In political theory and particularly Marxism, class consciousness is the set of beliefs that a person holds regarding their social class or economic rank in society, the structure of their class, and their class interests] According to Karl Marx, it is an awareness that is key to sparking a revolution that would "create a dictatorship of the proletariat, transforming it from a wage-earning, property-less mass into the ruling class".
Marxist theory
While German theorist Karl Marx
rarely used the term "class consciousness", he did make the distinction
between "class in itself", which is defined as a category of people
having a common relation to the means of production; and a "class for itself", which is defined as a stratum organized in active pursuit of its own interests
Defining a person's social class can be a determinant for their
awareness of it. Marxists define classes on the basis of their relation
to the means of production, especially on whether they own capital. Non-Marxist social scientists distinguish various social strata on the basis of income, occupation, or status.
Early in the 19th century, the labels "working classes" and "middle classes"
were already coming into common usage: "The old hereditary aristocracy,
reinforced by the new gentry who owed their success to commerce,
industry, and the professions, evolved into an "upper class". Its consciousness was formed in part by public schools (in the British sense
where it refers to a form of private school) and Universities. The
upper class tenaciously maintained control over the political system,
depriving not only the working classes but the middle classes of a voice
in the political process".
Georg Lukács' History and Class Consciousness (1923)
Class consciousness, as described by Georg Lukács's famous History and Class Consciousness (1923), is opposed to any psychological conception of consciousness, which forms the basis of individual or mass psychology (see Freud or, before him, Gustave Le Bon).
According to Lukács, each social class has a determined class
consciousness which it can achieve. In effect, as opposed to the liberal conception of consciousness as the basis of individual freedom and of the social contract,
Marxist class consciousness is not an origin, but an achievement (i.e.
it must be "earned" or won). Hence, it is never assured: the proletariat's class consciousness is the result of a permanent struggle to understand the "concretetotality" of the historical process.
According to Lukács, the proletariat was the first class in
history that may achieve true class consciousness because of its
specific position highlighted in The Communist Manifesto as the "living negation" of capitalism. All other classes, including the bourgeoisie, are limited to a "false consciousness"
which impedes them from understanding the totality of history: instead
of understanding each specific moment as a portion of a supposedly
deterministic historical process, they universalize
it and believe it is everlasting. Hence, capitalism is not thought as a
specific phase of history, but is naturalized and thought of as an
eternal solidified part of history. Says Lukács, this "false
consciousness", which forms ideology itself, is not a simple error as in classical philosophy, but an illusion which cannot be dispelled.
Marx described it in his theory of commodity fetishism, which Lukács completed with his concept of reification in which alienation
is what follows the worker's estrangement to the world following the
new life acquired by the product of his work. The dominant bourgeois
ideology thus leads the individual to see the achievement of his labour take a life of its own. Furthermore, specialization is also seen as a characteristic of the ideology of modern rationalism,
which creates specific and independent domains (art, politics, science
and the like). Only a global perspective can point out how all these
different domains interact, argues Lukács. He also points out how Immanuel Kant
brought to its limit the classical opposition between the abstract form
and the concrete, historical content, which is abstractly conceived as
irrational and contingent. Thus, with Kant's rational system history becomes totally contingent and is thus ignored. Only with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's dialectic can a mediation be found between the abstract form and the abstract notion of a concrete content.
Even if the bourgeois loses his individual point of view in an
attempt to grasp the reality of the totality of society and of the
historical process, he is condemned to a form of false consciousness. As
an individual, he will always see the collective result of individual
actions as a form of "objectivelaw" to which he must submit himself (liberalism has gone so far as seeing an invisible hand
in this collective results, making capitalism the best of all possible
worlds). By contrast, the proletariat would be, according to Lukács, the
first class in history with the possibility to achieve a true form of
class consciousness, granting it knowledge of the totality of the historical process.
The proletariat takes the place of Hegel's Weltgeist ("World Spirit"), which achieves history through Volksgeist ("the spirit of the people"): the idealist conception of an abstract Spirit making history, which ends in the realm of Reason, is replaced by a materialist conception based not on mythical Spirits, but on a concrete "identical subject-object
of history": the proletariat. The proletariat is both the "object" of
history, created by the capitalist social formation; but it is also the
"subject" of history, as it is its labour that shapes the world, and
thus, knowledge of itself is also, necessarily, knowledge of the reality
and of the totality of the historical process. The proletariat's class
consciousness is not immediate; class consciousness must not be mistaken
either with the consciousness of one's future and collective interests,
opposed to personal immediate interests.
The possibility of class consciousness is given by the objective process of history, which transforms the proletariat into a commodity,
hence objectifying it. Class consciousness is thus not a simple
subjective act: "as consciousness here is not the consciousness of an
object opposed to itself, but the object's consciousness, the act of
being conscious of oneself disrupts the objectivity form of its object"
(in "Reification and the Proletariat's Consciousness" §3, III "The
proletariat's point of view"). In other words, instead of the bourgeois
subject and its corresponding ideological concept of individual free will,
the proletariat has been transformed into an object (a commodity)
which, when it takes consciousness of itself, transforms the very
structure of objectivity, that is of reality.
This specific role of the proletariat is a consequence of its
specific position; thus, for the first time, consciousness of itself
(class consciousness) is also consciousness of the totality (knowledge
of the entire social and historical process). Through dialectical materialism, the proletariat understands that what the individual bourgeois conceived as "laws" akin to the laws of nature, which may be only manipulated as in René Descartes's
dream, but not changed, is in fact the result of a social and
historical process, which can be controlled. Furthermore, only
dialectical materialism links together all specialized domains, which
modern rationalism can only think as separate instead of as forming a
totality.
Only the proletariat can understand that the so-called "eternal
laws of economics" are in fact nothing more than the historical form
taken by the social and economical process in a capitalist society.
