Class conflict is most commonly described as occurring within capitalist societies. The conflict manifests itself as clashes between the capitalist class and working class, and takes the form of disputes over hours of work, amount paid in wages, division of profits, culture in the workplace, cost of consumer goods, cost of rent, control over
parliament or government
bureaucracy, and
economic inequality. Even a seemingly benign humanitarian program such as government-provided disaster relief can exacerbate class conflict if the relief is seen as being unequally distributed depending on the recipient's class.
Adam Smith As a
liberal political economist,
Adam Smith believed that the amassing of property in the hands of a minority naturally resulted in a disharmonious state of affairs. He wrote that "avarice and ambition in the rich, in the poor the hatred of labour and the love of present ease and enjoyment, are the passions which prompt to invade property", requiring a government to protect property rights, which he elaborated on in
The Wealth of Nations: Smith observed that, outside of colonies where land is cheap and labour expensive, both the masters who subsist by profit and the masters who subsist by rents will work in tandem to subjugate the class of workmen, who subsist by wages. He analyzed wage levels in terms of the conflicting interests of owners of capital and of labourers. Of the latter, he said they were often compelled to form
trade unions for fear of suffering starvation wages:
Karl Marx In his writings,
Karl Marx argued that
classes had formed in history due to changes in the
mode of production. Members of a class may become aware of their economic position in society, achieving what is known as
class consciousness. For workers, this happens when they become aware of their
exploitation at the hands of the capitalist class. According to Marx, workers then take action against capitalists, and vice versa. In his analysis of 19th-century industrial society, he identified two main groups as the source of
social stratification, which in his view generated class conflict: •
Labour (the
proletariat or workers) includes anyone who earns their livelihood by selling their
labor power and being paid a wage or salary for their labor time. They have little choice but to work for capital, since they typically have no independent way to survive. •
Capital (the
bourgeoisie or capitalists) includes anyone who gets their income not from labor as much as from the
surplus value they appropriate from the workers who create wealth. The income of the capitalists, therefore, is based on their
exploitation of the workers (proletariat). In Marxist theory, class struggle becomes a more potent factor as it becomes more general, as industries are organized rather than crafts, as workers agitate for systemic change, and as their class consciousness rises. Marx referred to this as the progress of the proletariat from being a class "in itself", i.e., merely a position in the social structure, to being one "for itself", an active and conscious force that could change the world. While Marx elevated the importance of the class struggle, he did not claim to have discovered it. He acknowledged his debt to Adam Smith and other earlier economists and historians. In an 1852 letter to
Joseph Weydemeyer, Marx wrote: "And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society nor yet the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes." He believed the class struggle would result in the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie, and that private property would become communally owned. He predicted that after a revolution, as class boundaries broke down, the need for a state apparatus would diminish, which would lead to a
classless, stateless
communist society.
John Stuart Mill Like Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill was a liberal political economist concerned with class conflict. In his
Considerations on Representative Government, he notes the complete marginalisation of workmen's voices in
Parliament, rhetorically asking whether its members ever empathise with the position of workmen, instead of siding entirely with their masters, on issues such as the right to
go on strike. Later in the book, he argues that an important function of
representative government is to provide a relatively equal balance of power between workmen and masters, in order to prevent threats to the good of the whole of society.
Max Weber While
Max Weber accepted the Marxian notion of classes in conflict due to stratification, he did not reduce it to a binary struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. Instead, Weber claimed that society contained multiple strata, stemming from differences in property ownership, political power, and social standing. His multiclass approach to social stratification went beyond economic factors to also include differences in status and prestige.
Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer Charles Comte and
Charles Dunoyer believed that class struggle was engendered by
factions that managed to gain control of the
state apparatus. The
ruling classes are the groups that seize the power of the state to carry out their political agenda; the
ruled are then taxed and regulated by the state for the benefit of the ruling classes. Through
taxation,
subsidies,
tax codes, laws, and privileges, the state creates class conflict by giving preferential treatment to some at the expense of others. In the
free market, by contrast, exchanges are not carried out by force but by the
non-aggression principle of cooperation in a
win-win scenario.
Other perspectives One of the first writers to comment on class struggle in the modern sense of the term was the
French revolutionary
François Boissel. Other class struggle commentators include
Henri de Saint-Simon,
Augustin Thierry,
François Guizot,
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, in
What is Property? (1840) states that "certain classes do not relish investigation into the pretended titles to property, and its fabulous and perhaps scandalous history." While Proudhon saw the solution as the lower classes forming an alternative, solidarity economy centered on cooperatives and self-managed workplaces, which would slowly undermine and replace capitalist class society, the anarchist
Mikhail Bakunin insisted that a massive class struggle by the working class, peasantry and poor was essential to the creation of libertarian socialism. This would require a final showdown in the form of a social revolution. One of the earliest analyses of the development of class as the development of conflicts between emergent classes is available in
Peter Kropotkin's
Mutual Aid. In this work, Kropotkin analyzes the disposal of goods after death in pre-class or
hunter-gatherer societies, and how inheritance produces early
class divisions and conflict.
Fascists have often opposed 'horizontal' class struggle in favour of vertical national struggle and instead have attempted to appeal to the working class while promising to preserve the existing social classes and have proposed an alternative concept known as
class collaboration. == Twentieth and twenty-first centuries ==