Blog Post #4

When trying to understand Marxism it is easiest to start at the general and move toward the specific. In general, a Marxist society is characterized based on the economic system, or the ways in which the citizens of this society produce what is needed to survive and progress as a community. This economic system influences what Marx calls a superstructure, or the values of the society. Marxism breaks down the people in a society mainly within two social groups; the first is the bourgeoisie class, which includes the owners or leaders of a society’s large corporations that produce goods and services, and the second and largest is the proletariat class, which includes the exploited workers within these corporations. An important outcome in a Marxist capitalist society is alienation, which is the separation and distance between classes. This separation can make people turn to mass media for temporary gratification and as encouragement to work harder, make more money, and then have the ability to buy things. This maintains the consumer culture of a society, cycling back to the bourgeoisie group having constant power over the lives of the proletariat. The hegemony of a culture ties in the dominant ideology, or the leading class’s beliefs and interests that transcend down to lower classes, and the culture of a society, or how members of a society shape their lives; hegemony, in simpler terms, is like the paradigm of a specific society encompassing all that exists within a society. A Marxist analysis really divides people into two groups, the bourgeoisie (leaders and owners of industry that are responsible for alienation and leading a society’s ideology and, therefore, their lifestyles) and the proletariat (the mass workers that are fed only the information and means to stay oppressed within their class). The hegemonies, ideologies, and media advertisings are just a few ways that the bourgeoisie class controls what is reaching the proletariat class while maintaining their dominance as the ruling class.