Class conflict

In political science, the term class conflict, class struggle, or class war refers to the economic antagonism and political tension that exist among social classes because of clashing interests, competition for limited resources, and inequalities of power in the socioeconomic hierarchy. In its simplest manifestation, class conflict refers to the ongoing battle between the rich and poor.
In the writings of several leftist, socialist, and communist theorists, notably those of Karl Marx, class struggle is a core tenet and a practical means for effecting radical sociopolitical transformations for the majority working class. It is also a central concept within conflict theories of sociology and political philosophy.
Class conflict can reveal itself through:
In the economic sphere, class conflict is sometimes expressed overtly, such as owner lockouts of their employees in an effort to weaken the bargaining power of the employees' union; or covertly, such as a worker slowdown of production or the widespread, simultaneous use of sick leave (e.g., "blue flu") to protest unfair labor practices, low wages, poor work conditions, or a perceived injustice to a fellow worker.
When Marxists speak of class struggle, they define a class primarily in economic terms, i.e., by its relationship to the means of production. When anarchists like Bakunin speak of class struggle, they have a broader definition of "social class" which encompasses "notions of domination and privilege" in the political and cultural spheres as well as the economic. Bakunin believed the successful struggle of the dominated classes would achieve a revolution to depose the ruling elites and create a stateless or libertarian socialism, and that a prerequisite for successful revolution is class solidarity.
Marx's theory of history asserts that in the history of economic systems such as capitalism and feudalism, class struggle is "the central fact of social evolution." Indeed, the first sentence of Chapter 1 of the Communist Manifesto reads: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Marxists view the struggle's resolution in favor of the working class to be inevitable under plutocratic capitalism.
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. The rise of class structures eventually leads to class conflict. It is a pattern that has repeated since at least European classical antiquity as illustrated in the Conflict of the Orders and the slave revolt led by Spartacus.
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."
In the Politics, Aristotle describes the basic dimensions of class conflict: "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", but did not consider poverty to be the only cause of revolution. In a society where property is distributed equally throughout the community, "the nobles will be dissatisfied, because they think themselves worthy of more than an equal share of honors; and this is often found to be a cause of sedition and revolution." Moreover, Aristotle said that it was wrong for the poor to seize the wealth of the rich and divide it among themselves, but he said that it is wrong for the rich to impoverish the multitude.
Moreover, Aristotle further discussed 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 was the first Greek philosopher to describe class conflict. In the Republic, by Plato, Socrates said that "any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other [the city] of the rich; these [cities] are at war with one another." Socrates disapproved of oligarchies, in which members of a small class of wealthy property owners take positions of political power in order to dominate the large social class of impoverished commoners; and used the analogy of a maritime pilot, who, like the power-holder in a polis, ought to be chosen for political office for his skill, not for the amount of property he owns.
The historian Plutarch recounts how the Greek people participated in the class conflict between the aristocrats and the common folk. Financially oppressed by their indebtedness to the aristocrats, the mass of Athenians chose Solon to be the lawgiver to lead them to freedom from their creditors. The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said that Solon's constitution of the Athenian popular assembly created a political sphere that balanced the competing socio-economic interests of the social classes of Athens:
Participating in a war among the social classes of Ancient Greece was a dangerous political endeavour. In his book Parallel Lives, Plutarch wrote of two Spartan kings, Agis and Cleomenes, who "being desirous to raise the people, and to restore the noble and just form of government, now long fallen into disuse, [they] incurred the hatred of the rich and powerful, who could not endure to be deprived of the selfish enjoyment to which they were accustomed."
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 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.
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.
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:
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 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.
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."
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:
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:
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 conflict 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.
Writing in pre-capitalist Europe, the Swiss philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Federalist statesman James Madison across the Atlantic Ocean made significant remarks on the dynamics of class struggle. Later, German idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would also contribute his perspective to the discussion around class conflict between employers and employees.
It was with bitter sarcasm that Rousseau outlined the class conflict prevailing in his day between masters and their workmen:
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.
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) led the U.S. as president from 1801 to 1809 and is considered one of America's Founding Fathers. Regarding the interaction between social classes, he wrote:
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'.
