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Jack Molloy
Every society has inequality to some degree. Inequality varies from life opportunities to
levels of power, prestige, and wealth. Social structures affect the way a society functions and in
the end, causes some sort of stratification. In some cases, the structure that causes stratification
could be in the form of an economic foundation, religious ideology, and even racial
discrimination. As a result of these structures, the varieties of life chances are predetermined and
differ dramatically whether in our own country of the world itself. Inequality began with the
human transformation over the past 10,000 years from a hunter-gatherer society to an
agricultural one, from there due to advances in technology, civilization advanced into an
industrial society. Technological advancement is the basis of how social structures began to
emerge. From slavery and caste systems to the development of the middle class, various
institutions and ideologies have been introduced to reduce these inequalities yet none have
proven more inefficient than capitalism.
Social stratification divides members of a population in hierarchical groups. Economic
inequality is attributed to be as the most common and powerful form of stratification.
Throughout history, many societies have had different forms of economic systems. For example,
the hybrid form of capitalism/socialism that dominates the world today compared to medieval
feudalism that was popular prior to the renaissance. The underlying theme that both of these
highly contrasting economic systems have is the fact that they cause social stratification due to
their economic activity. Gerhard and Jean Lenski (1995) asserted that societies change as they
acquire new information, especially in technology.
There have been hunting-gathering, horticultural/pastoral, agrarian, industrial and, as of
today, post-industrial societies. Because of their simple technology, they live day by day, chasing
animals to hunt and gathering plants. This lifestyle generates almost no economic inequality
because there is no surplus and there is no way to accumulate wealth while being always on the
move. The initial domestication of animals and plants in horticultural and pastoral society and
the following rise of agricultural technology changed this picture ultimately. Once there was a
material surplus people were able to settle down and were able to support a larger population.
This availability of a surplus eventually led to the development of cities and eventually empires.
Much world history is little more than the wars the human beings fought to seize such
accumulated wealth of each other. As agriculture required a great concentration of manpower,
militarized ruling elites found a solution to this in the institution of slavery, feudalism and so
forth. Now, there were kings and their administrators on one side and a mass of agricultural
workers on the other.
With the advent of industrial technology, greater occupational stratification has led to
greater economic inequality. At first, industrial societies saw a huge amount of poverty as rural
people had to leave their traditional lifestyles and sought poor-rewarding jobs in the urban
industrial complex. While the owners of factories lived in prosperous conditions, the creators of
that wealth lived in absolutely dramatic conditions in the slums, working for 15 to 18 hours a
day. Although through resulting legal regulations and the advent of unionized labor this
prosperity has started to be distributed in a more balanced way. Yet inequalities in post-industrial
societies are still striking. Kuznets (1966) pointed out that while these technological
developments have caused huge stratification at first, after a certain point there starts to occur a
leveling of social opportunities. Yet, the industrial societies of today could never be as
egalitarian as past hunter-gatherer societies.
The capitalist mode of economy has been pointed as the main reason behind economic
inequalities by many sociologists such as Karl Marx, Noam Chomsky, and Immanuel
Wallerstein. We owe our traditional conception of social class to Karl Marx who determined
the criteria for his analysis by looking at the roles people play in the process of production. For
him, the struggle of classes determined in such a way by economic inequalities is what history is
all about. Marx noted two classes in his own day when he looked at the mode of production: the
capitalist, the bourgeois who owns the means of production, and the worker, the proletariat
whom the capitalist hires to operate his means of production. Thus, while the worker, who
owns nothing but his labor power, sells it in return for a minimum wage that is barely enough
to keep him alive, the capitalist expands his profits day by day by exploiting his workers labor.
Schock argues The fact that the shoe company Nike pays only about sixty dollars a month to its
workers while selling the shoes they produce to hundreds of dollars is enough of an example for
pointing out how unequal is this mode of production and economy.(Schock, 1996, p.102)
Corporations often pay minimum wage to their low skill workers who in turn have to get
on welfare in order to sustain a living. Wal-Mart is a prime example of this and was actually the
subject of the U.S. Committee on Education and the Workforce. The study determined that a
typical Walmart store costs taxpayers over 1.7 million dollars per year, or about $5,815 per
employee.(Congressional Report) McDonalds is also a large corporation that pays their
fulltime employees under the poverty level. The maximum wage that a McDonalds employee
can make in a year is $18,200. McDonalds itself recommends its own employees to get a
second job or get on food stamps. Meanwhile the American taxpayer foots the bill to ensure that
the McDonalds employee doesnt starve to death while the company ekes out an $8 billion dollar
annual profit.
