page_title: Class conflict
section_title: Usage
hierarchical_section_title: Class conflict / Usage
caption_attribution_description: English: A 1789 French hand tinted etching that depicts the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution.
context_page_description: 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. 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 are: 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 of unfair labor practices, such as low wages and poor workplace conditions.
context_section_description: 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 plutocratic capitalism.
caption: Heads of aristocrats on pikes
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "1100", "Image YResolution": "1100", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS Windows", "Image DateTime": "2008:08:25 23:34:13", "Image ExifOffset": "162", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1905", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1211"}