Since these "laws" are the result of the collective actions of
individuals, and are thus created by society, Marx and Lukács reasoned
that this necessarily meant that they could be changed. Any
attempt in transforming the so-called "laws" governing capitalism into
universal principles, valid in all times and places, are criticized by
Lukács as a form of false consciousness.
As the "expression of the revolutionary process itself",
dialectical materialism, which is the only theory with an understanding
of the totality of the historical process, is the theory which may help
the proletariat in its "struggle for class consciousness". Although
Lukács does not contest the Marxist primacy of the economic base on the ideological superstructure (not to be mistaken with vulgar economic determinism), he considers that there is a place for autonomous struggle for class consciousness.
In order to achieve a unity of theory and praxis,
theory must not only tend toward reality in an attempt to change it;
reality must also tend towards theory. Otherwise, the historical process
leads a life of its own, while theorists make their own little
theories, desperately waiting for some kind of possible influence over
the historical process. Henceforth, reality itself must tend toward the
theory, making it the "expression of the revolutionary process itself".
In turn, a theory which has as its goal helping the proletariat achieve
class consciousness must first be an "objective theory of class
consciousness". However, theory in itself is insufficient, and
ultimately relies on the struggle of humankind and of the proletariat for consciousness: the "objective theory of class consciousness is only the theory of its objective possibility".
Criticism
Economist Ludwig von Mises
argued that "Marx confus[ed] the notions of caste and class". Mises
allowed that class consciousness and the associated class struggle were
valid concepts in some circumstances where rigid social castes exist, e.g. when slavery
is legal and slaves thus share a common motive for ending their
disadvantaged status relative to other castes, but according to Mises
"no such conflicts are present in a society in which all citizens are
equal before the law. [...] No logical objection can be advanced against
distinguishing various classes among the members of such a society. Any
classification is logically permissible, however arbitrarily the mark
of distinction may be chosen. But it is nonsensical to classify the
members of a capitalistic society according to their position in the
framework of the social division of labor and then to identify these
classes with the castes of a status society". Murray Rothbard
argued that Marx's efforts to portray the workers and capitalists as
two monolithic groups was false as workers and capitalists would
routinely compete within themselves, such as capitalists entrepreneurs
competing amongst themselves or native workers competing with immigrant
workers. Rothbard argues that if there is constant conflict between
different members of the same class, then it is absurd to argue that
these members have objective interests with one another against another
class.
A slave rebellion is an armed uprising by enslaved people,
as a way of fighting for their freedom. Rebellions of enslaved people
have occurred in nearly all societies that practice slavery or have
practiced slavery in the past. A desire for freedom and the dream of
successful rebellion is often the greatest object of song, art, and
culture amongst the enslaved population. Many of the events, however,
are often violently opposed and suppressed by slaveholders.
Ancient Sparta had a special type of serf called helots who were often treated harshly, leading them to rebel. According to Herodotus (IX, 28–29), helots were seven times as numerous as Spartans. Every autumn, according to Plutarch (Life of Lycurgus, 28, 3–7), the Spartan ephors would pro forma
declare war on the helot population so that any Spartan citizen could
kill a helot without fear of blood or guilt in order to keep them in
line (crypteia).
In the Roman Empire,
though the heterogeneous nature of the slave population worked against a
strong sense of solidarity, slave revolts did occur and were severely
punished. The most famous slave rebellion in Europe was led by Spartacus in RomanItaly, the Third Servile War. This war resulted in the 6000 surviving rebel slaves being crucified along the main roads leading into Rome. This was the third in a series of unrelated Servile Wars fought by slaves against the Romans.
The English peasants' revolt of 1381 led to calls for the reform of feudalism in England and an increase in rights for serfs. The Peasants' Revolt was one of several popular revolts in late medieval Europe. Richard II agreed to reforms including fair rents and the abolition of serfdom.
Following the collapse of the revolt, the king's concessions were
quickly revoked, but the rebellion is significant because it marked the
beginning of the end of serfdom in medieval England.
In Russia, the slaves were usually classified as kholops. A kholop's master had unlimited power over his life. Slavery remained a major institution in Russia until 1723, when Peter the Great converted the household slaves into house serfs. Russian agricultural slaves were formally converted into serfs earlier in 1679. During the 16th and 17th centuries, runaway serfs and kholops known as Cossacks, ("outlaws") formed autonomous communities in the southern steppes. There were numerous rebellions against slavery and serfdom, most often in conjunction with Cossack uprisings, such as the uprisings of Ivan Bolotnikov (1606–1607), Stenka Razin (1667–1671), Kondraty Bulavin (1707–1709), and Yemelyan Pugachev (1773–1775), often involving hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions. Between the end of the Pugachev rebellion and the beginning of the 19th century, there were hundreds of outbreaks across Russia.
Numerous African slave rebellions and insurrections took place in
North America during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. There is
documented evidence of more than 250 uprisings or attempted uprisings
involving 10 or more slaves. Three of the best known in the United
States during the 19th century are the revolts by Gabriel Prosser in the Richmond, Virginia area in 1800, Denmark Vesey in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822, and Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831. Slave resistance in the antebellum South did not gain the attention of academic historians until the 1940s, when historian Herbert Aptheker
started publishing the first serious scholarly work on the subject.
Aptheker stressed how rebellions were rooted in the exploitative
conditions of the southern slave system. He traversed libraries and
archives throughout the South, managing to uncover roughly 250 similar
instances.
Middle East
The Zanj Rebellion was the culmination of a series of small revolts. It took place near the city of Basra,
in southern Iraq over fifteen years (869−883 AD). It grew to involve
over 500,000 slaves, who were imported from across the Muslim empire.
