Home > Class conflict

Sometimes class conflict results in violent struggles, either episodic, such as the Johnson County War in Wyoming in the 19th century, or chronic, such as the atmosphere that prevailed in pre- revolutionary Russia. It can be open, as with a business lockout aimed at destroying a labor union, or it can be hidden, as with an informal slowdown in production that protests low wages or an excessively fast or dangerous work process.

Representing a political group of working people with a common interest, Labour unions and labor-oriented political partiesA political party is a political organization subscribing to a certain ideology or formed around very special issues. In party-list proportional representation, parties (and sometimes multi-party cartels) can play a functional role in the voting system. have revolutionised health and safety standards in industrial economies, either directly (by making government policy) or indirectly (by pressuring incumbent politicians).

1 Classes under capitalism

Class warfare is a term long-used by many socialistsFor information on mainstream political parties using the term "Socialist", see Social democracy and Democratic socialism For the governments of the USSR, the PRC, and others, see: Communist state Other variants of Socialism include Marxism, Communism, an (including Marxists and communistsThis article is about communism as a form of society, as an ideology advocating that form of society, and as a popular movement. For issues regarding the organization of the communist movement, see the Communist party article. For issues regarding one-par, but also anarchistsLibertarian socialism is a political philosophy dedicated to opposing coercive forms of authority and social hierarchy, most famously the institutions of capitalism and the state. It has gone by various names: libertarian communism anarcho-communism left-, democratic socialistsDemocratic socialism is a political movement propagating the ideals of socialism within the framework of a parliamentary democracy. Democratic socialism has its roots in classical Marxism and the socialist movement of the 19th century; however, it is stro, etc.) to describe social and political conflicts between classes (groups of people with a different relationship to the means of productionIn Marxist economics and its contemporary derivatives, the means of production refers to physical, non-human, inputs used in production. This includes factories, machines, and tools, along with both infrastructural capital and natural capital, the classic, and to each other).

In this view, capitalism consists of two social classes: the wage-workers (the proletariatThe proletariat (from Latin proles offspring) is a term used to identify a lower social class; a member of such a class is called a proletarian . Originally it was identified as those people who have no other wealth than their sons; the term was initially) and the business owners or capitalists (the bourgeoisie). The wage-workers do not own or have control over the means of production, and must sell their labor-power to the capitalists in order to survive. The capitalists own and control the means of production, and subsist by exploiting the workers.

Therefore, a socio-political imbalance is said to exist between individuals of extreme wealth or power and those with little or no wealth. This imbalance was probably first recognized by Adam Smith:

"The masters [i.e., employers], being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long-run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him, but the necessity is not so immediate." (The Wealth of Nations, volume I, ch. 8, paragraph 12)

Going beyond Smith, the interests of the wealthy are seen to conflict (often dramatically and violently) with the interests and needs of classes without power.

In any class society, each of the two main classes has its own divisions, so that neither is monolithic. Concerning capitalism, Marxist theory argues that the working class has both an "objective" class interest as a collective group, and a large number of individual interests of workers. Class interest may thus differ from "trade union consciousness", economism, and the like. Similarly, the capitalist class may be riven by the difference between the long-term collective interest of the class and the profit-seeking of individual capitalists. In a revolutionary situation, convergence of individual interests and class interests is expected; this might be seen as a polarization of society.

The empirical manifestation of class antagonisms depends on the specific (concrete) historical situation in which they operate. For example, other societal divisions -- concerning issues of nationality, ethnicity, religion, language, and gender -- can interact with, confuse, and/or mute class tensions. Sometimes class can be simultaneously moderated by ethnic issues (as between white proletarians and capitalists in apartheid-era South Africa) and intensified by them (as between blacks and whites there).