(a) What characterizes degradation of work in capitalist society according to Marx ? (20 marks) (b) Social stratification is…

(a) Degradation of work under capitalism (Marx) For Marx, work should be free, creative life-activity, but under capitalism it is turned into a degraded means of subsistence. The features of this degradation are:

• Alienation (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844) in four forms: from the product, which belongs to the capitalist and confronts the worker as an alien power; from the act of production, which is forced and external, so that the worker feels at home only when not working; from species-being, since creative, conscious activity is reduced to a means of survival; and from other human beings, as workers compete for jobs.
• Labour-power as a commodity: owning no means of production, the worker must sell labour-power for a wage. Surplus value is extracted, and the capitalist, not the worker, controls the pace, purpose and duration of work.
• Division of labour in manufacture (Capital, Vol. 1, 1867): the worker becomes a lifelong detail-worker performing one fragmentary operation, and loses skill and grasp of the whole process.
• Machinery: in the factory the worker serves the machine and becomes, in the words of the Communist Manifesto (1848), "an appendage of the machine"; work loses its individual character and charm. Machines also intensify labour, lengthen the working day and bring in women and children as cheaper labour.
• Industrial reserve army: unemployment and competition keep wages near subsistence and make employment insecure.
• Commodity fetishism: relations among workers appear as relations among things, which hides exploitation.

Later Marxists such as Braverman (Labor and Monopoly Capital, 1974) extended the argument as deskilling through scientific management.

(b) Stratification and social order: a critical assessment The claim is the functionalist one.

• Davis and Moore (1945) argue that stratification is universal and necessary: unequal rewards of prestige and income draw the most talented to functionally important positions that need scarce skill and long training. Parsons (1940) holds that ranking flows from a shared value system, so that stratification integrates society and legitimises authority.
• Supporting points: it motivates effort and achievement, allocates roles, and, when seen as legitimate and open to mobility, reduces resentment.

Critique:

• Tumin (1953) objects that functional importance is hard to measure, that rewards often reflect power and inherited advantage, that talent is wasted when opportunity is unequal, and that inequality breeds hostility instead of harmony.
• Marx sees stratification as class exploitation sustained by the ruling ideology; it produces class conflict, not stability. Weber adds that class, status and party create competing interests, and that social closure by privileged groups excludes others. Dahrendorf locates conflict in the unequal distribution of authority.
• In India, caste ranking historically held local order through ritual hierarchy and the jajmani system (Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 1966), but it also sustained untouchability and atrocities and provoked Dalit and backward-class movements.
• Inequality is steep today: in 2022-23 the top 1% held 22.6% of income and 40.1% of wealth (Bharti, Chancel, Piketty and Somanchi, World Inequality Lab, 2024). Where inequality is high and mobility low, it fuels protest and claims for redistribution and reservation.

Assessment: stratification supports order only when it is seen as legitimate and open; otherwise order rests on coercion and ideology, and the same hierarchy becomes a source of conflict.

(c) Reliability and its tests Reliability is the consistency of a measure: the same instrument gives the same results when repeated under similar conditions, free of random error. It is necessary but not sufficient for validity. Tests:

• Test-retest: the same instrument is given to the same respondents after an interval and the two sets of scores are correlated. Memory effects and real change over time weaken it.
• Parallel forms: two matched versions of the instrument are administered and correlated.
• Split-half: items are divided into two halves (such as odd and even), the half-scores are correlated, and the Spearman-Brown formula r = 2r₁/(1 + r₁) estimates full-test reliability, where r₁ is the half-test correlation.
• Internal consistency: Cronbach's alpha (Kuder-Richardson 20 for yes/no items) shows how well the items measure one construct; about 0.7 or above is conventionally acceptable.
• Inter-rater reliability: the agreement of observers or coders on the same material, measured by percentage agreement or Cohen's kappa.