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:
Class conflict is most commonly described as occurring within capitalist societies. The conflict manifests itself as clashes between the capitalist class and working class, and takes the form of disputes over hours of work, amount paid in wages, division of profits, culture in the workplace, cost of consumer goods, cost of rent, control over parliament or government bureaucracy, and economic inequality. Even a seemingly benign humanitarian program such as government-provided disaster relief can exacerbate class conflict if the relief is seen as being unequally distributed depending on the recipient's class.
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. He said that "avarice and ambition in the rich, in the poor the hatred of labour and the love of present ease and enjoyment, are the passions which prompt to invade property", requiring a government to protect property rights:
Writing The Wealth of Nations, Smith's concern was the welfare of the ordinary workers who make up society and provide for it:
Regarding the extravagant consumption of the aristocracy, he remarked that:
In the third book of The Wealth of Nations, Smith explains that in the medieval period, after the fall of the Roman Empire, governments were unable to protect commoners, and their property, from the "violence of the great lords":
Residents of the cities were able to establish their freedom and security of property long before those of the country, which enabled a gradual increase in their prosperity:
In Book I Chapter 6, Smith explained how income is distributed between workers and their employers:
Smith said that while a worker is paid wages in proportion to their "dexterity and ingenuity", as well as for "superior hardship and superior skill", this is not the case for the profit of their employers:
He added that the work of management is often performed by other employees, rather than the business owner themselves:
In Chapter 9, Smith notes that: "The increase of stock, which raises wages, tends to lower profit. When the stocks of many rich merchants are turned into the same trade, their mutual competition naturally tends to lower its profit". He says that "high profits tend much more to raise the price of work than high wages", because "the rise of wages operates in the same manner as simple interest", while "the rise of profit operates like compound interest". He concludes the chapter:
Concerning wages, he explained the conflicting class interests between the owners of capital and workers, who he said were often compelled to form trade unions for fear of suffering starvation wages, as follows:
Smith was aware of the main advantage of employers over workers, in addition to state protection:
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 merchants and manufacturers 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.
In the conclusion of the first book of The Wealth of Nations, Smith assessed the knowledge and interests of capitalists in comparison to that of the landed aristocracy:
In the final words of the first book, he suggested how the public should consider the political agenda of this class:
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 due to changes in the mode of production. Members of a class may become aware of their position within it, achieving what is known as class consciousness. For the working classes this happens when their members become aware of their exploitation at the hands of the ruling class. According to Marx, the working class then takes action against the ruling class, and vice versa.
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:
Not all class struggle is radical, violent or aggressive, as in the case of strikes, lockouts and workplace sabotage. Class antagonism can also surface in minor acts of pilferage, low worker morale, and individual worker resistance to petty authority and hoarding of information. On the employers' side, lobbying for anti-union laws and against minimum wage increases, and hiring union-busting legal firms are expressions of class antagonism. On a larger scale, workers engage in class struggle when they agitate for systemic change via socialist or populist parties.
But not every instance of class struggle from below constitutes a grave 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 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 most clearly be seen in 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. Technological advances de-skill and alienate 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.
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:
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.
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.
One of the first writers to comment on class struggle in the modern sense of the term was the French revolutionary François Boissel. [fr] 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.
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 generate surplus value for their personal wealth as the generated profit from the economy was equally distributed into Soviet society. Even some Trotskyists 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."
Class conflict was present in the earliest days of the U.S. with the struggles between slaveowners and slaves. Since the abolition of slavery, class conflict is more 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 day-to-day forms of class conflict, there are also periods of crisis or revolution when class conflict takes on a violent nature and involves repression, assault, restriction of civil liberties, and assassinations or death squads.
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."
Noam Chomsky, American linguist, philosopher, and political activist, has spoken out on the topic of class conflict in the United States:
The 2024 killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was seen by some as a class struggle event. Luigi Mangione was charged with the killing, and a manifesto attributed to Mangione criticized the health insurance industry. According to NBC, highly engaged posts on social media appeared celebrating the shooter, and mentioning other powerful figures as potential targets. In particular, some called it the opening blow of a class war.
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.
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."
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.
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.
Nationalist movements are not included.