The second innate problem of the worldwide adoption of this hybrid capitalism model as
an economic system is the fact that it has proven to be a source of conflict throughout history.
The major conflict on a macro scale occurred when the economic interdependency of countries
on each other assumed an intense form following the Industrial Revolution that brought about
mass production, and increased facilities in transportation and communication, which in turn
stimulated the growth of capitalist economies.
According to Wallersteins (1979) world system and dependency theory, the inequalities
between nations are a result of global capitalism. Colonialism is seen as a direct development of
the advent of capitalism creating core regions, the industrialized and imperial West, and
periphery regions, the technologically backward, colonial world. The core regions are dependent
on periphery regions for their prosperity and the peripheral regions are dependent on core regions
for their mere survival. Just as the capitalist exploits his citizens by making them produce at a
minimum wage and consume at a maximum price, the core countries to use the cheap labor force
and raw materials of the periphery regions to produce at a minimum cost and also exploit them
as a market.
This dependency and exploitation still continues today but the initial result of this pattern
happened to be devastating as we all know: Two worldwide wars that killed millions of people
and devastated the lives of billions. The disaster was inevitable when the capitalist, imperial
nations of the world adopted the capitalist idea of private ownership of natural resources and
self-profit instead of thinking collectively in terms of the needs of all human beings who share
this same planet, this same house with each other. The thinkers who saw the capitalist mode of
production as the basic reason behind inequalities offer us the most sound and major theory on
economic stratification both between across the world and within the nations. Evidence from
socialist countries, which were formed as the anti-thesis of capitalism, proves that they were
right. Whatever statistics we can derive from socialist countries reveal that although they were
unable to form a classless society with perfect income equality, they managed to reduce the
inequality to a great degree. While the income ratio of the highest 20% per cent to the poorest
ratio was 32/1 in Brazil, 9/1 in UK, 8/1 in Us, 5/1 in Sweden, 4/1 in Japan, in the former Soviet
Union it at 3/1 between 1980 and 1992 (Macionis & Plummer, 2002,p.187).
While reduced inequality seems like a good thing, it is a very deceiving statistic. For
example, the former Soviet Union noted at a 3/1 ratio may seem ideal, but is well known that
living there was quite frankly, horrible. Just because something is more equal doesnt mean the
country is prosperous. It is a well-known fact that the economy of the USSR was often
deplorable and can be described simply as laughable. This brings up the question of whether or
not capitalism, although it can generate a lot of inequality, does that inequality outweigh the
prosperity it brings along with it?
There is no better example to look at what inequality can do to a society than what just
recently occurred in the United States that was coined the great recession. Where a financial
crisis, attributed to those known as the 1% (the bourgeoisie) led to a massive spike in inequality.
Jenifer Sherman notes in her conclusion that Regardless of prior experience, many workers
experienced losses of jobs, wages, hours, and benefits, which for many created serious
challenges to their basic survival. During this same period, use of government aid programs such
as unemployment insurance and food stamps rose significantly, as did attacks by politicians and
the popular press on these same programs and their recipients. Presidential hopefuls criticized
Obama for being the food stamp president while dismissing concerns about growing
inequality and the plight of the poor and disparagingly discussing the unemployed as lazy
dependents who needed to go find jobs (Sherman, 2013, p.426-427). This episode and the great
depression of the 1920s are two example of how capitalism nearly sent the human race back to
the pre-industrial era in economic terms.

Many sociologists have tried to understand the structures leading to such inequalities in
society. A lot of their research was geared to levels of income, due in part because ones life
chances are often times determined by their wealth. Technological innovation changed societies
towards patterns that were increasingly less equal in income distribution. As the technology level
increases and mode of production and sustenance changes, occupational specialization creates
wide differences in economic wealth. Looking at the status of his current society, Marx
concluded that what is ultimately responsible for economic inequality is the capitalist mode of
production that divide the society into two conflicting camps. Sociologists like Chomsky and
Wallerstein agreed with Marx and pointed out how global capitalism is responsible for the
income inequality both across the world and within nations. It is an obvious fact that today there
is a tragic inequality and huge discrepancy in the way people experience and sustain their lives in
the 21st century.