’s political economics and call to communist / socialist revolution. However, historical conflict exists between Marx, Engels, and the Social Democratic Party in Germany with regard to what the founders viewed as the party’s adoption of views and policies that compromised the worker’s movement and revolutionary struggle while appealing to its force. It is in these ideological reforms of Marxism that were introduced by the SDP in Germany historically, creating a more mainstream Socialism that could be integrated into the western democratic political system without worker’s revolution, that it is necessary to view the differences between Karl Marx and Max Weber’s theories of class. â€Å"There can be no doubt whatever that what interests all internationalists most is the state of affairs among the German Social-Democratic opposition. Official German Social-Democracy, which was the strongest and the leading party in the Second International, struck the heaviest blow at the international workers’ organisation. But at the same time, it was in German Social-Democracy that the strongest opposition was found... The split in the present-day