“Explain Karl Marx’s theory of social stratification. On what grounds functionalists refute it?” (1993)
For Karl Marx, stratification is not a ladder of unequal rewards but a relation of exploitation rooted in ownership of the means of production. Functionalists such as Kingsley Davis, Wilbert E. Moore and Talcott Parsons turned this upside down: inequality, they held, is universal, necessary and integrative.
Marx’s theory of stratification
- Economic base of class: in The German Ideology (with Friedrich Engels, 1846) and the 1859 Preface, the mode of production (forces plus relations of production) is the base on which law, politics and ideas rest; a class shares one relationship to the means of production.
- Dichotomous structure: every class society has an owning and a non-owning class (lord and serf, bourgeoisie and proletariat); intermediate strata are transitional.
- Exploitation: in Capital, Vol. I (1867), the worker sells labour power, and the value produced beyond wages, surplus value, is appropriated by the capitalist. Inequality is built into production, not earned by merit.
- Ideology and the state: the ruling ideas of each epoch are the ideas of the ruling class, and the state manages the common affairs of the bourgeoisie. False consciousness keeps subordinates docile.
- Consciousness and change: through pauperisation and polarisation, a class-in-itself becomes a class-for-itself, and class struggle drives history.
- Historical, not eternal: classes arose with surplus and private property and will disappear with communal ownership.
Functionalist grounds of refutation
- Universality and inevitability. Davis and Moore (“Some Principles of Stratification”, 1945) argued that every society must motivate qualified people to fill functionally important positions, so no society can be unstratified. A classless society is sociologically impossible, not merely unlikely.
- Integration, not division. Parsons (“An Analytical Approach to the Theory of Social Stratification”, 1940) treated ranking as the evaluation of people against shared values. Inequality is legitimate because members agree on what deserves reward; Marx mistakes a consensual order for coercion.
- Rewards follow importance and scarce talent. Long training for doctors must be compensated; unequal rewards motivate effort and benefit the whole society, not a ruling class.
- Multiple bases of rank. Prestige, education and occupation, not ownership alone, place people; managers and professionals do not fit a two-class model.
- Failed predictions. Welfare states, rising real wages and an expanding middle class contradicted pauperisation. Soviet-type societies, as Milovan Djilas showed in The New Class (1957), bred a bureaucratic elite after abolishing private property, suggesting that stratification outlives capitalism.
Weighing the debate
Melvin Tumin (1953) replied that functional importance cannot be measured, that unequal opportunity restricts the talent pool, and that stratification breeds hostility and wasted ability.
Indian evidence cuts both ways:
- Inherited wealth and caste privilege, not scarce talent, explain much inequality. Estimates by Thomas Piketty and colleagues put the top 1% at 22.6% of national income and 40.1% of wealth in 2022-23, the highest on record.
- Yet a growing salaried and professional stratum supports the functionalist stress on skill: regular wage workers rose to 23.6% of employment in the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2025.
Conclusion
Functionalists explain why some differentiation of reward may be universal; Marx explains how inequality hardens into inherited, exploitative class relations. One is a theory of positions, the other of power, and the Indian data call for both.