Europe and the Mediterranean
In the 3rd century BCE, Drimakos (or Drimachus) led a slave revolt on the slave entrepot of Chios, took to the hills and directed a band of runaways in operations against their ex-masters.
A number of slave revolts occurred in the Mediterranean area during the early modern period:
1748: Hungarian, Georgian and Maltese slaves on board the Ottoman ship Lupa revolted and sailed the ship to Malta.
1749: Conspiracy of the Slaves
– Muslim slaves in Malta planned to rebel and take over the island, but
plans leaked out beforehand and the would-be rebels were arrested and
many were executed.
1760: Christian slaves on board the Ottoman ship Corona Ottomana revolted and sailed the ship to Malta.
São Tomé and Príncipe
On 9 July 1595, Rei Amador,
and his people, the Angolars, allied with other enslaved Africans of
its plantations, marched into the interior woods and battled against the
Portuguese. It is said that day, Rei Amador and his followers raised a
flag in front of the settlers and proclaimed Rei Amador as king of São Tomé and Príncipe, making himself as "Rei Amador, liberator of all the black people".
Between 1595 and 1596, the island of São Tomé was ruled by the
Angolars, under the command of Rei Amador. On 4 January 1596, he was
captured, sent to prison and was later executed by the Portuguese. Still
today, they remember him fondly and consider him a national hero of the
islands.
In the first decades of the 17th century, there were frequent slave revolts in the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe, off the African shore, which damaged the sugar crop cultivation there.
St. John, 1733, in what was then the Danish West Indies. The St. John's Slave Rebellion
is one of the earliest and longest lasting slave rebellions in the
Americas. It ended with defeat, however, and many rebels, including one
of the leaders Breffu, committed suicide rather than being recaptured.
The most successful slave uprising was the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791 and was eventually led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, culminating in the independent black republic of Haiti.
Panama also has an extensive history of slave rebellions going back to the 16th century. Slaves were brought to the isthmus from many regions in Africa, including the modern day countries of the Congo, Senegal, Guinea, and Mozambique.
Immediately before their arrival on shore, or very soon after, many
enslaved Africans revolted against their captors or participated in mass
maroonage or desertion. The freed Africans founded communities in the forests and mountains, organized guerrilla bands known as Cimarrones. They began a long guerrilla war against the SpanishConquistadores, sometimes in conjunction with nearby indigenous communities like the Kuna and the Guaymí.
Despite massacres by the Spanish, the rebels fought until the Spanish
crown was forced to concede to treaties that granted the Africans a life
without Spanish violence and incursions. The leaders of the guerrilla
revolts included Felipillo, Bayano, Juan de Dioso, Domingo Congo, Antón Mandinga, and Luis de Mozambique.
In the 1730s, the militias of the Colony of Jamaica fought the Jamaican Maroons
for a decade, before agreeing to sign peace treaties in 1739 and 1740,
which recognised their freedom in five separate Maroon Towns.
Tacky's War (1760) was a slave uprising in Jamaica, which ran from May to July before it was put down by the British colonial government.
The Suriname slave rebellion was marked by constant guerrilla warfare by Maroons and in 1765-1793 by the Aluku. This rebellion was led by Boni.
Cuba had slave revolts in 1795, 1798, 1802, 1805, 1812 (the Aponte revolt), 1825, 1827, 1829, 1833, 1834, 1835, 1838, 1839–43 and 1844 (the La Escalera conspiracy and revolt).
Vincent Brown, a professor of History and of African and
African-American Studies at Harvard, has made a study of the
Transatlantic Slave Trade. In 2013, Brown teamed up with Axis Maps to
create an interactive map of Jamaican slave uprisings in the 18th
century called, “Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761, A Cartographic
Narrative.”
Brown's efforts have shown that the slave insurrection in Jamaica in
1760-61 was a carefully planned affair and not a spontaneous, chaotic
eruption, as was often argued (due in large part to the lack of written
records produced by the insurgents).
Later, in 1795, several slave rebellions broke out across the Caribbean, influenced by the Haitian Revolution:
In Jamaica,
the descendants of Africans who fought and escaped from slavery and
established free communities in the mountainous interior of Jamaica (Maroons), fought to preserve their freedom from British colonialists, in what came to be known as the Second Maroon War. However, this featured just one of the five Maroon towns in Jamaica.
In the Danish West Indies an 1848 slave revolt led to emancipation of all slaves in the Danish West Indies.
In Puerto Rico in 1821, Marcos Xiorro
planned and conspired to lead a slave revolt against the sugar
plantation owners and the Spanish Colonial government. Even though the
conspiracy was unsuccessful, Xiorro achieved legendary status among the
slaves and is part of Puerto Rico's folklore.
Brazil
Many slave rebellions occurred in Brazil, most famously the Bahia Rebellion of 1822-1830 and the Malê Revolt of 1835 by the predominantly Muslim West African slaves at the time. The term malê was commonly used to refer to Muslims at the time from the Yoruba word imale.
Drapetomania was a supposed mental illness invented by American physician Samuel A. Cartwright in 1851 that allegedly caused black slaves to run away. Today, drapetomania is considered an example of pseudoscience, and part of the edifice of scientific racism.
Slave resistance in the antebellumSouth did not gain the attention of academic historians until the 1940s, when historian Herbert Aptheker started publishing the first serious scholarly work
on the subject. Aptheker stressed how rebellions were rooted in the
exploitative conditions of the Southern slave system. He traversed
libraries and archives throughout the South, managing to uncover roughly
250 similar instances.
The 1811 German Coast Uprising, which took place in rural southeast Louisiana, at that time the Territory of Orleans, early in 1811, involved up to 500 insurgentslaves. It was suppressed by white militias and a detachment of the United States Army.
