Social stratification means the subdivision of society into groups characterized by unequal access to resources by the individuals who are part of it. In Ancient Greece, for example, slavery was seen as natural, because slaves were considered incomplete souls and deserved to be punished, while in India there is the caste system.
There are two great currents of thought regarding social stratification: that of Marx and that of Weber. According to Marx, social stratification is due only to the division into classes, therefore according to an economic criterion. For Marx, a social class is a set of individuals who have the same relationship to the ownership of the means of production. The capitalist bourgeois class possesses the means of production and derives its profits, while the proletarian working class does not possess the means of production and is forced to live in subsistence conditions. Instead, according to Weber, social stratification consists not only in the division into classes, therefore according to an economic criterion, but also in the division into classes and parties. The classes would be sets of people who share the same status or lifestyle, and therefore have a certain social privilege. Instead, the parties refer to those associations of individuals who share the same political ideologies.
Thanks to the improvement of living conditions, the popular classes also have access to goods that were previously exclusive to the upper classes, and thanks to the advent of mass media such as television, more and more of the ways of doing things shared by all classes social. An example is clothing, nowadays it is difficult to distinguish in everyday life the people who belong to different social classes because we dress more or less all in the same way. However, one thing is apparent, and another is substance, in fact, although it is no longer as obvious as before, the social classes still exist and this implies the existence of different levels of opportunity, in fields such as education or even life expectancy.
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