From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Class conflict, also referred to as class struggle and class warfare, is the political tension and economic antagonism that exists in society because of 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 (capital flight); or ideologically, by way of political literature. Additionally, political forms of class warfare include legal and illegal lobbying, and bribery of legislators.
The social-class conflict can be direct, as in a dispute between labour and management such as an employer's industrial lockout of their employees in effort to weaken the bargaining power of the corresponding trade union; or indirect such as a workers' slowdown of production in protest at perceived unfair labor practices, low wages or poor workplace conditions.
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 sociopolitical changes for the social majority, the working class.
Usage
Heads of aristocrats on pikes
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.[3]
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-Corinth oligarchic
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 honor's; 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 constitution granted the consuls far too much power.
- The plebs were constantly verbally slighted.
- 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 a civil war between the patrician Sulla and the populist reformer Marius. 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
Of all the notable figures discussed by Plutarch and Tacitus, agrarian reformer Tiberius 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. Publishers Weekly
said "Parenti [...] narrates a provocative history of the late republic
in Rome (100–33 BC) 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
Enlightenment-era historian Edward Gibbon might have agreed with this narrative of Roman class conflict. In the third volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he relates the origins of the struggle:
[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.
Masters versus workmen
Writing in pre-capitalist Europe, both the Swiss philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Adam Smith made significant remarks on the dynamics of class struggle, as did the Federalist statesman James Madison across the Atlantic Ocean. Later, in the age of early industrial capitalism, English political economist John Stuart Mill and German idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would also contribute their perspectives to the discussion around class conflict between employers and employees.
Rousseau
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 liberal Adam Smith
believed that the amassing of property in the hands of a minority
naturally resulted in a 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.
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.
Twenty-first century
Financial crisis
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 philanthropist Warren 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." In a 2022 piece "America’s New Class War", Hedges argues that increased class struggle and strikes by organized workers, often in defiance of union leadership, is the "one last hope for the United States."
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.
Socialism
Marxist perspectives
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.
Soviet Union and similar societies
A variety of thinkers, mostly Trotskyist and anarchist, argue that class conflict existed in Soviet-style societies. Their arguments describe as a class the bureaucratic stratum formed by the ruling political party (known as the nomenklatura in the Soviet Union), sometimes termed a "new class", that controls and guides the means of production.
This ruling class is viewed to be in opposition to the remainder of
society, generally considered the proletariat. This type of system is
referred by them as state socialism, state capitalism, bureaucratic collectivism or new class
societies. Marxism was already a powerful ideological power in Russia
before the Soviet Union was created in 1917, since a Marxist group known
as the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party existed. This party soon divided into two main factions; the Bolsheviks, who were led by Vladimir Lenin, and the Mensheviks, who were led by Julius Martov.
However, many Marxists 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."
Non-Marxist 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, François-Auguste Mignet and Adolphe Thiers. The Physiocrats, David Ricardo, and after Marx, Henry George noted the inelastic supply of land and argued that this created certain privileges (economic rent) for landowners. According to the historian Arnold J. Toynbee,
stratification along lines of class appears only within civilizations,
and furthermore only appears during the process of a civilization's
decline while not characterizing the growth phase of a civilization.
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.
Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky, American linguist, philosopher, and political activist, has criticized class war in the United States:
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)
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.
Relationship to race
Jobless black workers in the heat of the
Philadelphia summer, 1973
Some historical tendencies of Orthodox Marxism reject racism, sexism, etc. as struggles that essentially distract from class struggle, the real conflict.
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." 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.
Chronology
Riots with a nationalist background are not included.
Classical antiquity
Middle Ages
Modern era
The rebellion of
György Dózsa in 1514 spread like lightning in the
Kingdom of Hungary where hundreds of manor-houses and castles were burnt and thousands of the gentry killed.
[82]- German Peasants' War since 1524
- Shimabara Rebellion, 1637–1638
- English Civil War, 1642–1651 (Diggers)
- French Revolution since 1789
- Old Price Riots, 1809
- July Revolution, 1830
- Canut revolts in Lyon since 1831, often considered as the beginning of the modern labor movement
- June Rebellion, 1832
- Galician slaughter, 1846
- Revolutions of 1848 in France et al.
- Newport Rising, political revolt in 1839 led by Chartists
- Paris Commune, 1871
- Johnson County War, 1889–1893
- Coal Wars, 1890–1930
- Donghak Peasant Revolution in Korea, 1893/1894
- 1905 Russian Revolution
- 1907 Romanian Peasants' Revolt
- Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920
- October Revolution in 1917
- Limerick Soviet in Ireland, 1919
- Spartacist uprising in Germany, 1919
- Seattle General Strike of 1919 in Seattle
- General Strike of 1919 in Spain
- Winnipeg General Strike, 1919
- Ruhr Uprising in Germany, 1920
- Kronstadt rebellion, 1921
- Battle of Blair Mountain, 1921
- Hamburg Uprising, 1923
- 1926 United Kingdom general strike
- 1934 West Coast waterfront strike
- Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939
- Mass killings of landlords under Mao Zedong, 1947–1950
- Communist insurgency in Myanmar, 1948–1988
- Uprising of 1953 in East Germany
- Telangana Rebellion
- Cuban Revolution, 1953–1959
- Hungarian Revolution of 1956, foundation of worker's councils
- Poznań 1956 protests
- Naxalite-Maoist insurgency, 1967–present
- May 1968 in France
- Battle of Valle Giulia in Italy, 1968
- Communist rebellion in the Philippines, 1969–present
- Wild cats in Western Germany, 1969
- Several strikes by coal miners in the United Kingdom
- Winter of Discontent 1978/1979
- Nicaraguan Revolution
- 1993 Russian constitutional crisis
- 1999 Seattle WTO protests
- 2006 Oaxaca protests in Mexico
- Bolivarian Revolution
- 2008 Greek riots
- Kyrgyz Revolution of 2010
- Egyptian Revolution of 2011
- 2011 England riots
- World Social Forum
- World Economic Forum
- Occupy Wall Street, 2011
- Jasic Incident
- Rojava Revolution
- Protests against Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, 2016-2022
- Yellow vests movement in France, 2018–present
- 2019–2020 Chilean protests
- 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests
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