In retaliation for the deaths of two white men and the destruction of
property, the authorities killed at least 40 black men in a violent
confrontation (the numbers cited are inconsistent); at least 29 more
were executed (combined figures from two jurisdictions, St. Charles Parish and Orleans Parish). There was a third jurisdiction for a tribunal and what amounted to summary judgments against the accused, St. John the Baptist Parish. Fewer than 20 men are said to have escaped; some of those were later caught and killed, on their way to freedom.
Although only involving about seventy slaves and free Blacks, Turner's 1831 rebellion
is considered to be a significant event in American history. The
rebellion caused the slave-holding South to go into a panic. Fifty-five
men, women, and children were killed, and enslaved Blacks freed on
multiple plantations in Southampton County, Virginia,
as Turner and his fellow rebels attacked the White institution of
plantation slavery. Turner and the other rebels were eventually stopped
by state White militias (Aptheker, 1993).
The rebellion resulted in the hanging of about 56 slaves, including Nat
Turner himself. Up to 200 other blacks were killed during the hysteria which followed, few of whom likely had anything to do with the uprising.
Fears afterwards led to new legislation passed by Southern states
prohibiting the movement, assembly, and education of slaves, and
reducing the rights of free people of color. In addition, the Virginia legislature considered abolishing slavery to prevent further rebellions. In a close vote, however, the state decided to keep slaves.
The abolitionistJohn Brown had already fought against pro-slavery forces in Bleeding Kansas for several years when he decided to lead a raid on a Federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia.
This raid was a joint attack by former slaves, freed blacks, and white
men who had corresponded with slaves on plantations in order to create a
general uprising among slaves. Brown carried hundreds of copies of the
constitution for a new republic of former slaves in the Appalachians.
But they were never distributed, and the slave uprisings that were to
have helped Brown did not happen. Some believe that he knew the raid was
doomed but went ahead anyway, because of the support for abolition it
would (and did) generate. The U.S. military, led by Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee,
easily overwhelmed Brown's forces. But directly following this, slave
disobedience and the number of runaways increased markedly in Virginia.
The historian Steven Hahn proposes that the self-organized involvement of slaves in the Union Army during the American Civil War composed a slave rebellion that dwarfed all others. Similarly, tens of thousands of slaves joined British forces or escaped to British lines during the American Revolution,
sometimes using the disruption of war to gain freedom. For instance,
when the British evacuated from Charleston and Savannah, they took
10,000 slaves with them. They also evacuated slaves from New York,
taking more than 3,000 for resettlement to Nova Scotia, where they were
recorded as Black Loyalists and given land grants.
In 1808 and 1825, there were slave rebellions in the Cape Colony, newly acquired by the British. Although the slave trade was officially abolished in the British Empire by the Slave Trade Act of 1807, and slavery itself a generation later with the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, it took until 1850 to be halted in the territories which were to become South Africa.
There are 485 recorded instances of slaves revolting on board slave ships. A few of these ships endured more than one uprising during their career.
Most accounts of revolts aboard slave ships are given by Europeans. There are few examples of accounts by slaves themselves. William Snelgrave reported that the slaves who revolted on the British ship Henry in 1721 claimed that those who had captured them were "Rogues to buy them" and that they were bent on regaining their liberty.
Another example that Richardson gives is that of James Towne who gives
the account of slaves stating that Europeans did not have the right to
enslave and take them away from their homeland and "wives and children."
Richardson compares several factors that contributed to slave
revolts on board ships: conditions on the ships, geographical location,
and proximity to the shore.
He suggests that revolts were more likely to occur when a ship was
still in sight of the shore. The threat of attack from the shore by
other Africans was also a concern. If the ship was hit by disease and a
large portion of the crew had been killed, the chances of insurrection
were higher. Where the slaves were captured also had an effect on the number of insurrections. In many places, such as the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra, the percentage of revolts and the percentage of the slave trade match up. Yet ships taking slaves from Senegambia experienced 22 percent of shipboard revolts while only contributing to four and a half percent of the slave trade.
Slaves coming from West Central Africa accounted for 44 percent of the
trade while only experiencing 11 percent of total revolts.
Lorenzo J. Greene gives many accounts of slave revolts on ships
coming out of New England. These ships belonged to Puritans who
controlled much of the slave trade in New England.
Most revolts on board ships were unsuccessful. The crews of these
ships, while outnumbered, were disciplined, well fed, and armed with
muskets, swords, and sometimes cannons, and they were always on guard
for resistance. The slaves on the other hand were the opposite, armed only with bits of wood and the chains that bound them.
However, some captives were able to take over the ships that were
their prisons and regain their freedom. On October 5, 1764 the New
Hampshire ship Adventure captained by John Millar was successfully taken by its cargo.
The slaves on board revolted while the ship was anchored off the coast
and all but two of the crew, including Captain Millar, had succumbed to
disease. Another successful slave revolt occurred six days after the ship Little George had left the Guinea coast. The ship carried ninety-six slaves, thirty-five of which were male.
The slaves attacked in the early hours of the morning, easily
overpowering the two men on guard. The slaves were able to load one of
the cannons on board and fire it at the crew. After taking control of
the ship they sailed it up the Sierra Leone River and escaped.
After having defended themselves with muskets for several days below
decks the crew lowered a small boat into the river to escape. After
nine days of living on raw rice they were rescued.
There is one factor that is not addressed by either Richardson or
Greene. That is of enslaved sailors on slave ships. While Mariana P.
Candido does not write explicitly on revolts, she does discuss there
being enslaved Africans working on the ships that transported other
Africans into slavery. These men, 230 in all,
were used onboard slave ships for their ability to communicate with the
slaves being brought on board and to translate between Captain and
slaver. Enslaved sailors were able to alleviate some of the fears that newly boarded slaves had, such as fear of being eaten.
