Posted: February 15th, 2022

Marxist and other conflict theories

Marxist and other conflict theories

Strengths and weaknesses of the use of Marxist and other conflict theories.

The Marxist conflict theory focuses on competition in society because of limited resources. The conflict theory views that society has minimal resources that are maintained by domination and power as opposed to conformity and consensus. The theory suggests that the dominant and powerful tend to hold on to all the resources through oppressing the poor. Generally, the conflict theory reflects on how society develops conflicts in terms of resources, economics, and power (Schaff,2008). Marxism in conflict theory looks at the conflict through class, while the other concepts examine the conflict through the lens of race, gender, and ethnicity. The paper presented will focus on the strengths and weaknesses of the use of Marxist and other conflict theories.
According to Marxist criminology, conflict is the basis of crime because, during the struggle for resources in capitalism, the people at the bottom achieve economic, social, and political equality through crime. The Marxist theory bases its concept on capitalism that separates the natural distribution of products. Natural distribution distributes products and wealth to the poor as opposed to hoarding them. The needy are oppressed by the rich because of the restricted flow of resources; thus, the unmet needs to drive the poor to resort to crime. Crime and social class associate crime with underprivileged societies. The powerful and wealthy commit crimes, but they are under punished as compared to the poor and powerless. Also, the powerful in society uses violence to control the poor. Violence is used as a means of wealth redistribution, and the poor people who resist are incarcerated, or their property gets seized.
Economic and political crime entails the laws that protect the wealthy in society. Research shows that the people in power design the laws and structures in society. The poor people in society who threaten the power are eliminated through economic and political influence. The crime and social class theory present an imbalance in the system. For example, in the 1980s, crack versus cocaine cases was charged differently because the rich were associated with cocaine while the crack was associated with the poor communities. Cocaine was perceived as a choice of drug for the rich. Therefore, 50 grams of crack equaled a ten-year sentence, while the same sentence required an individual to have 5,000 grams of cocaine (Booth,2015). Research shows that the disparity was 1 to 100, thus showing the inequality of crime at the social class level.
Other theories include feminist theory and deviance, where the crime is examined based on gender. In this theory, criminal women are viewed as doubly deviant based on gender norms on acceptable female behavior.However, criminal men are seen as being consistent with their self-assertive and aggressive character, thus presenting double standards in social values.
The powerful in society makes laws, while the poor in society suffer the consequences. Marxists and other theories are beneficial because they present the idealism of this structure. The approaches expose the injustice in the world while asserting that everyone should be treated equally and with dignity. Marxism examined the effects of the class world and advocated for a classless society where there is no ethnic, racism, and sexism discrimination (Pierson, 2011). The theories offer ideas that can alleviate the economic and resource inequality in society. The strengths can change the ratio of criminal disparity in society. For instance, the crack cocaine disparity was reduced from 1 to 100 to 1 to 18 when President Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act. The Marxist theory creates the foundation for studying crime and deviance with wealth and power.
The weakness of Marxist and other theories is that they do not offer realistic goals for overthrowing the tyrannical system of the dominant groups. The powerful in the society own everything; thus they easily misallocate resources and oppress the poor. Marxism presents these systems as temporary, but it does not offer real solutions. The theories are ideological, but they do not reveal the reality of the matter. According to (Pierson, 2011), the conflict theory fails because it makes assumptions about the lower history which fails to hold up in history. The theory does not fully compass the reality of the interactions with the injustices of capitalism.
The Marxist and other conflict theories look into the concepts that cause crime and deviance in society. Conflict theory offers evidence for inequality in the system. The theory disrupts the control theory that causes socio-economic issues. Also, conflict theory examines and gives answers to the relationship between the problems of race, gender, wealth, and crime (Pierson, 2011). The theories offer new perspectives on how the powerful centralize power to impact society. The concepts help understand how the powerful oppress the masses. However, the theories can be termed as unfalsifiable. The theory ties most of its ideas to power; thus they can be viewed as theorists’ creativity. The approach does not offer tangible ways to test these methods and relate them to power versus oppression in society.

References
Schaff, A. (2008). Structuralism and Marxism. Pergamon Press.
Booth, D. (2015). Marxism and development sociology: interpreting the impasse. World Development, 13(7), 761-787.
Pierson, C. (2011). Marxism, Democracy, and the Public Sphere. Politics and Social Theory, 30-47.