Class conflict
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Class conflict is both the friction that accompanies social relationships between members or groups of different social classes and the underlying tensions or antagonisms which exist in society due to conflicting interests that arise from different social positions. Class conflict is thought to play a pivotal role in history of class societies (such as capitalism and feudalism) by Marxists and anarchists who refer to its overt manifestations as class war, a struggle which today, in their view, is fought most relentlessly and secretly by the capitalist class.
Class conflict can take many different shapes, for example direct violence such as wars fought for resources and cheap labor, policemen beating poor blacks or the workers who try to democratically run their workplaces and economy; indirect violence such as deaths from poverty, starvation or unsafe working conditions; coercion, such as the threat of losing a job or pulling a much needed investment, or ideology, e.g. trying to convince people that the power should be in the hands of the working class or the capitalist class, or instilling passivity and consumerism with advertising
It can be open, as with a business lockout aimed at destroying a labor union, or it can be hidden, as with an informal slowdown in production that protests low wages or an excessively fast or dangerous work process.
Contents |
[edit] Definition of Classes and Class Conflict
Class conflict is a term long-used mostly by socialists, Marxists, and anarchists, to describe social conflicts between two or more classes in society, and the injustices they perceive, such as gaining profit from actions they deem "non-productive" or "non-labor" e.g. the granting of permission to use the means of production (e.g. a capitalist being paid for investing or for allowing the use of land or a building such as a hotel)
Marxists and many anarchists define a 'class' by its relationship to the 'means of production'-such as factories, land, and machinery. Non Marxists non-anarchists usually define classes by the type of employment (such as manufacturing/blue collar, white collar, or management), or by income.
In the classical Marxist and anarchist view, capitalism consists of 2 basic social classes: those who sell their labor for survival (the proletariat) and those who own the means of production (the bourgeoisie). Anarchist analysis also distinguishes a third techno-managerial class. In non-Marxist non-anarchist theory, there are usually deemed to be three or four classes: Working (blue collar or manual laborers), Middle (those who work in a non manual profession such as teaching, computing, or management), and upper (the rich, or those whose career is highly specialized and requires great education, such as stock brokers, politicians, judges etc). Sometimes a fourth class is added: The 'Underclass' or Lumpenproletariat - those who are unemployed, living on state benefits, or engage in 'blue collar' crime such as burglary, mugging, or drug dealing.
[edit] Class in the Soviet Union and similar societies
Some argue that in a system such as that which existed in the Soviet Union, the leaders of the ruling political party form a powerful bureaucratic stratum -- sometimes termed a "new class" -- that controls the means of production. This type of system is referred to by its detractors as state capitalism.
Socialist critics of Soviet-style societies, such as the libertarian socialists and the syndicalists, argue that the solution is for factories and offices to be run by the workers who work in them. In this view, merely changing who controls the state is insufficient; the nature of the work process itself must also be changed. In the syndicalist and anarchist views, in fact, there is generally no state apparatus at all, but rather a network of democratic worker and consumer councils with regional federations, as in Catalonia during the Spanish anarchist revolution.
[edit] References
[edit] See also
- Class struggle
- Class consciousness
- Social class
- Slave rebellion
- Revolution
- Economic inequality
- Economic stratification
- Exploitation
- labor union
- No War But The Class War
- Class envy
- Anti-hunting
- Classism
- Popular revolt in late medieval Europe
- sharecropping
- taxation
- Conflict of the Orders
- Johnson County War
[edit] Further reading
- Class & Class Conflict in Industrial Society,Ralf Dahrendorf, Stanford University Press, 1959, trade paperback, 336 pages, ISBN 0-8047-0561-5 (also available in hardback as ISBN 0-8047-0560-7 and ISBN 1-131-15573-4).
- Li Yi. 2005. The Structure and Evolution of Chinese Social Stratification. University Press of America. ISBN 0-7618-3331-5
[edit] External links
- libcom.org UK class struggle information and networking site