This was a double-edged sword. The enslaved sailors sometimes joined
other slaves in the revolts against the captain they served. In 1812
enslaved sailors joined a revolt on board the Portuguese ship Feliz Eugenia just off the coast of Benguela.
The revolt took place below decks. The sailors, along with many of the
children who were on board, were able to escape using small boats.
Class conflict, also referred to as class struggle and class warfare, is the political tension and economic antagonism that exists in society consequent to socio-economic competition among the social classes or between rich and poor.
The forms of class conflict include direct violence such as wars for resources and cheap labor, assassinations or revolution;
indirect violence such as deaths from poverty and starvation, illness
and unsafe working conditions; and economic coercion such as the threat
of unemployment or the withdrawal of investment capital; or
ideologically, by way of political literature. Additionally, political
forms of class warfare include: legal and illegal lobbying, and bribery
of legislators.
In the political and economic philosophies of Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin,
class struggle is a central tenet and a practical means for effecting
radical social and political changes for the social majority.
Farmer confronting landlord during Mao Zedong's mass purging of landlords
In political science, socialists and Marxists use the term class conflict to define a social class by its relationship to the means of production,
such as factories, agricultural land, and industrial machinery. The
social control of labor and of the production of goods and services, is a
political contest between the social classes.
The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin said that the class struggles of the working class, the peasantry, and the working poor were central to realizing a social revolution to depose and replace the ruling class, and the creation of libertarian socialism.
Marx's theory of history proposes that class conflict is decisive in the history of economic systems organized by hierarchies of social class such as capitalism and feudalism. Marxists refer to its overt manifestations as class war, a struggle whose resolution in favor of the working class is viewed by them as inevitable under the plutocratic capitalism.
Oligarchs versus commoners
Where
societies are socially divided based on status, wealth, or control of
social production and distribution, class structures arise and are thus
coeval with civilization itself. This has been well documented since at
least European classical antiquity such as the Conflict of the Orders and Spartacus, among others.
Thucydides
In his History, Thucydides describes a civil war in the city of Corcyra between the pro-Athens party of the common people and their pro-Corintholigarchic
opposition. Near the climax of the struggle, "the oligarchs in full
rout, fearing that the victorious commons might assault and carry the
arsenal and put them to the sword, fired the houses round the
market-place and the lodging-houses, in order to bar their advance." The historian Tacitus would later recount a similar class conflict in the city of Seleucia,
in which disharmony between the oligarchs and the commoners would
typically lead to each side calling on outside help to defeat the other.
Thucydides believed that "as long as poverty gives men the courage of
necessity, [...] so long will the impulse never be wanting to drive men
into danger."
Aristotle
In his treatise Politics, Aristotle
describes the basic dimensions of class war: "Again, because the rich
are generally few in number, while the poor are many, they appear to be
antagonistic, and as the one or the other prevails they form the
government.". Aristotle also commented that "poverty is the parent of revolution."
However, he did not consider this its only cause. In a society where
property is distributed equally across the community, "the nobles will
be dissatisfied because they think themselves worthy of more than an
equal share of honours; and this is often found to be a cause of
sedition and revolution."
Aristotle thought it wrong for the poor to seize the wealth of the rich
and divide it among themselves, but he also thought it wrong for the
rich to impoverish the multitude.
Moreover, he discussed what he considered a middle way between
laxity and cruelty in the treatment of slaves by their masters, averring
that "if not kept in hand, [slaves] are insolent, and think that they
are as good as their masters, and, if harshly treated, they hate and
conspire against them."
Socrates
Socrates was perhaps the first major Greek philosopher to describe class war. In Plato's Republic,
Socrates proposes that "any city, however small, is in fact divided
into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at
war with one another."
Socrates took a poor view of oligarchies, in which members of a small
class of wealthy property owners take positions of power in order to
dominate a large class of impoverished commoners. He used the analogy of
a maritime pilot, who, like a powerholder in a polis, ought to be chosen for his skill, not for the amount of property he owns.
Plutarch
This 6th century Athenian black-figure urn, in the British Museum, depicts the olive harvest. Many farmers, enslaved for debt, would have worked on large estates for their creditors.
Plutarch
recounts how various classical figures took part in class conflict.
Oppressed by their indebtedness to the rich, the mass of Athenians chose
Solon to be the lawgiver to lead them to freedom from their creditors. Hegel believed that Solon's constitution of the Athenian popular assembly created a political sphere that had the effect of balancing the interests of the three main classes of Athens:
The wealthy aristocratic party of the plain
The poorer common party of the mountains
The moderate party of the coast
Participation in Ancient Greek class war could have dangerous consequences. Plutarch noted of King Agis of Sparta
that, "being desirous to raise the people, and to restore the noble and
just form of government, now long fallen into disuse, [he] incurred the
hatred of the rich and powerful, who could not endure to be deprived of
the selfish enjoyment to which they were accustomed."
Patricians versus plebeians
It was similarly difficult for the Romans to maintain peace between the upper class, the patricians, and the lower class, the plebs. French Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu notes that this conflict intensified after the overthrow of the Roman monarchy.
In The Spirit of Laws he lists the four main grievances of the plebs, which were rectified in the years following the deposition of King Tarquin:
The patricians had much too easy access to positions of public service.
The plebs had too little power in their assemblies.
Camillus
The Senate had the ability to give a magistrate the power of dictatorship,
meaning he could bypass public law in the pursuit of a prescribed
mandate. Montesquieu explains that the purpose of this institution was
to tilt the balance of power in favour of the patricians. However, in an attempt to resolve a conflict between the patricians and the plebs, the dictator Camillus used his power of dictatorship to coerce the Senate into giving the plebs the right to choose one of the two consuls.
