Marx and Aristotle, a comparison
...od in which they eat. Greeks are in a higher class than non-Greeks because they do not relate to each other; they don’t even acknowledge the other’s existence. Non-Greeks might be in a lower class than the Greeks, but they are higher than the class of the slaves. Aristotle says that superior beings have a monetary system and use coinage. Slaves neither have money nor a monetary system. Aristotle also says that citizen’s are in a higher class than non-citizens because citizens have more rights and more benefits than non-citizens, who have limited rights. Marx’s evaluation on classes is that classes are loose and the flow form one to another is common and probable. His view of class is as follows. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. (Marx-9) He thinks classes are bad because they are always in a constant feud. He feels that classes will always exist until the classes fight enough to destroy each other. In Marx’s idea of class, people can move up in class as well as down in class; classes evolve. The upper class rules because they have all the money, control of the government, and control of the military, even though they have a smaller population. Society always arranges itself into some sort of order. According to Marx, society is splitting up into “two great hostile camps, into two directly facing each other—bourgeoisie and proletariat.”(Marx-9) The technological advances of the middle class have pushed down the traditional ways of the lower class. The bourgeoisie consists of the industrial middle class. Marx is completely against the bourgeoisie; in fact he is against any classes in general. Marx comments on the bourgeoisie saying it “has stripped if its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe.” He says that classes are not necessary for life and that society would be better off without them. It is the fault of the bourgeoisie that overpopulated cities were created, with their own laws, government, and system of taxes. The bourgeoisie has also caused differences of age and sex to no longer have meaning. In addition to that, they supply the proletariat with political and general education, which they only use against them. He also talks about the proletariat saying that they are “not only slaves of the bourgeois class and state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois ma...