Cultural Evolution

The process of change that results from a society’s gaining new information, particularly technology

Proletariat

          people who provide labor necessary to operate factories and other productive enterprises.

Social Conflict

struggle between segments of society over valued resources

Social Institutions

                  the major spheres of social life, or society’s subsystems, organized to meet basic human needs.

Alienation

the experience of isolation resulting from powerlessness

Capitalists

people who own factories and other productive enterprises

Communism

                       a hypothetical economic and political system in which all members of a society are socially equal

Class consciousness

Marx’s term for the recognition by workers of their unity as social class in opposition to capitalists and to capitalism itself