Marius
Tacitus
believed that the increase in Roman power spurred the patricians to
expand their power over more and more cities. This process, he felt,
exacerbated pre-existing class tensions with the plebs, and eventually
culminated in the patrician Sulla's first civil war, with the populistreformerMarius. Marius had taken the step of enlisting capite censi, the very lowest class of citizens, into the army, for the first time allowing non-land owners into the legions.
Tiberius Gracchus
Tiberius Gracchus
Of all the notable figures discussed by Plutarch and Tacitus, agrarian reformerTiberius Gracchus
may have most challenged the upper classes and most championed the
cause of the lower classes. In a speech to the common soldiery, he
decried their lowly conditions:
"The savage beasts," said he, "in Italy, have their
particular dens, they have their places of repose and refuge; but the
men who bear arms, and expose their lives for the safety of their
country, enjoy in the meantime nothing more in it but the air and light;
and having no houses or settlements of their own, are constrained to
wander from place to place with their wives and children."
Following this observation, he remarked that these men "fought indeed
and were slain, but it was to maintain the luxury and the wealth of
other men." Cicero believed that Tiberius Gracchus's reforming efforts saved Rome from tyranny, arguing:
Tiberius Gracchus (says Cicero) caused the free-men to be admitted into the tribes,
not by the force of his eloquence, but by a word, by a gesture; which
had he not effected, the republic, whose drooping head we are at present
scarce able to uphold, would not even exist.
Tiberius Gracchus weakened the power of the Senate by changing the law so that judges were chosen from the ranks of the knights, instead of their social superiors in the senatorial class.
Julius Caesar
Contrary to Shakespeare's depiction of Julius Caesar in the tragedy Julius Caesar, historian Michael Parenti has argued that Caesar was a populist, not a tyrant. In 2003 The New Press published Parenti's The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome.Publisher's Weekly
said "Parenti [...] narrates a provocative history of the late republic
in Rome (100–33 B.C.) to demonstrate that Caesar's death was the
culmination of growing class conflict, economic disparity and political
corruption." Kirkus Reviews
wrote: "Populist historian Parenti... views ancient Rome’s most famous
assassination not as a tyrannicide but as a sanguinary scene in the
never-ending drama of class warfare."
Coriolanus
Coriolanus, Act V, Scene III. Engraved by James Caldwell from a painting by Gavin Hamilton.
The patrician Coriolanus, whose life William Shakespeare would later depict in the tragic play Coriolanus,
fought on the other side of the class war, for the patricians and
against the plebs. When grain arrived to relieve a serious shortage in
the city of Rome, the plebs made it known that they felt it ought to be
divided amongst them as a gift, but Coriolanus stood up in the Senate
against this idea on the grounds that it would empower the plebs at the
expense of the patricians.
This decision would eventually contribute to Coriolanus's undoing when he was impeached following a trial by the tribunes of the plebs.
Montesquieu recounts how Coriolanus castigated the tribunes for trying a
patrician, when in his mind no one but a consul had that right,
although a law had been passed stipulating that all appeals affecting
the life of a citizen had to be brought before the plebs.
In the first scene of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, a crowd of
angry plebs gathers in Rome to denounce Coriolanus as the "chief enemy
to the people" and "a very dog to the commonalty" while the leader of
the mob speaks out against the patricians thusly:
They ne'er cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and
their store-houses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to support
usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich,
and provide more piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain the
poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there's all the love
they bear us.
Landlessness and debt
The Secession of the People to the Mons Sacer, engraving by B. Barloccini, 1849.
[T]he
plebeians of Rome [...] had been oppressed from the earliest times by
the weight of debt and usury; and the husbandman, during the term of his
military service, was obliged to abandon the cultivation of his farm.
The lands of Italy which had been originally divided among the families
of free and indigent proprietors, were insensibly purchased or usurped
by the avarice of the nobles; and in the age which preceded the fall of
the republic, it was computed that only two thousand citizens were
possessed of an independent substance.
Hegel
similarly states that the 'severity of the patricians their creditors,
the debts due to whom they had to discharge by slave-work, drove the
plebs to revolts.' Gibbon also explains how Augustus facilitated this class warfare by pacifying the plebs with actual bread and circuses.
The economist Adam Smith noted that the poor freeman's lack of land provided a major impetus for Roman colonisation, as a way to relieve class tensions at home between the rich and the landless poor. Hegel described the same phenomenon happening in the impetus to Greek colonisation.
It was with bitter sarcasm that Rousseau outlined the class conflict prevailing in his day between masters and their workmen:
You
have need of me, because I am rich and you are poor. We will therefore
come to an agreement. I will permit you to have the honour of serving
me, on condition that you bestow on me the little you have left, in
return for the pains I shall take to command you.
Rousseau argued that the most important task of any government is to
fight in class warfare on the side of workmen against their masters, who
he said engage in exploitation under the pretence of serving society.
Specifically, he believed that governments should actively intervene in
the economy to abolish poverty and prevent the accrual of too much
wealth in the hands of too few men.
Adam Smith
Like Rousseau, the classical liberalAdam Smith
believed that the amassing of property in the hands of a minority
naturally resulted in an disharmonious state of affairs where "the
affluence of the few supposes the indigence of many" and "excites the
indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted
by envy, to invade [the rich man's] possessions."
Concerning wages, he explained the conflicting class interests of masters and workmen, who he said were often compelled to form trade unions for fear of suffering starvation wages, as follows:
What
are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract
usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means
the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as
little, as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to
raise, the latter in order to lower, the wages of labour.
Smith was aware of the main advantage of masters over workmen, in addition to state protection:
The
masters, 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.
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.
Moreover, he warned against blindly legislating in favour of the class
of masters who subsist by profit, since, as he said, their intention is
to gain as large a share of their respective markets as possible, which
naturally results in monopoly prices or close to them, a situation harmful to the other social classes.
