“Karl Marx” became an important figure in the science of sociology, because he gave the term “class” to the discipline of sociology. He must have picked this term, from the intellectuals of Paris; in mid nineteenth century. One of the main concept of sociology is social inequality especially social stratification and the creation of social ladder from low to high. Everywhere in the world People correlate, poverty, low education and bad living condition with standing low on the imaginary social ladder. On the other hand, people who stand high on social ladder have good education, good job, high salary and excellent living condition.
In theories of social stratification we use the terms, cast, creed and social layer but Marx gave the term class to social sciences which became almost universal. When people read in newspapers and magazines the statement like, a new class of very poor people is growing in taxes America, they don’t even know that, the term was introduced by Marx. In Karl Marx journalistic articles, he has mentioned many classes, however, in his theoretical work he has only focused on two classes. He believed that when capitalism reach its peak there will be only two classes’ upper class and lower class. The middle class will disappear some people of middle class will climb the ladder to upper class, and the other will climb down to lower class, but most of middle class people will climb down the ladder to lower class.
At low point of social ladder are the people who do not own the means of production (the tools, factories and money) the only thing they are left with is to sell their labor power. The other class stands on the high point of social ladder, they own means of production, tools to manufacture, factories and money so, they do not have to sell their labor instead they buy them. Marx labeled the former as proletariat and later as bourgeoisie. According to “Karl Marx” bourgeoisie are exploiters and proletariat are exploited because bourgeoisie extract surplus from the labor proletariat and give them minimum wedges for their work.
