What is a critical perspective in social work?

Critical social theory constitutes an effort to rethink and reform Marxist social criticism; it characteristically rejects mainstream political and intellectual views, criticizes capitalism, promotes human liberation, and consequently attempts to expose domination and oppression in their many forms.

A proletary (or proletarian) is a key figure in the philosophy of Karl Marx. It denotes a person who does not own any means of production; his (or her) only source of income is to sell his own workforce. In the Russian language there’s also a collective noun, proletariat, that identifies the working class as a whole.

There is no government or private property or currency, and the wealth is divided among citizens equally or according to individual need. Many of communism’s tenets derive from the works of German revolutionary Karl Marx, who (with Friedrich Engels) wrote The Communist Manifesto (1848).

Horkheimer described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.” … Concern for social “base and superstructure” is one of the remaining Marxist philosophical concepts in much contemporary critical theory.

The term critical theories refers to theories that critique social injustice from a variety of perspectives, including racism, ethnocentrism, the patriarchy, ableism, and others. … Critical theories help define social justice, as well as identify sources of oppression that are barriers to achieving it./span>

Social criticism is a form of Academic or journalistic criticism focusing on sociological issues in contemporary society, in particular with respect to perceived injustices and power relations in general.

Sociological criticism is literary criticism directed to understanding (or placing) literature in its larger social context; it codifies the literary strategies that are employed to represent social constructs through a sociological methodology.