James Madison
In his Federalist No. 10, James Madison
revealed an emphatic concern with the conflict between rich and poor,
commenting that "the most common and durable source of factions has been
the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and
those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in
society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a
like discrimination."
He welcomed class-based factions into political life as a necessary
result of political liberty, stating that the most important task of
government was to manage and adjust for 'the spirit of party'.
John Stuart Mill
Adam Smith was not the only classical liberal political economist concerned with class conflict. In his Considerations on Representative Government, John Stuart Mill observed 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 truly 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.
During Mill's discussion of the merits of progressive taxation in his essay Utilitarianism, he notes as an aside the power of the rich as independent of state support:
People
feel obliged to argue that the State does more for the rich than for
the poor, as a justification for its taking more [in taxation] from
them: though this is in reality not true, for the rich would be far
better able to protect themselves, in the absence of law or government,
than the poor, and indeed would probably be successful in converting the
poor into their slaves.
Hegel
In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel
expressed concern that the standard of living of the poor might drop so
far as to make it even easier for the rich to amass even more wealth.
Hegel believed that, especially in a liberal country such as
contemporary England, the poorest will politicise their situation,
channelling their frustrations against the rich:
Against
nature man can claim no right, but once society is established, poverty
immediately takes the form of a wrong done to one class by another.
Capitalist societies
The
typical example of class conflict described is class conflict within
capitalism. This class conflict is seen to occur primarily between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat,
and takes the form of conflict over hours of work, value of wages,
division of profits, cost of consumer goods, the culture at work,
control over parliament or bureaucracy, and economic inequality.
The particular implementation of government programs which may seem
purely humanitarian, such as disaster relief, can actually be a form of
class conflict.
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
(1743–1826) led the U.S. as president from 1801 to 1809 and is
considered one of the founding fathers. Regarding the interaction
between social classes, he wrote:
I am convinced that those societies (as the Indians)
which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely
greater degree of happiness than those who live under the European
governments. Among the former, public opinion is in the place of law,
& restrains morals as powerfully as laws ever did anywhere. Among
the latter, under pretence of governing they have divided their nations
into two classes, wolves & sheep. I do not exaggerate. This is a
true picture of Europe. Cherish therefore the spirit of our people, and
keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but
reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to
the public affairs, you & I, & Congress & Assemblies, judges
& governors shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our
general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience
declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I
can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the
general prey of the rich on the poor.
— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Edward Carrington - 16 January 1787
Max Weber
Max Weber
(1864–1920) agreed with the fundamental ideas of Karl Marx about the
economy causing class conflict, but claimed that class conflict can also
stem from prestige and power.
Weber argued that classes come from the different property locations.
Different locations can largely affect one's class by their education
and the people they associate with.
He also stated that prestige results in different status groupings.
This prestige is based upon the social status of one's parents. Prestige
is an attributed value and many times cannot be changed. Weber stated
that power differences led to the formation of political parties.
Weber disagreed with Marx about the formation of classes. While Marx
believed that groups are similar due to their economic status, Weber
argued that classes are largely formed by social status. Weber did not believe that communities are formed by economic standing, but by similar social prestige. Weber did recognize that there is a relationship between social status, social prestige and classes.
Twentieth century
In
the U.S., class conflict is often noted in labor/management disputes.
As far back as 1933 representative Edward Hamilton of the Airline Pilot's Association, used the term "class warfare" to describe airline management's opposition at the National Labor Board hearings in October of that year.
Apart from these day-to-day forms of class conflict, during periods of
crisis or revolution class conflict takes on a violent nature and
involves repression, assault, restriction of civil liberties, and
murderous violence such as assassinations or death squads.
Class conflict intensified in the period after the 2007/8 financial crisis, which led to a global wave of anti-austerity protests, including the Greek and Spanish Indignados movements and later the Occupy movement, whose slogan was "We are the 99%", signalling a more expansive class antagonist against the financial elite than that of the classical Marxist proletariat.
The investor, billionaire, and philanthropistWarren Buffett, one of the wealthiest people in the world,
voiced in 2005 and once more in 2006 his view that his class, the "rich
class", is waging class warfare on the rest of society. In 2005 Buffet
said to CNN: "It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they
shouldn't be." In a November 2006 interview in The New York Times,
Buffett stated that "[t]here’s class warfare all right, but it’s my
class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning."
In the speech "The Great American Class War" (2013), the journalist Bill Moyers asserted the existence of social-class conflict between democracy and plutocracy in the U.S. Chris Hedges wrote a column for Truthdig called "Let's Get This Class War Started", which was a play on Pink's song "Let's Get This Party Started."
Historian Steve Fraser, author of The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power,
asserted in 2014 that class conflict is an inevitability if current
political and economic conditions continue, noting that "people are
increasingly fed up [...] their voices are not being heard. And I think
that can only go on for so long without there being more and more
outbreaks of what used to be called class struggle, class warfare."
Arab Spring
Often seen as part of the same "movement of squares" as the Indignado and Occupy movements, the Arab Spring
was a wave of social protests starting in 2011. Numerous factors have
culminated in the Arab Spring, including rejection of dictatorship or absolute monarchy, human rights violations, government corruption (demonstrated by Wikileaks diplomatic cables), economic decline, unemployment, extreme poverty, and a number of demographic structural factors, such as a large percentage of educated but dissatisfied youth within the population. but class conflict is also a key factor. The catalysts for the revolts in all Northern African and Persian Gulf countries
have been the concentration of wealth in the hands of autocrats in
power for decades, insufficient transparency of its redistribution,
corruption, and especially the refusal of the youth to accept the status
quo.
