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A Conflict of Class

The Elements of Social Conflict The Process of Conflict Social Fields and Types of Societies The State and Political System Societies, Politics, and Conflict Societies in Empirical Perspective Is Conflict Manifest as Theorized? The Dynamic Psychological Field Vol.

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Conflict In Perspective Vol. War, Power, Peace Vol. Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes! Bow, bow, ye tradesmen, bow, ye masses. Gilbert , Iolanthe I.

Class Conflict

The conflict of classes is a reality of all large societies and cannot be eliminated. This prestige is based upon the social status of one's parents. Prestige is an attributed value and many times cannot be changed. Weber states that power differences led to the formation of political parties. While Marx believes that groups are similar due to their economic status, Weber argues that classes are largely formed by social status.

Class Conflict

Numerous factors have culminated in what's known as the Arab Spring. Agenda behind the civil unrest, and the ultimate overthrow of authoritarian governments throughout the Middle-East included issues such as dictatorship or absolute monarchy , human rights violations, government corruption demonstrated by Wikileaks diplomatic cables , [19] economic decline, unemployment, extreme poverty, and a number of demographic structural factors, [20] such as a large percentage of educated but dissatisfied youth within the population.

Karl Marx — 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. 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.

Class conflict

This in turn leads to conflict between individual members of different classes. 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.

Class conflict - Wikipedia

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.


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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. 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. Marx believed that this class conflict would result in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and that the private property would be communally owned.

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.

A variety of predominantly trotskyist and anarchist thinkers 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 ".

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. 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 Marxist argue that unlike in Capitalism, the Soviet elites didn't 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. Social commentators, historians and socialist theorists had commented on class struggle for some time before Marx, as well as the connection between class struggle, property, and law: 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.


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  • According to the historian Arnold 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. Proudhon, in What is Property? This would require a final showdown in the form of a social revolution. Fascists have often opposed class 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.

    Some historical tendencies of Orthodox Marxism reject racism, sexism, etc. However, many Marxist internationalists and anti-colonial revolutionaries understand sex, race and class to be bound up together. 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 to " 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". In a letter to Friedrich Engels in Karl Marx wrote: Neither group was homogeneous. The political conflict between the count of Flanders, the king of France, and the partriciate opened the way for the craftsmen to score a military victory in This led to the constitutional recognition of….

    The bourgeoisie controls governmental machinery in its own interests. In its international relations, the capitalist state engages in wars because it is driven by the dynamism of its system—the constantly growing need for raw materials, markets, and supplies of…. Marx derived his views in part from the philosophy of G.