Karl Marx (1818–1883) was a German born philosopher who lived the majority of his adult life in London, England. In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx argued that a class is formed when its members achieve class consciousness and solidarity. This largely happens when the members of a class become aware of their exploitation
and the conflict with another class. A class will then realize their
shared interests and a common identity. According to Marx, a class will
then take action against those that are exploiting the lower classes.
What Marx points out is that members of each of the two main
classes have interests in common. These class or collective interests
are in conflict with those of the other class as a whole. This in turn
leads to conflict between individual members of different classes.
Marxist analysis of society identifies two main social groups:
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).
Not all class struggle is violent or necessarily radical, as with
strikes and lockouts. Class antagonism may instead be expressed as low
worker morale, minor sabotage and pilferage, and individual workers'
abuse of petty authority and hoarding of information. It may also be
expressed on a larger scale by support for socialist or populist
parties. On the employers' side, the use of union busting legal firms
and the lobbying for anti-union laws are forms of class struggle.
Not all class struggle is a threat to capitalism, or even to the
authority of an individual capitalist. A narrow struggle for higher
wages by a small sector of the working-class, what is often called
"economism", hardly threatens the status quo. In fact, by applying the
craft-union tactics of excluding other workers from skilled trades, an
economistic struggle may even weaken the working class as a whole by
dividing it. Class struggle becomes more important in the historical
process as it becomes more general, as industries are organized rather
than crafts, as workers' class consciousness rises, and as they
self-organize away from political parties. Marx referred to this as the
progress of the proletariat from being a class "in itself", a position
in the social structure, to being one "for itself", an active and
conscious force that could change the world.
Marx largely focuses on the capital industrialist society as the source of social stratification, which ultimately results in class conflict.
He states that capitalism creates a division between classes which can
largely be seen in manufacturing factories. The proletariat, is
separated from the bourgeoisie because production becomes a social
enterprise. Contributing to their separation is the technology that is
in factories. Technology de-skills and alienates workers as they are no
longer viewed as having a specialized skill. Another effect of technology is a homogenous workforce
that can be easily replaceable. Marx believed that this class conflict
would result in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and that the private
property would be communally owned. The mode of production would remain, but communal ownership would eliminate class conflict.
Even after a revolution, the two classes would struggle, but
eventually the struggle would recede and the classes dissolve. As class
boundaries broke down, the state apparatus would wither away. According
to Marx, the main task of any state apparatus is to uphold the power of
the ruling class; but without any classes there would be no need for a
state. That would lead to the classless, stateless communist society.
However, many Marxist argue that unlike in capitalism the Soviet elites did not own the means of production, or generated surplus value
for their personal wealth like in capitalism as the generated profit
from the economy was equally distributed into Soviet society. Even some Trotskyist like Ernest Mandel criticized the concept of a new ruling class as an oxymoron,
saying: "The hypothesis of the bureaucracy’s being a new ruling class
leads to the conclusion that, for the first time in history, we are
confronted with a 'ruling class' which does not exist as a class before
it actually rules."
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,
while influenced by Proudhon, 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.
Well, there’s always a class war
going on. The United States, to an unusual extent, is a business-run
society, more so than others. The business classes are very
class-conscious—they’re constantly fighting a bitter class war to
improve their power and diminish opposition. Occasionally this is
recognized... The enormous benefits given to the very wealthy, the
privileges for the very wealthy here, are way beyond those of other
comparable societies and are part of the ongoing class war. Take a look
at CEO salaries....
— Noam Chomsky, OCCUPY: Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity, Second Edition (November 5, 2013)
Rightwing libertarianism
Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer argued that class struggle came from factions that managed to gain control of the State power. The ruling class 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, State power, subsidies, Tax codes,
laws, and privileges the State creates class conflict by giving
preferential treatment to some at the expense of others by force. 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.
Jobless black workers in the heat of the Philadelphia summer, 1973
Some historical tendencies of Orthodox Marxism rejectracism, sexism, etc. as struggles that essentially distract from class struggle, the real conflict.[citation needed]
These divisions within the class prevent the purported antagonists from
acting in their common class interest. However, many Marxist
internationalists and anti-colonial revolutionaries believe that sex, race and class are bound up together. Within Marxist scholarship there is an ongoing debate about these topics.
According to Michel Foucault, in the 19th century, the essentialist notion of the "race" was incorporated by racists, biologists, and eugenicists, who gave it the modern sense of "biological race" which was then integrated into "state racism". On the other hand, Foucault claims that when Marxists
developed their concept of "class struggle", they were partly inspired
by the older, non-biological notions of the "race" and the "race
struggle". Quoting a non-existent 1882 letter from Marx to Friedrich
Engels during a lecture, Foucault erroneously claimed Marx wrote: "You
know very well where we found our idea of class struggle; we found it in
the work of the French historians who talked about the race struggle."[76][citation needed] For Foucault, the theme of social war provides the overriding principle that connects class and race struggle.
Moses Hess, an important theoretician and labor Zionist of the early socialist movement, in his "Epilogue" to "Rome and Jerusalem"
argued that "the race struggle is primary, the class struggle
secondary. [...] With the cessation of race antagonism, the class
struggle will also come to a standstill. The equalization of all classes
of society will necessarily follow the emancipation of all the races, for it will ultimately become a scientific question of social economics."
W. E. B. Du Bois theorized that the intersectional paradigms of race, class, and nation might explain certain aspects of black political economy. Patricia Hill Collins
writes: "Du Bois saw race, class, and nation not primarily as personal
identity categories but as social hierarchies that shaped
African-American access to status, poverty, and power."
In modern times, emerging schools of thought in the U.S. and other countries hold the opposite to be true.
They argue that the race struggle is less important, because the
primary struggle is that of class since labor of all races face the same
problems and injustices.
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